DJ Aethelred In Da House

I am still reading medieval history in between all the other things I am perusing.  Education has not totally fallen by the wayside.  It is merely resting for a moment or two.

I am slowing down because I have library books to finish.  I have actually finished Clarissa Dickson Wright’s ‘Rifling Through My Drawers’, which I didn’t enjoy much, unlike her first book, which made me hoot with laughter at how un PC and forthright she is.  This just seemed a trifle contrived.

I am also three quarters of the way through Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis, which I love.  I am having to resist rushing out to get all his other books.  As I have to move house on Wednesday morning, ordering things from Amazon now would be insane.  This is the only thing that has stopped me.  Auntie Mame is a kind of American Cold Comfort Farm, or something Nancy Mitford would have written were she born on the other side of the pond.  It gets a huge thumbs up from me.

Anyway, back to Medieval times.  There are two things I have been mulling over in my tiny brain when the thought of all the things I have to do and haven’t yet even started gets me down.  First is the subject of Saint’s Relics. 

I am intrigued by relics. 

Having been dragged through the Catholic education system, despite my parents being religious hippies who were christened three times each so their mother’s could get shot of them to as many Sunday Schools as would have them, and not from any firm religious conviction, I am quite interested in the more colourful aspects of Catholicism.

I remember at the Convent school having quite a crush on Padre Pio, a relatively modern saint who was known in his lifetime for having the stigmata (where your hands/feet/sides bleed in sympathy with Christ’s wounds on the cross).  I thought this was quite cool. I would have liked to meet him.  He sounded way more interesting than the Good Samaritan for instance, who seemed to be a sanctimonious prig wearing a t-towel.

Once, when I was in Italy as a teenager visiting my aunt, we took a trip to the town of Lanciano in the Abruzzi mountains.  We visited a  church which  claimed to have a slice of the heart of Jesus on display. Not only was it on display, it also spontaneously performed miracles.  Clearly this was too good to miss.  We stumbled into the darkened church and peered at it fiercely.  It was sandwiched between two bits of glass, rather like a specimen ready to go under the microscope.  Apparently on important occasions it would bleed real drops of Christ’s blood. Sadly, I have no way of proving this, as my visit was clearly not deemed special enough for even the tiniest hint of moisture to come trickling out.

Later, also in Italy, with UE on honeymoon I dragged him into a church in one of the innumerable cities we visited, because it had a saintly relic.  It had, to be precise, the finger of a saint.  Not only did it have this saint’s finger, it had it mounted on a golden stick encrusted with jewels.

Now I don’t know about you, but to me that is a very exciting thing indeed.  It was very pointy, and did indeed look like a gnarled, yellowing finger on a giant golden stick, unlike the slice of heart, which actually looked like a bit of tinned spam under glass.  If I had been a nun with the keys to the finger cupboard I’d have been forever getting it out to poke people with or knock their mitres of with, and then run away, sniggering.

You can see now, why I was never really invited to be at one with the Catholic church.  Much too irreverent.

Anyway, in this book I was talking about the other day, The Death of Kings, the author elaborated on the subject of relics, and mentioned that everyone in those days was absolutely mad keen on them.  It was like the craze for Pokemon trading cards, but better.  Quite often, kings who people thought were quite holy, or just annoying enough to the new king to be useful to a cause, would be turned into saints shortly after their death. 

In order to become a saint you have to have done some miracles first.  There were a lot more saints in the Middle Ages, because of course it was a lot easier to be miraculous.  There was absolutely heaps of stuff that nobody had thought of doing then that is actually dead easy, but nobody had quite got round to fitting in, what with all the dying of plagues and worrying about burning in hell they had to fit in.  Probably making a cheese sandwich would have caused you to be canonised quicker than you could say ‘pass the Wensleydale.’  Either that, or burned as a witch.  These days you don’t stand a chance unless you’re religion’s answer to Stephen Hawking.  The bottom has dropped right out of the saint market.

Zounds.

So, if a king stood even a faint chance of being made into a saint, and relics were big news, it stood to reason that before the king went into his coffin, every relic hunter in the land would be chasing round after the body, accidentally bumping into it with big, sharp knives, hoping that vital bits would drop off.

Harsh, but fair.

It got so bad, that if a king died a long way from his final resting place, they had to escort the body there with armed guards to stop the relic crazed mob from stripping him down for spare parts.  He should count himself lucky.  These days, if that were the case, his ear lobes would be on E-bay before the sun went down.

To elaborate just how vicious the scrum for body parts could get the author illustrated his point with the tale of a chap called St. Hugh of Lincoln.  Apparently he had managed to get a viewing of Mary Magdalene’s body and was so overcome by the idea of having a part of her, probably fairly odiferous person, that he took the liberty of biting her nose off to ensure that a) nobody else could have it, and b) he could get it home without anyone taking it off him.

Ewww.

A little bit stalkerish these relic collectors don’t you think? I wonder if that’s why monks had tonsures in those days? It wasn’t a matter of religious conviction at all, it was probably them selling locks of hair round the back of the herb garden on the offchance that they might get canonised for inventing the unicycle or doing those funny farty noises under their arms.

So, you can see how that topic has kept me merrily occupied for some time.

The other thing that has been intriguing me is this subject of kingly names, or indeed names for anyone in the Medieval public eye.  Lots of people in those days were known as something  the something.  I have already posted previously on the wonderfully named, Roderick the Fat (or was it Gregory? I know it was ‘the fat’ for sure).  You can also take Edward the Confessor or Alfred the Great as examples.  Now these two names aren’t bad, but they’re quite unusual for the time.

There seems to have been much more popularity for unflattering names, often ones which emphasised something really bloody stupid you had done or were known for, or which made much of a physical problem that you probably didn’t want anyone else to think about, and hoped that nobody would notice, only to find that twenty years down the line you are going down in history as Pepin the Short or Aethelred the Unready. 

You’d be gutted, wouldn’t you?

The closest I can come to a modern equivalent is this craze for having a DJ name. 

It’s astonishing how the past repeats itself really.

I’m looking forward to the day when I can take my grandchildren to see M.C. Aelfric and his finger on a stick.

Advertisement