The Medieval Year: Twelfth Day before the Kalends of October, AD 1224
A peaceful painting enclosed in prayer.
The Medieval Year, a weekly feature of the Via Mediaevalis newsletter, gives us an opportunity to appreciate calendrical artwork from the Middle Ages, reflect on the basic tasks and rhythms of medieval life, and follow the medieval year as we make our way through the modern year. Please refer to the first post in this series for more background information!
As we saw last week and the week before that, the labor of the month for September was harvesting grapes and making wine. However, this was not the only rural activity that medieval calendars associated with September. Two variants existed, and the Flemish painter Simon Bening decided to incorporate both of them into his lovely miniature for an early-sixteenth-century book called the Da Costa Hours.
The more common of these two variants—the sowing of seed in a plowed field—occupies the foreground. The other one is in the middle distance, on the left: pigs graze on acorns that have fallen from a tree. How many of them fell naturally and how many were knocked loose by the stick-wielding swineherd is hard to say.
The artistic prominence of this rural labor seems out of proportion with its agricultural prominence—compared to making hay, sowing seed, or harvesting grapes, beating and shaking trees to get a few more acorns into the hogs seems like a suboptimal use of time and energy, and rather peripheral to the grand task of keeping bodies and souls together during the cold months. Maybe I’m wrong; I’ve never tried it. I would, however, like to lodge a complaint with Mr. Bening regarding a separate but related detail in his painting: if he expects that diminutive woven-twig fence to serve as an effective barrier between those hungry swine and that sack of grain, either he is greatly mistaken, or medieval pigs were much more temperate than modern ones.
This well-dressed fellow is hard at work planting winter wheat or rye, and the birds are hard at work nullifying his efforts. As the old seed-sower’s saying goes,
One for the pigeon,
Two for the crow,
Three to rot,
And four to grow.
I can say from personal experience that broadcasting wheat by hand is harder than it looks. Well, actually, broadcasting is perfectly easy if the results are of little consequence. Just walk around the field throwing seeds in pseudo-random fashion, stir them up with a rototiller, and then go inside to a fully stocked pantry soon to be fully re-stocked by the next trip to the supermarket. But to broadcast wheat and actually achieve a vigorous, uniform stand, and then to do this year after year with so much success and consistency as to produce the nutritional foundation for an extensive and flourishing civilization still renowned for its creative genius and far-flung military campaigns and profound spirituality—that takes some serious skill.
This is a delightfully clear and detailed depiction of late-medieval plowing. The plowman really has quite a sophisticated setup here: the plow, equipped with coulter and wheels, is a so-called heavy plow or carruca, which in the stubborn soils of northern Europe greatly outperformed the old scratch plows that managed to get the job done in light Mediterranean soils. The one shown here is hefty and well made, and it’s hitched to two fine horses fitted with horse collars and blinders.
Collars were a major improvement over older harness designs; they allowed horses to pull much more weight and made them more practical as draft animals. This is the early sixteenth century, after all, and fading away are the old days of homespun plows pulled by a yoke of good-natured, slow-and-steady oxen. I’ve seen stately Amish workhorses pulling a modern plow through modern soil, and it is a magnificent thing to behold. I’ve also seen eastern European farmers attempting to plow a small field with horses that were, at least in the plowmen’s estimation, insufficiently cooperative. Magnificent it was not, and everybody—probably the farmers, definitely the onlookers, and above all the horses—would have been glad to see a yoke of oxen hitched up instead.
I love the brushwork in this painting, which is, we must recall, a miniature—only about six inches by four inches. You have to keep those dimensions in mind when you’re pondering the many small features formed by minute lines and dabs of paint, the pleasantly realistic representations, and the charming little details: birds in the sky, folks walking here and there, a footpath leading to the parish church down in the valley.
Though vastly closer to medieval reality than to ours, this painting is still a visual idyll—a collage of the peaceful, well-ordered, harmonious moments that in real life are never as frequent and uninterrupted as we would like them to be. Modern artists have produced plenty of idyllic paintings as well, but there’s an important difference. The modern paintings tend to be in museums and private collections, or even in doctor’s offices and corporate conference rooms. The painting that we’ve been enjoying today was found—still is found—in a very different place: it’s on folio 10 verso of a book that is filled with prayers.
Shakespeare’s Isabella said it well—facing a grievous loss of peace and harmony in her own life, she knew how to respond:
Not with fond shekels of the tested gold,
Or stones whose rates are either rich or poor
As fancy values them; but with true prayers
That shall be up at heaven and enter there
I learn a little more each time I experience your entries!
Reading about medieval history and culture and pondering the artwork brings me to a peaceful place. In many respects life was simpler then, holier, yet not without difficulty. However, the words of Isabella say it all - they knew who to turn to. Thank you for your writings!