Medieval Word of the Day

Wood-penny: a penny required of villeins before they could gather dead wood from the forest

(an English medieval penny)

Medieval Word of the Day

The Law of a Year and a Day: one of the few ways a villein could win his freedom. If a villein escaped from his manor, took refuge in a chartered town, and was accepted into a guild without being caught and challenged by his manor lord for a year and a day, he was considered free from serfdom.

(An escaped villein had to join a guild, like this shoemakers' guild)

Medieval Word of the Day

Fees and services: what separated the freeman (or free farmer) from the villein – After paying rent for his land, the freeman owed only nominal services to the manor lord, whereas the villein owed the manor lord innumerable “fees”, including: tithes to the Church; a yearly tax called tallage; the wood-penny; fees to grind their grain at the mill; a hen or eggs for permission to keep poultry; merchet; heriot (the villein’s best beast or chattel forfeited to the lord of the manor when the villein died); mortuary (the villein’s second best beast or chattel forfeited to the Church when the villein died); and many more. A villein also owed “services” to the manor lord, including week-works (a certain number a days per week the villein was required to work on the lord’s demesne) and boon-works (extra days a villein was required to work on the lord’s demesne, usually during the height of harvest season). Villeins could also be summoned to help with repairs around the manor or at the manor house

(villeins pay fees in the form of money and animals to their lord)

Medieval Word of the Day

I'm afraid I've been neglecting this blog terribly while I finished up revising, formatting, and finally publishing my new romantic historical novel, The Lady and the Minstrel. Now that The Lady and the Minstrel is finally available for sale (see buy links in the right margin), I'll share a few new medieval words from you that appear in this novel.

Beginning with...villein.

(villeins working their lord's fields)

The class of peasants known as "villeins" in medieval England play a significant role in my story of The Lady and the Minstrel. So what were villeins?

This term "villein" is often used today as interchangeable with “serf”, but in fact a “villein” was an unfree peasant on the higher social end among the serfs, while a “cottar” was at the bottom of the social scale among the serfs, the scale being determined by the amount of land one possessed and the number of fees and services owed to the manor lord. Whether villein or cottar, both were “unfree” peasants. At the same time, they were not slaves. Serfs at any level could not be sold, although the land they worked on could be sold and thereby bring the serf under the authority of another manor lord. Each serf held some land of his own on which he could raise crops to support himself and if he managed to grow any excess, he could sell that excess for profit. Serfs had some rights and privileges that the manor lord was (in theory) required to respect. It was technically illegal for a manor lord to separate a serf from his lands and send him to work on a different manor, although one manor lord in The Lady and the Minstrel does exactly that with one of the characters. It was also illegal for a serf to leave his land and go live somewhere else, with the exception of the Law of a Year and a Day. Although Robert’s mother was a cottar and his father a villein, I use the term “villein” throughout The Lady and the Minstrel to simplify the class of unfree peasants for the reader.

Silver and Gold (and I’m not talking Christmas!)

I’m talking money. Medieval money, to be specific. When I wrote my first published novel, Loyalty’s Web, I had few resources to help me understand the monetary system of Western Europe in the 12th Century. The internet wasn’t widely available when I wrote my first draft. I thought it made perfect sense that the upper classes, like royalty, would have coffers and coffers filled with gold coins, so I put gold coins into my draft and didn’t look back. Loyalty’s Web was first published in 2007 (years after that draft was actually written) and no one ever called me on the gold coins in the story.

This year, I have been focused on a rewrite of an even older story of mine called The Lady and the Minstrel. In a new scene that I wrote for the book, I wanted to contrast an English gold coin with a French gold coin in the early 13th Century. This time I had easy access to internet research, so on the internet I hopped. And what, to my dismay, did I discover? Gold production took a nose dive along with the fall of the Roman Empire! While gold continued to be used in small amounts like jewelry, illuminated manuscripts, and even embroidery thread for the rich, when it came to money, silver ruled the day during the Early and High Middle Ages. (Roughly the 8th-13th Centuries.)

(Oops! No! Very, very rare! And a later century)

The first significant gold mine in medieval Western Europe wasn’t established until around 1320 in Slovakia. And it took the discovery of additional gold deposits to begin mining enough gold to mint coins in any kind of sizeable numbers.

The first thing I did on learning this was to go through The Lady and the Minstrel and change all my gold coins to silver ones. I also received the publishing rights back to Loyalty’s Web this summer and am planning to republish it soon. But not before I do a find/replace search to change all the gold coins in that story to silver ones, too!

(Yes! This is more like it.)

So when you write your medieval novel, don’t make my mistake. Give your characters silver coins from the beginning and keep the gold for fripperies like jewelry and embroidery threads!

Here are some helpful websites to learn more about coins in the Middle Ages:

MiningWeekly.com: Silver, gold in the Medieval Europe

MyGeologyPage: Medieval Silver and Gold

Oh, and if you’re wondering, like one of my characters did, what one of King John of England’s coins looked like vs. one of King Philip II’s of France, check out these two websites:

King John’s coins: The FitzWilliam Museum: King John, 1199 - 1216. Silver penny, Winchester mint

King Philip’s coins (Capetingi filippo II agusto = Philip II Augustus)

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Capetingi,_filippo_II_augusto,_denaro,_1180-1223.JPG

(Here’s another version of a coin for Philip II: http://home.eckerd.edu/~oberhot/froy.htm#Philip2)

And if you’re interested, here’s a website to see coins from the various Plantagenet kings up through the Wars of the Roses. You’ll notice that they’re all silver.

http://home.eckerd.edu/~oberhot/eplant.htm

Building a medieval lute – fiction style!

The hero of my current WIP, The Lady and the Minstrel, is…well, a minstrel. Every good medieval minstrel needed an instrument, and for my hero, Robert, his instrument of choice is the lute. I don’t play the lute. I don’t own a lute. How can I, then, learn how to describe my hero’s lute? I can look at pictures, of course, but I wanted to go deeper than that. Here are some of the internet links I used to help me “put the lute together.” I’ll tell you how I used each link, then I’ll show you how I assembled all of this information into an actual scene.

Yes, I began with Wikipedia for the basic components of lute construction:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lute#Construction

This article broke down the components of a lute into the following parts: soundboard, back, neck, belly, bridge, frets, strings.

While I don’t like to rely on Wikipedia as my sole research source on a subject, it is often a good beginning point. This article gave me the terminology I needed to research further. When writing a fiction scene, you don’t want to describe every minute detail of an object. It is best to seize upon a few aspects and highlight those for the reader, just enough to give the reader a flavor of what you are describing. After studying this Wikipedia article and comparing it against a Google search for pictures of lutes, I decided for my description to focus on the following parts:

The soundboard, with its sound hole or rose

The neck, with its pegs

The back

The belly

And a brief, non-specific mention of the strings

From the Wikipedia article, I learned that a lute is made from a combination of woods. Here are the websites that helped me decide which specific woods to use for my hero’s lute:

Build Your Own Renaissance Lute! : http://www.vanedwards.co.uk/renwood.htm This site gives a list of wood options for each of the lute’s components (neck, ribs, soundboard, pegs, etc), along with dimensions needed to build an actual lute. I didn’t go that far in my description, but you might like to in your novel!

A web page with answers to the question: “Which is a more naturally resonate wood?” : http://www.thegearpage.net/board/archive/index.php/t-282046.html

After studying the above two sites, I decided to go with the following woods for my hero’s lute:

Ash for the soundboard

Boxwood for the neck

Maple for the ribs on the back

But there was one final check I needed to do. I needed to be sure the woods I was using were actually available in Europe and England during the Middle Ages. To my excitement, I stumbled across this lovely site:

Woods in Use in the Middle Ages & Renaissance : http://www.medievalwoodworking.org/articles/wood.htm

This article confirmed that I was good to go.

After researching all of the above, here is the scene I came up with. I’ve highlighted the lute description words in red so you can see how I worked them into the scene.

Robert removed the lute from its case, and set it in her lap.

“Oh!” Marguerite exclaimed. “The design of the rose is lovely.”

Robert felt a surge of pride at her pleasure in the intricate grillwork over the sound hole. “My father carved it,” he said. “He fashioned the entire instrument for my mother and gave it to her on Epiphany when I was seven years old. I helped him gather the wood late at night while old Lord Simon slept. A minstrel who was passing through the village told us which wood was best: ash for the soundboard, boxwood for the neck, strips of maple for the ribs on the back.”

She had pushed off her hood as he spoke and listened with her gaze flitting alternately between the instrument and his face, but she tilted the lute now to examine its deep, rounded body. He admired the graceful turn of her cheek, the whimsical freckles dusted across her small nose as he continued.

“The minstrel showed my father the thickness to cut the wood and showed him how to bend the ribs to form the belly so that the sound would be the sweetest. Father let me slide the pegs in their places after he had carved their notches before he attached the strings. In truth, my contributions were small, but at the time, I felt for all the world as though I had labored over the gift quite as much as he.”

Can you see how I only used a few elements from all the research I did to put together this description and how I tried to work in the description naturally through a dialogue section? Accurate research is crucial, but you don’t want to use so much of what you learn that it bogs down the story.

If you’d like to do a little writing exercise yourself, study the links I shared with you above and put together your own scene describing a medieval or Renaissance lute. If you’d like to, share it with me in a comment on this post. I would love to hear what you come up with!

(Painting: detail from "The Ambassadors", globe, lute and books, by Hans Holbein the Younger)

Name Your Medieval Character: new resource book

This week I published my first non-fiction title: Name Your Medieval Character: Medieval Christian Names (12th-13th Centuries). 

Here's a description:

Medieval author Joyce DiPastena is always on the lookout for authentic medieval names for her characters. Internet searches are helpful, but occasionally they can lead a writer astray. Accurate lists can be found on the internet, but it can take a deal of searching and double-checking of sources. In Name Your Medieval Character: Medieval Christian Names (12th-13th Centuries), DiPastena has done much of this work for you. Name Your Medieval Character is a compilation of her 30-plus years of research into medieval Christian names. Every name and name variation in this book was borne by a living, breathing medieval man or woman.

Name Your Medieval Character includes over 800 female names (including variations) and over 1500 male names (including variations). This book will prove a treasure trove for historical fiction writers, fantasy writers, gamers, or anyone who just enjoys names!

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I hope some of you will find Name Your Medieval Character helpful and enjoyable. It is available in e-book format on Kindle and Smashwords for just .99 cents! Print version coming soon.