Bologna University is the oldest university in the world, first established in 1088. But if professors struggle with bumptious students today, these first professors had an even more difficult time of it: the students ran the university, voting through their representatives on who to hire as teachers, how much to pay the professors and the content of the courses.
There was even a committee, called the ‘Denouncers of Professors’, to which students could report teachers who did not keep time or who failed to teach all their classes during a term. Students at Bologna, and indeed at all the later medieval universities, began their education by studying the seven liberal arts: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music.
While medieval royal women were accorded high status, when it came to the task of producing heirs to the throne, they were sometimes subject to the most humiliating examinations.
One example is what Anne of Brittany had to endure. Charles VIII, king of France, had besiedged her in her city of Rennes to persuade her to marry him. Anne was the Duchess of Brittany and marriage meant that Charles would bring the previously obstinately independent Bretons under his control. When Anne realised that none of her allies would break the siege, she agreed to negotiate terms.
The terms were clear. Charles wanted to marry her. But before Charles would enter into marriage with Anne – and remember she was only 14 at the time – the French required that she prove that she was able to produce children for the king. To that end, Anne had to parade naked before the king’s commissioners: Anne, Charles’s elder sister, and two male advisers.
Having inspected the naked duchess as one would inspect a brood mare, the commissioners wrote a report that noted Anne had a congenital limp but concluded that she would be capable of bearing children.
The marriage duly agreed, the ceremony was fixed for 6 December 1491. Making her views about her future husband very clear, Anne arrived for the marriage celebration with two beds.
Anne and Charles were married for seven years – until Charles, a famously short man, contrived to hit his head on a door lintel and died shortly afterwards.
Charles VIII, King of France, didn’t mean to end the Middle Ages. He just wanted the kingdom of Naples and to be taken seriously.
Charles was short, ugly and rumoured to be stupid. The first two were true. But when he took control of France from his regent, his elder sister, he was determined to prove his mettle.
In 1494, with his army pulling its mobile cannon, he invaded Italy, intent on getting to Naples. Everyone expected his advance to be halted by the many fortresses in the way but the French cannon smashed down the walls.
To the shock of all, Charles and his army rolled down through Italy and conquered Naples in a matter of months.
The Middle Ages were over. The modern world was born in rolling clouds of cannon smoke.
The oldest judicial procedure in England, dating to the 12th century, is the annual Trial of the Pyx. This is a formal legal procedure during which the Assay Office tests over 50,000 coins taken at random to check that their metallic content is within the boundaries set by law.
The testing begins in February each year and lasts for two or three months. When the testing has been completed, the Trial of the Pyx is held, wherein the verdict as to the content of the coins is announced before a jury including members of the Goldsmiths’ Company and the Queen’s Remembrancer (who is also the senior judge of the Royal Courts of Justice).
The Chancellor of the Exchequer attends the trial for, as chancellor and custodian of the royal exchequer, the chancellor has responsibility for the purity of the coinage of the realm. Strictly speaking, should any coins fail at assay, then the chancellor would be liable to execution but luckily for recent chancellors the coinage has proved true.
On the beach, in the depths of winter, these small boys were finding and collecting rocks and bringing them back to the growing pile. The best rocks were small, about the size of a thumb, and deep rust-red. They dropped them at the feet of the waiting overseer. The overseer then ran a metal rod over the stone and added it to the pile or tossed it away before dispatching the boys to search for more.
It’s a common fate for children born to archaeologists. They get put to work on archaeological projects – such as finding ironstone to smelt down into iron. The rod was a magnet; if the rock stuck, it had enough iron to make it worth the keeping.
The Roman officer, splendidly caparisoned – wearing a full-face crested helmet and with his elegant sword sheathed at his waist, sitting astride his horse with 2,000 legionaries arrayed in front of him – was the very model of command.
The Anglo-Saxon warlord was no less splendidly equipped, his helmet just as magnificent. But he would be standing with his sword drawn, its pommel glinting with red garnets and yellow gold, at the centre of a line of fifty warriors, their shields overlapping and their spears outthrust.
Swordsmith Owen Bush holding one of the many swords he has forged.
Swords are individual. Each is unique, with its own set of characteristics. These characertistics impress a style upon the man wielding it who in turn exerts his own style upon the sword.
A sword is not a dumb brute of a weapon but rather one that works in partnership with its wielder. Depending on the sword and the swordsman, the partnership may be one of equals, the sword may be superior to its wielder, or the swordsman may have to impose his own style upon a crude and poorly made weapon.
As for the Christian church in Britain, shortly after the Synod of Whitby it took an unexpected but extremely important international turn. The Archbishop of Canterbury designate went to Rome to be confirmed – and died, before either confirmation or return.
With the See of Canterbury empty the pope decided to dispatch a truly wild card to Britain to take over as Archbishop of Canterbury. The man he chose was already in his 60s: Theodore of Tarsus was Greek and steeped in classical and patristic learning. Accompanying him was a North African, Hadrian, who was equally learned.
This pair of international scholars established a school in Canterbury that inaugurated a new age of learning among the Anglo-Saxons.
The insular world of the Anglo-Saxons was bursting open. A young boy by the name of Bede, growing up in Northumbria, took that knowledge and made it his own and that of his countrymen.
The Franks Casket in the British Museum portrays both the legend of Wayland the Smith and the Adoration of the Magi, suggesting that old and new religions coexisted for a while.
With the destruction of the kingdom of the Isle of Wight, the old religion was officially dead.
Of course, belief in the old gods and some of the old practices lingered on in places. But the chroniclers of this new age in Britain, the monks of the new god, had little interest in recording either the beliefs or the practices of the old religion.
What we know for sure of Anglo-Saxon paganism is minimal. Most of our purported knowledge either predates the Anglo-Saxon arrival in Britain, coming from Roman reports on the religion of Germania, or postdates it, derived from the work of Scandinavian and Icelandic scholars from the 12th century onwards recording the myths and legends of their forefathers. How closely either of these related to the lived pagan religion of early medieval Britain we simply don’t know.