The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [10]
After a century of predominantly Scandinavian violence, the Norsemen settled in northern France, and the disruption began imperceptibly to tail off. The weather improved. Slowly, like moles coming up from below ground, people began to emerge from hiding. Ninth-century improvements in agricultural techniques, such as the mouldboard plough, the harness and the horseshoe, made it easier to open up the forest for arable land, and as assarting increased so too did the food supply and the population.
Country life in the Middle Ages, as shown in a bestiary. A woman milks the cow in the open air, using a coopered wooden pail with a plain stave handle.
The medieval economic recovery was stimulated by the horseshoe, an import from the Middle East which improved the performance of the animal over rough ground and helped to protect it from foot rot.
Thus began the first cautious stirrings of commerce, as each hamlet with a surplus went in search of buyers. Markets were set up in the lee of ruined Roman town walls, or at monastery gates. Merchants began to travel small distances to barter goods. The discovery of silver at Rammelsberg, in Saxony, at the end of the tenth century put a tiny amount of coin into circulation. Small towns, which we would now call villages, grew up around the market-places, following the contours of the land. The houses were built in terraces for warmth and the streets were curved to blunt the effect of the wind.
But the philosophical viewpoint at the time of the resurgence of the cities in the tenth and eleventh centuries left their citizens ill-prepared for the new problems now demanding solution. There was no concept of progress. In the early Middle Ages men were aware only of the greatness that had been lost. ‘We stand on the shoulders of giants,’ they said. The past held all that was great and glorious. It was the source of all authority. The purpose of any intellectual activity was not to question this past world, but to add respect for it.
The trivium provided skills only for administration. What little arithmetic the quadrivium offered was clumsy. The use of roman numerals made multiplication and division nearly impossible. In 1050 in Liege, people worked out geometry problems by cutting pieces of parchment into triangles. On the spot reckoning was done with what was called ‘finger maths’. For numbers higher than 9000, said the Venerable Bede, echoing Capella, you needed the skills of a dancer!
The Byzantine court of Justinian, shown in a mosaic at S. Vitale, Ravenna. The officials’ robes and accoutrements display the rigidly hierarchical structure of society at the time, reflecting the unchanging nature of the cosmos in which they lived.
Artistic activity also reflected the Augustinian attitude. The heavy Romanesque churches like that of S. Apollinare in Classe, near Ravenna, were based on the basilica, or public hall, of classical Roman architecture. With half-columns inserted in the thick walls, and massive tunnel vaults, they were the work of engineers. Small alabaster windows let in a faint glow of light to brush the flashing mosaics that seemed to float away from the walls, washing the darkness of the church with mystical colour.
Even in later buildings like the great church of Mary Magdalene at Vezelay in Burgundy, the decoration reveals a typical lack of interest in the real world. Foliage is reduced to abstract designs, faces to two-dimensional masks. The rose becomes a medallion, the acanthus a vague cactus-like shape. The Byzantine icon-like crucifixions show Christ