Gerri Russell's Knightly Musings

While most animals during the Middle Ages were service animals, our ancestors also enjoyed the company of domesticated pets. The evidence can be found in many different art forms such as literature, paintings, tapestries, stained glass windows, and stuatuary. Lords and ladies and peasants alike all enjoyed the company of domesticated animals. In the stained glass window pictured here from 1520 Cologne, the couple’s pet dog is a sleepy symbol of wedded tranquillity.

In drawings of medieval pets, the British Library has a manuscript showing a woman with a pet squirrel, while the Luttrell Psalter shows a collared pet squirrel as a sign of status.

In many households, birds were kept in cages as pets.  Larks and nightingales were kept for their sweet songs. Jays and magpies, often simply called ’pies’, were taught to copy speech. Parrots, which were called popinjays, were available for a high price. They were exotic, colorful, and entertaining, but being imports from the Middle East were not easily obtained. Geoffrey Chaucer mentions the popinjay six times in his works.

Cats in the Middle Ages were kept mainly to hunt mice, and also, more grimly, for their fur and skins. Yet cats were also treasured. Exeter Cathedral lists in its accounts from 1305 to 1467 the sum of a penny a week to feed the cathedral cats if the animals did not catch many mice in the main church.

Dogs, however, remained a favourite. Geoffrey Chaucer referred to the Prioress in The Canterbury Tales as having ”small hounds that she fed with meat and milk”. Eileen Power, in her research into medieval nunneries, found that in spite of efforts by ecclesiastical authorities to banish such worldly customs, the nuns often kept dogs, cats, monkeys, birds, rabbits, and squirrels. 

Hunting dogs and hawks were not officially pets, being used to hunt and bring extra food for the table and to provide sport and entertainment to their lords and ladies. However, hawks were also status symbols, given as kingly gifts and well-known as signs of wealth and power. As such they were pampered and displayed–so much so that perches were even brought indoors to their owners could have their falcons with them. In 1368 the Abbot of Westminster, Nicholas de Litlington, bought a wax image of a falcon to offer at the altar to help a sick falcon recover. Lay men and women often brought their pets into church–the men with hawks on their wrists and women with lap-dogs.

The people of the Middle Ages were afflicted with many of the same sicknesses, from cancer to nosebleeds, that exist today. But they also had to contend with a variety of skin lesions and other ailments that are no longer the scourges they once were. Diseases such as smallpox, leprosy, St. Anthony’s fire, and St. Vitus’s dance were products of the unsanitary living conditions, overcrowding, and malnutrition that characterized the lives of the majority of Europe’s population.

At that time disease was thought to result from an imbalance in the four fluids, or humors, of the body–choler, phlegm, black bile, and blood. The physician’s task was to restore the balance of these humors. Means at his disposal included cauterization, surgery, diet, and medicine. A common medical practice was bloodletting, in which a specific vein was opened to treat a particular disease. The blood was then checked for distinctive properties, such as smell and greasiness.

Medical science during the Middle Ages became increasingly sophisticated and even extended to the study of cadavers. Profusely illustrated manuals guided apprentice doctors through every step of patient diagnosis. There were charts to aid in inspecting urine for color, smell, and sediment; calendars and tables for use in astrological medicine; manuals on techniques of bloodletting; pharmaceutical reference books depicting herbs and their applications; and collections of recipes for balms and potions.

Members of the medical community ranged from university-trained doctors-strongly influenced by centuries of Greek and Islamic insight–to traditional healers, who learned their craft through apprenticeship to other folk practitioners.

The care provided by a formally-trained doctor was priced beyond the reach of most people, although in the early 13th century some Italian cities retained physicians to treat the poor for free. And during the 14th and 15th centuries, religious communities offered the poor and aged refuge in hospitals, providing food, shelter, and prayer, along with limited medical care.

On the whole, however, in the Middle Ages such care for agrarian peasants and poor city dwellers was limited to the ministrations of village healers, herbalists, and barber-surgeons, as well as self-medications and visits to mineral baths.

In medieval times childbirth could be a time of great joy or great sorrow. Mortality rates for both mother and baby were high, and many children who lived through the birth died shortly thereafter.

During the delivery, some peasant women received help from female neighbors, others could rely only on their husbands. A woman of the merchant or noble classes was attended by midwives and female relatives. The chamber would be dimly lit, and a warm bath prepared for the infant. Both measures were designed to ease the transition from the womb into the world. The expectant father performed the important job of appealing to the saints for the safety of his with and child.

The infant was wrapped in swaddling clothes–long cloths wrapped around the body and secured with crisscross bands. Swaddling kept the child warm but was also said to force the limbs to grow straight.

Unless work prevented it, peasants and artisans nursed their own babies, but wealthy mothers hired other women to serve as wet nurses. Without the burden of nursing, which can serve as a natural birth control, such women sometimes conceived as frequently as biologically possible, bearing as many as twenty children in their lifetime.

Throughout the Middle Ages, Europe’s rulers built strongholds along the frontiers of their realm to guard against the constant threat of invasion. The earliest castles were earth-and-timber forts located along trade routes or likely avenues of attack. As kingdoms grew in power and wealth, these forts were replaced by massive permanent structures with thick stone walls.

The first requirement for a castle was that it be difficult to reach, and the easiest way to do that was to build in a naturally inaccessible location. Dunnottar Castle in Scotland, for example, sits on a bluff near the sea, leaving attackers few lanes of approach. Other castles were built on islands, or steep hilltops. Where there was no natural defense, builders created one by digging a moat around the castle. Some moats were filled with water diverted from a nearby river, but most were not, as even a dry moat presented a formidable obstacle. The only access over the moat was a bridge, which could be drawn into the castle. Large gatehouses guarded entry to the bridge.

The castles themselves boasted ingenious defenses. The battlements, which give castle walls their familiar notched silhouette, afforded shelter as archers returned fire through “arrow slits” cut into them.  Many battlements were also built with overhangs called machicolations. These had holes in the floors so the defenders could drop stones or hot oil on any invaders who reached the castle walls. If any enemy did manage to get inside the castle, he would have to dodge stones dropped through “murder holes” cut into the ceilings.

Though castles were first and foremost defensive structures, they also served as residences for the lord and his family. Inside, elaborate vaults and buttresses created soaring interiors that were often described as elegant as they were strong. A castle had to house not only its master, but also a garrison of soldiers and the retinue of servants required to keep it running. To meet the huge demand of services and supplies, entire towns often sprang up around the castle.