Originally posted 1st August 2024
Paris was first adopted as the capital of the Frankish kingdom in 508 when Clovis I, the king of the Franks, adopted it as his capital. At the time, this had no real effect since the entire government consisted of Clovis and his immediate entourage and he continued to move around the kingdom in the usual way for a king of the time, but when he chose to be buried there it gave the city some lasting symbolic weight.
There had already been a settlement on the site of Paris for some time; the Romans had founded a city there called Lutetia, named for a settlement of the native Gauls which was at least nearby if not on exactly the same site; descriptions by Julius Caesar have suggested that the original Lutetia was on what is now the Ile de la Cite in Paris, but there is no clear archeological evidence of this. The local tribe was called the Parisii, hence the name of the later city.
Clovis may have chosen Paris as his capital because it had been the home of Saint Genevieve, for whom he appears to have had a great deal of respect. She died in 502 and Clovis chose a spot beside her for his own burial. After his death, his sons divided his kingdom but retained Paris as joint property, making it an obvious candidate to be used as capital as what is now France formed.
Originally posted 15th August 2024
The church of St Mary and All Saints in Willingham dates mostly from the 1200s and early 1300s, but is built on the foundations of an earlier church on the same site. It may originally have been dedicated to St Matthew as this name is recorded in the late 1400s and early 1500s. It is especially notable today for its collection of wall paintings, which spans a period of 400 years from the mid 1200s to the 1600s and demonstrates the variety of types of wall paintings that appeared in medieval churches.
The church site was originally at the northern edge of the village, nearer the fens, and a landing spot was constructed on Willingham Lode to deliver building materials for it. The same landing point was also used for the building materials required for the bishop’s palace, which was on the site now occupied by the village cemetery behind the modern church. Anglo-Saxon settlement was mostly in the area between modern Church Street and Berrycroft and excavations in the 1990s found evidence of the early village, including a well-preserved wicker-lined well. There may also have been another centre of settlement near where the Green now is, which was also handy for the church, and over the course of the Saxon period settlement drifted north to be around the church and the fen edge.
The Saxon church was demolished to make way for the modern church and some pieces of stonework were incorporated into the walls of the chancel; they were found during restoration work and are now visible in the porch. The nave was built roughly on top of a Norman nave and a small lancet window in the west end, near the belltower, appears to have come from this older church; it is decorated with the oldest wall painting in the church: a pair of ochre paintings showing St Etheldreda and another saint dated to about 1250. Henry III visited Willingham in 1244 and it’s possible these paintings were added to the church in honour of his visit.
Originally posted 23rd August 2024
The earliest known surviving example of knitting is a cotton sock made in North Africa in about 1100-1300. While there are earlier examples of woollen socks which appear to have been knitted, it’s more likely they were made by a technique known as nalbinding, which is more like sewing than conventional knitting, though it may have been a forerunner of the technique. This may seem relatively recent, but the surviving knitted sock shows some relatively advanced techniques such as multiple colours and the combination of knit and purl stitches, implying that knitting had been around for significantly longer to allow these techniques to develop.
From the 1300s onwards, knitting spread across Europe and by the 1500s it was sufficiently important in England to warrant legislation: the Cappers Act of 1571 required everybody above the age of 6 (except “Maids, Ladies, Gentlewomen, Noble Personages, and every Lord, Knight, and Gentleman of 20 Marks Land”) to wear a knitted woolen cap made in England by a professional capper, on pain of a fine. Several of these caps survive and can be seen to have been knitted “in the round”: a type of knitting that uses four or five needles and produces a tube rather than a sheet of material. Knitting in the round also provides a smooth herringbone-patterned exterior without the need for purl stitches, since while North African knitting used purl stitches from an early date this technique appears to have been lost in Europe, only reappearing in the mid-1500s.
The spread of knitting is also visible in art; during the 1300s it became more common to show human and emotional elements in art showing the childhood of Jesus and this sometimes included the Virgin Mary knitting. The technique in several of these images is clearly recognisable and correct, suggesting that the artists at least had access to models who knew how to knit, but does not indicate how common knitting was during this period and whether it was a common activity or only one done by ladies, since either could have been applied to the Virgin Mary.
Originally posted 29th August 2024
During the Norman and early Plantagenet eras of English medieval history - the late 1000s to the mid 1200s - sea travel was vitally important to the king and his court. The King of England was also the Duke of Normandy and ruled other parts of what is now France at different times, for example Henry II’s role as Duke of Aquitaine following his marriage to its Duchess Eleanor. Accordingly, the court essentially needed a cross-channel ferry. There wasn’t often a reason England needed a navy per se during this period, but that started to change during the reigns of Richard I and John as Richard needed ships to transport him, his army, and their luggage on crusade and John started to build up a royal navy to counter an increased threat from France. Unfortunately, royal navies require a good economy and a strong central government and John’s son Henry III had neither, so this progress was rapidly lost again.
Early on, the main recurring ship is the royal snecca - a word meaning ‘snake’: an updated Viking longship which was used to carry the king between England (usually Southampton or Portsmouth) and Normandy (usually the port of Barfleur). When William the Atheling, son of Henry I, was killed in a shipwreck it was as he was leaving Barfleur, attempting to catch up to his father’s snecca in a borrowed galley, since the king did not have many of his own ships and it was customary to borrow or hire others as required. The size of the ship in question - named simply the White Ship - gives an impression of the scale of medieval galleys, as it was apparently capable of carrying several hundred passengers, a crew of fifty, and cargo. Unfortunately, all but one of the people on board that night drowned when it sank, also illustrating the dangers of sea travel in the middle ages. Many churches along coasts in the British Isles were founded as thanks for a safe passage across the sea or as a result of promises made in the middle of storms and divine helmsmen saving the heroes from the perils of the sea are a recurring device in Anglo-Saxon poetry.
Despite these dangers, land travel could be just as bad and much more difficult, so travel by sea remained common. For example, when Richard I set out on his great crusade he had a choice of routes: across land via Constantinople, or by ship from the south of France and through the Mediterranean. The land route had ended poorly for King Louis VII a generation before and both Richard and his ally Philip of France chose to travel by sea, Richard from Marseille and Philip from Genoa. Richard’s fleet had sailed from England to meet him - interrupting the trip for some plundering in Lisbon - and consisted of 170 sailing ships and 36 oared galleys: a massive number. They accompanied him to Acre on the coast of what is now northern Israel and were apparently well equipped, but were not suitable for outright naval warfare as they couldn’t be used for ramming. Allegedly, when the fleet encountered a large Muslim ship off the coast of Acre they attempted to sink it by sending a diver over with a drill to bore holes in it below the waterline.
John built on what Richard had founded and had 52 galleys in 1205, dispersed around the English coast from East Anglia to Ireland to keep watch for French invasion forces. There were several naval and amphibious battles between the French and English during this period, including what has been described as England’s first great naval victory in 1213: an attack on the French invasion fleet that all but destroyed it in its harbour at Damme. After that, the conflict escalated until the Battle of Sandwich in 1216: a unique ship-to-ship battle under sail on the high seas. Since ramming was not possible the hand-to-hand tactics were similar to those on land, taking place on the decks of the ships. However, Sandwich also allegedly saw the use of quicklime as a chemical weapon: it was thrown down in pots to blind the French soldiers and sailors. There is no record of payment for this quicklime (records of the Battle of Damme mention payments for soap to make the decks of the French ships slippery, for comparison), and some historians believe that the use of quicklime was added out of contemporary military manuals rather than reality, but all three secular accounts of the battle mention it and two also add the detail that the wind direction was such that the quicklime powder was carried away from the English fleet: a vital component of a chemical attack. Regardless, the English fleet decimated the French; one account claims that over 4,000 French soldiers and sailors were killed. Sandwich is the other claimant for the title of England’s first great naval victory.