Transcription
During the Middle Ages, winter was a particularly harsh season—cold and dark, with short daylight hours and no need to be out working in the fields. So, there was no better time to take 12 days off from Christmas Eve until Epiphany on the 6th of January and party, except for the obligatory church services. That's exactly what the medievals did with feasts, fun, and celebrations.
Let's travel back in time and take a look at Christmas trolls, holiday hooligans, and fire hazards in the Middle Ages. Bartering for items is a skill that you must hone to be successful during the medieval period, and it's one that has been lost over the centuries. However, it's one that you can practice with our sponsor today, DealDash.
DealDash is the modern equivalent of a medieval marketplace where you can find the best goods at the lowest prices—if you know how to bid well. DealDash is an auction site that has been around for well over a decade, working to sell excess items for wholesalers that have more inventory than they need. DealDash buys the excess stock and then sells it to you at a massive discount. It's a unique system where you, the customer, can find amazing deals on brand new products. You download the app, find the item that your heart desires, and then you bid on it. Each bid increases the price by 1 cent and restarts the 10-second timer. When no one bids after you and the timer hits zero, you win the auction.
You may have seen it around in the last 15 years, and people seem to either love or loathe it. Why does this seem like sorcery? Well, there is one difference from all the other auction sites: you have to buy bids up front. As you sign up, you'll be asked to buy bids. Right now, I can get $400 worth of bids for $30, which will allow me to bid 400 times in any auction. The unique thing about DealDash is that every single auction starts at nothing—there is absolutely no reserve price, and bids can only increase by one penny. This means that a brand new Jeep has sold for only $1,875, or a Nintendo Switch has sold for only $22.
So, I really like the look of this faux fur throw, and I'm going to try and make a bid on it and see what happens. If I click bid now, you can see it's gone up by a cent. Let's see what happens. Yeah, so in 10 seconds—there we go, someone else has bid on it. Damn, my nemesis TZ Cali Poco! I really want this faux fur throw, so I'm just going to click bid again, and you can see the price has now gone up to a dollar, which is kind of insane because the total price you can see at the bottom is worth $350. If I'm being honest, I wouldn't mind parading around my house pretending I'm a medieval king while wearing this faux fur throw. So, I'm going to sit here and keep clicking this button and see if I can win it.
The other thing you can do is choose to use the Buy It Now price. So, if you bid 200 times and don't win the auction, you can buy it outright, and then you'll get your bids back. DealDash isn't for everyone; it takes a savvy barterer who knows a good deal when they see it and has the time to invest into bidding. They also only ship to the US and Canada so far. But for those of you who are interested, you can check out DealDash.com and use my promo code "Medieval Madness" to get an additional 100 extra free bids on your first bid pack purchase. If you don't win an auction or don't like DealDash for any reason, you can contact them and get your money back on your first bid pack purchase—no questions asked. So, it's basically risk-free. Check out DealDash.com, use my promo code "Medieval Madness," and see for yourself if you can be a master barterer.
And now for today's episode: welcome to Medieval Madness!
Football Christmas football matches are still a tradition today in England, but their origins can be traced back to the 8th century. It's not the sort of football we now see with the seasonal Boxing Day matches. Medieval mob football was more of a violent free-for-all. There were rules in so much as two goals were chosen—one at each end of a town or village. It might be a church porch or a specific house window or roof that was used as either end of the pitch, maybe a couple of miles apart or more. And that's where the rules ended, really, because the aim was to get the ball—which was an inflated pig's bladder—into the goal by whatever means.
You might think there is nothing wrong with a little bit of festive football, but the problem was that during the kicking, biting, and heading of each other, as well as the ball, tripping, carrying, hair-pulling, and punching, quite a few people got badly injured, and some even died. The game could go on for days and involved everyone in the town, even the wives and young girls, who would often hide the ball in their skirts to give themselves an advantage. Football also happened at other religious festivals like Pentecost and Easter, but it was the aggressive violence involved in the sport that became such a problem.
In 1314, the mayor of London banned the game from being played anywhere near the city. Around 15 years later, Edward III banned it from the whole kingdom, as he preferred the men to use their energies for more wholesome pastimes, like practicing archery. Sadly, during one match held in the 13th century, a young man in Norblin died because he "ran into an opposing player's dagger," and he wasn't the only person to be killed during a game of medieval football. In 1440, the French were threatened with excommunication if they insisted on playing the dangerous and pernicious game of mob football because it was used to sort out grudges and enmities under the veil of recreational fun.
The Mummers' mumming went on over the Christmas period in northern parts of Europe from as early as the 13th century. The daughter of the English king Edward had her wedding day during the Christmas period, and she had mummers and minstrels in attendance. The mummers would play disgusting games and travel around in groups, going from house to house in the middle of the night. Some would dress up in frightening masks and pretend to be ghosts or other scary creatures. There were also mummers' plays, which were specifically written for the occasion and usually involved someone dying and then being resurrected. The silly play-acting was more about the roles than the scripts.
King Edward III held hugely extravagant events with hundreds of guests, and at Christmas in 1338, he ordered, "86 plain masks, 14 masks with long beards, 15 baboon heads of linen, 12 elves of canvas to make a forest with a wooden pillar, and a cooking stool." At Christmas, nine years later, he ordered even more elaborate disguises so that his guests could dress up and perform these morality plays.
Caroling goes back to the 13th century when carols were all about ring dancing rather than a group of people standing together to sing. The early caroling involved everyone holding hands or linking arms together in a large circle, with just one person standing in the center and singing. The leader, who stood in the middle, would sing the verses of the song while the others would whirl around, skipping from left to right and joining in with the chorus if they could catch their breath. Unlike the wholesome and solemn religious hymns that we sing today, most medieval carols were quite vulgar, and the tunes were often made up on the spot.
Caroling didn't take place in church either; it would happen indoors, perhaps in the Great Hall of the Lord's manor house or the tavern, or outside in the village. Medieval churchyards were often a place used to meet and socialize and might be used for caroling, and the priests were more than a little unhappy about this. One story told by the 12th-century historian William of Malmsbury describes how, on Christmas night, a dozen carolers went dancing around the church and cajoled the priest's daughter into joining them. Her father warned the dancers to stop and threatened that if they didn't, then he would make sure that they would carry on dancing without stopping for a whole year. His curse worked; the group was unable to cease dancing, and their hands became fused together. The priest's son ran outside to try and save his sister, but when he grabbed her arm, it snapped off like a rotten twig.
Christmas dinner usually took place in a manor house set in the middle of a lord's lands for the exclusive use of himself and his family. It was there that the tenants would come to pay their rents and fines, but it was also a place to join together in the Great Hall for a communal meal during Christmas and other special feast days. The Great Hall might be big enough to host hundreds of guests in a large castle or much smaller and only able to squeeze in about 20 in a modest manor house. Either way, it was a communal space at Christmas where everyone, whether rich or poor, might join together to eat, dance, and make merry.
Everybody was supposed to come together at Christmas and open up their homes, whether they were kings, lords, or a lowly peasant. Even the boar's head, that posh medieval Christmas dinner centerpiece, had its own carol. As with all celebrations, food was a major part of the festivities, and incidentally, those rents due to the boss might also include providing the lord with a couple of chickens or a pig for the Christmas dinner. So, Christmas was a time when the lord of the manor would show his gratitude to his serfs and feed their own food back to them as a thank you.
All of the best food was always going to be served at the royal court. In 1213, King John of England held a Christmas feast with huge quantities of food. One order included 24 hogsheads of wine, 200 head of pork, 1,000 hens, 50 lb of pepper, 2 lb of saffron, and 100 lb of almonds—all that, as well as 500 lb of wax, other spices, napkins, linen, and 10,000 salt eels ordered from the sheriff of Canterbury. Even those in smaller households ate well at Christmas. The Bishop of Hereford, Richard of Swinfield, had 41 guests over to his place in 1289. They had three meals in one day and dined on two carcasses and three quarters of beef, two calves, four does, four pigs, 60 fowls, two geese, bread, and cheese. They also managed to drink 40 gallons each of red and white wine.
After all that eating and drinking, it's understandable that no one seems to have been able to keep track of how much beer was coughed. If a lord was unable to accommodate all of his tenants at a fancy Christmas feast, he might provide them with supplies to enjoy in their own homes instead. On one manor in Somerset during the 13th century, a shepherd was given a loaf of bread and a dish of meat on Christmas Eve. His dog would get a loaf on Christmas Day. At the same manor, three other tenants had to share two loaves of bread, a mess of beef and bacon with mustard, one chicken, cheese, fuel for cooking, and of course, as much beer as they could drink during the day.
Icelandic trolls: For the residents of Iceland, December means only a few hours of daylight—usually around 4 to 5. For the Icelandic medievals, this meant long cold nights and a time of danger when they believed that evil creatures wandered the land. The Icelandic sagas tell tales of strange occurrences during the Yule festival. In one saga, a farmer invites all of his neighbors to a Christmas banquet, only to have several ghosts also arrive and cause trouble. The festive spirits shook the mud from their clothes and sprayed all of the other guests. Anyone who tried to stop them fell ill and died.
In another saga, a shepherd named Thorg went out with his sheep on the eve of Yule in a heavy snowstorm, and it was the trolls that became the problem for him. Thorg usually came back when it grew dark, but that day he did not come. Everyone went to church but wouldn't go looking for the shepherd because they were afraid of the power of the trolls in the night. On Yule day, they did go looking for Thorg and found the shepherd, broken and with every bone in his body torn from its place.
In the later Middle Ages, Icelandic stories about the hidden people were quite common, and elves and trolls became associated with Christmas.
Jousting: During the Middle Ages, the English and the Scots developed jousts of war in the marches of Scotland. These were not just for entertainment and sport but were rather fought to the death with sharpened steel lances. At one joust, which was held in Berwick to celebrate Christmas, Henry, Earl of Derby, led 20 English knights in a series of jousts against an equal number of Scottish knights. Many of the men were injured, and they were lucky that only three of them died, but that was probably because some of them cheated by wearing armor underneath their clothes for some inexplicable reason—although probably due to beer. Both sides had agreed not to wear protective clothing before the joust began.
The Yule log: This medieval tradition probably originated in Scandinavia and was a pagan custom that became absorbed into the Christian Christmas. The household fire would be started on Christmas Eve with last year's Yule log. A tree would be very carefully chosen and dragged into the house, and then the largest end of it would be placed in the fire to burn. The rest of the tree would just lie across the room and slowly be fed into the fire to burn throughout the 12 days of Christmas. But you also had to carefully judge when to remove the log from the fire so that enough of it was left over to start the following year's Christmas fire. In some areas, the end of the Yule log would be placed underneath the bed of the head of the household, as it was thought to hold supernatural powers that could stop fire and lightning strikes.
Now we are happy enough to just eat a lovely chocolate cake in the shape of a log rather than have a burning tree thrown across the living room floor. Some of the traditions that are still popular today have their roots in the weird and wonderful Christmas customs that started in the Middle Ages. It just remains for us to wish all of our wonderful medievalists a Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year. Thanks so much for watching this episode, and I'll see you in the next video. Have a great Christmas! Cheers!