Medieval Vignettes, or Amusing Tales of Ye Olde Times

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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This thread is intended to be a repository of vignettes, or other entertaining such-like, cribbed from medieval chronicles, letters, or other sources, for my own amusement and hopefully, for the amusement of others. Think of this as an opportunity to read about medieval people, in their own words. I trust you will find they are more familiar than you might think.

My first submission, from 1160 AD, comes from a poem, *Hodoiporikon *, written by a Byzantine official named Konstantinos Manasses. Here he proudly tells us about beating up a guy who showed up at church stinking of garlic:

It was the day of the awesome feast called Pentecost, and we were all assembled in church [in Cyprus], attending the evening service. I happened to be standing near the door, when another man walked in, a Cypriot by birth but surpassing all Cypriots in folly. He entered, came and stood next to me; he stank of wine and he stank of garlic. And I, my nostrils filled with the foul odor (I fiercely hated this kind of evil-smelliness which did remind me of feces, or of the type of sulfurized Satan himself) grew dizzy and felt faint. The darkness which then took possession of my eyes did nearly throw me almost half-dead to the ground.

I said to him, casting a friendly look his way, “Man, please, go just a little further. Don’t approach. You reek of garlic; therefore, go far away.” He did not react nor leave his spot. A second time I said to him, but louder now, “Man, just go further, don’t stifle me. Your mouth is breathing the same breath as breathes hell!”

But he was a dear adder that stoppeth her ear. He paid attention just as much to me as does a wild boar to a gnat or a lion to a fly. Regarding any further word superfluous, I took to force to bring him to reason. Clenching my fist courageously, I gave the churl stout-heartedly a heavy blow on his ear. This moment finally the dung-eater pissed off! This is what I did, though some may disapprove.

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That is awesome.

(SCAdian here; my husband and I love hearing about wacky period stories and jokes, and we collect 'em!)

One historical joke I’ve always enjoyed is the following (listed herealong with some other good ones):

(I’ve told this and substituted in the verrrry long, Basque, SCA name of a friend, to good effect. :D)

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Yay! Another round of Medieval tales from Mississippienne!

::sits in comfy chair, plumps pillows::

I think the stinky guy had it coming!

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Oh, yes! It’s been far too long since the last ones!

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Bravo, bravo! Encore, encore!

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IIRC, in one of the Canterbury Tales, the miller (I think) tells of knocking down neighbours’ doors by running at them and butting them with his head just for juvenile mischief.:smack: (When I was a kid, ringing a doorbell and running away was called Knock Down Ginger. I’ve wondered if that name is connected with the miller’s tale.)

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For our second vignette, I bring you one of the most obscure, yet unexpectedly heartwarming, incidents from the Crusades. This is from the De Profectione of Odo of Deuil, chaplain and chronicler of King Louis VII of France; Odo accompanied Louis (and Louis’ then-wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine) on the Second Crusade in 1145, which quickly turned into a total disaster. Both the armies of Louis VII and Konrad of Germany were obliterated as they attempted to march overland to the Holy Land. The survivors limped along to the Byzantine city of Adalia (now Antalya in Turkey), where they faced a difficult choice. There were only ships and money enough to ferry part of the Crusade onto Syria. Louis VII decided to take the fighting men on ahead and leave the injured, sick, pilgrims, women, and children behind. He paid the local Greeks to care for them until he could send the ships back for them.

As soon as the army took ship, the Greeks of Adalia turned on their charges. They drove the foreigners out of the city, locked the gates, and even told the local Turks where to find them, fully intending for the Turks to finish them off. These pilgrims and wounded soldiers were easy pickings for the Turks: hungry, wounded, sick, and exhausted, with no horses and no arms with which to defend themselves. But something quite remarkable happened.

The Crusaders made it as far as the river Eurymedon (known in Turkish as Köprüçay) when the Turks caught up with them. They were so wretched and so helpless that the Turks took pity on them, taking them in and caring for them; they tended to the sick and fed the half-starved Crusaders and pilgrims. Odo of Deuil relates with astonishment that more than 3,000 of the Crusaders, traumatized by the cruelty of fellow Christians, willingly converted to Islam and went to live with the Turks. “In their kindness was cruelty”, said Odo, for the Turks got them to trade “their faith for bread”.

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For our third vignette, I bring you one of the lesser-known adventures of Richard I, king of England, known as the Lion-heart, as told by the chronicler Roger of Hoveden.

In September 1190, while the Crusading army was in Italy en route to the Holy Land, Richard was riding about, taking in the scenery, accompanied by only a single knight (solo milite). He heard the cry of a falcon, and discovered the bird in the keeping of a peasant. Richard seized the fine hunting bird, only to be attacked by the disgruntled peasant and a pack of his friends. Richard smacked the peasant with the flat of his sword, only for the sword to break in half. “Barely escaping” (vix evadens) the melee, Richard was reduced to slinging rocks at the peasants as he fled. And all that because he tried to take some guy’s hunting bird from him.

Richard I: Total Nonstop Asshole.

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You just know those peasants and their descendants spent the rest of the Middle Ages telling everyone who’d listen about the time they/great-great-great-grandpa totally kicked the ass of King Richard the [del]Lion-Hearted[/del] Feckless Bird-napper.

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I read this joke in a history book, not certain what period it originated in or how many different versions there may have been.

There are two businessmen who have dealings together, one a Christian and one a Jew. The Christian keeps trying to convert the Jew to Christianity. Finally, after many years, the Jew says he’s considering conversion but before he does he wants to make a journey to Rome to see the “capital city” of the faith. The Christian guy despairs, because he knows how venial and corrupt many high clergy are.

But the guy goes on the trip anyway, and on his return announces that he’s ready for conversion and baptism. When the Christian guy asks him about his decision the Jewish man says that “Any religion that can survive for so long, when things are so bad at the top, must really have something to it!”

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My previous post was not meant to represent a real occurence of course, but the kind of joke that might have seemed funny back then.

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I can’t summarize or link to it on my humble phone, but my suggestion would be “The Summoner’s Tale” from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, strangely omitted from many curricula.

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I’m back with one whopper of a tale. How about ZOMBIES? MUSLIM ZOMBIES? And INCEST? Sound sordid enough? Well, this tale comes to us from the late 10th century Iraqi poet and qadi al-Tanukhi. But first, a quick note on the theme.

Incest appears frequently in medieval story-telling; there’s a 300+ page book Incest and the Medieval Imagination (2001) by Elizabeth Archibald, which is just about the theme of incestuous desire in medieval literature. All this proves to me is that medieval people were every bit as kinky as their modern-day descendants, they just had to disguise it via the medium of morality tales.

One night I (the narrator of this story) looked out of my house towards the cemetery [of al-Khayzuran], as I usually do when I cannot sleep. And look! The tombs opened up, and their occupants came out, with disheveled hair, dust-colored, barefoot, and naked, and they gathered in one place there. In the end there was no tomb left occupied. They made a lot of noise, crying, praying and beseeching God not to have that woman buried with them who was to be buried the following day.

Why has the zombies of Baghdad in such a tizzy? Well, the recently-deceased woman had, by means of a trick, slept with her own son, conceived a child, and then killed it at birth. Not satisfied with what she had done, the wicked woman slept with her son again, and conceived another child, a girl who was so beautiful that she could not bear to kill her. So the mother/grandmother arranged for the baby to be brought up by a poor family, and then brought her into her household at the age of nine and passed her off as a slave. After more stratagems, the brother-father married his sister-daughter, who gave birth to more children. In the end, the truth comes out, the brother-father curses his dead mother and divorces his sister-daughter-wife.

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But what about the children?
Shakespeare would have had a field day with this tale.

I plan on watching the current movie Richard the Lionheart and feeling properly derisive.

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Mississippienne I hope you won’t mind if I contribute one of my own. This gory account of western medicine from a (Christian) Arabic doctor during the Crusades has always amused me in a gallows-humour kind of way, particularly for the dry wit of its conclusion:

(From The Book of Contemplation, C12th, Usama ibn Munqidh quoting the Lebanese doctor Thabit.)

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Medieval riddle:
“What thing is it, the less it is, the more it is dread?”

Shoot, I don’t know how to do spoiler boxes. I’ll put the answer in my next post.

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Answer:

A bridge.

(I figured out how to do a spoiler!)

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Medieval enforcement of morality codes is very interesting. Public shaming featured prominently. There’s a medieval torture museum somewhere in Germany–I want to say Rothenberg–where they display various instruments and explain what they were punishments for. If a couple slept together before their wedding, the bride had to wear a straw hairpiece for the wedding, which I guess was like a banner reading “I’m not a virgin” for the illiterate.

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Just thought of another one. Can’t remember where I read this…there was some very famous figure, I think the Archbishop of Canterbury, one of the famous ones. Possibly Thomas Becket. Anyway, when he died his body was put on display for viewing. It was winter, and he was dressed in woolen garments, plus overcoats (woolen also). As his body cooled, it was said that the body lice could be seen pouring off him in great waves.

Evidently people had to put up with a lot of parasites back then. I don’t supposed all those woolens could really be washed properly…

Ooh, thought of another one. I think I heard this in Heidelberg castle–the one with the giant wine cask. So there’s this castle with a huge wine barrel that still exists; it’s the size of a room. It was built to hold the taxes collected; they were paid “in kind,” meaning in cider or wine. (Actually, I don’t think the really big barrel was used much; Wikipedia says it was empty for most of its existence.) Anyway, wherever the wine went, it was just mixed all together–cider, white wine, red wine, whatever they got was dumped willy-nilly into giant casks. It became table wine for the lords and ladies. Well, apparently one lord of the castle finally got fed up with the drunkenness at dinner, and made up a “moderation rule.”

The rule was: No more than nine glasses of wine are permitted in one sitting.

Granted wine had less of an alcohol content back then, but this still made me wonder how much people were drinking before the rule.

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At the tour at Heidelberg Castle where the barrel is, they said the average consumption of wine at the peasant level was 3 liters a day.