"As Kingfishers Catch Fire" by Karen Maitland

'Looking for Fish' A common kingfisher in England
Photo: Tony Wood

Have you noticed that animals and birds never seem to read the books about how they are supposed to behave? According to the bird books, kingfishers like clean water, yet for months I daily watched one pair fishing in a filthy, muddy ditch next to a busy main road, apparently shunning an ideal river and lake less than half a mile away. But curious behaviour aside, there is no doubt, kingfishers are beautiful creatures, who have inspired many poets – 

‘As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flames,’ - Gerald Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

‘It was the rainbow gave thee birth,' - ‘The Kingfisher’ William Henry Davies (1871-1940)

But in medieval and Tudor times kingfishers were not simply admired, they were caught and killed to be used in the house. Also known as halcyons, these unfortunate birds were thought to be able to predict the wind direction when dried and hung up. Many Tudor houses had a dead kingfisher dangling from the rafters as an internal weather vane and they were also used for this purpose on board ships. 

‘A lytle byrde called the kingfisher, being hanged in the ayre by the neck; his nebbe or byll wyll be always dyrect and strayght againt ye winde.' Thomas Lupton, 1579

And both Shakespeare and Marlowe refer to this practise. 

‘How stands the wind? Into what corner peers my halcyon’s bill?’  Chrstopher Marlowe 

Coming up empty
Photo: Andy Morffew

Even as late 1928, a local historian noticed a dried kingfisher hanging from the rafters in house he visited and was told by the householder that the bird pointed in one direction if the weather was fine, but in the opposite direction if it was wet. 

But halcyons were used for more just weather vanes. Dead kingfishers, if kept in a dry place, were thought never to decay and always smelled sweet, so the dried carcasses of the birds were also placed in chests of clothes, linens and blankets, as they were said to preserve them from moths and decay, and keep give them a pleasant perfume. It was a strange belief since the kingfisher’s nest burrow smells anything but sweet. But beauty was associated with fragrance, and the birds could well have been packed with herbs or spices during the drying process which might have helped.

But the even their ancient name ‘halcyon’ is steeped in history and legend. It comes from the Greek myth of Alcyone, daughter of Aeolus, god of the winds. Alcyone’s husband, Ceyx, son of the Morning Star, perished at sea. His wife was so grief-stricken that she drowned herself. The gods took pity on them and turned the pair into kingfishers, so that they could be reunited. It was thought that kingfishers built a nest of fishbones which floated on the sea, into which they laid their eggs. For fourteen days in winter, when the halcyon was said to brood her eggs on the sea, her father, Aeolus, stilled the wind and waves for her. In ancient times, this period of unusually calm weather was known as the ‘halcyon days’. It was believed to occur at the time of the winter solstice, 21st December, and start around 14th December, though later the phrase came to mean any period of happiness, peace and calm.

Success! Kingfisher and fish
Photo: Andy Morffew

In Medieval France and England kingfishers came to be called St Martin’s birds, and were thought to brood their eggs around his feast day on 11th November, which often coincided with a period of calm weather, known as ‘St Martin’s little summer’, which Shakespeare refers to in Henry VI – ‘Except St Martin’s summer, halcyon days.’ St Martin’s summer was said to be three consecutive days of dry, mild weather around the time of Martinmas. This might have occurred more frequently in earlier centuries, but modern weather records show this has rarely happened in the last 100 years. So, perhaps, another bird is a better predictor than the kingfisher of the winter weather now, for as another old saying goes –

'If Saint Matinmas ice can bear a duck,

The winter will be all mire and muck.'

'Chilled Duck'
Photo: Ian Paterson/Chilled Duck/CC BY-SA 2.0

Now that sounds more like a British winter!

'In And Out The Dusty Bluebells' by Karen Maitland

In the last few weeks, people have been flocking to see the wonderful bluebell woods in Devon, where the carpet of flowers spreads beneath the trees like a violet-blue mist. I heard one visitor say, the bluebell wood was ‘an enchanting place’. They thought so too in the Middle Ages, but unlike the 21st century visitor, they did not mean it was beautiful, they regarded bluebell woods as places of sinister and dangerous bewitchment.

Bluebells were harvested as early in the Bronze Age, for the gluey sap which was used to fixed feathers to arrow shafts. During the Tudor period, bluebell sap was used as starch to stiffen muslin and the immense ruffs worn by the Elizabethans. It was used as a glue in bookbinding, because the poisonous sap also discouraged insects from attacking the books. In the Middle Ages, bluebells were thought to be a cure for leprosy, consumption, snake bites and spider bites. Bluebells could prevent nightmares if the flowers were threaded and hung over the bed. But whatever you needed bluebells for, you never went to collect them alone.

Photo: Dr Richard Murray

Bluebells (Hyacinthoides non-scripta)

A child who picked bluebells alone would be spirited away by the fairy folk, never to be seen again. Even an adult who ventured into a bluebell wood by themselves was in mortal danger. They would be pixie-led, and forced to wander round and round, unable to find their way out, until they died of exhaustion, unless someone else entered the wood, thereby breaking the enchantment, and guided the bewildered victim home. Bluebells were known as Deadmen’s bells, because whoever hears them ringing, is listening to their own death knell and will be taken by a malicious spirit within weeks.

Pig trapped by his nightmares of goblins.

From 'The Fairy Caravan.' (1929)

Illustration by Beatrix Potter

The much-loved children’s author, Beatrix Potter, makes great use of these old superstitions in her only full-length novel for older children The Fairy Caravan (1929). In the novel, the circus characters have to travel through a small bluebell wood, Pringle Wood, and are warned not to eat anything they find there because they will never leave if they do. Even though most heed the warning, they still find themselves going round in circles for hours, until the pony pulling the caravan almost collapses with exhaustion. The pig, who naturally disobeys the injunction, is trapped in a hollow tree by his own hallucinations and is only finally rescued by the pony who protects himself with fern seed plaited in his mane, which was a amulet that medieval travellers used to render themselves and their horses invisible to evil spirits. The pony also asks the blacksmith to reverse his horseshoes. Again, people thought that by reversing your clothes and wearing a garment inside out you could break enchantment or a run of bad luck.

Pony searching the bluebell wood for pig.

From 'The Fairy Caravan' (1929)

Illustration by Beatrix Potter

Bluebells are highly poisonous, and when not in flower the bulbs can be easily mistaken for ramsons or wild garlic, which often grows in the same habitat, so the warning that you might never leave the bluebell wood if you ate anything there was probably sound advice.

Whenever I see a bluebell wood, I am reminded me of a circle game we used to play as children in the sixties.

"In and out the dusty bluebells,
In and out the dusty bluebells,
In and out the dusty bluebells,
Who will be my master?

Tipper-ipper-apper on your shoulder
Tipper-ipper-apper on your shoulder
Tipper-ipper-apper on your shoulder
I am your master now."

In some versions, they are called ‘dusky’ bluebells or ‘Scottish’ bluebells. There is much speculation about the age of this song. Some say that it refers to the hiring fairs that took place around April-May, but a group of country children in the 1900’s reported that ‘the master’ in the song was the sinister Fairy King, who like the pied piper, would lead unwary children dancing into the underworld, from which there was no return. This is probably not, of course, the original meaning of the game, but it is interesting that Edwardian children were still aware of the ancient superstition.

Other common beliefs were that if you placed a garland of bluebells on someone you wanted to question, they would be compelled to tell the truth. Perhaps the sweetest one is if you manage to turn one of the flowers inside out without tearing it, you will eventually win the one you love. Again, it is the act of physically reversing an object, which turns or reverse your fortune. The task also requires patience and gentleness, two qualities which might well help a young lad or lass win the heart of any future lover. Either that, or it took so long to master the art, you might well have stopped fancying the person by then, which solved the problem.

Janus - by Gillian Polack

Yesterday I thought a lot of Janus. Christianity’s early rise as a major religion was strongly linked to the Roman Empire, so in the Julian and Gregorian calendars we have a month named after a god. More than one month, in fact, but today I shall focus on just that one. I love this. It reminds me, always, that the relationship between religions and the places they grow up help shape the way they shape us. I don’t want to talk about that today, however. I was thinking of Janus. 

In the Middle Ages (which is definitely the period of western European history I know most about) representations of Janus showed him as two-faced or three-faced. On a bad day, I would make Batman jokes about Two-Face, but today is a good day, and what interests me is what Janus means for the way people saw time in the Middle Ages.

Janus was two-faced on calendars because he looked back into the old year and forward into the new. This reflected something so important culturally that we still check our futures on horoscopes and we make resolutions for the New Year and we write “This is what 2018 was like.” Not everyone does all of this, but enough of us do these things that I have to suspect that this response to the change of years is a deep artefact.

It may date back to far earlier than the Middle Ages, and it may not. My evidence is Medieval. In the Middle Ages one gave nice gifts (gloves, for instance) to celebrate the new year. That was part of the looking forward, too. These presents were, I suspect, more important than anything given for Christmas itself, for we have a lot more listings of presents given for the new year than for any other part of Christmastide.

In the Jewish Middle Ages in the same western European countries, Janus does not appear. Jews used both the Christian calendar (for their everyday interactions with the majority part of the community) and their own, and the change of year was governed by the Jewish calendar and was, as it is now, in September/October. White was the colour of the New Year, so white food was popular. New food was popular and new clothes. 

The celebration of the calendar change focussed more on the forward and the cleansing of the slate than on looking back. I suspect this is because there is a formal ‘looking back’ during the ten days after the new year itself in the Jewish calendar. This means there isn’t as much of a call for it during the actual new year celebrations. 

Interestingly, Judaism and Christianity lived alongside each other in ancient Rome. 

Cultural remnants are not always an indication of worship. Christianity was the minor religion of the two nearly 2000 years ago but it adopted facets of Roman religion quite early. Judaism did not. The gods that label Jewish months are earlier deities from a different region. Just as Christians didn’t worship Janus just because Janus illustrated calendars and prompted people to look at both past and future on New Year, Jews didn’t worship the gods that appear on the Jewish calendar. 

If gods don’t indicate worship or even belief, what do they indicate? Why weren’t they dropped?

They are cultural remnants that act as reminders of the paths our cultures have travelled. I mostly like to think of it as a form of respect for our ancestors. Our world is very different to theirs. Some years, though, certain similarities strike. I look at Janus today and see something old that’s nevertheless very new and very important.

So many people assume that I am an ethnohistorian because the food history side of it is amazing. Well, the food history side of it is totally amazing. I’m not going to give it up in a hurry. My friends will suffer my experiments with old recipes for a long time yet. 

Cooking, however, is part of a vastly complex everyday and that everyday is our Janus-looking-backwards. I’m not actually a culinary historian. I’m an ethnohistorian. I need to understand people and their societies, not simply one element of them, but as much as I can.

Janus is important as an indicator of the strength of culture over time and of the legacy that culture gives us. Cultural artefacts can hang on or leave powerful echoes. Culture is not some neutral aspect of the universe: it’s our lives. Janus reminds us, every year, that we have a past as well as a future. If we’re wise and clever and remember to look back and think about that past, we’re more likely to walk into that future without as many burdens. If we stride forward blindly, then we’re carrying all kinds of burdens with us. 

Right now, with all the hate in our current world, it helps me to be able to look at the witch trials and back further at how the Inquisition targeted people who were Christian but with Jewish ancestors, and back further at the invention of the blood libel. All three of these vile parts of the past have carried forward into the present and are with us right now in a variety of forms. Imagine a Janus looking at mass murder in the past and then imagine him turning his head and looking at us, with a grim face. He’s seeing the same sights in both directions.

That’s the way I see Janus this year. We had a difficult 2018 and 2019 is going to be a challenge for many of us. The wonderful thing about looking at history through Janus’ eyes is that we know it. It doesn’t just change theoretically. We change it. We can choose to carry all those wonderful foodways forward and we can also say, “But we don’t need to carry this other thing.” 

Instead of a resolution, we can make a choice as to which aspects of culture we want to keep from those that Janus saw in the last year.

This isn’t where I meant to go with this month’s post. I was going to talk about the formal change to calendars. I wanted to talk about the libraries that keep the ephemera, including those cheap Jewish calendars from the seventeenth and eighteenth century that married the Christian year with the Jewish so that people could live in both, happily. Then I read the news and I thought that the only part of the calendar I wanted to talk about was Janus.

The news in Australia today was that our government in 1996-7 began a lot of the policies we so hate in 2018-9. 

Looking back colours what we see when we look forward. It also helps us to say “I don’t want this” and pushes us to action. This year, I can see precisely why Janus was so important when the year was depicted in the Christian Middle Ages. It was nothing to do with his ancestry as a god and everything to do with the help he gave in understanding what the year meant and how to handle its more impossible aspects.

A Short History of Mermaids by Catherine Hokin

I've been pondering on mythical creatures lately (too many publisher/audience/bookseller witticisms here to indulge in so I'll resist) and in particular mermaids, largely because I've just lost the best part of a weekend to the very wonderful The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gower.

 Mermaid from The Medieval Bestiary, British Library

Given how much water there is on the planet, it's hard not to wonder what might be down in the depths and it's equally hard not to hope that its mermaids rather than some of the more terrifying creatures that stop me watching nature programmes. From the little one to the mischief makers who lived in Peter Pan's lagoon, the mermaid of Zennor and all the others who flitted through Andrew Lang's fairy books, mermaids were a big part of my childhood, as Ariel was in my daughter's. Perhaps because I was brought up in the Lake District and loved to swim, a mostly human creature who could live underwater, had great hair and wore a lot of pearls always struck me as an ideal playmate.

Our curiosity about these creatures, and belief/hope that they exist, goes back thousands of years, although they have always had a sinister side outside children's tales, particularly among sailors who viewed them as both beautiful and dangerous. The earliest known depiction of a mermaid dates back to the 18th century BC on a Babylonian sealstone and there are mermaid paintings still visible at Pompeii. One of the earliest stories is about Alexander the Great’s sister, Thessalonike. After her death, a legend sprang up that she had turned into a mermaid who would ask the sailors on any ship she would encounter the question: “Is King Alexander alive?”. If the sailors answered “He lives and reigns and conquers the world” then she would leave the sea calm. If there was any other answer, she would stir up a terrible storm, destroying the ship and all its crew.

 Medieval carved mermaid with mirror & comb

This dual and conflicting aspect, beautiful and seductive or siren-esque beast, is a key part of mermaid mythology. Who needs to blame God for a storm or a mysterious wrecking that sinks a ship, when you can blame a malicious beautiful woman out to kill human men in the full knowledge that the Church would happily support your view? Unsurprisingly, as the Christian Church sought to crush pagan beliefs, mermaids were increasingly depicted as vain and lustful, tempting men to risk not only their lives but also their souls. Their iconography of comb and mirror stems from this idea of vanity and mermaids were regularly used as pictorial shorthand for the deadly sin of lust. The image of a mermaid continued to have dark sexual connotations down the centuries and was employed as a euphemism for a prostitute with even Mary Queen of Scots falling foul of it: the people of Edinburgh depicting her as a mermaid when she married Bothwell in May 1567, a few weeks after Lord Darnley's murder.

The reality of mermaids existing was assumed during medieval times, when a belief endured that anything that moved on land had a counterpart in the sea. In 1430 in the Netherlands, it was said that, after the dikes near the town of Edam gave way during a storm, some girls rowing around in a boat found a mermaid floundering in shallow, muddy waters. According to the Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend, They got her into the bat, took her home, [and] dressed her in women’s cloths. She remained, however, totally mute. Interestingly, by the 1600s the story had evolved somewhat. This time the injured mermaid was taken to a nearby lake and soon nursed back to health. She eventually became a productive citizen, learning to speak Dutch, perform household chores, and eventually converting to Catholicism. Little miss lusty turned into a proper woman then.

 John William Waterhouse: Sketch for a Mermaid

Other sightings include John Smith, of Pocahontas fame in 1614, who saw a mermaid swimming about with all possible grace. He noted that she had large eyes, a finely shaped nose that was somewhat short, and well-formed ears that were rather too long and that her long green hair imparted to her an original character that was by no means unattractive. Christopher Columbus in 1493, however, was less impressed,  writing in his diary: The day before, when the Admiral was going to the Rio del Oro, he said he saw three mermaids who came quite high out of the water but were not as pretty as they are depicted, for somehow in the face they look like men. Perhaps his lack of enchantment would have made him better placed to listen to Olaus Magnus, a 16th century writer and cartographer whose map Carta Marina catalogued the many monsters of the seas around Scandinavia. He warned that fishermen maintain that if you reel in a mermaid and do not presently let them go, such a cruel tempest will arise, and such a horrid lamentation of that sort of men comes with it, and of some other monsters joining with them, that you would think the sky should fall. 

What had they seen? Probably manatees or dugongs which have a flat, mermaid-like tail and two flippers that resemble stubby arms. Not a beautiful maiden by any stretch but many 'sightings' were from quite a distance away, possibly in poor light or during storms when fear was high and, being mostly submerged in water and waves, only parts of the 'mermaid's' body would be visible. A glimpse of a head, arm, or tail just before a creature dives under the waves in those circumstances might be just enough to spawn a legend.

 The Fiji Mermaid, Mead Art Museum

By the 1800s, the fake mermaid trade was big business with hoaxers churning them out by the dozen. One of the best known was the Feejee Mermaid displayed by P.T. Barnum in the 1840s. However, your 50 cents bought not a svelte, fish-tailed lovely combing her hair but a small and rather more grotesque fake corpse made (probably in Japan) of monkey bones, papier-mache, painted wood and the bottom part of a fish. 

Since then, mermaid encounters tend to be of the oddly-coloured hair/Starbucks cup/Disney type although news reports in 2009 claimed that a mermaid had been sighted off the coast of Israel in the town of town of Kiryat Yam, performing tricks for onlookers before just before sunset, then disappearing. One of the first people to see the mermaid, Shlomo Cohen, said, I was with friends when suddenly we saw a woman laying on the sand in a weird way. At first I thought she was just another sunbather, but when we approached she jumped into the water and disappeared. We were all in shock because we saw she had a tail. The town's tourism board offered a $1 million reward for the first person to photograph the creature but no one came forward and the mermaid has disappeared. I'm betting she's run off with Nessie.

'Murdered Saints and Salmon' by Karen Maitland

Chapel of St Mary, Glastonbury Abbey.

Photo c1865. Cornwell University Library

Today is the feast day of St Indract or St Indracht, who is said to have been martyred in around 700. What I find fascinating about this obscure saint, is not whether he really existed, but the way his story evolved throughout the Middle Ages, which reveals so much about the medieval mind-set.

For peace-loving men, saints attract a lot of trouble and in St Indract’s case it all revolved around food. Early writings about him, draw on an account (now lost) by William of Malmesbury (1095-1143). According to him, Indract was the son of an Irish King, who set off on a pilgrimage to Rome with seven or nine companions. Ireland was suffering a terrible famine and when Indract and his band travelled back through England, they were carrying bags of grain to relieve their people's suffering. They took shelter overnight at Huish Episcopi where a thegn named Horsa who was in the service of Ine, King of the West Saxons (688-726), decided that these royal pilgrims must be carrying gold in their sacks. Horsa and his cutthroats murdered Indract and his companions for this imagined gold, disposing of their corpses in a pit.

But throughout the hours of darkness, great beams of light shone up from the pit revealing the crime to King Ine. He had the corpses reinterred near the high altar of St Mary’s Church in Glastonbury Abbey, where they become the focus of a local cult until the old church was destroyed by fire in 1184. But legend has it that one body was never removed from the pit, and on the night of the 8th May, a light shines up from ground marking its resting place. Later writers give Shapwick as the place where the men were murdered and the bodies concealed.

By 1478, William Worcester claims that the number murdered by Horsa and his men was 100, not merely 10, and that the murderers watching the disinterment of the corpses, were driven into a guilty frenzy and ripped each other to pieces. This reflects the medieval superstition of the period that a murdered victim will reveal their killer if the guilty party is brought into the presence of the corpse or touches the body, when the corpse will bleed afresh or cry out.

The cult surrounding this Celtic saint seems to have mainly been limited to the south west of England and the original legend which William recorded might simply have been a story created to explain an earlier internment of unidentified bodies in the abbey. But it would have brought some welcome income from those who came to venerate the martyrs.

In 14th century, John of Tynemouth, a monk at St Alban’s abbey, recorded the same story of the murder, but with a new legend, which appears to have originated in Cornwall. John has St Indract travelling to Rome with his sister St Dominica, and their companions. But when they reached Temerunta on the banks of the Tamar, they decided to remain for a while. There Indract struck his staff against a rock and well full of salmon sprang up. Then he planted his staff in the ground, where it sprouted into an oak tree to give them shelter. But one of their number stole some salmon in addition to his allotted rations and their fish supply failed. In another version of the legend, the party quarrelled about a fish weir. But both accounts have the group splitting up and St Indract going off to Rome with nine companions.

Medieval Fishing & hunting c.1480

Salmon were vital to the medieval economy and many fish weirs were constructed during the Middle Ages. We know from records there were numerous disputes over ownership and the obstruction caused by these weirs, and cases brought over the rights to take the fish from rivers, so that the idea that a saint was involved in a bitter dispute over salmon, would have seemed entirely feasible to the medieval pilgrims and monks.

But salmon were also important Celtic symbols. Their ability to return the same spawning beds made them symbols of memory and wisdom. The salmon was said to have gained its spots when it ate nine hazelnuts from the nine trees of wisdom, which grew at the heads of the seven major rivers in Ireland and the two holy wells of Connla and Segais. In Irish mythology, it was said that if a man ate the Salmon of Wisdom which had swallowed nine hazelnuts in the sacred well, he would gain all the knowledge of the world. In the celtic tale, the poet Finegas finally caught the salmon after seven years fishing. He ordered his servant, Fionn, to cook it for him and on no account to eat any, but the boy licked his finger burnt by the hot juices from the fish and he gained the wisdom instead.

Atlantic salmon. Timothy Knepp

The oak tree was equally important to medieval life, for it not only provided wood for buildings and ships, but acorns upon which the household pigs could be fattened for free. But it too had sacred links. For both the Norsemen and Celts, groves of sacred oaks were the setting for not only for religious rites, but as places where old enemies would swear binding oaths of peace.

In the Middle Ages, oak leaves were worn as a protection against evil spirits and community meetings were often held beneath oak trees, so that people would be protected from those who might try to curse them, or from witches who would send their familiars in the form of animals to discover what was being discussed. Bede records that when St Augustine wanted to preach in a building on the Isle of Thanet, King Ethelbert of Kent ordered that the meeting be held under an oak tree in case St Augustine and his followers were ‘skilful in sorcery’ and might attempt to deceive and bewitch the king and his men.

Oak leaves and acorns on the choir screen, Lincoln Cathedral

Photo: Poliphilo

It is interesting that the salmon and the oak, which were such important symbols in pre-Christian Celtic mythology, should still be significant enough to be woven into the hagiography of the Christian saint at late as the 14th century. A seamless blending of the pagan and the Christian in the medieval mind, complete with a sacred tree and a holy well.

Through a Glass Darkly: Mirrors, Myths and Magic by Catherine Hokin

I am a bit obsessed with mirrors at the moment. That's not an unusual state for many women as we oscillate between avoiding or checking our appearance depending on how hopeful/fearful we are feeling on any given day especially if, like me, your approach to dressing may be on the 'eclectic' side. An American acquaintance recently commented that she 'was interested in' the way I flaunted the look in the mirror, remove one item adjunct by adding three more. I digress (which may also be my clothing issue): my mirror obsession is currently centred on their mythical properties.

 

 Roman lead mirror, faces missing

Superstition is one of the many threads that connect us to our ancestors and many have ancient roots. Walking under a leaning ladder, for example, may have connections to the Ancient Egyptians and their belief that the triangle was a sacred shape. You might not be a salt thrower and you may place new shoes on the table without a care but I bet few of us break a mirror without a shiver. The belief that seven years bad luck would result comes from Ancient Rome and is linked to the 7 years the Romans believed it took for a soul to renew itself. If you do have a disaster, simply popping the pieces in the bin is not enough to reverse the misfortune: you can bury the pieces, immerse them in south-flowing water for several hours or grind them to a fine powder so the pieces no longer reflect an image. Or do all three while flinging salt and turning in a circle three times. Best to be safe in these strange times.

The idea of reflection, seeing an image that may otherwise be hidden or differs from what the watcher expects, has always fascinated, whether the source be water, metal or glass. We look for our identity in them, for good or ill: Socrates advised young men to look at their faces and, if the reflection was a handsome one, to focus their life on keeping their souls pure. Some ancient cultures believed the reflection was the true self, 'the shadow soul', hence the myth that vampires and evil spirits have no reflection. In some cultures, the images go beyond the individual: in ancient Chinese mythology, there is the story of the Mirror Kingdom in which creatures who will one day rise up to battle humans are caught in a magic sleep; the flickers we sometimes see in the corners of our eyes as we look into a mirror are the creatures' first stirrings. Other superstitions spanning cultures include not looking into them at candlelight when spirits of the dead might appear and covering mirrors when someone in the house dies so that the soul does not become trapped. The deep-seated hold these superstitions have on the popular imagination is reflected in stories as far apart as Narcissus, Snow White and Candyman. We look but we do not always believe or trust what we see.

 Ancient Egypt c. 1479 BC

That mirrors have grown up surrounded by myths is understandable: not only could they show us new aspects of ourselves and our world, in their earliest incarnations they were rare and expensive. Mirrors made from polished stone (obsidian) have been found in use in Turkey from 6000 BCE and also in South and Central America from 2000 BCE. Polished bronze discs with handles of ivory, wood or metal are seen in Egypt as early as 2900 BCE and in China from around 2000 BCE. By 465 BCE, some Greek mirrors were large enough to reflect a whole figure but most remained small enough to be portable and were highly ornamented, often with figures of the gods. All were recorded as being highly valuable: "For a single one of these mirrors of chiseled silver or gold, inlaid with gems, women are capable of spending an amount equal to the dowry the State once offered to poor generals’ daughters!” (Seneca). However, the reflected image purchased at such cost was not an accurate one: stone and bronze were both dark, metal scratched and tarnished easily and the very few glass mirrors that have been found were curved and therefore distorting - a problem which continued well into the sixteenth century and goes some way to explain the distrust around the reflected image.

 Pictish mirror symbol

Superstition and magic, mirrors have long been associated with both. The idea of reflecting things that were previously hidden or unseen is a short step from looking at mirrors as a method of divination: seeing not just what is there but what might be. One of the most common symbols carved onto Pictish stones in Scotland is a mirror, usually accompanied by a comb. There are a number of theories around the symbol's meaning, including a link to a matriarchal culture but another possibility is an association with astrology and using a mirror to read the heavens. Turning a mirror to the stars to divine messages about the future is seen in ancient Persia, by Shamans in Asia and is even attributed to Pythagoras who, according to legend, tipped a mirror at the moon to read the future. This practice, known as catoptromancy or scrying, is described in a number of ancient Greek texts and sometimes involves mirrors being lowered into water on a thread to provide a double reflection. It appears to have had a number of uses including predicting the future, medical diagnoses and communicating with people not physically present. Practitioners would burn herbs, chant 'prayers' and wait for answers and messages to reveal themselves in surfaces sometimes viewed as a portal between worlds. The practice is recorded well into the middle ages.

 15th century woman and mirror

During the mid to late medieval period, mirrors had rather mixed fortunes. Their role in divination made them a target for the Church and divination itself, associated as it was with demons and evil spirits, was banned. In The Book of the Knight of the Tower, an advice manual written in 1372 by Geoffrey de la Tour Landry for his daughters who are about to attend court, the dangers of sitting in front of the mirror rather than attending church are clearly spelled out:“Will this lady never be done combing herself! Staring at herself in the mirror? And as it pleased God to make an example of her, even as she stared into the mirror she perceived the enemy, who bared his behind, so ugly and horrible that the woman lost her reason, as if possessed by the devil.” However, mirrors also start to appear as a means of guarding against evil and excess: in Dit du Miroir by Jean de Cande, a man asks for a double mirror so he can look at himself inside and out. As mirrors became more common, it seems people were trying to find better ways to accommodate their presence.

The process by which mirrors were made gradually became more sophisticated: the process for making flat glass began in Germany and was perfected in sixteenth century Venice and new coating methods were discovered which improved reflectivity. At the same time, Johannes Kepler was working on a better understanding of the way light is received and focused by the eye. Distorted reflections and magic associations gradually became a thing of the past. Well logically they did but I'm not convinced humans are really that logical when you scratch the surface. For every child who listens to Snow White and then tries the magic mirror refrain out in their bedroom or reads Harry Potter and wants to buy scrying implements in Diagon Alley, there's a teenager giggling with their mates into a candle-lit glass on Halloween and an adult fixing a new mirror on the wall with very great care. Don't believe me? Go drop a mirror, I dare you...

'The Bishop of Butterflies' by Karen Maitland

King Arthur, 13th Century Illustration

Recently, I stumbled across a delightful legend recorded in the chronicles of Lanercost Priory, Cumberland written around 1216. It tells how Bishop Peter of Rochester was hunting in a forest, but became separated from the huntsman. Lost, weary and hungry, he was relieved when he stumbled upon a palace in the forest and was offered food and shelter. He discovered that his mysterious host was none other than the immortal King Arthur.

Awe-struck, the bishop told the great king that no one would ever believe him if he said that he had seen and talked with King Arthur. Arthur told him to close his right hand and then open it. When the bishop did so, a beautiful butterfly flew from his palm. Arthur told Peter that as a remembrance of their meeting, whenever the bishop wanted to see a butterfly he only had to close and then open his right hand, and one would appear. The bishop returned to his duties and fame of this miracle soon spread, so that whenever men or women knelt before the bishop to ask for his blessing, they’d also ask for a butterfly, and the bishop would open his hand to release another butterfly into the world. Bishop Peter became known as the Bishop of the Butterflies.

1503-1508, by Jean Bourdichon

Page from the beginning of

St. John's Gospel. 'In the beginning...'

It is just a fable, of course, but these legends can be wonderful insights into medieval mind. And I love the idea that a blessing could take the form of a butterfly. Many ancient cultures saw the transformation of the earth-bound caterpillar into a chrysalid of death then its rebirth as the aerial butterfly, as a symbol of death and resurrection, or of the transformation of the spirit. Butterfly wings were said to resemble the flickering of firelight. 

The Celts likened the soul of a baby waiting to enter woman to be born, to a butterfly hovering around her. Although, we should not assume that they thought butterflies really were souls. In the same way, during the medieval period, the spirits of the departed were likened to butterflies, but that does not mean that the majority of people believed butterflies were spirits. Nevertheless, this did later solidify into a superstition in some country areas that it was unlucky to kill a butterfly, because they were the spirits of the recently dead who had not yet entered purgatory and were hovering close to the living, unwilling to depart this earth, or that they were the souls unbaptised infants who could enter neither heaven nor hell.

1410, by Jean Malouel. Madonna and angels

with butterflies hovering above.

In places such as Somerset, the first butterfly of the year was hunted and killed to prevent it ‘coming again’, in other words returning to ‘haunt’ the living. And this perhaps is linked to the idea that the souls of dead children could re-enter a woman’s womb over and over again, preventing her from giving birth to a living child. In Lincolnshire, butterflies were said to symbolise the enemies who were planning to harm you, both known and unknown, and so the first butterfly you saw, you killed and crushed to powder, so that your enemies would be defeated for the rest of the year.

14th century. Children playing and catching butterflies.

One of the minor frustrations of writing novels set before the 17th century, is that our medieval forbears were far more pragmatic than we are. Naming plants and fungi was essential to survival, because they had to be able to identify different plants for healing, food and poisons, and in many cases the name they gave the plant, such as lungwort, told you exactly what its use was for man. But there was no practical function in being able to distinguish one type of butterfly from another, so there was no reason to invent different names for them.

Labels such Red Admiral and Tortoiseshell butterfly only came into use once people started to collect butterflies for scientific interest. So, unlike mentioning flowers in the novel where the medieval novelist can easily find and use the old names of the period, if we want to specify a type of butterfly in the story we can only refer to its colour. But maybe that’s no bad thing. It reminds us that classifications and names are man-made, and encourage a human-centric outlook on the world. And occasionally, we should stop and enjoy the blessings of a creature just for the beautiful thing that it is.

Thistles and Butterflies

by Otto Maseus Van Schrieck. (1660's)

Scotland's Medieval Monasteries by Catherine Hokin

Forget Park Run, Tough Mutha, Iron Man and triathlons. A few weeks ago we embarked on an endurance feat far more favourable to writers on the research trail: 4 monasteries in 24 hours or, as we fondly christened it, The Tough Monk Challenge.

Medieval monasteries and abbeys are an integral part of Scotland's historic landscape and many of them are rightly famous landmarks including Iona, Dunfermline, Sweetheart and Inchcolm. The Scottish monastic movement has its roots in the Celtic period and was a great influence in the way Christianity spread after the seventh century with abbots remaining far more powerful than bishops. The early monasteries themselves, however, bore little relation to what we now understand from the term and were often little more than isolated collections of wooden huts inhabited by hermits. It is not until the Normans begin to really impact on society after 1100 that we see a great wave of Scottish monastic building, promoted particularly by King David I (1124-1153).

 Plan of St Gall

Life in medieval monasteries was strictly organised and strictly run and, whatever order the monks espoused, the principles were broadly in line with (or reacting to) the rules written by St Benedict in c.530 AD. Not only was the internal life rigidly structured, the external fabric (the buildings) also followed a set of ideals, known as the Plan of St Gall. The plan, named after the Abbey in which it is still held, is the oldest preserved visualisation of a medieval building complex. Five pieces of annotated and sewn together parchment contain the plans for forty structures as well as boundaries and roads and an orchard. Each building and its use is identified in 333 inscriptions and include bake and brew houses, an abbot's residence and a dormitory and refectory for the monks. It appears to have been designed for Gozbert, the Abbot of St Gall from 816-837, and it is an idealization of a monastery - no complex was ever built to its exact specifications and scholars have described it as a meditation on monasticism. Most of us, however, who are familiar with monastery layouts, would easily find our way round the plan and its influence on the complexes that were built is clear.

 Jedburgh Abbey - it doesn't actually lean

The four we visited, Melrose, Dryburgh, Jedburgh and Kelso, are all in the Scottish Borders. They were founded between 1113-1150 and all have close links to David I. They are in varying states of preservation, with Kelso being little more now than a massive gateway, but they are all visually stunning - especially if you see them as we did in snowdrop season. With the exception of Kelso, each of the four has its own claim to fame. Jedburgh, an Augustinian monastery founded in 1147 is an extraordinary marriage of Romanesque and early Gothic architecture and is the best preserved in terms of its scale and its beautiful rows of arches. Melrose, Cistercian dating from 1136, is most famous for reputedly having the heart of Robert the Bruce buried in its graveyard. That may or may not be true: the Abbey words its claim that the casket, discovered first in 1921 and reburied in 1998, is Bruce very carefully and the position of its discovery, under the Chapter House rather than close to the high altar, makes the idea questionable. It is, however, a nice story and Bruce was known to have had great affection for the Abbey. What I loved most about Melrose, however, are the wonderful carvings which cover the outside and include saints, gargoyles and, for no reason anyone knows, a pig playing the bagpipes.

 Dryburgh Abbey

My favourite was Dryburgh. The setting is impossibly romantic, nestled in a bend of the River Tweed and surrounded by trees which act like curtains to the first view. It is hardly surprising that Walter Scott, the great exponent of romantic Scotland, is buried in the ruin's north wing. Accounts of his funeral read not unlike passages from his novels (of which I am a massive fan): the day was dark and lowering and the wind high and when the coffin was taken from the hearse, and again laid on the shoulders of the afflicted serving-men, one deep sob burst from a thousand lips (Lockhart, Life of Walter Scott). I tried not to let the fact that he is buried next to General Haig spoil the moment.

 Headstone Dryburgh

The Abbey also has a Chapter House with traces of medieval wall paintings and a collection of rather wonderful headstones embossed with figures including a number who are reading. Oh and it is haunted by a ghost called Fat Lips - a woman who lost her lover in the 1745 Rebellion, moved into the ruins and maintained that a little booted man named Fat Lips used to do her housework. Could anything be more perfect?

Maintaining a medieval monastery was tough in Scotland even before the Reformation's bite desecrated what was left. If your community was in the Highlands, internecine strife could reduce you to rubble; if you were in the Borders, the ongoing battles with the English were your main concern. Melrose Abbey was destroyed in the early 1300s by Edward II, rebuild and then, in 1385, Richard II burnt it down. The poor monks of Kelso, which was regularly attacked, were reduced to begging food and clothing from the surrounding locals on frequent occasions. It's quite remarkable so much has survived for us to gaze in awe upon.

I've got Sweetheart Abbey in my sights next where the heart of John Balliol, the King of the Scots who annoyed his people so much they signed the first treaty with Europe, may well be buried. As a second referendum looms, I'm wondering how many more of these rather significant caskets might suddenly turn up...

Scents and Sensibilities: The Not So Smelly Middle Ages? By Catherine Hokin

Setting: one of the most important things for an author to get right. That might be the most obvious statement you read all day and no, you haven't stumbled into a 'how to write' blog but this balancing act of anchoring the reader fully in a time period very different from our own while not bludgeoning them to death under a tsunami of description is occupying a lot of my time with the current WIP.

One of the best ways to communicate a sense of place is through smell. The modern world is obsessed with fragrance: from beauty and cleaning products to the artificial bread that wafts through every supermarket, we walk through such a vanillery-bakery-flowery world that any slightly unpleasant scent feels like an assault. I am beginning to think that most of our Proustian moments will shortly be controlled by Airwick. The challenge for the writer, however, is that this most crucial sensory experience is the hardest to research and to replicate.

That the Middle Ages was a morass of stinking towns and villages filled with people whose body odours would have made a skunk weep is one of those history myths that gets peddled at school and repeated incessantly until it ends up on QI. Scrape under the mucky surface and things are rather different.

There are admittedly plenty of stories of medieval people who did not regard hygiene as a priority. Isabella of Castile (1451-1504) reputedly only bathed twice in her lifetime, once when she was born and once when she married. King Louis IX (1214-1270) was described by the Russian ambassador to his court as stinking like a wild animal. They, however, were not the norm for their class: foul odours were associated with disease, low standing in the social order and moral corruption (based on the idea of miasma). Those who could avoid smelling revolting did.

At the height of the Middle Ages, bathing was a serious business. For the wealthy this would take place in tented wooden tubs lined with cloth; the better-off town-dwellers had communal bathhouses; the peasants made do with rivers in the summer and fire-warmed water in the winter. Whatever rank you were, de-lousing with salty water would probably feature somewhere in your life. Health manuals such as the Regimen Sanitatis (c.1308) contained dozens of rules for bathing at specific times such as pregnanacy and noted the importance of bathing for getting rid of dirt and grime beyond that which was visible: “if any of the waste products of third digestion are left under the skin that were not resolved by exercise and massage, these will be resolved by the bath.” As with medicine, herbs and plants were central to the process of sweetening the body for those who had access to them. Thyme and rose petals were widely used to perfume bath water, the body could be dried using sheets sprinkled with rosewater and then dusted (men and women) with a powder made from ground rice, ground orris root  (a violet smell favoured by King Edward IV) and fragranced with cloves or lavender. Bay leaves, hyssop and sage were used to make deodorants and sachets of lemon balm and dried rose petals could be slipped into clothes already boiled in water scented with orris root and stored in chests containing 'sweet bags' which held a mix of ingredients such as musk, citrus peel and marjoram. Finally a 'pomme d'ambre' (an apple of ambergris) filled with a fragrant paste could be attached to a waist belt and, once Arabic gums and essential oil distillation methods could be combined with the discovery of alcohol distillation in the early 1300s, a perfume with notes of mint and rosemary could be added to the mix. The notion of a court filled with walking pot-pourri bowls is rather hard to escape.

 Woodcut 1489

So, if the people battled the negative associations of fetid smells rising from their bodies, where does the notion of the smelly medievals come from? For that we have to turn to place. I have always been an urbanite but I think medieval England may have forced a love of the country on me. Wood smoke, days old pottage and damp over-close animals still seem preferable to the alternative. Medieval towns stank. Clearly sanitation was an issue: towns were cramped, pavements were rare and Roman drains were long forgotten although muckrackers were well-paid. Houndsditch, which runs through London's glossy financial district, gets its name from the amount of dead dogs deposited in it when it was a great open ditch running through one of the medieval  city's main thoroughfares. In the 14th century, Sherborne Lane in the east of the capital was officially known as Shiteburn Lane and every town had its equivalent, Pissing Alley apparently being quite a favourite.

 

 Fes Medieval Tanneries

The main problem, however, was not the disposal of human waste,  it was the industries and commerce that multiplied as the towns grew. Anyone who has battled down the narrow Shambles in York can imagine how disgusting this road must have been when it was the open air Great Flesh Shambles with a drain filled with blood and offal running down its centre. Even more noxious were the great tanneries which used copious amounts of urine, dog excrement and stale beer in their processes. The smell of the tanneries in Nottingham was said to be so terrible it even repelled rats although, on the plus side, this is credited for reducing the incidents of plague in the area.

Awareness of the links between filth and disease can be seen in the regulations that were constantly passed in medieval towns. Fines were imposed for throwing waste from high windows and dumping it in clean water sources and on butchers for failing to clear waste which attracted dogs and wild pigs. But, as town populations continued to rise, the battle became increasingly hard and raw sewage continued to flow into the Thames until the nineteenth century. The towns smelled bad and, by the end of the Middle Ages, it is likely that the majority of people smelled pretty bad too. The public bath houses had long been associated with sexual activity, the Stews in Southwark for example were largely regarded as a front for brothels. The Church railed against them in vain but attitudes to communal bathing began to change after successive outbreaks of plague and the new disease syphillis, which began to make its presence felt in the late 1400s. Taking a bath became a rather risky adventure.

So back to the balancing act. No one wants to read a seduction scene where the protagonists' body odour acts like extra characters but drowning everything in herbs seems like a recipe for a cliched dish. I'm off to Glasgow's West End streets to breathe in petrol fumes and ponder.