Showing posts with label medieval times. Show all posts
Showing posts with label medieval times. Show all posts

Sunday, November 14, 2021

Knights Loaf, Cheat Bread, Maslin: what's in a name?...by Sheila Claydon

 


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So let me introduce you to one of the main characters in my next book. Old Mill!

Hidden away in woodland on the edge of a golf course, it has stood four-square for more than 600 years. Its roof fell in long ago. Its water wheel has disappeared, and so, more bizarrely, has the tumbling river that turned it. If it wasn't for the blue placque beside what was once a door, you wouldn't know it had ever been a mill. A best guess would have been a tumbledown shack a couple of hundred years old. 

Because I wanted to use it as the basis for my next book, the third one in my Mapleby Mysteries trilogy, I needed to find out more about it, however, and goodness me I've been amazed. Not about the old mill itself but about medieval mills in general and medieval life in particular.

For example, I learned that the same as a church, there was a mill in every medieval village, usually owned by the lord of the manor but operated by a miller. The miller was always better off than most of the peasant farmers who used the mill. This was because everyone needed their corn, rye, oats and barley milled, ground into flour and made into bread, so he (it was always a he) was never out of work. Many millers also made bread from the peasants own flour and then charged them for it. The peasants also had to pay the feudal lord banalities (small fees) for the use of the mill, so no wonder they were always poor.

The miller, who often had a baking house next to the mill, made as many as 20 different types of bread, most of which had names unusual to today's ears. There was the Knights loaf, the Popes loaf, Maslin, which was a mix of wheat and rye, and Manchets and Pandemain. Manchets were large rolls and loaves of white bread, while Pandemain  was the loaf preferred by the lord of the manor and his wealthy friends and relatives. Both of these were made from finely ground and sifted wheat flour, while their poorer cousin was Wastel,  a white bread made from flour that had been less carefully sieved. 

There was also Cheat bread, made from wheat flour that had the worst of the bran removed, and horse bread, which was made from a mix of cereals, pulses, bran and acorns.This was originally made for horses but many of the poorest people had no choice but to eat it to keep themselves alive, especially in times of famine. And that was another thing I learned. There was often famine, or flooding, and living in medieval times was very, very hard. 

There was no such thing as rest either . Millers and peasants alike toiled from dawn to dusk, working to the seasons. Everything from planting to ploughing, sowing and harvesting, scaring the birds (done mostly by children) pruning and weeding, and even fertilising the fields, had to be done in the correct season, the same as shearing and butchering. And all this was done  alongside basket making, weaving, animal husbandry, collecting  eggs and nuts and berries, preserving food by salting and smoking, digging ditches to protect the fields from flooding, and of course collecting wood to repair their own houses and tools and keep them warm in the winter. No electricity, no glass in the windows of their one roomed huts or cruck houses, where everyone, including the animals, slept together around a central fire in the winter both for warmth and as protection from the wild animals that roamed the fields at night. No wonder life was short and brutish. No wonder more babies died than lived. 

Of course I won't put all of this into my book because there is nothing more boring than reading too much detail about a particular activity, so the skill of the writer is to give just enough to inform and not a single word more.However, for realism, I'm going to have to convey the poverty and dirt of those times while somehow making the medieval protagonists attractive enough to intrigue the modern day reader. I've also got to come up with a title. The first two books in the trilogy are Remembering Rose and Loving Ellen, so to go with the flow I need to find something short that goes with Sophie, the heroine. I'm still working on that but when I've found it, I'll let you know.







Friday, March 27, 2015

ASTARA the ancient Goddess of Easter - by Vijaya Schartz


The 8th century British writer Bede, mentions that the name for Easter is derived from a Pagan spring festival of the goddess ASTARA. Revered by the Babylonians, Sumerians and Persians, this goddess derived from ASTRA and OSTARA the Greek goddess of spring and fertility. The name means STAR and she is sometimes referred to as the Star Goddess.
She is said to be the last Pagan goddess to leave Earth, bound for the stars, during the Bronze Age, and was worshiped throughout the civilized world of that time, even in Asia (under the name of Kali). Ancient Alien theorists will tell you that she must have been an alien visitor, who remained on Earth to teach the populations of the time, then flew back to the heavens.

The familiar Easter bunny and the multicolored eggs (both symbols of fertility) come not from the Christian or the Jewish Passover traditions, but straight from the Pagan festival of ASTARA. Since this was a spring festival, around the same time as the Jewish Passover and it marked the resurrection of Christ, the early Church made both events coincide, and blended the traditions.

In other words, if you cannot prevent the Pagans from celebrating their festivals, join them and call it a Christian holiday. This technique worked well for early Christian rulers, and helped impose Christianity in many Pagan societies.
Even the last supper that inspired the modern communion was a tradition from ancient Egypt, where the priests and priestesses symbolically partook of the body of Osiris during religious rituals.

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Now that we have forgotten the origins of our festivals, we take for granted that Christian or Jewish holidays include only Christian and Jewish traditions, but the deeper roots of these traditions go far back into our ancient past. It seems that religions change and evolve, but somehow, the traditions remain.
Learn more about ancient traditions by reading THE CURSE OF THE LOST ISLE, a Medieval series based on authentic Celtic legends. Find these books on my Amazon page HERE.

Vijaya Schartz
Swords, Blasters, Romance with a Kick

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