What does the term ‘medieval’ mean to you? Most of us have some idea of the Dark Ages, the centuries roughly spanning the departure of the Romans and the early, or indeed late, Middle Ages (which Ian Mortimer extends to the Renaissance). For those brought up on school history, or who revere the nous of the Romans, it was a time when civilisation declined. But the ‘Dark Age’ moniker is increasingly accepted as unfair, with historians arguing hotly and convincingly that the period was anything but dark. Seb Falk’s recent The Light Ages showed that major scientific exploration was under way in the late Middle Ages. Following on from this, Mortimer now explains why the period matters, and why it was once overlooked.
For a deft conjuring of the time, he points us to Chaucer’s ‘motley group of characters making pilgrimage from the Tabard Inn in Southwark to Canterbury’: a knight, a reeve, three nuns, a businesswoman from Bath, a prioress, a friar, a merchant, a scholar, a sergeant-at-law, a seller of pardons and a miller, among others. These figures help to encapsulate the diversity of the late-medieval world, even if they are just snapshots of the vast stretch of time from 1000-1600 – the date range Mortimer uses to assert his thesis.
One of his key contentions is that we now define success and progress in the past in terms of technological development – considering, for example, the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century to be one of the greatest transformative periods:
As a society, we worship technology. You could say that faith these days is not so much a conscious belief in a divine being as a subconscious one in technology – In Technology We Trust.
But his descriptions of the creativity and innovation taking place in the Middle Ages in architecture, construction, art and literature – let alone the sheer speed at which such changes were happening – leave one staggered.
Horizons, both metaphorical and physical, are important to this argument; and Mortimer begins by examining ‘the expanding skyline, and the expansion of travel and trade; growing literacy, and the advent of printing; and the standardisation of time’:
It is a salutary thought that between 1100 and 1300, the tallest point on the London skyline quintupled in height, whereas between 1300 and the completion of the Shard in 2010, it merely doubled.
Such architectural feats were indeed stunning; but martial developments were brutal, and there was appalling inhumanity. We tend to associate the Middle Ages primarily with conflict – whether in popular movie depictions of the grime and gore of battle or in tales of King Arthur and his knights – and Mortimer, naturally, dedicates a chapter to it. But he argues that war, particularly in the late-medieval period, was about personal gain, glory and adventure. With the advent of heavy artillery in the civil wars of the 17th century,
there was no chivalric glory. No sins were forgiven. No souls went to heaven. Men and women suffered in their thousands, as a necessary evil was allowed to slash nations in two.
And more sophisticated technology of course meant greater atrocities.
But where military developments were for the worse, there was a gradual change for the better in terms of human liberty. In the 11th century, a significant proportion of the English population lived as serfs – bound in fiefdom to their overlords, with generations of their descendants destined for the same fate. As numbers dwindled in the wake of the cataclysmic Black Death, how-ever, the situation began to change, and by 1600 there were very few ‘unfree’ people living in England.
The weary troglodyte pushing a cart in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, set in 932, bears little resemblance to the medieval person presented here. In his razor-sharp book, Mortimer argues the case for the wonder of the Middle Ages with rigour, verve and, above all, evidence.
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