The idea behind this book--a history of the ordinary man (human) in the Middle Ages--is a compelling but difficult one. [1] Only someone as experienced and erudite as Robert Fossier could manage to provide so much detail about things for which references are often found only in obscure corners of the medieval literature, documentation and archaeological record. It is a fascinating book to read. It is frustrating in its lack of citations and bibliography. It is also uneven in its treatment of various subjects, being strongest on those areas that are Fossier's research specialties, the history of the medieval rural world. The impetus for The Axe and the Oath thus appears to be a reaction to current tendencies to dismiss anything outré as "medieval." He denounces: "The ignorant chatterboxes who reign over our sources of information [who] may indeed call a particular decision or event 'medieval,' but fail to see that they are still living 'in the Middle Ages.'" As Fossier concludes on p. 384, he is not only addressing that group; indeed:
I am not quite sure whom I am addressing...Simplistic for the erudite, confusing for the student, obscure for the non- initiate? I don't know: I felt like saying all this, and that is enough.
As to its originality, he says on p. xii:
I have borrowed almost everything from others and I do not cite them. But, as is usually said in hastily prepared acknowledgments, they will recognize themselves. Here and there I have added a thought or two of my own, especially on the import of what is "natural" and on the "misery" of men.
This is an understatement, for in many parts of its nearly 400 pages Fossier introduces new ideas, new findings and new ways of viewing the medieval world.
The volume is divided into "Part One: Man and his World" and "Part Two: Man in Himself?" Part One begins with "Naked Man" in subsections entitled: "A Fragile Creature," and "An Ungainly Being," where on page 5 Fossier argues that we must consider ourselves carefully and our human or animal violence: "Man is the only mammal who can oppose his thumbs to the other fingers of his hands...[and] he is the most dreaded and the most pitiless of predators."
Yet man--the white male Christian norm against which all others were judged--is "Fairly Content with Himself" (the next subsection title):
Persuaded that they were what God willed, men of the medieval centuries necessarily attributed the ugliness and weaknesses that they saw in those around them to that same divine will, but as an alteration of God's original work.
Hence medieval man reacted to lepers, Saracens, or Jews as being the result of sin (6-7). Nonetheless, such standards could be nuanced ones. Part of the argument that Fossier is making here is about how differently we make judgments today, as he opines: "One treats more leniently the obese King for being obese, if he is nonetheless a good King." If that King's obesity is a sin, it is not because it's self-indulgent or unhealthy, but because it might make him less good as a warrior. [2]
Having worked on many of the same types of intractable charters on which Fossier has worked, I found particularly perceptive the section called "Can Those Men be Counted?" pp. 27-36. It describes a medieval disdain for measurement: "Someone would sell "a wood," bequeath "his land," and give "what he has." Similarly, here Fossier underlines the problem of men in 1427 Florence who do not know how many children they had, historians' frustrations with the problem of estimating the size of a hearth, and of our not knowing how many children died at birth-- because they might be buried under the doorsill rather than in cemeteries. He underlines losses of children with a couple of examples:
Blanche of Castile lost five of her thirteenth children...[and] as late as the fifteenth century, 42 percent of the ground space in Hungarian cemeteries was taken up by the graves of children under ten years of age.
Yet the answer to why population grew in the eleventh and twelfth centuries--one of the major questions of medieval social history-- seems to him obvious. He tells us on p. 31:
The answer is easy to see. A richer diet reinforced man's natural defenses and brought down the death rate, particularly in infant mortality; family structure evolved at a faster rate in the direction of the isolated, child-producing conjugal couple; the practice grew of putting out babies to a wet nurse, thanks to the large number of women capable of feeding another woman's child; liberated from the amenorrhea that accompanies breast-feeding, a woman could become pregnant again sooner, thus reducing "generational intervals."
I would call this "intervals between births." It is part of Fossier's strong argument on what he describes elsewhere as a "révolution des nourrices." [3]
As Fossier tells us on page 45-46, the frequency of births and the choice of breast-feeding or turning to wet nurses was a simple one. While nursing a child might be done in the fields, or while spinning, cooking, mowing hay, if the mother could not or did not want to nurse the child, there would be no problem: "The child would then be given to a wet nurse, and candidates were not lacking for the simple reason that a large number of mothers had children who died in childbirth."
As for weaning, it:
Inevitably determined the rhythm of a woman's fertility at about a year and a half between births if she breast-fed. If not, the births were more closely spread and the "revolution of the nurses [wet-nurses]," as it has been called, figured among the possible causes of demographic increase in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Fossier and I both seem to have been reading Marie de France's Le Fresne on attitudes that twins necessarily came from two fathers; see page 42. More often I do not recognize his sources, as when after a rather gruesome description of childbirth, Fossier goes on to say on page 41: "We can estimate that one women out of ten, and perhaps more, and almost always first-time mothers, did not survive a difficult childbirth." I would have opined that women with low levels of iron in their blood might live through a first, but not a second childbirth, but I am thinking about women's general health while perhaps Fossier's thinking is specifically about "presentation" during birth-- difficulties for which we moderns resort to caesarian section.
On diet and food, Fossier makes statements possibly drawn from archaeology. One would agree as on page 61 that:
People ate much, but badly. It was the imbalance among protein- bearing foods that explains a situation that was reliant not on choice but necessity. Carbohydrates account for up to 80 percent of the calorie load, which is excessive.
One wonders more, however, about the assertion on page 62 that "Meat was quite rare," and on page 63 that "Fish hardly ever appears on a banquet menu and disappears almost entirely from the peasant's table. Better (or worse) there are few traces of fish spines." [4] On the other hand, it is from other types of sources that he draws his assertions about elite food practices on pages 67-69:
The "princely:" table required personnel and space. In the royal palace around 1330 there were seventy-five cooks, thirty- three wine-stewards, twenty-one bakers, men (and some women) arranged in a strict hierarchy, and who were often persons of long experience.
Still, it is possibly on women that Fossier is most interesting, celebrating rural women and their strength, arguing often that they are the stronger and more important gender at many times. He asks on page 126, "Where were the women?"
First, they were in their private lives, where they displayed an activity and furnished efforts--even physical ones--that were equal to or surpassed those of the men laboring outside the house. Women were responsible for the fire and the food, the oven and the mill, the water from the well and aiding at harvest time.
Moreover, he asserts on page 171, "And it is the woman, although she is not alone at the harvest, who gathers the sheaves and carries them to the barn." Here continuing what he had earlier said on page 44:
But in reality, the true wealth of the family lay in the females, whose marriage was of prime importance and whose fertility would carry on the species. This is visible and well known in regard to the aristocracy and was probably true elsewhere as well. The discredit from which the female sex suffered was thus much more psychological than economic in nature and was based on a supposed physical weakness and lesser productive utility...[to which] all serious physiological studies and economic data prove the contrary.
This is seen in specific contexts, for instance in relationship to sailors, fishing, the sea, and salt on page 164:
What the historian of those times finds original in this salt trade is not the method of accumulating the salt, which has changed little since then, in spite of the use of industrialized methods. It is the place given to women. Women did not spend their time mending nets, setting out ex-votos, or watching out, with resignation and anguish, for the return of the sailor; they did hard physical labor, raking the salt pads, tending the drying ovens, and carrying the sacks of salt. This sort of activity was rarely individual, but it took up a large part of women's time and contributed to isolating these sailors' wives while their husbands were at sea.
Fossier is thus solidly convinced of women's strength and hard work in the countryside. This assessment is only partially extended, however, to urban areas, as on page 127:
In the city, however, as is attested by the feminization of many patronymics related to occupations, the place of women was strengthened during the final centuries of the middle Ages. They reigned over leather-working, felt-making, and the cloth trades. It is true that a loom required more strength than they were capable of giving, as did setting a sail or brewing beer but they were the ones who sorted the merchandise, counted it and sold it...So was there parity?...Probably not, and for all the reasons that are still put forward, Female labor outside of the domestic setting was broken up by pregnancies, limited by the rough tasks of manipulating tools, and marginalized by a fearful male prejudice that we have already encountered. [my emphasis]
That looms are too heavy, but not salt or sheaves or the wet cloths that women hung out in the meadows on tenterhooks to dry or bleach, is to accept assumptions about urban women and men that are mythology, not history. Claims by fifteenth-century guildsmen to monopolies over use of the broadcloth looms (which in any case constitute only a small percentage of the total numbers of horizontal looms in all shapes and sizes) have shaped assumptions by most historians that women were too weak, because in most historians' views men's work, as authorized by guilds or licenses and as those men assert, counts as skilled labor, while women's work, which is picked up and put down in the interstices of other chores, is unskilled. But this is based on institutional categorization not actual abilities; indeed I challenge anyone thinking it unskilled labor to learn to spin a weight of wool to a specified length and uniform thickness. Some of us are skilled at this; others are not.
Finally, monastic women and the lack of availability of monastic places for women appear too to be subject to standard clichés and misogynist report, when Fossier asserts on page 105 that: "A number of female monastic institutions had such a bad reputation that it permits us to surmise that they were filled with women with little inclination for the cloistered life." His conclusion is that hence ordinary women would not be attracted to the religious life; in fact recent studies, including my own, have asserted the contrary--the widespread increase and a tendency towards democratization in religious women's communities in the later middle ages, with little evidence for any sort of scandal. [5] It follows that such religious women, like those in villages, tend to be dismissed as not doing productive work, but only labor at unskilled tasks to prevent boredom or accidia.
Overall, despite these hesitations, I have found this book well worth reading. It comprises much that is new in our way of thinking about the middle ages and ordinary people in the middle ages. It is made more difficult for its lack of citations and the occasional mistranslation. [6] Still Fossier's insights inspire us to think more carefully about many assumptions, changing the way that many of us understand the middle ages. That is a huge accomplishment.
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Notes:
1. This is a translation of Robert Fossier, Ces Gens du moyen äge (Paris: Fayard, 2007).
2. In this section Fossier follows a series of tangents which are somewhat typical of the book as a whole. Discussion of obesity and gaze leads to the humors, to drinking blood--that of Christ, or the blood of a particularly strong and courageous warhorse, and finally to comment on how some people's blood (B group) is resistant to plague bacillus; thus this fact probably explains why some regions (Hungary for instance) had fewer victims of the plague.
3. On this see Robert Fossier, "Histoires de famille," in Claudie Duhamel-Amado and Guy Lobrichon, Georges Duby; L'écriture de' l'Histoire, preface de Jean Lacouture (Brussels: DeBoeck, 1976) pp. 175-88, unfortunately without citations. On translations see note 6 below.
4. Perhaps on fish he has been led astray by the archaeological report. As argued by Richard C. Hoffmann, "Medieval Fishing," Working with Water in Medieval Europe: Technology and Resource Use, ed. Paolo Squatriti, pp. 331-93 (Leiden: Brill, 2000) where he notes principally on pages 335-40 that sieving and expert analysis of fish remains is necessary, and fish bones, being smaller than mammal bones, more easily disappear in certain soils. I would add that it seems possible that this may have been the case in village contexts for meat bones as well--not just being carried off by dogs--but possibly crushed to be used as a soil additive, as we use bone-meal today?
5. See Penelope Johnson, Equal in the Monastic Profession: Religious Women in Medieval France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), and Marilyn Oliva, The Convent and the Community in Late Medieval England: Female Monasteries in the Diocese of Norwich 1350-1450 (Woodbridge, Boydell, 1998).
6. A few corrections may help the reader find his/her way through the argument more easily. On p. xii: what in Fossier's French is prétérition and translated by preterition might better be translated as paralipsis; in fact, in the context it means things mentioned only in passing, or things averred to as not worth mentioning; on page 31 "generational intervals," would be better translated as "intervals between births;" page 46, "revolution des nourrices" should be translated as "the revolution in the use of wet-nurses;" page 97, "hope for descendants" rather than "hope of descendants;" page 153, "the soil and the water necessitated this," rather than "...had wanted this to happen;" page 237, the semi-colon should fall after joking, in order to avoid attaching abbot Suger to the fourteenth century.