1215: The Year of Magna Carta

by Danny Danziger and John Gillingham

Simon & Schuster 2004, originally published in Great Britian in 2003 by Hodder & Stoughton

ISBN 0-7432-5773-1

This is a fun book. The goal of the book, I think, is to help the reader understand what the Magna Carta really was, how it came to be, and what on earth it was talking about. [Quick! Why is it important that your recognizance of novel disseisin be held in your own county’s court?!  Yeah, I didn’t know either.  This is why we read *about* the Magna Carta in school, but almost never read the document itself.]

The books opens with very broad chapters setting the scene – what was life like in a medieval English castle, or town or farm – and gradually shifts towards the events leading to the Magna Carta itself. The details are fascinating, entertaining, and sometimes disturbing – the excerpt I posted last week is typical of the kinds of colorful anecdotes the authors use help build a vivid portrait of medieval life.

–> One of the most helpful  of the earlier chapters for me was on warfare (“Tournaments and Battles”), because I don’t think until this reading I had really understood quite how it all worked – most books on medieval warfare that I have read tend to dive into a single aspect – castles, or knights, or the winning of particular battles – this book finally gave me the broader picture.

The narrative is quick – the word ‘breezy’ comes to mind – flowing very quickly from one idea to the next, and dropping details and anecdotes wherever they can be fitted smoothly.   Examples of various practices jump around time and place, and often a character is introduced without any real context, so that it was hard at times to fully understand the meaning behind the anecdote. The complete absence of footnotes did not help. This complaint of mine applies primarily to the earlier chapters, though, and by the end of the book, as the authors unroll the month-by-month developments leading to the Magna Carta, it is much easier to follow the train of events and be sure of who is doing what and why they are doing it.

In all I found the book to be believably balanced in its view. History being what it is, you can of course always find an argument with the historian’s version of events, but I can’t remember any point where I thought the authors were overlooking an obvious explanation for some particular practice.   Generally I found the reading of people and events to be very real – very aware of the normal humanity of the people involved, not at all trying to make them into something other than what they were.  And of course, if you know very little about the Magna Carta, this book is just the remedy.

So my recommendation is: Check it out from your local public library. I wouldn’t urge you to buy it unless you are really at the point where what you need is a readable popular history of the topic – it is a good book, but the lack of footnotes is a real stumbling block for those who want to use it as a launching point for further study. (There is a bibliography, though, if you are the sort who uses those. Perhaps it will be enough for you.)

I do think it makes a good beginner (adult) book – someone who was jumping into medieval history for the very first time could probably read and enjoy, and come away the winner for it.  And that in itself is impressive — there are not many history books that are informative for intermediate readers and still approachable for beginners.  I should emphasize that although younger readers could understand and enjoy, you would not necessarily want them to do so.  Parental pre-reading strong advised.

Note before I begin:  Two things always seem to happen to me when I visit Las Vegas:  1) My baggage arrives on a different plane than I do, and 2) I end up borrowing a computer that causes strange formatting issues on my blog.  The first is resolved now, but the 2nd I’m not so sure about.  If this post is difficult to read, my apologies, and if need be I’ll try to fix it when I get home.

 

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Daily Life in Medieval Europe, Jeffery L. Singman (Greenwood Press, 1999)

Daily Life in Chaucer’s England, Jeffery L. Singman and Will McLean (Greenwood Press, 1995)

Daily Life in Elizabethan England, Jeffery L. Singman (Greenwood Press, 1995)

 

Summary: These are some of the better history books I’ve seen.  They may or may not be what you are looking for, but if you are interested in the topics they cover, I think they do a great job.  I can’t say there was never a single sentence that made me pause and go ‘hmmn’, but I don’t have any of the reservations I have about other very helpful but still flawed works on the same era.

***

The SuperHusband brought two of these three home from our local library for me last fall. I was skeptical (judging the book by the cover and all that), but eventually boredom got the best of me and I cracked one open. Pleasant surprise.  [The three are part of a larger series, but I haven’t read any of the other titles in the series, which are by other authors.]  I made myself read the entirety of Medieval Europe last fall so that I could write a proper review; I think I read all of Elizabethan as well, or at least the bulk of it; Chaucer’s England I picked up the a few weeks ago when I went to fetch the others in order to prepare this post, and have skimmed it to see what’s there, but have only read snatches of it in any detail. I lump them together because they are all by the same author, and are very similar to each other in the kinds of information and comments they contain, and are all of similarly good quality.

 

As the titles indicate, these books deal with what ordinary life was like in the indicated time periods; if you want detailed accounts of kings, bishops, and battles, you’ll need to find some other book – though these do each open with a brief overview the history of the period, to help put the bulk of the book into context. In contrast, if you always wanted to know about how much it would cost* to buy a quart of ale in 16^th century England, or maybe you have some spare honeycombs sitting around and were looking for a nice medieval mead recipe to use them up, these books can help.

 

The goal of the series is to provide an entry-level to intermediate resource, but which is more substantial than most beginner’s histories. At this is fully succeeds. Something like this would be a good choice before trying to get into A Day in a Medieval City (which I reviewed last month). The reading level is adult, but not overwhelmingly complex or technical – a high school student shouldn’t have any difficulty with the books, and would probably really enjoy picking one out to read as part of a European History course.

 

I expect that younger students who are strong readers and highly interested in the subject would also find them accessible, and it is fairly easy to skip to the sections of high interest for those who don’t want to read the whole book. That said, parental guidance is always recommended – I can’t recall anything particularly objectionable, but I’m fairly sure I ran across some adultish topics, though if your children are already immersed in contemporary American pop culture (mine are not) I bet you’ll never bat an eyelash.  If nothing else the discussion of religion is one where parents may want to provide some perspective.

 

What I really love about these books is the respect with which they describe and speculate about the people living in medieval and renaissance Europe. The author comes from a living-history background, and I think this really shows through – people of the past are treated as ordinary people quite like ourselves. The three d’s of the gossip-method history writing – dumb, depraved, and disgusting – are refreshingly absent, and without succumbing to the opposite error of combining nostalgia and amnesia to gloss over the difficult realities of the time period.

 

Another strength is the avoidance of gross generalizations. Medieval Europe, the title most likely to succumb to that temptation, limits itself to the high middle ages – approximately 1100 to 1300 – and to northwestern Europe. In each of the chapters devoted to village, city, monastic and castle life, a specific location (one for which ample documentation is available) is chosen and examined in detail. Rather than pretending that you could possibly explain two hundred years and four countries worth of monastic life in a single chapter, for example, the book gives you a detailed look inside Cluny, thus giving you a general idea of what a monk’s life might have been by showing just how it was in that particular time and place.

 

All three books are geared towards helping the re-creationist get started. There are specific instructions for making clothing, as well period songs with sheet music, descriptions of how to play period games, specific recipes culled from historical sources, and so forth.   For that reason these books would make an excellent resource for planning a themed party, educational event, or costuming and set ideas for a play (or story) set in the relevant era.  Obviously Chaucer’s England is just begging to be read by anyone studying The Cantebury Tales, and Elizabethan England would likewise be a natural accompaniment to a study of Shakespeare.

 

Some differences between Medieval Europe and Chaucer’s England, in case you are wondering which title will better fit your needs:  As I mentioned above, the former covers the period from 1100 to 1300, whereas the latter focuses on the second half of the 14^thcentury.  Also, as one could guess from the titles, Europe covers a slightly broader geographic era than England.  In addition to the study of Cluny, the chapter on town life uses Paris (mining the data from the 1292 tax assessments for evidence) as its sample city.  The sections on castle and village life are based on locations in England.  Chaucer’s England leans very strongly in the direction of aid to the aspiring re-creationist; it lacks these detailed studies of archeological sites as found in Medieval Europe, but seems to have more material on clothing, music, games, and so forth.

 

*Answer: about a half-penny.

 

A Day in a Medieval City, Chiara Frugoni

University of Chicago Press, 2005 ISBN: 0-226-26634-6

(Originally published as Storia di un gionro in una citta medievale, Laterza, 1997)

Chiara Frugoni is a professor of medival history at the University of Rome, and this book builds on articles written by her father, Arsenio Frugoni, who died in 1970 and who was also, in his time, a professor of medieval history at the University of Rome.

The book begins with an introduction consisting of Arsenio Frugoni’s original work, which vividly captures the feeling of life in an eleventh or twelfth century Italian city, as well a brief perspective on how it reached its medieval form. Chiara Frugoni adds seven chapters that explore various themes ( “Inside the City” “Childhood Learning”, etc.) in more detail. It seems to me she draws the majority of her examples from the late medieval period (14^th and 15^th centuries).

The book is written for adults, both in reading level and content, but is very approachable for the hobbyist-historian. Someone who has never studied medieval history at all might be more comfortable reading some more introductory works first, and going to this one as a sort of ‘intermediate’ level text. Detailed endnotes add another layer of depth.

This is a book I can’t help but like, despite several reservations I’ll mention below. The vividness of detail is positively delightful, and with little to none of the gee-whiz snappiness that plagues many popular works on medieval history. For example there is an exploration of the role pigs played in the city (as garbage collectors), including period accounts of pig-related incidents. If you are looking for illustrations of medieval dress and furnishings, there are 153 images available for your perusal.

The most compelling feature of the book is this enormous collection of (period) illustrations it contains, and the explanations that go with them. A typical medieval history book might have a caption that gives the title, author, date and place of creation. Chiara Frugoni puts detailed descriptions in the text of the book, often describing a work panel by panel, to help draw the eye to details the reader would otherwise overlook or perhaps not comprehend at all.

[A note of caution: the illustrations include all aspects of medieval life. Including, say, the torture and execution of captured enemies. Not for the faint of heart. On the other hand, haven’t you always wanted to see a little toilet-related artwork, and the discover the story that goes with?]

One of the weaknesses of the book, though an understandable one, is that it flits back and forth through a broad time frame, even within paragraphs. Topics are arranged by theme (medicine, education, religious belief, etc), and often the entire medieval period is treated in the aggregate. It is helpful to have studied the timeline of medieval history elsewhere, so that you can parse apart references that mix and match centuries.

This is probably one of the first works on specifically Italian medieval history that I’ve read, and I think I probably missed a few jumps between cities as well. I liked the work because it dealt with a region I hadn’t previously studied (most lay-accessible english-language books on medieval “Europe” tend to focus on England), but as a result, I really didn’t have the capacity to know just how alike or different, say, Venice and Milan might have been at the time, and whether an anecdote from one city reliably shed light on the other.

Last in my list of complaints, there were moments when I thought the generalizations needed a little more documentation. For example, at one point the author writes in a passage on women reading, “They used reading stands made for the men of the house (it is difficult to imagine that they were built to meet the particular needs of women)”. Now this may be entirely true, and yet it is a terribly bold statement to make – here we are looking at illustration after illustration of women reading, and we are to believe that in this time and place men didn’t give their wives gifts related to their daily activities? It may well be the case, but any time you accuse whole gender of utter selfishness towards their own family members*, it would seem appropriate to present a bit of evidence.

Likewise there were times when I wanted a little more context for a quotation. I found myself wondering, Is this preacher condemning something that is widely practiced, or is he largely “preaching to the choir”? Is his opinion widely held in the church, or was his sermon preserved because of its unusual nature? I also wish the references to witchcraft had been footnoted – so many excellent footnotes elsewhere had me spoiled, I suppose.

And I think these last examples sum up my mixed feelings towards the work as a whole. It’s a beautiful book, a splendid look into a region that isn’t as well known to English-speaking readers, full of detail after vivid detail about medieval life. But it is a book you would want to read with a bit of salt handy – hold onto the treasure trove of illustrations and anecdotes, but be prepared to want to question some of the interpretation.

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*In our home the accusation tends to be kind of the reverse. “Oh honey, how thoughtful! A reading stand? For me? It’s just what you’ve always wanted!”