One particularly fascinating historical figure I ran across in my research into the 11^th century was Gerbert d’Aurillac, possibly one of the most learned men of his time. For most of his life Gerbert was a scholar, scientist, mathematician, poet, philosopher, statesman and soldier. For a few years at the end, he was also a pope: Sylvester II.

Gerbert d’Aurillac

Born into a humble family in southern France in the mid 10^th century, he was educated at the Benedictine monastery of St. Gerald. His teachers recognized his promise, and eventually sent him to the monastery of Santa Maria De Ripoll. This was one of the five intellectual centers of northern Spain. Situated near the border with the Moorish caliphate, the abbey focused on translating Arabic manuscripts into Latin. Gerbert had the knowledge of the Muslim world at his fingertips! Fervently he took up his studies, particularly Mathematics. He mastered the abacus, studied astronomy, and would, eventually, introduce Arabic numerals to Western Europe. He also visited Cordoba, the most populous city in the world at the time and the intellectual center of Europe. A city of mosques, palaces and baths, it was a cultural, political and economic center. Its library boasted one million books.

Gerbert was in Spain for three years, but he was an intellectual and a scholar throughout his life. He would invent the pendulum clock; he would construct sundials and celestial globes; he would not only learn to play the organ, he would learn how to build them.

He was so brilliant and accomplished that several hundred years later historian William of Malmsbury would diverge from his history of the English kings (actually, interrupting a tirade about the hapless Aethelred II) to go off at a tangent for several pages regarding Gerbert d’Aurillac, claiming that he was a necromancer and had made a pact with the devil. Apparently, in William’s 12^th century world view, it was impossible to believe that a mere human could have been so learned without a little diabolical assistance.

In 970 Gerbert made his first trip to Rome where he became part of a circle of intellectuals and artists. There he was introduced to Otto the Great, founder of the Holy Roman Empire and emperor of Italy. As Otto’s court mathematician, Gerbert spent two years travelling with the court, then settled in Rheims as head of the Cathedral School there. He taught writing, reading, grammar, rhetoric, geometry, astronomy and music. He began to collect books for his private library; he was a patron of the Greek classics at a time when, in Rome, classical learning was considered debauched, and Greek manuscripts were being scraped clean and re-used.

Coronation of Otto III

Gerbert spent many years in Rheims, involving himself in the succession struggles of the infant Otto III as Holy Roman Emperor. He also worked towards the overthrow of the Carolingian kings, Lothair and his son Louis V. Eventually Louis accused Gerbert of treason and attacked Rheims, but Gerbert and his troops repulsed the king. A year later, when Louis was killed in a fall from his horse, Gerbert’s efforts were rewarded when Hugh Capet became France’s first Capetian king.

Gerbert was also deeply involved in the stew of church politics. His appointment by a council of bishops to the post of Archbishop of Rheims in 991 was opposed and eventually declared invalid. Gerbert meantime had allied himself with the young Otto III as counselor and tutor, accompanying him to Italy for a magnificent coronation in 996. In 998 the Pope granted Gerbert the Archbishopric of Ravenna, and when the Pope died in 999, Gerbert – through the influence of Otto III – was elected to replace him.

Crown supposedly given by Pope Sylvester II to King of Hungary

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, Pope Slyvester II administered his office with earnestness and “a profound sense of responsibility.” Among other accomplishments, he brought Poland and Hungary into the Christian fold.

Pope Sylvester died in 1003. William of Malmesbury insists that when the devil came to claim him, the Pope committed suicide by cutting up his own body. Personally, I find this hard to swallow, but the belief persisted for centuries. In 1648, in order to confirm or deny the story, Gerbert’s body was exhumed, and found to be in one piece. So much for William of Malmesbury.

Still, the stigma of Gerbert’s dabbling in the Dark Arts remains even today. In the 2010 fantasy novel “A Discovery of Witches” Gerbert makes a cameo appearance. Author Deborah Harkness, a history professor at USC, sides with William of Malmesbury, and one of the most brilliant men of the 10^th/11^th centuries appears in the 20^th as a vampire. Some guys just can’t get a break.

Sources: “The Last Apocalypse”; Reston, James.
The Catholic Encyclopedia.
Wikipedia.

I’m willing to bet that you’ve never spent an afternoon curled up with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Right? This is not surprising because the ASC is not an easy read. For starters, it’s not just one chronicle, but several, written in several places in England over a period of about three hundred years. It was written in Old English, so unless you have a translation you wouldn’t be able to understand much, although you might be surprised by the number of familiar words that pop out at you here and there. Besides that, the names of the individuals who appear in its pages are tongue-twisting: Cynewulf, Ecgbryht, Ceawlin. Yikes!

When did the chronicling begin? Some time in the 9^th century Alfred the Great decided that it would be a good thing to make a record of events occurring in what was then the Kingdom of Wessex, so he commissioned a group of monks to write a chronicle. The monks were ambitious, and they started in the year 1, referring to the Bible and to Bede’s Ecclesiastical History for their ancient history. They brought their Chronicle up to date, made several copies of it, and Alfred saw to it that copies were sent to other monasteries on the island of Britain with instructions to keep it up to date. Over the next few centuries, chroniclers in at least four different places added posts, not always annually. One wonders if a particular monk was given the job and, once in a while, he just didn’t get around to it. Sometimes the entries are terse references to ecclesiastical events, sometimes they are poems, sometimes they are long, long descriptions of battles, burnings and even extended quotes from the lips of Saxon kings.

What intrigues and infuriates me the most about the ASC are the details that it does not give. It’s the lacuna, the missing stories behind the stories, that raise questions in my mind. Consider the following tantalizing entries:

697 – The Mercians killed Osthryth, Aethelred’s Queen.

Since Aethelred was king of the Mercians, why did the Mercians murder their queen? The murder of a queen strikes me as a very big deal, yet the chronicler had no more to say about it. Why?

933 – The atheling Edward was drowned at sea.

Edward was the brother of the king. How old was he? Where was he going? Did everyone on the ship drown, or just the aetheling? Was there a storm or did the ship strike a rock? There is far more to this story than just this bald statement in the ASC.

942 – Olaf stormed Tamworth, and many dead fell on either hand; the Danes had the victory. They took much booty away with them, and Wulfrun was taken captive in that raid.

Wulfrun was a wealthy woman. What happened to her after she was taken captive? Was a ransom paid? Was she harmed? Raped? Did she ever get back home?

946 – King Edmund passed away on St. Augustine’s Day; he had reigned six and a half years. It was widely known how he ended his days, that Liofa stabbed him at Pucklechurch.

In 946 the circumstances around the death of the King of Wessex (England wasn’t united yet) may have been common knowledge, but today I want to know who Liofa was, what happened to him, why he killed the king and how he managed to get close enough to stab him, never mind that Pucklechurch sounds like a name straight out of The Hobbit. Who wouldn’t want to write a complete account of what happened there?

977 – In this year all the most senior counselors of the English fell at Calne from an upper floor, except the holy archbishop Dunstan, who alone stood upon a beam; and some were very badly injured, and some did not come through it with their lives.

Surely the Anglo-Saxon monks saw this as an Act of God…that only the saintly Archbishop would remain standing high above the wreckage of – what? Poor construction? An earthquake? Had they been pounding their feet in rhythm for some reason, like fans at a football game so that vibrations caused the floor to collapse?

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: England’s history as it happened.

Sort of.

Mind the gaps.

In the early middle ages any journey by ship across a vast expanse of water would have been dangerous. The Narrow Sea, that we know today as the English Channel, was no exception. In the year 1009 a fleet of 80 English ships was destroyed when “there came against them such a wind as no man remembered, the ships were beaten and dashed in pieces” according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The loss of almost an entire fleet would have a significant impact on events in England in the years that followed.

But in 1120 the loss of just a single ship also had a devastating effect on England. The White Ship was the swiftest and most modern vessel in the royal fleet of Henry I, King of England and Duke of Normandy. As you might imagine, Henry made frequent journeys back and forth across the Channel for the purpose of governing his two realms. In November, 1120, he arrived at the port city of Barfleur, Normandy, intending to take ship for England with a large retinue that included his heir, 17-year-old William Ætheling, as well as four of Henry’s illegitimate sons and daughters and many of the heirs to some of the noblest families in England and Normandy.

The Master of the White Ship requested the honor of taking the king across the Channel, but Henry chose to board his usual vessel. He proposed, though, that his children and their companions take the newer, faster ship–the White Ship. So, on November 25, the king set sail in daylight, while the White Ship, delayed by the revelry of its passengers, did not leave port until after nightfall. There were 140 knights and 18 noble women on board, as well as barrels of wine and a party atmosphere.

The story goes that William Ætheling wanted to outpace his father’s vessel and arrive in England first, so the White Ship, instead of sailing northeast to avoid the rocky shoals along the Norman shore, headed due north. Many factors could have played a role in what happened next: the tide, the darkness, the free-flowing wine or all of the above. At any rate, the ship foundered on the rock of Quillebeuf, its hull ripped wide.

They were a mile and a half from shore, and in the dark the three hundred men and women on the sinking ship had little hope of rescue. William’s quick-thinking body-guard tumbled the prince into the only life boat and began to row towards shore, but William ordered him to turn around and rescue his brothers and sisters. Too many desperate victims, though, tried to clamber aboard the small boat, and it capsized.

The only survivor of the White Ship was neither prince nor knight, but a butcher who managed to cling to a spar. For weeks, bodies would wash up along the Norman shore.

The sinking of the White Ship was a tragedy for England, even beyond the loss of so many of its noble youth, for William Ætheling was a symbol as well as a prince. Descended on his mother’s side from King Aethelred II of England, and on his father’s from Duke Richard II of Normandy, he united the pre-Norman, Anglo-Saxon dynasty of Wessex with the new Norman line founded by the William the Conqueror.

William Ætheling, b. 1103 – d. 1120 (Wikimedia Commons)

He was also his father’s only legitimate male heir. His sister, Mathilda, would try to step into their father’s shoes, but many in England were not yet ready to accept a woman on England’s throne, including Mathilda’s cousin, Stephen. He claimed the prize first; she objected. For eighteen years civil war would rage in England – a high price to pay for the loss of a single White Ship off the rocky Norman coast.

Sources:  

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, translated and collated by Anne Savage;
Travel in the Middle Agesby Jean Verdon;
http://www.britannia.com/history/bb1120.html;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Ship

This happens about once each millennium: somebody decides to tinker with the calendar. A couple of millennia ago, the Roman calendar was 355 days long, divided into 12 months. But to make the days of the year match the seasons, they had to add an extra 22 or 23-day month every other year. Enter Julius Caesar, who took a little jaunt to Egypt, hung out with Cleopatra and her astronomers, and learned all about their 365 day calendar. In 46 B.C. he instituted the Julian Calendar in Rome that was even better than the Egyptian one. It was 365 ¼ days long, plus one extra day in February every 4 years to make up for that .25 day. In order to make it work, Caesar had to add 67 days to 46 B.C. It was a really long year.

Only guess what? The true solar year is actually 11 minutes shorter than 365 ¼ days, which meant that the Julian Calendar gained 3 days every 400 years. Caesar didn’t realize that, of course. And if you think this whole calendar thing is complicated, the truth is it’s far more complicated than it seems. I’m only giving you the tip of the iceberg. And don’t even get me started on whether New Year’s Day in the Middle Ages was January 1, March 25, or December 25.

Right. Well, by 1582 the spring equinox was off by 10 days which was messing with the minds of the priests who had to calculate when Easter was supposed to happen. (Don’t go there. You’ll be sorry.) So the pope at the time, Gregory XIII, decided that the calendar needed to be reformed by first, bringing it back into alignment with the spring equinox and second, devising a formula for deleting leap years so that the calendar would not go off track again. So in 1582 the Pope deleted 10 days in October and put the new calendar into use. Still, it took a while for some countries to jump on the Gregorian bandwagon. England didn’t adopt it until 1752. Russia? 1918. It’s the calendar we still use today.

Except now an economist at Johns Hopkins University, Steve Hanke, says that the Gregorian calendar needs reforming. He wants to simplify it by having the days of the week fall on the same date year after year. School calendars, sports calendars, business calendars would not have to be re-worked every year. Christmas and New Year’s Day would always be on a Sunday. Thanksgiving in America would be on November 25, period. My birthday would forever be on a Thursday. The year would be 364 days long, and every 5 to 6 years we would re-sync with the seasons by adding a leap week.

Frankly, I’m not convinced. It sounds pretty boring to me. Besides, I like knowing that December 21 is the shortest day of the year and that June 21 is the longest, instead of having the solstices wandering drunkenly about. On the other hand, with global warming impacting our seasons, Mother Nature appears to be completely befuddled, and after all the research I’ve done on calendars, I know just how she feels. To find out what day your birthday would fall on forever, go to http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/ccct.calendar.html.

It is nearly Twelfth Night (January 6, thank you, King Alfred) when we will have to put all thoughts of Christmas behind us for another year. Before we do that, though, let us consider what Christmas might have been like for the southern colonies in early America.

Jamestown was founded in April, 1607, by members of the Church of England. Their first Christmas was not recorded, possibly because by Christmas of that first year, only 38 of the original 104 settlers were still alive. But the intrepid John Smith describes a 1608 Yuletide feast of shellfish, meat and poultry that was celebrated outside the settlement among the Indians by Smith and a dozen companions who were foraging for food. So, bleak as it may have been, Christmas was observed in early Virginia.

Bracewell Ghost of Xmas Past

Except for Pennsylvania, where the Quakers initially did not regard Christmas as a holiday, the later colonies celebrated Christmas with the traditions they brought with them from the old world, whether they were Dutch or English, Polish or Portuguese. As the colonies became a melting pot of nationalities and religions, the earlier Puritan prohibition against celebrating Christmas faded, and even in Boston folk kept Christmas however they wished. Thomas Jefferson described his 18^th century Virginia Christmas as “a day of mirth and jollity”.
By the time President Grant declared Christmas a Federal holiday in 1870, the kinds of excesses that had offended the Puritan settlers no longer characterized the feast. And now we have arrived at the Christmas celebrated by Louisa May Alcott and the March girls, a time of nostalgia and hope, of family warmth and communal ties, of tradition and good cheer. It would become the Season of Shopping soon enough.

One of my favorite Christmas cd’s is Winter’s Dance by the Celtic folk group Golden Bough. It is the background music for all the cooking and baking I do between December 18 and January 1. One of the songs on the album is Christmas Comes But Once a Year, a traditional Irish tune from Carrick, which is singularly appropriate for kitchen listening.

Come then to the laden table
Ham and goose and pints of beer
Whiskey handed round in tumblers
Christmas comes but once a year.

Puddings made with eggs and treacle,
Seeded raisins and ground suet,
Sated breadcrumbs and mixed spices,
Grated rind and plenty fruit,
Cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and nutmeg,
Porter, brandy, and old ale.
Don’t forget the wine and whisky!
Christmas comes but once a year!

This description of Irish Christmas feasting fits an old fashioned English Christmas just as well. Back in the 800’s, the Anglo-Saxon king, Alfred the Great, went the Celts one better by extending the Christmas feasting to cover twelve days. Alfred was wise. The Anglo-Saxons must have needed all the carbs (from beer) and protein (from boar) they could get to last them through the long, lean days of winter until the next great feast at Easter. And since America was founded by English settlers who brought with them these same English traditions, the early American Christmases must have been just as festive. Right?

Wrong. I recently learned, to my surprise, that the medieval Christmas feasting that would have been embraced through the reigns of English kings right through to Charles I (d. 1649), was considered an abomination by the Puritans. From 1644 until 1681, there was a law on the books forbidding excessive celebrating at Christmas. (Cue Alan Rickman’s Sheriff of Nottingham: “Cancel Christmas!!!!”)

So, what did that mean for the New England colonies, founded by our stern Pilgrim forbears? Well, let us remember that while they must have been admirably stoic and enduring, the Puritans were also hard-nosed, flinty-eyed, no-nonsense, religious zealots. (I speak as one who, my genealogy-minded sister has informed me, had an ancestor on the Mayflower.) On Christmas Day in 1620, at Plymouth, the Pilgrims showed their contempt for Christmas by spending the day building their first structure in the New World. No feasting, no singing, no holiday, and not even a religious service.

Even as late as 1870, Boston public schools were open for business and students were expected to attend or else.

“But wait!” you may protest, as I did. What about Fezziwig’s party? (Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was published in New York in 1844.) What about Louisa May Alcott’s four sisters who read Pilgrim’s Progress at bedtime, but celebrated their New England Christmas by making gifts for Marmee? (Little Womenwas published in 1868.)

How did we get from the sober Puritans to Alcott and Dickens? This post will be continued next week, but I’ll give you a hint: Before there was Plymouth (1620), there was Jamestown (1607).

In our house the tree has been trimmed, the wreaths hung, candles placed on tables and mantels, gifts…….okay, let’s not go there just yet. I haven’t had time to even think about gifts, and barely time to do all of the above.
So, as I was decking my little hall I was thinking about what Christmas might have been like for an 11^th century English queen. (And I say might have been because, really, who can possibly know for certain?) Nevertheless, what kinds of informed guesses can I make from my research?

She would have been tremendously busy. Apart from being a major religious feast, (lots of prayers and lots of Masses in the days between December 25 and January 6), Christmas had political significance. The king would have held meetings with his counselors, sometimes as many as 40 of them – archbishops, bishops, abbots, and prominent nobles. And they would have brought with them their retainers and servants, wives and children. Add to that the households of the king and queen, and one cannot help but wonder where everyone slept.

They all had to be housed and fed, and the feasts would have been lavish. It was the time for crown-wearing, for putting on a sumptuous royal display, and the queen would have played a major role in the logistical planning.

Food preparation alone would have been a massive chore – roasting the meat, baking the bread, brewing the ale – non-stop cooking for twelve days. There must have been an army of servants (and slaves in Anglo-Saxon times) to do it all, probably including folk from villages near whatever royal estate would have been the site for the event.

But the queen had a political role to play as well. She greeted the guests with the welcoming cup of mead, and in a court made up of warrior nobles and ecclesiastics, she would have been a counselor and even, one imagines, an arbitrator – at Christmas and at all the great feasts. According to historian Pauline Stafford, she was “the organizer of the palace and of the royal dignity, a giver of gifts and provider for its magnificence.”

She probably had all her Christmas shopping done by December 1.