Medieval Monks
There were a lot of different orders of monks in the Middle Ages (still are, in fact), but the primary monasteries in England consisted of: Dominicans: Dominicans are about preaching and doctrinal conformity. They were (no surprise) the order behind the inquisition, with the intent to rule out any doctrine that didn’t abide strictly by received Catholic theology. “Domingo de Guzman (around 1170-1221), a Spanish priest travelling with his bishop Diego of Osma, encountered by chance Cistercian monks who tried to bring the Cathars of Southern France back to the Catholic Church. He saw the deficiencies of their attempts and decided to do a better job, by walking and dressing humbly, listening to and talking with people, being aware of contemporary developments, and first of all preaching the Gospel. He gathered a band of priests around him. After the Fourth Read more…
The Quest for Welsh Independence
When the Romans conquered Britain, the people they defeated were the Britons, the ancestors of the Welsh, a Celtic people who themselves had come to the island hundreds of years before. After the Romans marched away in 410 AD, the Saxon invaders overwhelmed the British in successive waves, pushing them west and resulting in a Saxon England and British Wales. When the next conquerors—the Normans—came in 1066 AD, they conquered England but they did not conquer Wales. Not yet. For the next two hundred years, power in Wales ebbed and flowed, split among Welsh kings and princes, Marcher barons (Norman lords who carved out mini-kingdoms for themselves on the border between England and Wales), and the English kings. Through it all, the Welsh maintained their right to independence—to be governed by their own laws and their own kings. The ending came on Read more…
Traveling on Medieval Roads
Traveling on medieval roads meant traveling on surfaces as varied as stone, gravel, grass, and dirt. There have been roads across Britain for as long as people and animals have traversed the landscape. The original roads were tracks, created by years, decades, and millennia of people and wheeled vehicles, wearing a passage through forests, fields, and mountainous terrain. One of the first videos we produced was about Bwlch y Ddeufaen, an ancient road across north Wales marked by two standing stones, dating back thousands of years. Because of the difficult terrain, rather than build a new road entirely, the old one was improved by the Romans and then was in continuous use up until the modern era when a new road along the coast line was blasted through the mountains. One of the most lasting effects of the Roman occupation Read more…
Slavery and Wales
The title says Slavery ‘and’ Wales because the degree to which slavery existed in Wales is difficult to determine. Without a doubt, many Welsh were forced into slavery–evidence points to Welsh captives on the continent of Europe as well as in Anglo-Saxon England. St Patrick himself was Briton/Welsh (born 387 AD) and was captured by the Irish and made a slave. The Celts were well-known slave-keepers, as were the Romans after them. But were the Welsh themselves, after the Romans left? Hard to imagine they weren’t when their neighbors all around were enslaving them. But in all of the 767 pages of John Davies The History of Wales, he doesn’t mention slavery once. However, Ron Wilcox writes in his book Between Romans and Normans: “Living alongside the bondsmen were the slaves who worked as agricultural labourers or artisans. Most were born into slavery but Read more…
Shifting views of the past
On a history forum I frequent, someone asked a question about why historians’ views of the past have changed over time, particularly in reference to the ‘Dark Ages’. My novels are set in ‘Dark Age’ and medieval Wales, and this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. Dark Age Britain, as one example, was conquered first by the Romans, who delighted in contrasting their ‘civilized’ society with the barbarity of the native tribes. Next, the Saxons moved in, then the Normans who came in 1066. All of these conquering groups spouted continually about the brutish, uncivilized lives the native British people led (the Scots are included in this too). It’s not uncommon to have English media TODAY speak of the Welsh as some sort of less-than-civilized ‘other’ (I blogged about this here). Compare this to a similar situation: Native Read more…
Taliesin the Bard
Whence come night and flood? How they disappear? Whither flies night from day; And how is it not seen? These lines are taken from a poem by Taliesin, a Welsh poet who lived roughly between 534 and 599 AD. His poetry has survived in the medieval Red Book of the Hergest, and The Book of Taliesin, found here: http://www.llgc.org.uk/index.php?id=bookoftaliesinpeniarthms2. “It is this manuscript which preserves the texts of famous poems such as ‘Armes Prydein Fawr’, ‘Preiddeu Annwfn’ (which refers to Arthur and his warriors sailing across the sea to win a spear and a cauldron), and elegies to Cunedda and Dylan eil Ton, as well as the earliest mention in any western vernacular of the feats of Hercules and Alexander. The manuscript is incomplete, having lost a number of its original leaves, including the first.” He is associated with Arthur, Read more…
The Wildwood — the lost forest of the UK
Imagine all of the UK covered in a thickly wooded landscape, much like portions of the western United States. I just spent the last 1/2 an hour looking up native plants in Wales, trying to come up with a couple that would have reliably flourished in Gwynedd in the 13th century. My sister-in-law is a botanist, and she agreed that agrimony and juniper would good choices. What has been difficult to determine, as with the Roman and ancient roads, is what the landscape looked like in the Middle Ages. England was mostly denuded of trees by then, but it is possible that wasn’t the case in Wales. So when we see these broad lanscapes in the uplands with no trees, was that what they looked like eight hundred years ago? How do we find that out? According to scientists, only Read more…
Vortigern? Who was he again?
Vortigern was a King of the Britons who is remembered for welcoming the Saxons into Britain during the dark ages and then being unable to get them to leave. This site: http://www.vortigernstudies.org.uk/artwho/who.htm would very much like to rehabilitate Vortigern. He has extensive information on this site. Our knowledge of Vortigern comes from some early sources. Gildas, who wrote a moral history of Britain, states, around 540 BC: “At this meeting, the council invited the Saxons in three keels from Germany, as a counter to the threat from the Picts in the north. This is followed after some time by a conflict over the annona (payment in kind), after which the Saxon federates devastate the country. Vortigern, who may have been named by Gildas, is not portrayed by Gildas as a sole ruler, or a High King if you will. He rules Read more…
Rewriting the Dark Ages
A new theory has been working it’s way through the archaeological literature that there was no Saxon ‘invasion’ of Britain after the fall of Rome. The theory states that “9th century Anglo-Saxon propaganda distort [ed] the records for the turbulent 5th and 6th centuries. . . . Rather than Briton versus Anglo-Saxon – as in the myth of Arthur – was it simply a murderous struggle between rival British warlords?” http://www.archaeology.co.uk/articles/rewriting-the-age-of-arthur.htm The theory, at least in this article, is based on a lack of primary sources of the era. This is an interesting argument, but there are a number of sources that suggest it isn’t accurate. First: written evidence, which the article claims to be scarce, is far more prevalent than at first appears–it’s just that the sources are not necessarily British. This site on the ruin and conquest of Britain, details, Read more…
What happened to silence?
With more than 80% of Americans living in metropolitan areas (and only 2% living as I do in towns of fewer than 25,000 people), nobody knows what real silence is anymore. http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/Population/ Writing historical fiction requires that you project yourself into that long ago past. As the modern world hurtles headlong into the future, this becomes more and more difficult. Trying to find spaces where it’s possible to get a sense of that historic time is getting harder by the day. Like light pollution, noise pollution is everywhere. This winter in the Olympic National Forest and on the Quinnault Indian Reservation, my husband and I experienced the silence of the natural world, though it is presently threatened by the air routes over it into Sea-Tac airport south of Seattle. In Eastern Oregon, the silence can be complete–and loud–to the point of ringing Read more…
The Pelagian Heresy
The Pelagian heresy is an important part of any discussion of religion in Wales during the era formerly known as the Dark Ages. Pelagius was a British monk, born around 350 AD, who moved to Rome and was a contemporary of St. Augustine. His crucial fault was that he believed that the notion of original sin–that all men were condemned because of the actions of Adam–was false. Unfortunately, our primary source of his writings are not the writings themselves, but the reaction to them on the part of his opponents. He was condemned as a heretic by Augustine, whose teachings became predominant in the church. http://www.brojed.org/IE/pelagius.php; for a list of primary sources: http://www.earlychurch.org.uk/pelagius.php The two differing paths are: Augustine: 1. Death comes from sin, not man’s physical nature; 2. Infants must be baptized to be cleansed from original sin and those who die without Read more…
Red, Black, and White Books
In Lord of the Rings, Frodo leaves Sam the Red Book of Westmarch, in which to record the goings on of Middle Earth after he is gone. Tolkein himself says that his inspiration for the fictional book was the Red Book of Hergest in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, which he knew well. In Wales, there were three such books of which we know: The Red Book of Hergest The Black Book of Camarthan The White Book of Rhydderch The Red Book of Hergest was written between 1375 and 1425 by Hywel Fychan fab Hywel Goch of Fuellt, for his employer, Hopcyn ap Tomas ap Einion of Ynys Tawe. In it are some of the most famous Welsh texts, including the Chronicles of the Princes, The History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth, The Ruin and Conquest Read more…
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