The Medieval Year: Fifth Day before the Ides of August, AD 1224
Otherwise known as Friday, August 9th, (eight hundred years before) 2024.
This is the third post in The Medieval Year, a new weekly feature of the Via Mediaevalis newsletter. These brief posts give us an opportunity to appreciate calendrical artwork created over five centuries ago, 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 important background information!
Let’s begin with another stunning illustration from the Hours of Henry VIII. Here’s the full calendar page for August:
Below is a close-up of the labor of the month. A man and his trusty oxen bring in bundles of grain, carefully stacked and tied down, from the fields. Three others, fortunate enough to be working in the shade, are at the threshing floor, beating the stalks with jointed flails to separate the kernels from the straw. The bold, rich colors of the laborers’ garments make a lovely contrast with the golden earth tones that unify the other foreground elements and convey the central theme of August: the grain is ripe—the harvest has come.
That woven fence in the background reminds me of a fence that I saw in eastern Europe, not too long ago:
The Renaissance poet Edmund Spenser (d. 1599) wrote a sequence of twelve poems, one for each month, called The Shepheardes Calender. Modeled on the “eclogues” (pastoral poems) of Virgil and other literary predecessors, it’s a pleasant and sometimes puzzling journey through the rural year. It’s very much a Renaissance work, but the world that Spenser depicts feels medieval to us modern readers, in part because he adopted a quaint style and archaic language, and also because the life of a shepherd in the Renaissance wasn’t much different from the life of a shepherd in the Middle Ages.
In fact, if you asked one of these shepherds if he considered himself a man of the Middle Ages or a man of the Renaissance, he might have moseyed off toward the sheepfold wondering when you lost your wits, and praying that you recover them someday. Those historical periods did not exist in his world, and in any case, they had little to do with the task at hand: the sheep needed pasture and protection, just as they always had, and just as they always will.
At one point in Spenser’s poem for August, the character Willy says to his fellow shepherd Perigot,
But for the sunbeam so sore doth us beat,
Were not better, to shun the scorching heat?
That was August in the medieval countryside: hard work and heat. Chopping firewood is hard work, but it also supplies biological warmth at a time when warmth is in short supply. Digging drainage ditches is hard work, but that happens in the cool days of spring. The labors of August—making hay, harvesting and threshing grain, plowing fallow fields before sowing rye or winter wheat—were performed in the sultry air and beating sun of late summer.
Willy and Perigot didn’t have air conditioning, so instead they escaped the “scorching heat” with the pleasure of a singing contest called a roundelay. A third shepherd named Cuddie, appointed as judge, gets them started: “Begin, when ye list, ye jolly shepherds twain.”
Perigot: It fell upon a holy eve,
Willy: hey ho holiday,
Perigot: When holy fathers wont to shreve:
Willy: now beginneth this roundelay.
Perigot: Sitting upon a hill so high,
Willy: hey ho the high hill,
Perigot: The while my flock did feed thereby,
Willy: the while the shepherd self did spill:
Perigot: I saw the bouncing Bellibonne,
Willy: hey ho Bonnibell,
Perigot: Tripping over the dale alone,
Willy: she can trip it very well:
…
Perigot: So learned I love on a holy eve,
Willy: hey ho holiday,
Perigot: That ever since my heart did grieve.
Willy: now endeth our roundelay.
Here are a few more illustrations for August:
Wonderful illustrations. The folk with horse-laden cart are very small, like hobbits.
I wish my phone had beautiful pictures like their calendars. So many things have been lost.