A Deep Plunge into the High Middle Ages

I hadn’t planned on studying the Middle Ages, but one semester the only European course that looked good to me was History of the High Middle Ages, the period from 1000 to about 1300. (For climate aficionados that was the time of the Medieval Optimum, when it was warm enough to grow grapes in England and Greenland was temporarily settled.)

One thing I learned was that our romantic “Sir Walter Scott” fantasies about knights, castles, chivalry, and jousts are—largely true! There really was a courtly world. Lords built scores (perhaps hundreds) of castles across western Europe; the move to primogeniture (inheritance by the first-born male) meant that a lot of younger sons (“cadets”) were looking for rich heiresses; and jousts were a way of keeping young knights busy and in good shape without actually engaging in wars (of course, they had plenty of those, too). The aristocrats may have represented only 2 percent or so of the population, but they had chroniclers and poets to commemorate them.

Another reason why knights traveled all over Europe was that even if they were eldest sons and able to offer a castle or two to their wives, they had to find a wife who was not forbidden by the church. Starting perhaps as early as 597, the Church established extraordinary “consanguinity rules,” preventing anyone from marrying someone who was remotely related. Modern Americans are familiar with prohibitions (in some states) against the marriage of first cousins. The Medieval Catholic Church barred marriages as far apart as the seventh degree, that is, between two people who had a common ancestor in the sixth previous generation. Prohibiting first  cousins means that you cannot marry someone with the same grandfather; prohibition to the seventh degree meant that you and your potential spouse could not have the same great-great-great-great-great grandparent. These remote connections were sometimes “discovered” years after a marriage in order to justify annulment.

Jack Goody, an anthropologist/historian, has a theory of why these rules were so strict. He argues that the Church took these positions in order to limit the number of heirs and thus make it more likely that families would donate land to the Church. Historians don’t like the explanation, but economists do.

The warm climate contributed to agricultural growth and population growth. A common practice was “assarting,” reclaiming wilderness or swamps in response to population increases. Among other things, the availability of newly productive land eased the shift to primogeniture because the new land could be given to the unlucky younger sons. All the good news ended in 1348, however, when the Black Death arrived. Luckily for me, that launched the Late Middle Ages and was not a major part of our class.

If my post sounds a little Pollyanna-ish or even “Monty Pythonish,” I’m sorry. In another post I will discuss what I consider the gloomier side of the High Middle Ages, the extreme religiosity. (That was another boost to primogeniture, by the way, since the proliferating monasteries provided cadets with potentially  prominent places in abbeys or even archbishoprics.) And it’s complicated.