Suzannah Rowntree

Sarcasm alert. Everything I've heard about this movie sounds like it was created specifically to annoy me, so I'm going to try to ignore it and just talk about my pet peeve, which is this pop culture myth that the medieval period was particularly filthy, brutal, misogynistic and lawless. 

Which is simply not the truth, and here's a true story from 1348 that shows the real Middle Ages.

We know this story because it's a very important moment in the development of common law - that is, the facts and the conclusion of the story were written down and became the basis for how similar cases would be decided long into the future. This 1348 judicial decision (citation: I de S et Uxor v W de S (1348) yb 22 edw iii f 99) is still read by law students today when studying the tort (or wrong) of assault. That's nearly seven hundred years of judges and lawyers looking back at a medieval judicial decision and saying, "Yes! That was a good and just decision!"

To set the stage, it's the 1300s - a century famous for the Black Death, the Hundred Years' War, the Peasants' Revolt, and the Babylonian Captivity of the Church that saw the papacy moved to the French town of Avignon as puppets of the French monarchcy. But that's not the only thing that happens in the 1300s. This century also sees the publication of Dante's Divine Comedy; the Clockwork Revolution in which intricately designed clocks tracked everything from the hours of the day (which were measured in variable lengths) to the phases of the moon and the Sun's path through the zodiac; the creation of gorgeous books of hours and tapestries; the career of Christine de Pizan, the first woman known to have made a living from her pen; the writing of Geoffrey Chaucer and the radical social and religious reforms proposed by John Wyclif and his followers.

About the middle of this century a man known to history as W de S came in the night to the house of I de S and M, his wife, looking to buy some wine. The door to the taven was closed, so W pounded on the door with a hatchet, which he had in his hand. At this, M, the tavern-keeper's wife, put her head out the window and told him to stop. W responded by throwing the hatchet at M, narrowly missing her.

The tavern-keeper and his wife, contrary to what pop culture will tell you, responded exactly the way a couple of pub owners might respond today: they took the offender to court and argued that W had made an assault on M. W argued, in response, that he had committed no crime because the hatchet had not in fact struck M.

You might now be thinking that of course W would have won the case, since no actual physical harm was done to the woman he'd attacked. But you would be wrong! The judge in the case declared that the assault itself was harmful, and that W was liable to pay compensation for the fright he had caused M. 

"Ever since then," states my old Torts textbook, "the tort of assault has extended protection to a person's right to be free of emotional disturbance brought about by intentional threats of physical violence."

Law did exist in the middle ages. Women, as well as men, could expect to be protected by the law from assault. And not only physical, but even emotional damages could be awarded for assault...all the way back in 1348.

The answer, so far as I see it, is that like many historical periods, the medieval period ended in a backlash. Sadly for them, this backlash has lasted an unusally long time. In broad strokes:

- in THE RENAISSANCE (1400s-1500s), humanists rediscovered the value of going back to original source documents to get at the truth of what had been said in them. This gave scholars a much more accurate view of what historians, scholars, and holy books like the Bible had actually taught, free of later, less accurate accretions. Unfortunately, the lesson the Renaissance humanists took from this was "new books bad". Anything that had been written in the medieval period - for instance, scientific treatises that pointed out the obvious errors in Aristotelian thought - was now viewed as worthless. Thousands of medieval books were lost, destroyed, or torn apart for spare parts because Renaissance humanism considered them valueless. It was here that thinkers dubbed them "the middle ages" - they were what came between the real history of the ancient world and the "rebirth" of the Renaissance. 

- in THE REFORMATION (1500s-1600s), humanist primary-source scholarship revolutionised how people viewed and studied the Bible, leading to the Protestant Reformation, originally a movement designed to prioritise the old sources above later medieval traditions such as indulgences, transubstantiation, and ultimately, the entire Roman church hierarchy. While (as a Reformed Protestant myself) I view the Reformation as a net positive and a movement that itself was deeply medieval in origin, this did ultimately lead - despite a lot of early Reformers' best intentions - to a sharp break with, and critique of, the medieval church.

- in THE ENLIGHTENMENT (1600s-1700s) many Enlightenment thinkers viewed religion as antithetical to reason. Writers such as Edward Gibbon valorised the pagan, pre-Christian world of Ancient Rome and viewed the medieval period as a time when superstition ruled over reason. (Somewhere, the medieval period's most influential figure, Thomas Aquinas, is facepalming). This is where the "filthy, stupid, superstitious" view of the middle ages really got started, and the existing term "The Dark Ages" was hard-welded to the medieval period. 

This view has remained influential ever since, as you can tell from the fact that we still use the Enlightenment's own self-aggrandising term for itself, and are having trouble letting go of its views on the middle ages. So influential has the view of the medieval period as uniquely dark and barbaric become, that it's now commonplace for ANYTHING stupid or brutal to be attributed to them. Medieval people knew the world to be round, enjoyed regular baths in purpose-built bathhouses, had a policy against making accusations of witchcraft, and understood the value of using antiseptics in wound care. But the opposite views are regularly attributed to them (mostly from the 1500s and 1600s, when witch hunts came into style and bathing went out of style). Why? Because we all know that the Renaissance and Enlightenment were times of rebirth and wisdom, so any dumb things that happened in history couldn't possibly have happened then; they must have happened in medieval times.

The 21st century has seen a nasty new development in this intellectual wrangle over the middle ages described by Amy S Kaufamn in THE DEVIL'S HISTORIANS. Certain far-right groups have chosen to embrace the idea of the brutal middle ages to justify their own religiously motivated brutality. I've seen these people argue that Richard I, leader of the Third Crusade, would have been against interracial marriage (in fact, he famously proposed that his sister Joanna should marry a brother of Saladin in order to settle the war). I've seen them argue that medieval religion made no critique of the knightly warrior ethic (in fact, the Peace and Truce of God movements, some of the most successful popular movements in history, were designed by the church to rein in the violence of the knightly class). I could go on.

Sarcasm alert. Everything I've heard about this movie sounds like it was created specifically to annoy me, so I'm going to try to ignore it and just talk about my pet peeve, which is this pop culture myth that the medieval period was particularly filthy, brutal, misogynistic and lawless. 

Which is simply not the truth, and here's a true story from 1348 that shows the real Middle Ages.

We know this story because it's a very important moment in the development of common law - that is, the facts and the conclusion of the story were written down and became the basis for how similar cases would be decided long into the future. This 1348 judicial decision (citation: I de S et Uxor v W de S (1348) yb 22 edw iii f 99) is still read by law students today when studying the tort (or wrong) of assault. That's nearly seven hundred years of judges and lawyers looking back at a medieval judicial decision and saying, "Yes! That was a good and just decision!"

To set the stage, it's the 1300s - a century famous for the Black Death, the Hundred Years' War, the Peasants' Revolt, and the Babylonian Captivity of the Church that saw the papacy moved to the French town of Avignon as puppets of the French monarchcy. But that's not the only thing that happens in the 1300s. This century also sees the publication of Dante's Divine Comedy; the Clockwork Revolution in which intricately designed clocks tracked everything from the hours of the day (which were measured in variable lengths) to the phases of the moon and the Sun's path through the zodiac; the creation of gorgeous books of hours and tapestries; the career of Christine de Pizan, the first woman known to have made a living from her pen; the writing of Geoffrey Chaucer and the radical social and religious reforms proposed by John Wyclif and his followers.

About the middle of this century a man known to history as W de S came in the night to the house of I de S and M, his wife, looking to buy some wine. The door to the taven was closed, so W pounded on the door with a hatchet, which he had in his hand. At this, M, the tavern-keeper's wife, put her head out the window and told him to stop. W responded by throwing the hatchet at M, narrowly missing her.

The tavern-keeper and his wife, contrary to what pop culture will tell you, responded exactly the way a couple of pub owners might respond today: they took the offender to court and argued that W had made an assault on M. W argued, in response, that he had committed no crime because the hatchet had not in fact struck M.

You might now be thinking that of course W would have won the case, since no actual physical harm was done to the woman he'd attacked. But you would be wrong! The judge in the case declared that the assault itself was harmful, and that W was liable to pay compensation for the fright he had caused M. 

"Ever since then," states my old Torts textbook, "the tort of assault has extended protection to a person's right to be free of emotional disturbance brought about by intentional threats of physical violence."

Law did exist in the middle ages. Women, as well as men, could expect to be protected by the law from assault. And not only physical, but even emotional damages could be awarded for assault...all the way back in 1348.

You are transported back in time and into the body of a young noblewoman in the 1400s. Your parents have married you off to an awful, abusive, rapist husband whom literally no one else would marry despite him being very high nobility because he's that terrible. You successfully produce a baby boy and then plan to murder this man for the good of everyone and yourself. Here is the question: do you think you could murder him in a way that is undetectable to the historical people around you? Note: they aren't stupid, you are the prime suspect as the battered wife AND you can't just say poison. Where are you going to buy poison? Do you know anything about poison actually? NO GOOGLING! You were sent back without a plan!