The Three Living and The Three Dead

Apologies to any regular readers that I still have left for being dilatory with my posting recently – the Black and the White really is occupying most of my available brain space at the moment (well, that and half term last week...)

In my last post I promised – if anybody was interested – to talk about the medieval story of the three living and the three dead. Well, there was at least one taker (thanks, David!) so here we go.

Before I start, I must give all the credit for this post to one of the most wonderful websites I have discovered in my medieval research. It's called Medieval Wall Painting in the English Parish Church and is an encyclopaedic collection of thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth century wall paintings. It's run by Anne Marshall, a retired associate lecturer with the Open University.

The website is brilliant because it's simple, informative and organised. All the examples of particular themes – everything from the familiar story of Christ's passion (ie Easter) to the more obscure St Eloi shoeing the possessed horse – are bracketed together so that you can see the different artists' and different centuries' treatment of the same subjects.

Anyway, here's what the site has to say about the three living and the three dead.

The subject is French or Flemish in origin and is first heard of at the Court of Flanders in the late 13th century, where it is the subject of five poems, Les Trois Mortes et les Trois Vifs . Three kings went out hunting (in the poems they are specifically described as young) and came across three corpses who castigated them for their preoccupation with pleasure and with wordly things, adding ominous words to the effect that ‘as you are, we once were; as we are, so shall you be’. Paintings of the subject on walls and in manuscripts followed, and the subject soon came to England, where it proved equally popular. 
Quite a few paintings of the subject survive in the English Parish Church. There is clearly a good deal of scope for imaginative narrative treatment of the story, and many paintings show fine clothes, elegantly caparisoned horses, dogs, hawks and a variety of flora and fauna. Sometimes there are speech-scrolls, with a version of the text quoted above (Wensley, now featured here, is a case in point). The Three Dead, needless to say, are painted in more or less gruesome detail - some are skeletons, some have flesh and skin visibly peeling from them, along with flies and other signs of mortal decay - Wensley’s remarkable example is again a case in point. This (the fifteenth century in particular) was after all an age of elaborate funerary and tomb sculpture - much of which survives - often rendered in similarly unsparing fashion.

Whether all this says something about a particular taste for the morbid in the later Middle Ages is debatable. The Black Death, the devastating effects of which had been felt in England as elsewhere in the decades after 1350 may have had something to do with the popularity of subjects like the Three Living and the Three Dead.

You can see pictures of the subject here, here, here, here and here.

Do have a look at the rest of the site to see what medieval churches would have looked like (though you do have to imagine all the colours unfaded). I think one of the biggest misconceptions about the medieval world was that all their stone buildings were grey and austere and bleak. No, that's just how they've come down to us - it's we who feel that bare stone is somehow more spiritual – but then we modern people are heirs of the Puritan reformation which taught us that ornamentation was bad and simplicity was good. The medieval world wouldn't have agreed at all!

When WAS the fourteenth century?

When I tell people that my current novel is set in the medieval period, they will often say something like 'Oh, I love the medieval period, it's fascinating'. And it is, I'm not arguing with that. But I'm never quite brave enough, then, to go on and find out exactly what they mean by 'the medieval period'. Wikipedia – repository of all instant knowledge - defines it as covering a period from the fifth century to the beginning of the sixteenth century. In other words, a millennium that includes the Dark Ages. I think that's a bit broad, myself and would probably have the medieval period beginning somewhere about the reign of Alfred the Great in the mid-ninth century, though others prefer to refer to anything prior to 1066 as The Anglo-Saxon period and to see the medieval period in England as the years between Conquest and Tudors. Fair enough.

But, even if you limit it to the period 1066 to 1485, the medieval period still totals 419 years, which makes research for the historical novelist quite tricky. I mean, life was very different in 1066 and 1485. OK, not as different as between 1485 and 419 years later in 1904, but still, very different.

Even when you narrow things down to the century I'm interested in - the fourteenth - things get very little easier. As I've mentioned before, the fourteenth century was an eventful, happening time and to assume that things in 1400 would look anything like those in 1301 would be a big mistake.

Most of all, the century is hard for the historical novelist (and, by the same token, wonderful) because of the HUGE event that sits bang smack in the midlde of it. 1348 -1350 - The Black Death. It changed pretty well everything, some things immediately, some things slowly. But it changed them. And if you try and research the fourteenth century so that you can get your historical details right, it's sometimes very difficult to find out which bit of the fourteenth century people are talking about.

For instance, I've done a certain amount of research into medieval church wall paintings. Now, there are, sadly, few mural works left in medieval parish churches because of the iconoclasm of the Reformation. What's left was whitewashed or plastered over and is, therefore, not always in the greatest nick. However, conservators all over the country are conserving and writing about the examples that are left and their work is invaluable to people like me. The trouble is, because of the poor condition of the paintings, they can't always say when, exactly, they were painted.

So, when I read - in a reliable source - that it was widely believed 'in the fourteenth century' that to see an image of St Christopher would keep you from dying a sudden death that day, I was delighted. (Clearly, I'm easily pleased.) Surely, I thought, everybody who was afraid of dying of the plague (ie everybody who was alive) would be buying up St Christopher medals and painting images of the saint on their church walls like nobody's business, wouldn't they?

It seemed like a sensible assumption until further (a lot further) research revealed that this belief seems to have come about as a result of the Black Death and that, therefore, those remedies were not immediately available at the time of the Black Death. Most of the surviving St Christopher wall paintings seem to be late fourteenth or fifteenth century. They wouldn't have been there for people to look at while the plague was raging, they were there as a prophylactic, should the plague return.

So the nice device of having people relying on the fact that they wouldn't die that day because they'd taken the trouble to go and look at St Christopher carrying the Christ-child across the river was a goner. As was a point of contact between my characters and my readers – after all, most people know who St Christopher is; they're likely to be far less familiar with the story of the Three Living and the Three Dead which every medieval parishionner would have known. (I'll tell you another time if you're interested.)

And, though I am interested in wall-paintings (as any reader of Testament will know) that's not why they make an appearance in the book. You couldn't possibly have a character walk into a church in the period before the mid 1540s without knowing that the plastered walls of any parish church would be covered in paintings. Our austere way with bare stone was unknown to medieval people and they would have found it incredibly barren and unhelpful. Their religion was very different to anything practised in Britain now. And not just different but bigger. Much bigger. Bigger than most of us can possibly imagine; as big a social factor (though not in the same way) as Islam is in, for example, modern Iran or Saudi Arabia. And, of course, for 'religion' think Roman Catholicism, the only brand of Christianity then flourishing in Western Europe.

But any unwary novelist who assumes that medieval catholicism can be mapped straight on to pre-second vatican council Roman Catholicism is going to get things wrong.

Take a small example. The hail Mary. Even non-Catholics, like me, know that this goes:

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen

As such, with its references to the hour of one's own death – which was pretty much in the forefront of everybody's mind during the Black Death – it seems to be the perfect prayer for my main character to be muttering pretty constantly.

Except that more detailed research reveals that the second part of the prayer was only added in the late fifteenth century, almost a hundred and fifty years after the Black Death.

Drat; another point of contact with modern readers gone.

So many things changed as a result of the Black Death – the value of labour, the standard of living, the status of English, the respect people gave to the church, the relationship between the land and the towns, the feudal system – that the early and late fourteenth centuries turn out to be very different times. People literally thought differently about life after it. Not immediately, of course, but the outlook and world-view of the generation that was born after 1348 is different in many ways to that born, for instance in 1308.

The unwary historical novelist has to tease all this out. Every reference to things 'in the fourteenth century' have to be explored, teased out, evaluated and pinned down to exactly WHEN in the fourteenth century. Otherwise, the howlers generated would be as bad as having a hip and trendy character putting a record on the gramophone in the year 1999, while they smoked their medically endorsed cigarette from a chic ivory holder.

Me and My Opinions...

I seem to be playing away a lot at the moment. Many thanks, once again, to Norm Geras who has asked me to appear in the Friday Normblog Profile. If you're interested in my views on such diverse topics as philosophies to be disseminated (or not) and who I'd ideally invite to dinner, you can find out here.