The Story of Fauvel

Fauvel holds forth.  

A 14th century manuscript is an amazing example of a "multi-media" piece of fiction.

The story? It's about a horse ... a horse that becomes a politician.

The Roman de Fauvel ["Story of Fauvel"] is dated to as early as 1310, although the author is unknown. It is an allegory, in which a fawn-colored (French fauve) horse decides he is unhappy with the stable and moves himself into the largest room in the nearby house, altering it to suit his needs (like adding a crib for fresh hay). Fortuna (Fate) makes him the head of the house, and leaders both secular and religious come to listen to him, increasing his fame. Ultimately, Fauvel marries Lady Vainglory and begins a life of begetting corrupt leaders that will usher in the end times.

The original story was expanded by Chaillous de Pesstain*, who added musical notations to it—in fact, 169 snippets of musical notation to accompany the story. This particular copy is found in the Bibliotheque Nationale in France as manuscript BN fr. 146 (which you can see online here).

The Roman de Fauvel gave birth to a modern idiom. To "curry" is to groom a horse, and the leaders in the story would curry Fauvel in order to ingratiate themselves to him. "To curry Fauvel" became a saying to indicate trying to please someone so that they look kindly upon you. After the 17th century, this was misunderstood in English as "to curry favor," to try to get a favor from someone by flattery.

*And that's about the sum total of all we know about him. He may have been just the scribe of that particular manuscript.

The Exeter Book

"The Wanderer" in the Exeter Book

The Exeter Book was mentioned as the source of two poems about St. Guthlac. It holds much more than that, however. Of the four manuscripts we have of Anglo-Saxon literature, the Exeter Book is the largest collection in existence of Anglo-Saxon poetry, including all the Anglo-Saxon riddles we have (but one), and several poems that survive nowhere else.

The original date of composition is unknown, but it is assumed to have been produced as part of the Benedictine revival in the 10th century, when Benedictine monasteries strove to record and preserve manuscripts of all kinds.

Its existence can reliably be traced to the will of Bishop Leofric (1016 - 1072), who left it to the library of Exeter Cathedral in 1072 along with the rest of his impressive (for the time) collection. Exeter was one of the largest scriptoria in Leofric's lifetime, where manuscripts were created and copied, so it is surprising that this particular manuscript seems to have been so abused.

Several pages at the beginning are believed missing along with the cover. Several pages are scored as if the book was used as a cutting board. One reader of the book clearly set his drink down on the page, leaving a stain, and several pages at the end of the book show burn marks.

The Book contains religious texts; not just the aforementioned Guthlac A and B, but also poems on Christ, Judgment Day, Soul and Body, and The Lord's Prayer. It also has examples of Anglo-Saxon culture in poems such as "The Wanderer," "The Seafarer," "Deor," and "The Wife's Lament." As well it contains over 90 riddles whose answers are usually mundane things, but some of which engage in double entendres, such as the following, whose answer is dough:

I have heard of a something-or-other, growing in its nook, swelling and rising, pushing up its covering. Upon that boneless thing a cocky-minded young woman took a grip with her hands; with her apron a lord's daughter covered the tumescent thing.

When Poets Collide?

Did the greatest English poet of the 14th century and the greatest French poet of the 14th century meet, thanks to the Hundred Years War?

Guillaume de Machaut (c.1300-1377) was a classical composer and poet—in fact, one of the last poets who also composed music—and a part of the ars nova ["new technique"] movement which embraced polyphony. His name suggests that he was born in Machault, east of Rheims in France, but it is clear that he spent most of his life in Rheims. Unlike many non-royal figures of his age, his popularity has ensured that we possess a remarkable amount of biographical information about him.

As a young man, he was a secretary to the ing of Bohemia, John I. He was named a canon of Verdun, then Arras, then Rheims; by 1340 he had given up the other positions and was a canon of Rheims only. As a canon, attached to the cathedral in Rheims and living without private wealth, he could devote himself to composing poetry and music. In all, we have about 400 pieces in various forms.

He lost his first patron, King John of Bohemia, when John died at the Battle of Crécy in 1346 during the Hundred Years War. Machaut found support from John's daughter. When she died during the Black  Death, he found support from her sons, Jean de Berry and CharlesV, Duke of Normandy.

In the next phase of the Hundred Years War, Geoffrey Chaucer (likely still a teenager at the time) was in the retinue of Prince Lionel as a valet. During the siege of Rheims in early 1360, Rheims rallied and captured the besiegers. Chaucer was taken prisoner. This would not have involved being thrown in dungeons and experiencing deprivation. The practice at the time was to capture as many high-ranking opponents as possible in order to gain money from ransoms. (Chaucer was ransomed for £16 in March.) The English would have likely experienced a mild form of "house arrest" which would have allowed them a certain amount of freedom. Chaucer would have had ample opportunity to visit Machaut.

Did he? We cannot be sure. Chaucer's poetry rarely offers attribution for his influences, but he was certainly intimately familiar with Machaut's work. Scholars have found numerous influences in Chaucer's writing. Chaucer scholar James I. Wimsatt has referred to "Guillaume de Machaut, who among fourteenth-century French poets exerted by far the most important influence on Chaucer."[link] Even long before he himself began writing, he was in a court that valued and supported the arts and poetry. Machaut was enormously popular in his own lifetime, and it seems inconceivable that Machaut would not have been sought out by several of the English who would have appreciated his reputation.

For a sample of his musical composition:

Sir Richard Stury

King Edward and his knights counting their dead
after the Battle of Crécy, Hundred Years War

Sir Richard Stury (c.1330-1395) was a member of a family that served the kings of England for generations. Stury, during the 1359-60 campaign of the Hundred Years War, was captured along with Geoffrey Chaucer by the French and held at Reims. Where Chaucer, as a valet in Prince Lionel's contingent, had been ransomed for £16, Stury, as a knight in the employ of the king, was worth £50.

He was a chamber knight and a councilor to Edward III. He was also, like many of his fellow chamber knights, a lover of poetry. His will included an expensive copy of the Romance of the Rose.

He and Chaucer were well-acquainted. Their paths would have crossed frequently in London, and they were put together on an embassy in 1377 and a commission in 1390 to look into repairing the dikes and drains of the Thames.

Stury had a reputation for being a Lollard, a follower of the teachings of John Wycliffe. The popularity of this stance waxed and waned over the years, sometimes putting him in opposition to powerful forces in society.

"The Most Popular Poet in America"

Today is the 805th anniversary of Rumi's birth. On the 800th anniversary, in a story done by BBC News online, he was referred to as "the most popular poet in America." What journey took a medieval Muslim mystic to that title?

Marco Polo described the city of Balkh in what is now northern Afghanistan as a "noble and great city and a seat of learning"—this despite its destruction 50 years earlier by Genghis Khan. Since the mid-8th century, Balkh had been a center for Persian-Islamic culture, drawing scholars and theologians from near and far. One of them was a theologian, jurist and mystic named Bahā ud-Dīn Walad, the latest of several generations of jurists, who was also known later as Sultan al-Ulama, "Sultan of the Scholars."

Bahā ud-Dīn Walad fled Balkh at the approach of the Mongols, taking his family westward until finally reaching an area that had been under the control of the Eastern Roman Empire and was still called Rûm. There he became head of a madrassa, which upon his death was inherited by his son, Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī. Because the son lived in Rûm, however, he is usually known today as Rumi.

Rumi started in his father's footsteps as a jurist; he preached and issued fatwas.* A meeting with the dervish Shams-e Tabrizi inspired him to become an ascetic; when Shams disappeared (or was murdered; sources disagree) a few years later, Rumi was devastated. His emotions found expression in poetry. Once he started writing, he didn't stop; the Mathnawi has been called his greatest poetic work.

Although a devout Muslim (his poetry includes hundreds of lines from the Quran), his work is considered to have universal appeal. According to the BBC:

With his injunctions of tolerance and love, he has universal appeal, says Abdul Qadir Misbah, a culture specialist in the Balkh provincial government.
"Whether a person is from East or West, he can feel the roar of Rumi," he says.

The madrassa where Rumi taught

"When a religious scholar reads the Mathnawi, he interprets it religiously. And when sociologists study it, they say how powerful a sociologist Rumi was. When people in the West study it, they see that it's full of emotions of humanity."[source]

His poetry has an evolutionary strain, in that he saw a progression in the universal soul working through levels of existence. The Muslim philosopher Al Farabi introduced this idea to Islam, and it finds expression in Rumi in lines like:

I died as a mineral and became a plant,
I died as plant and rose to animal,
I died as animal and I was Man.
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
Yet once more I shall die as Man, to soar
With angels bless'd; but even from angelhood
I must pass on: all except God doth perish.
When I have sacrificed my angel-soul,
I shall become what no mind e'er conceived.
Oh, let me not exist! for Non-existence
Proclaims in organ tones,
To Him we shall return.

Rumi's poetry has inspired much of classical Iranian and Afghan music, and has been translated into languages all over the world. Madonna, Goldie Hawn, Philip Glass and Demi Moore have done performances of his poetry.

As for Rumi in his country of origin: the Taliban outlawed music, and Sufism didn't fit their view of Islam. Since their ouster from political power in Afghanistan, Rumi has had a resurgence.

*Although in the West fatwas have a bad name, they are treated differently in the Sunni and Shia sects. Rumi was Sunni, and so his fatwas were non-binding.

London Bridge is Falling Down!

[For earlier history, see here.]

Finding the origin of nursery rhymes can be unreliable, since one never knows how long a rhyme was circulating orally until it got recorded. See my comments on "Ring Around the Rosie" here. Also, what we think of as the nursery rhyme may be just the latest version; earlier versions may lead to entirely different interpretations. The full current version of "London Bridge Is Falling Down" can be read here. It has references that make it very unlikely to be a medieval poem.

Viking boat pulling down London Bridge

The earliest reference to something that might be related to the Bridge rhyme is found in the Norse Heimskringla, written in Iceland by Snorri Sturluson (1178-1241). In it, Sturluson collected stories of Norwegian kings. In one story, King Olaf II attacked London and the Bridge in the company of the Saxon King Æthelred the Unready. They pulled it down with chains, dividing the Danish forces who had no other easy way to cross the Thames. The 1844 English edition included a poem by another poet, Ottar Svarti ("Ottar the Black"), which begins with the line "London Bridge is broken down." It was discovered later, however, that the translator decided to prefix Ottar's poem with a made-up line. Ottar never referred to London Bridge.

In the 1890s, another theory as to the origin came from a British folklorist. Drawing on an old theme of blood sacrifice to make foundations strong, she suggested that children were buried—perhaps alive—under the Bridge. Actually, there was a burial "under" the Bridge. Peter de Colechurch, who was heavily involved in the construction of the 12th century version, was a chaplain of the church in which St. Thomas Becket was baptized. He had a chapel on the Bridge dedicated to Becket. de Colechurch died in 1205 and was buried in the crypt, at the river level of the chapel. At the dismantling of the Bridge in 1832, when his bones were found, they were unceremoniously tossed into the Thames.

Wedding of Henry III & Eleanor of Provence

Then there's the story that Eleanor of Provence (c.1223-1291), who was given the tolls and rents from the Bridge as a present from her husband, Henry III, spent them on herself rather than the upkeep of the Bridge. The Bridge fell into disrepair, and a derisive verse was formed with the telling, sarcastic phrase "my fair lady."

Control of the Bridge was returned to the City of London in 1281. Ironically, the heavy river ice that winter built up against the bridge and five of the arches collapsed.

The Bridge has become iconic. A few remaining stones of the medieval version can be seen in the churchyard of St. Magnus Martyr, which used to be at one end of the span. In the early 1960s, when he learned London wanted to replace the Bridge and offered to sell the Victorian version, American chainsaw magnate Robert McCulloch offered the winning bid of $2,460,000. McCulloch transported the stones (carefully coded) to Lake Havasu City, Arizona, USA, where he had them painstakingly re-assembled over a steel structure. "London Bridge" now exists on both sides of the Atlantic!

It's the Economy, Stupid!

Even fans of the Middle Ages probably would never think to pair the phrase "economic theory" with the adjective "medieval." It would be a mistake, however, to assume that medieval thinkers were not aware of the needs and changes of the local economy. The 14th century alone saw some radical economic events, like the collapse of some Italian banking institutions. Whether this can truly be ascribed, wholly or in part, to Edward III, it is true that his administration spent larger sums of money than was prudent. The Black Death also had an effect on economy.

Merchants fueled a thriving middle class.

During the economic shifts of the 14th century, an anonymous poet wrote an alliterative poem addressing the topic of those who spend lavishly and those who are more frugal and prefer to make and save money. The poem probably would have been lost if not for the efforts of Robert Thornton, who in the 15th century made a hobby of collecting manuscripts. His copy of the poem—the only version we have—may have textual errors due to hasty copying. Still, it offers us an interesting look at that society.

The poem is called Wynnere and Wastoure, and refers to Winners (who earn money) and Wasters (who are extravagant with money). The narrator, while walking on a sunny day, falls asleep by a stream and has a dream-vision. (This is a common way to begin an allegory.) In the dream, Winner and Waster each lead an army. Just before their battle begins, a messenger arrives who summons them before the king, who will listen to their argument and resolve their issues definitively.

This he fails to do. After listening to the arguments of the two, the king gives an ambiguous judgment, condemning each as unbalanced practices but endorsing both as necessary actions in society—although the king does point out that Winner will never be able to keep up with Waster. Thornton's manuscript breaks off at line 503, so any conclusion after his judgment is lost to us.

Internal evidence in the poem suggests a date of composition prior to 1370: it mentions a Chief Justice, William Shareshull, who died in 1370. That would place the composition in the reign of Edward III, and it is generally accepted by scholars that the king of the poem is meant to represent Edward, who himself would have had constant dealing with "wasting" because of his expenses on wars and living well, and with the "winners" of a growing and increasingly wealthy middle class.

Medieval Acrostics

The simplest form of acrostic is a poem or other writing in which the first letter of each line spells out a word (presumably on that is related thematically to the writing). They are frequently used in education today because they are fun, but 2000 years ago they were considered valuable learning tools because of their embedded layers of meaning, especially the type of acrostic called carmina figurata ("shape poem"); it could either be a poem with words constrained to a shape such as a chalice or dragon, or it was designed so that various letters could be highlighted to make shapes or focus the reader on certain words or names.

This practice had been elevated to a high art by Roman poets. The sample on this page is from Publilius Optatianus Porphyrius, who was writing to please the Emperor Constantine in order that Optatianus might be recalled from exile. Optatianus is credited with inventing this type of carmina figurata, where the shapes to be found are internal to the poem, which is written out as a block (or other symmetrical shape) of text to aid in finding the lines. You can see not only the chi-ro symbol, but the name "iesus" spelled around the outside of the square. An interesting scholarly examination of Optatianus' figure poems can be found here.

But away from the 4th and back to the 8th century: as part of Alcuin's academic push, he gave various assignments to the men working with him at Charlemagne's palace school at Aachen. One of the men working with him was Joseph Scottus.

We know almost nothing about Scottus outside of his connection with Alcuin. He was Irish, and probably studied at the monastery in Clommacnoise. It is assumed that at one point he studied under Alcuin at York, and that connection drew him to the Frankish court when Alcuin took over. Despite his background and anti-Irish sentiment at the time, he was on very friendly terms with Charlemagne, and Scottus took over for Alcuin in 790 when Alcuin had business back home.

Very little writing by Joseph has survived, most of which is acrostics. Alcuin apparently tried to revive the form, and a manuscript of acrostics exists in Switzerland that clearly came from Charlemagne's school: the majority of acrostics are by Joseph Scottus, with others by Alcuin himself and Bishop Theodulf of Orléans. (Alas, I can find no pictures of the manuscript to share!)

Summer Solstice

The first full day of summer seems to be the appropriate place for this:

Sumer is icumen in,
Lhude sing cuccu!
Groweþ sed and bloweþ med
And springþ þe wde nu,
Sing cuccu!
Awe bleteþ after lomb,
Lhouþ after calue cu.
Bulluc sterteþ, bucke uerteþ,
Murie sing cuccu!
Cuccu, cuccu, wel singes þu cuccu;
Ne swik þu nauer nu.
Sing cuccu nu. Sing cuccu.
Sing cuccu. Sing cuccu nu!

Summer has come in;
Loudly sing, cuckoo!
Groweth seed and bloweth meadow
And the wood springeth anew,
Sing, cuckoo!
Ewe bleateth after lamb;
Cow loweth after calf.
The bullock starts, the buck farts,*
Merrily sing, cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo, sing well cuckoo;
Nor never now stop.
Sing cuckoo now. Sing cuckoo.
Sing cuckoo. Sing cuckoo now!

*There is disagreement on the meaning of "uerteth"; is it for "verteth" meaning "turns" (the buck is looking around for a doe?) or does the "v" sound indicate the fricative "f" for "ferteth" meaning "farts" (Middle English ferten = "to fart"; indicating...the richer diet of spring means life is being generated?). I have chosen "farts" simply because it rhymes with "starts" and gives me a chance to include this footnote. Happy Summer!