Medieval times. The Dark Ages. Life after the fall of Rome and before the Renaissance of art and reason.
If you believe the pop culture images of that era, Europe was full of peasants and kings, princesses and knights in shining armor who rode the realms protecting the weak.
But is it true? And if not, why are those the stories we’re all still told?
Answering that question is difficult, because the written record is spotty, at best, from that long ago. Very few people knew how to read and write, so we don’t have as many letters, books, diaries, and other historical documents to tell us what life was like.
But we do have some. And we also have those stories—the myths and legends passed down to us, like those about King Arthur. And more than that we have the history of the English language, which has clues of its own.
Speaking the language
If you want to study life in the medieval era, the first thing you need to do is learn the language. Even if you focus just on England, you won’t be able to understand it—and not just like Shakespeare is hard to understand.
“The core of the language is very much the same,” says Megan Hartman, a professor of medieval language and literature at the University of Nebraska Kearney (and this author’s cousin). “But there are two important differences in particular that make Old English essentially a foreign language.”
One is the language’s syntax, or the rules for how you put words together to form a sentence. In modern English, the order of the words is essential for telling you what those words are. The subject is the noun that comes first, objects come after the verb, and so on. But in Old English, that’s not true—instead, you add endings to the words that tell you what those words do.
The second difference is that English has picked up lots of words from other cultures. “More than most languages,” Hartman says, “English is very accepting of other languages and other vocabularies.”
In part, that’s because of the history of England. In 1066, for example, William the Conqueror took over the country in the name of the Normans, a people hailing from the French region of Normandy. They brought the French language with them, which gave us the roots of some modern English words. The word beef, for instance, comes from the French word boeuf.
A place in transition
The history of the language helps us make sense of what life was like at the time—and of all the ongoing conflicts over lands, ideas, and religion.
Take the beef/boeuf example: not only does it show how English took on parts of French after the Norman Conquest, but it also shows which people had power.
“You get French words and English words for similar things, but they’re showing different levels of society,” Hartman says. We use the French word for beef, which comes from cows. But the word cow comes from the Old English word cu.
“Once it becomes something sophisticated that you’re serving to the lords and the ladies, you use the French word. But you use the English word for what was on the farms, because that’s where the peasants were. That shows you the stratification in society.”
The medieval era was filled with these kinds of changes. Religion was another.
Earlier, before the fall of Rome, England was controlled by various Celtic tribes who had been Christianized by the Romans. But the Anglos, Saxons, and Jutes—nomadic Germanic tribes from Europe—invaded, bringing with them old Germanic pagan religions like the pantheon of Norse gods. The Christian tribes were then pushed to the edges of the island (including Ireland, Cornwall on the southwest of England, and Wales) until Augustine of Canterbury, a monk from Rome, helped Christianize England in 599.
What changes and what stays the same
To make sense of all those changes, scholars look at both how the language shifts and how it stays the same.
“The really important words have what’s called modern reflexes—the old word has come into modern language. You can see the connection between the two,” Hartman explains. One example is the Old English word pater, which means father. It’s the root for words we use today, like paternal. The fact that it has stuck around shows that family units were particularly important to people during the medieval era.
But other words changed meaning over time, which highlights changes in the way people thought. “The development of language can show the development in the society—what was considered important and who was considered important,” Hartman says.
She uses the example of the Old English concept of dom. “The society was based largely on a heroic ideal,” she says. There wasn’t a widely accepted notion of what would happen after you died, but everyone accepted that death was inevitable. So what mattered to them was how you were remembered and judged. That is your dom—which translates to judgment, but it wasn’t necessarily negative.
But the word dom is the root of our modern word doom—something completely negative, and something to be avoided. “That reflection of how you’re judged is now ultimately something bad—the doom that will be upon you,” Hartman says. “I don’t necessarily know why there is that change, but I wonder if it reflects Christianity and this shift to a God-fearing society. Having a good reputation after you die matters less in a Christian society, which is more focused on entering Heaven.”
The stories we tell
Those changes in how people thought also had an impact on the kinds of stories people told—and which ones were saved.
Because most people weren’t literate—writing was only taught in monasteries at the time—literature was passed down orally. Poems were written to be adapted on the fly and recited out loud. There is some evidence, Hartman says, that peasants did this as well as the rich.
However, the only literature to be saved over the centuries is what the rich selected. That could be one reason why we have so many stories of noble kings and heroic knights. The royalty wanted to be remembered well.
The stories also spoke to social and political issues of the time. The legends of King Arthur, Hartman explains, are set around 449, when the Britons were trying to defend their lands from other tribes—the Anglos, Saxons, and Jutes mentioned earlier. During the Old English period, those tribes were in control, so no one cared about King Arthur—why would they want to tell stories in which they are the villains?
That changed after the Norman Conquest, when the new rulers took power and Christianity spread. “Then the King Arthur stories pick up,” Hartman says. And with them came the idealized vision of lands with heroic knights that we still imagine today.
But those images weren’t even true at the time. “What’s interesting,” Hartman says, “is that these stories take place at a time when stirrups weren’t that prominent. But without stirrups you can’t have knights. The armor technology wasn’t there.”
It wasn’t until the eleventh century—over seven hundred years after Arthur supposedly lived—that the stereotypical knight came into existence. But the confusion didn’t start in modern times—story tellers in the medieval era imagined King Arthur as a knight, too. “These stories that hearken back to a grand past when things were noble and amazing were completely anachronistic, even at the time,” Hartman says.
The things we care about
There’s one last big change between the medieval era and now that these stories reveal, and that’s how people criticized their own societies.
Hartman emphasizes the fact that people in the medieval era did tell sophisticated stories that critiqued their rulers. She points to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a poem from the late fourteenth century, that aimed to show the hypocrisy of the ruling class.
However, literature from the time was less concerned with growth than we are today. We still have figures—like our own retellings of King Arthur and superheroes—who are larger-than-life heroes we look up to. But often the stories we tell include adventures in which the heroes become better people or learn something about themselves.
“Part of seeing ourselves in those figures is seeing that growth,” Hartman says. Think of Harry Potter: he didn’t start as a king. He started as the boy living under the stairs, and part of the charm is the idea that you, too, could be a great wizard and you just don’t know it yet.
In Old English literature, that wasn’t the case. “In some older stories, like Beowulf you don’t see that,” Hartman explains. “It’s very much about the hero being tested. Is this hero strong enough, brave enough, smart enough to withstand the trials plaguing society?” People didn’t tell stories about themselves learning to be heroes—instead, they imagined the great, powerful figures who protected the realm and offered safety.
What we learn from literature
Again, the fact that the stories we record of are those written by the royals may help explain some of the emphasis on heroic leaders. But it is also likely a reflection of what ordinary people concerned themselves with. If you were a peasant in the year 800, struggling to make enough food to last through the winter and watching an invading army making their way toward you, you would probably just want someone who can protect you. You wouldn’t care if they had grown during their journey—you would just want to be safe.
These are the kinds of insights medieval literature can offer. If you want to know what life was like at the time, reading these legends, analyzing the narratives—and the language itself—can show you not just what happened when, but what it was actually like to live in those conditions.