The Medieval Year: Fourth Day before the Nones of August, AD 1224
Otherwise known as Friday, August 2nd, (eight hundred years before) 2024.
This is the second 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!
It’s the beginning of August in medieval Europe, and the principal earthly concern is the grain harvest. In northern regions, they’re still harvesting grain, or maybe even waiting anxiously for the precious kernels to ripen. In more southerly climes, laborers are busy bringing in ox-cart loads of cut-and-bundled grain stalks from the field, or maybe they’re threshing and winnowing grain that has already been stored in the barn. Many of us modern folks might think of a barn primarily as a place for animals (or tractors), but the word “barn” is a shortened form of Old English bere-ern, which literally means “barley-place” or “barley-house.”
For many centuries of English-language history, a barn was a building for storing grain (or related produce such as hay and flax); not until the eighteenth century did the meaning extend to similar agricultural structures intended for livestock. And the fact that a barn was a bere-ern instead of a hwæte-ern (“wheat-house”) suggests that the Anglo-Saxons prioritized—understandably—ale over food. (Well, actually, it suggests that barley became a more important cereal crop than wheat in the early Anglo-Saxon period, which it did. But surely the delights of locally brewed ale were a decisive factor in this trend.)
Since we’re still in a transitional period between July and August, and since we’ve been talking about the Anglo-Saxons, who lived up north, most of the artwork in this post is taken from July calendars. However, we’ll start with a piece that includes both July and August, and which shows us monthly labors in the relatively rare form of relief sculpture.
These scenes adorn a late-twelfth-century metal font found in St. Augustine’s Church, Kent, England. The depicted tasks, with accompanying zodiac signs above, follow a more northern schedule: the scene for July (on the left) shows a laborer raking hay, and in August (on the right) he is taking his trusty sickle to stalks of grain. The barely legible arched inscriptions are in two different languages—neither of which is English! Latin (which was the international, official, and sacred language of western medieval Europe) is used for the zodiac signs, and French (which was widely spoken in England after the Norman Conquest) is used for the months.
Medieval agriculture was non-mechanized in the extreme—the famed Amish farms of the eastern United States are technological marvels by comparison. Agri-cultural practices strongly shape socio-cultural practices and even influence value systems, as we see in the next two illustrations.
Rigid separation between male and female labors or between professional and domestic spheres, such as we might see in a film based on a Jane Austen novel, was impossible in the Middle Ages. There was simply too much work to be done, especially during the heady days of high summer, and machines were not available—it was human hands or nothing.
In societies that practice non-mechanized, family-scale agriculture, women have an ancient tradition of helping with the grain harvest. The tradition began long before the fifteenth-century illustration shown above and was still alive when the photograph below was taken by my friend Kathleen Laraia McLaughlin.
Why was it called the Nones