Medieval Badges Their Wearers And Their Worlds Ann Marie Rasmussen
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- 7. T H E M I D D L E A G E S S E R I E S Ruth MazoKarras,SeriesEditor EdwardPeters,FoundingEditor Acomplete listof booksinthe series isavailable from the publisher.
- 8. MEDIEVAL BADGES THEIR WEARERS AND THEIR WORLDS AnnMarieRasmussen Universityof PennsylvaniaPress Philadelphia
- 9. Copyright © 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-8122-5320-7
- 10. Contents Acknowledgments vii 1 What Are Medieval Badges? 1 2 How Do We Know About Medieval Badges? 23 3 How Were Badges Made, Designed, and Used? 46 4 What Did Badges Do? 82 5 Badges and Pilgrimage 119 6 Badges and Chivalry 155 7 Badges in the Medieval City 185 8 Badges and Carnival 213 Concluding Remarks 233 Notes 241 Bibliography 271 Index 291 Color plates follow page 180
- 12. vii Acknowledgments T his book has accompanied me for the past ten years. The seeds for it were planted earlier than that, however. In 2003 I collaborated with a modernist colleague, Dick Langston, to propose a special session for the 2004 Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in New York City. Not only was the special session accepted by the program committee, the title of my paper on sexual badges, “Wandering Genitalia in Medieval German Literature,” made it into the New York Times article (published on December 27, 2004) that gleaned from the conference pro- gram enough apparently salacious or fatuous titles to skewer the research being presented at the conference. In any case, it made me think that when it comes to research topics, one might as well embrace the old saw that there is no such thing as bad publicity, and the MLA talk became the basis for my giving invited lectures on medieval sexual badges. At the time, I had planned that these talks would become part of a book about obscene texts in medieval German literature. As I reworked the talks into (now published) articles, I slowly realized that my study of medieval badges was raising a host of vexing issues about visual representation in the late medieval world. This insight marked a turning point, though I did not grasp that at the time. I had embarked on a new scholarly path and entered into unfamiliar terrain. I consigned the project on obscenity to the (digital) desk drawer and began writing the book you are reading now. At some point after the euphoria of new scholarly curiosity has passed, it dawns on a person that the research journey upon which she has embarked will be long and difficult.Turning back, that is to say, abandoning the project, feels like a viable option. I expressed thoughts like these many years ago to Romedio Schmitz-Esser, who was then a postdoctoral researcher at Duke University, and he replied,“Ann Marie, you must write this book.” Romedio’s simple words and the gravity of his tone admonished me to bear up and reas- sured me that the project mattered. In 2016 I started a research project on medieval badges with a small team of experts that was made possible by an Insight Grant from the Social Sci- ence and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada. The intellec- tual companionship of the scholars and graduate students who belong to this
- 13. Acknowledgments viii team, Hanneke van Asperen, Steven Bednarski, Flora Cassen, Lloyd de Beer, Sara Fontes, Torsten Hiltmann, Amy Jeffs, Hartmut Kühne, and Caley McCarthy, has been a source of constant inspiration. I am immensely grateful for the intellectual generosity of colleagues from many fields who share my enthusiasm for medieval badges,beginning with the members of the SSHRC Insight Grant badges team. They have corrected my mistakes;expanded my thinking;gently coaxed me out of the weeds;taken me on badge-related excursions to museums and churches; answered my pleas for publishable material with photographs, maps, off-prints, and scans; and re- peatedly refrained from saying,“I told you so”when the scales fell from my eyes and I discovered what it actually means to assemble 120 images for publica- tion, even without the complications wrought by pandemic lockdowns. I thank Willy Piron who responded to innumerable image requests and queries with sainted patience and kindness. I thank Christiane Andersson, Jörg Ansorge, Hanneke van Asperen, André Dubisch (European Hansamu- seum,Lübeck),Dirk Jakob,Françoise Labaune-Jean,and Kay-Peter Suchow for sharing images for publication.I am grateful to museum colleagues Isabelle Fronty (Musée de Cluny),Volker Hilberg (Schleswig-Holsteinisches Landes- museum),Lyle Humphrey (North Carolina Museum of Art),Anders Jansson (Kulturen,Lund),Bart de Sitter (Art in Flanders),Karin Schnell (Bayerisches Nationalmuseum), and Jan de Wilde (Yper Museum), and to Robbi Siegel of Art Resource. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the Family Van Beuningen Collection and to Hendrik-Jan van Beuningen.It was an honor to meet him in 2013. I especially thank Ferdinand and Christine Vaandrager for their hospi- tality and for granting permission to publish images of badges from the Family Van Beuningen Collection. This book has been through so many versions that I have lost track. For reading the entire manuscript in one of its guises and providing valuable feedback and encouragement, I thank Michael Andersen, Steven Bednar- ski, Lloyd de Beer, and Jennifer Lee. Alis A. Rasmussen, aka Kate Elliott, helped me make my fictional sketches better. I thank Jerry Singerman and the other skilled editors at the University of Pennsylvania Press for their support and advice. Over the years I have had the good fortune to work with outstanding research assistants. I thank Sara Fontes (who also built an awesome badges project website), Erik Grell, Caley McCarthy, and Max Sy- mulski. Special thanks go to Hannah Gardiner, who in spite of nightmares caused by close study of The Chicago Manual of Style became an eagle-eyed editor and cheered me on through the final phases of revising, editing, and assembling this book.
- 14. Acknowledgments ix Over the past ten years my research on medieval badges has been sup- ported by grants from the following organizations: the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the German Academic Exchange, the Arts and Science Faculty Research Council at Duke University. and the Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation. Thank you. I am grateful to Princeton University for generous research funding that paid for most of the high-resolution images in this book. At the University of Waterloo, I thank Tom Barber, Ruth Knechtel, and Angela Roorda for teaching me how re- search funding works at a Canadian university. Tom’s unique combination of political shrewdness with seemingly eternal optimism continues to inspire me to just keep applying. I thank the colleagues in North America and in Europe who invited me to give talks about medieval badges. I have enjoyed these opportunities for intellectual exchange. Preparing made me think hard about what I wanted to argue about medieval badges, and from our discussions I always learned something significant that flowed back into this book. Thank you to Ingrid Bennewitz, Michael Ott, Ludger Lieb, Tobias Bulang, Bruno Quast, Mon- ika Unzeitig, Rosemarie McGerr, Jehangir Malegam, Sarah Blick, Diane Wolfthal, Alison Beringer, Christian Schneider, Joe Sullivan, Hester Baer, Jim Schultz, David Pan, Gail Hart, Russell Berman, Bethany Wiggan, Ca- triona McLeod, Racha Kirakosian, Jane Toswell, Olga Trokhimenko, Chris Nighman,andAnnemarikeWillemsen,and to dear friends Clare Lees,Julian Weiss, and Gina Psaki. At Duke University I shared drafts of Chapters 1 and 2 with first-year students in writing seminars; their feedback was invaluable. Thank you. I thank my colleagues in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Stud- ies at the University of Waterloo for their collegiality and friendship: Emma Betz, Michael Boehringer, Alice Kuzniar, Grit Liebscher, Paul Malone, Bar- bara Schmenk, James Skidmore, and Andrea Speltz. Special thanks go to Janet Vaughan, for untangling so many bureaucratic and financial threads. I also wish to thank Jola Kormornicka for organizing the regular side-by-side writing sessions where I worked on this book and Sam Schirm for driving on that last-minute, evening dash to Toronto Pearson airport to get my Cana- dian work visa straightened out. In the 2019–2020 academic year I was honored to hold a position as Stanley Kelley Jr. Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching in the Ger- man Department at Princeton University. It was an intellectual feast. I thank Janine Calegero, Devin Fore, Florian Fuchs, Mike Jennings, Tom Levin, Barbara Nagel, Sally Poor, Lynn Ratsep, Fiona Romaine, Ed Sikorski, and
- 15. Acknowledgments x Nikolas Wegmann; graduate students Sebastian Klinger, Peter Malhkouf, and William Stewart, as well as Paul Babinski and Sean Toland who have now completed their PhDs, and undergraduates Molly Banes, Janice Cheon, Thomas Jankovic,and Jason Qu.I also thank Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Janet Kay, Beatrice Kitzinger, AnneMarie Luijendijk, Daniela Mairhofer, Helmut Reimitz, Melissa Buckner Reynolds, and Maggie Schleissner. Friendship is sustenance. Beth Eastlick, Mary Kay Delaney, Racha Kira- kosian, Astrid Lembke, Heidi Madden, Jean O’Barr, Sally Poor, and Sonja Rasmussen, kept me company and looked after me the first time I was in lockdown, which was after knee replacement surgery in 2018, and thank you to Anne Moscrip who drove me home. Since 2017, fellow members of the Medieval Global Storyworlds book club, Bettina Bildhauer and E. Jane Burns, have made studying non-European medieval literature a total delight, and our transcontinental and transatlantic reading group has provided heaps of practice for conducting meetings over Zoom. Thank you to Mitch Reyes for his Scholarly Writing Retreat, where I worked on this book. These work- shops taught me how much I love side-by-side writing. I thank my Port- land,Oregon,friends and side-by-side writing buddies Isabelle de Marte and Katja Altpeter-Jones, as well as Judith Bennett and Cynthia Herrup. Thanks always to Barbara Altmann and Jane Hacking for treasured companionship on our nearly annual writing retreat getaways. Thanks always to Christophe Fricker, Tim Senior, Christine Oeien, Amanda Lee, Isabelle Lee, Mary Kay Delaney, Fritz Mayer, David Delaney Mayer, Michael Delaney Mayer, Kellie McGown, Paul Delaney Mayer, Kate St. Romain, Catherine Green, Paul Green, Vee Green, Markus Stock, Ruth von Bernuth, Kathryn Starkey, Beth Eastlick, Tom Ferraro, Olga Trokhi- menko, and Helen Solterer. I do not know how I would have gotten through the many sloughs of despond into which writing takes one if I had not been able to rely on Kristen Neuschel’s understanding, friendship, and excellent advice. I remember here two dear friends whose writing and thinking profoundly influenced me and this project, and whom I miss every day, Sarah Westphal and Jonathan M. Hess. I also remember my beloved father, Gerald Rasmus- sen, who I think would have loved this book. For helping me in ways large and small to complete this work, I thank my brother, Karsten Hans Rasmussen; my sister-in-law, Christine Lewand- owski; my sisters, Sonja Rasmussen and Alis A. Rasmussen; and my niece, Rhiannon Rose Silverstein. I thank my cousins Helle Mølgaard and Nina Krüger for the wonderful times we have spent exploring Denmark. I also
- 16. Acknowledgments xi thank my ninety-two-year-old mother, Sigrid Marie Rasmussen, who will be delighted to see this book in print. This book is dedicated to my son,Arnbjorn Stokholm, who has patiently listened to and cogently summarized so many of its arguments about medie- val badges that he probably could have written it himself.
- 18. 1 1 What Are Medieval Badges? The road from Mont-Saint-Michel northwest toward Caen, July 1421, midmorning The old man rests in the shade by the side of the road. All the other pil- grims have gone ahead. The boy did earnestly offer to stay behind. He is a good boy, this nephew of his; he has been raised well. He worried that an old man alone would be set upon by that unsavory pack of armed toughs who were snoring under the elderberry bushes at the edge of the village as they passed by early this morning. Probably the same ruffians whose drunken street brawl awakened half the village last night.“I am safe. The archangel Saint Michael will protect his own,” he said to his nephew and the others, pointing to the bright, new badge sewn on his cloak. His jest that the sainted archangel might even speed his catch- ing up with them by carrying him back to their side like a mouse in the clutches of a hawk did bring a scowl to the face of that wretched, garrulous friar. In truth, the old man knows that the peace of resting in the shade of the linden tree, listening to the melodious song of the lark, Figure 1.1. Pewter badge, winged archangel Saint Michael wearing armor and stabbing flailing demon, attachment unknown, Mont-Saint-Michel, France, 1000–1599, find site unknown, 25 mm (height). London, British Museum, inv. 1913,0619.37 (Kunera 11267). Photograph and permission from © The Trustees of the British Museum.
- 19. Chapter 1 2 resting his aching bones and aged heart may come at a high price. Those fractious youths are doubtless on the road now, too. They are dangerous and unpredictable, as he well knows, having been such a one himself many years ago when he bore arms in the service of the English lord. Am I afraid? he asks himself. Perhaps. But one weighs risk differently at his age. Violent death, though painful, is swift, and in this case not certain, while another hour of listening to that clacking friar’s endless sermonizing will drive the peace of Saint Michael out of his heart and awaken the old bloodlust in him again. A bargain then. Is it one that Saint Michael would understand? He muses that the archangel did not seem to have much patience with clerics himself. The lark trills and sings. He closes his eyes, and the voice of his beloved, long dead, arises unbidden in his mind, singing that beautiful, strange old song he so loved,“Can vei la lauzeta mover . . .” A sharp jab in the side startles him awake; his inadvertent shudder is accompanied by peals of raucous laughter and shouts. A face—young, scarred, hungry—leans down into his own. “Old man,” it says in heavily accented but serviceable French,“hand over your money purse and perhaps we won’t eat you this time!” Another knife poke in his ribs. More gusts of laughter punctuate the joke, and words fly, though not in French. “Just slit his throat, you need the practice!” “That’s our ditherer, all sweet words and no action!” “Quick, be quick, before that Michael swoops in and carries him away!” Raising his head slowly, he gazes into the eyes of the four young predators gathered around him and sees that they will kill him. Why is he not frightened? he wonders. Has he faced death, meted out death so many times in his life that it no longer holds any mystery for him? What recognition is this? Unbidden, a memory from so long ago, its freshness miraculous, springs into his mind: he is a little boy, holding his older sister’s hand, peering down the wooded track for Papa. And then Papa is there! Again he hears Papa’s voice: “So, children, fresh meat for dinner tonight. Children! Mama has slit the old pig’s throat!” His childhood language—little used, half extinguished. These young roughnecks speak the Flemish tongue of his childhood village, and they bend their vowels as his father did. There is a chance. He
- 20. What Are Medieval Badges? 3 speaks carefully, slowly, watching and judging the young men, trusting the language to seek its own path. “Well met, countrymen. Having a little fun with the old folk, are you? I will gladly share my bread with you, but I fear you will find that Saint Michael has left this old pig too lean for your liking.” Surprise, even shock, crosses their faces. They hesitate. It is one thing to murder strangers. That is the sort of thing that binds such companions, much like going to the whorehouse together. But to kill an old man whose accent summons up the complexities of home, who might well be kin to one of them, such a killing and the knowledge of such a killing could sever friendship, turning boon companions into enemies bound to pursue vengeance. Still, perhaps it is not so. One more test then. The small, red-haired one, whose filthy, torn hose and rundown shoes contrast sharply with his new, colorful jacket and well-made short sword, speaks up. “Why are you on the road, Old Father?” “I come from visiting Saint Michael, as you can see.” The old man points to the shiny, new Saint Michael badge sewn onto his cloak. “And I walk, for so far no wings have sprouted from my back.” This last remark provokes, unexpectedly, new shouts of laughter from the young men. The red-haired one flashes open his jacket, revealing a badge pinned to his linen tunic above his heart: a crowned, engorged, bewinged penis that runs forward on little legs and shod feet. “We can still fly, Old Father. Do you know our destination?” Figure 1.2. Pewter badge, crowned, belled, walking penis with wings and tail, pin, origin unknown, 1375–1424,found in Nieuwlande, Netherlands, 29 × 28 mm. Langbroek, Netherlands, Family Van Beuningen Collection, inv. 1856 (Kunera 00634). Photograph courtesy of Family Van Beuningen Collection.
- 21. Chapter 1 4 The old man smiles. Like the long vowels and harsh consonants, it summons something familiar from long ago. “Ah, the house of little daughters in Ypres.You’re racing home tail first then?” They howl with laughter. He has passed the test. Now he dares to put his hand in his pocket, bringing forth the bread. The ruffian slices, each one eats, the bread is gone. No matter. He will live to eat another day. • I n the foregoing fictional sketch,the Saint Michael pin worn by the pilgrim who was once a soldier and the walking,crowned phallus pin worn by the red-haired hooligan are based on real, surviving medieval objects made of cheap metal and displaying vivid images and symbols that were widely familiar in the Middle Ages. In English, these objects are called badges, a word of unknown origin that is first attested in the fifteenth century.In most medieval European languages, however, these objects were called signs: sig- illum or signum in Latin, meaning little signs or seals; enseignes in French; zeichen in German or teken in Low German and in Dutch. Calling these objects signs signaled clearly the presence of another layer of meaning, and thus, their communicative function. Badges were meant to be seen and to be understood.1 Mass-produced by pouring lead-tin alloys in molds carved of stone, badges were cheap to make and to purchase, and they were widely used throughout the High and late Middle Ages. Badges are usually small objects, around four-by-four centimeters, and sometimes as tiny as two-by-one cen- timeters. They are two-sided objects, although in nearly all cases the back of the badge, not intended for display, features only scored lines (see, for exam- ple, figures 3.12, 4.2, and 6.2).2 In the High Middle Ages, larger badges were made that were not solid, plaque-like objects, but rather featured a lattice- grid of lead-tin alloy clearly intended to be pinned or mounted against a background showing through. This feature is seen in the fourteenth-century badge from the city of Ypres, which is nearly ten-by-eight centimeters in size in its current, fragmentary state (figure 1.3). By the late Middle Ages, very thin, ultra-lightweight, flat, single-sided plaques with an image in light relief were being mass-produced in a new mode of manufacture: die stamping or embossing (plate 4).
- 22. What Are Medieval Badges? 5 Many badges were associated with secular life. They featured images us- ing all manner of secular symbolism, from familiar symbols associated with courtly love and friendship, such as garlands, clasped hands, and crowned hearts, and with civic organizations or elite households, such as the personal devices of swan, stag, or rose, to symbols and images that are enigmatic or obscene, such as penis and vulva creatures. The majority of surviving badges, however, were closely associated with religion and were most often linked to specific charismatic or holy sites that had become pilgrimage centers. Pil- grims would acquire a site-specific badge at the holy site they had visited; in the opening sketch, the pilgrim who was once a soldier has been to Mont- Saint-Michel on the northern coast of France, where for centuries Saint Mi- chael’s shrine attracted pilgrims to the offshore abbey and church that had grown up around this charismatic site.3 Badges were made to be worn and seen and were most commonly sewn or pinned on clothing. There were some badges, including small, decorated, three-dimensional lead ampullae (also known as phials) that were made to be worn around the neck.These ampullae were often associated with shrine sites where a liquid was acquired as part of the pilgrimage,for instance,Canterbury or Walsingham. More can be learned about the way medieval religious badges Figure 1.3. Damaged openwork pewter badge, kneeling king and standing bishop in elaborated shield-like framework, eyelets, origin unknown, 1325–1374, found in Ypres, Belgium, 98 × 89 mm. Yper Museum, inv. SM 005187 (Kunera 06816). Photographer: Els Deroo. Photograph courtesy of Yper Museum.
- 23. Chapter 1 6 were worn from surviving medieval works of art. Late medieval artists some- times depicted medieval religious badges in their works. Plate 1 and figure 1.4 are details from an altarpiece, The Seven Acts of Mercy, which was created in 1504 for the Cathedral of Saint Laurence inAlkmaar in the Netherlands by an artist known as the Master of Alkmaar. The badges in these images are worn by people who crowd together on a city street, where burghers are shown per- forming acts of religious charity directed toward the poor. On plate 1 a small crowd of poor wanderers gathers in front of a city home,where they are being welcomed for the night by a well-dressed couple. The wanderers include Christ,the bearded and hatless figure standing at the back of the group, and three pilgrims, recognizable as such by the badges they wear on their hats and cloaks. The way in which badges communicate through the use of familiar iconography is visible in plate 1. Some of its painted badges can be easily identified even five hundred years later because they are connected to famous pilgrimage sites in western Europe. On the far left, the brown hat has a mirror badge in the center that probably represents the city of Aachen,Germany.It is centered between two small badges,one of which is the scallop shell that commemorated a pilgrimage to the shrine of the apostle Saint James the Greater at Santiago de Compostela in Spain.To the right, the hat of the man wearing red (from left to right) has something that may or may not be another Santiago de Compostela badge; a badge with three communion wafers in a monstrance, associated most likely with the Precious Blood (also known as Holy Blood) or Eucharistic pilgrim site at Alkmaar itself; and papal crossed keys from the Holy City of Rome. The pilgrim in a blue cape likewise has a scallop badge from Santiago de Com- postela on his hat and crossed swords on both his hat and cape, perhaps from Mont-Saint-Michel. Figure 1.4 from the same altarpiece features a woman with a badge-like object on her hat. Carrying a child in a kind of cloth wrap that is anchored with a shoulder strap, she stands at the back in the crowd of eight people representing the neediest of the poor: children, babies, widows, the aged, the infirm,the disabled.4 Again,Christ is shown standing in solidarity with them and watching the act of mercy being carried out by the well-dressed burgher couple, who are giving the travelers drink. The placement of the small item on the woman’s hat suggests it is a badge of some kind. Unlike the badges in the previous panel, however, it is not possible to identify this one. Whether the lack of detail was deliberate on the part of the artist or is due to the art- work’s present condition (the painting was damaged during the Reformation and has been restored) cannot be discerned. The badge’s shape does resemble
- 24. Figure 1.4. The Master of Alkmaar, The Seven Works of Mercy, oil painting on panel, 1504, detail from panel two of six, 103.5 × 56.8 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. SK-A-2815-2. Photograph courtesy of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
- 25. Chapter 1 8 that of the middle badge worn by the man in red in the previous panel, and this shape fits that of known badges from Alkmaar itself. A local reference would make sense, because it contributed to the idealized reality being cre- ated by the altarpiece, in which pilgrims flock to Alkmaar to partake in its holy site and the good citizens of Alkmaar hurry to their doorsteps to per- form good works by caring for the pilgrims. The shape and placement of the woman’s badge might also indicate a pilgrim badge manufactured not out of metal but out of paper, parchment, or small pieces of leather known as scrip. This book focuses on badges made of pewter (often known as lead-tin or tin alloy) because so many of them survive, but as will be discussed in more de- tail in Chapter 2, the range of materials in which badges were produced was great.5 Those made of extremely perishable materials,such as paper or parch- ment, are known primarily from written or pictorial sources. Such a pilgrim badge was probably even cheaper than the already inexpensive lead-tin alloy badges shown on plate 1. The detail of depicting a paper or parchment badge or scrip would be consistent with the other poor folk gathered here; a young woman carrying a child can afford only the very cheapest devotional object. The oldest medieval badges date from the last decades of the twelfth cen- tury. Their number and use increased steadily throughout the High Middle Ages, reaching a high point in the fifteenth century and largely disappearing in the first decades of the sixteenth century following the Reformation. At least twenty thousand medieval badges survive to this day.6 In the fifteenth century, the time of their greatest popularity, hundreds of thousands would have been in use at any given moment in time. Historian Carina Brumme estimates that the total number of badges once manufactured in the last two centuries of the MiddleAges (that is to say,from ca.1300 to 1500) to be some- where between ten million and twenty million.7 This number is staggeringly large, and it implies that each badge shown in a figure in this book is but a surviving example from the many duplicates produced using a single mold, as is explained in more detail in Chapter 3. The surviving badges demonstrate that they were made and used in many contexts. There are religious badges, heraldic badges, political badges, civic badges, satirical badges, comical badges, sexual badges, obscene badges. The sheer number of surviving badges and the diverse and wide-ranging contexts both religious and secular that they evoke suggest that badges were ubiquitous, woven tightly into the fabric of ordinary, late medieval life.8 Their ordinariness is part of what makes them so intriguing now. Who made badges and out of what materials? Who bought, gifted, and wore badges, and why? Most intriguing of all, what might they have meant,
- 26. What Are Medieval Badges? 9 and what can they tell about thought, belief, and practice in the late medieval world? This book seeks answers to those questions.9 Crucially, medieval badges display vivid, easily recognizable images. They are in effect very small sculptures displaying images from religious and sec- ular iconographies that were familiar and intelligible all across medieval Eu- rope. Because of their distinctive iconographies, nearly always linked to a specific place or to a specific corporate group, it is often possible to determine where a badge was made and acquired. Its image conveys this information. Sometimes it is possible to determine where a badge was found, especially for badges found in modern archaeological digs. Yet the when of a badges’ manufacture and use is much harder to decipher.The surviving badges them- selves provide very few clues. The kinds of contextual information typically supplied by archaeological sites that allow scholars to date objects (strata of finds, coins, dendrochronology of surviving timbers, and so on) are often en- tirely lacking for badges, especially those that became part of museum col- lections early on. Stylistic criteria or the use of a datable symbol, such as a nobleman’s newly adopted heraldic device or a holy site’s acquisition of a new relic, can sometimes allow the general assignment of a badge to a short span of decades in a specific century. While badge designs did change over time, these changes often happened relatively slowly, in part because the design el- ements for any specific badge were closely tied to a stable visual program that sought to unmistakably identify the badge’s giver or place of origin. Documents and texts about pilgrimage from the decades before the year 1200 provide a first glimpse of the manufacture and use of badges,where they appear as a part of religious devotion and pilgrimage.10 A late twelfth-century pilgrims’ guide to Compostela, where the shrine of Saint James the Greater flourished from the eleventh century on, describes stalls and shops in an en- closed area in front of the cathedral known as a parvis selling to pilgrims, alongside wine flasks, sandals, scrip, belts, and medicinal herbs and spices, “small scallop shells which are the insignia of the Blessed James” (crusille pi- scium, id est intersigna Beati Jacobi), such as the ones depicted in plate 1.11 In the French biography Vie de Saint Thomas Becket (Life of St. Thomas of Becket), from around 1174, Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence notes similar practices:“Pilgrims to Jerusalem bring back palm crosses, those to Rocama- dour lead figures of the Virgin, and Compostela shells cast in lead.”12 These twelfth-century mentions of Saint James badges, whether made of ordinary scallop shells or of shells fashioned out of lead-tin alloy, suggest that badges were already an ordinary part of pilgrimage.
- 27. Chapter 1 10 By the mid-thirteenth century, badges were being used for both secular and religious purposes across Europe, and their manufacture and use in- creased throughout the Middle Ages. Yet there is a clear geographic pattern to the survival of the badges.13 The vast majority, whether religious or secu- lar in purpose, have been found in northwestern Europe, including a band stretching east around the Baltic as far as Gdańsk (Danzig): in the cities of what are now the Netherlands, Belgium, northern France, and England, in German-speaking regions north of the Alps,in Denmark,Norway,and Swe- den, and in trading centers and cities along the Baltic Sea. Most badges were also made in these regions, but many originated in the great pilgrimage sites in southern Europe, such as Rocamadour in France, Compostela in Spain, and Rome, where badges were made and sold to pilgrims and travelers who carried them back north. Badges are only rarely found south of the Alps, however, including badges made in southern regions. This pattern of find distribution raises a number of intriguing questions. Identity markers of various kinds (clothing, hair, heraldic symbolism, and so on) were found everywhere in late medieval Europe, from the Mediterranean to the Baltic. Badges were manufactured both north and south of the Alps as North Sea Baltic Sea Elbe R. R h ô n e R . Thames Atlantic Ocean Sein e R . Danube Rhine R. R. W es e r R . Danube R. M e u s e R . Aachen Canterbury London Paris Ypres Vienna Amsterdam Oslo Hamburg Rome Santiago de Compostela Valenciennes Dordrecht Mont St-Michel Rocamadour Wilsnack Lund Stromberg Rostock Stralsund Maastricht Uggerby Lübeck 0 500 250 Km Pilgrimage Route City or Town Legend Key towns and cities mentioned in this book and some land-based medieval pilgrim routes. Map: Gordie Thompson.
- 28. What Are Medieval Badges? 11 well.Yet surviving badges overwhelmingly come from these northerly regions of Europe. Does this state of affairs reflect an as-yet-unexamined character- istic of regional European culture?14 After all, the area in which badges are found contains the great northern cloth and trading cities of the mercantile age. These cities played a large role in the rise of capitalism and were key play- ers in the spread of the Reformation. Perhaps badges were part of a vibrant and unique cultural form of identity formation and communal belonging that must have played a significant role in the rise of modern Europe and that is still only partially understood.If so,then badges might represent part of a pat- tern of large-scale regional,cultural difference between northern and southern Europe whose historical contours are still only incompletely understood. Or are there other plausible explanations? The distribution of badge finds might reflect not medieval practices but modern phenomena, arising from, perhaps, survival conditions or from scholarly and curatorial practice. Per- haps badges survived better in the mud of northern waters. Perhaps archae- ologists in the north have been more alert to and interested in badges. Badges have been collected privately and in museums since the 1840s in England, France, and the Low Countries (Belgium and the Netherlands), where pub- lishing on them also began. The long trend away from antiquarianism and toward modern scientific and scholarly, or disciplinarily based, approaches to medieval badges has had its ups and downs, and these approaches vary from country to country in northern Europe.15 Since the 1980s, however, more museum curators and private collectors in northern Europe have been cu- rating and publishing catalogues and articles about their collections. Perhaps scholarship on badges found in southern France and Italy has not had the benefit of similar endeavors and has been more sporadic.16 Before advancing a hypothesis about regional cultural differences concerning badges and com- munity formation, these more mundane and modern potential causes for the uneven distribution of surviving medieval badges must be ruled out. These issues await further study and so lie outside of the realm of this book. The passage of time has rendered badges as we see them today, tarnished and blurred, when new badges would have been bright and colorful. The lead-tin, or pewter, alloys out of which badges were made would have been shiny, looking something like aluminum foil, and would have had crisp, clear lines delineating the images.17 Many badges would have sported embellish- ments of various kinds, most commonly paint or bright backings of other materials (for example, metal foil or painted paper). Though small, badges would have been eye-catching, and they would have communicated meaning quickly and easily.
- 29. Chapter 1 12 Displayed on capes and hats as people went about their business, badges were mobile,because they moved through space with their wearers. This mo- bility meant virtually everyone in northwestern Europe in the Middle Ages would have encountered badges in some way, and virtually everyone could have afforded one because as mass-produced objects made of easily obtained and widely available materials, they were cheap. What distinguishes badges from other ordinary, ubiquitous, visible objects is that each displayed an im- age whose meaning was widely known and understood.18 Badges were more than personal adornments. They employed once common, widely under- stood symbols to create and communicate meaning. A few of these symboli- cally laden, meaning-making images are still with us today, such as an image of the heart as a symbol of tender love. Others, such as a knight kneeling before a lady, are still intelligible to a modern viewer as a symbol of love, although the full implications of the image are no longer well known. Many other symbols and images,however,are now obscure.The devices and images associated with medieval heraldry and secular politics are no longer widely known, while many religious images fell out of use after the Reformation, as is the case for the otherwise easily recognizable badges from Wilsnack (fig- ure 1.5), now a sleepy small town in the province of Brandenburg, Germany, but which before the Reformation was home to one of the most popular Holy Blood pilgrimage sites north of the Alps. Badges make and communicate meaning through their use of these once widely used and commonly understood images and symbols. Reading this Figure 1.5. Pewter badge, the Precious or Holy Blood wafers of Wilsnack, eyelets, Wilsnack, Germany, 1475– 1522, found in Nieuwlande, Netherlands, 36 × 31 mm. Langbroek, Netherlands, Family Van Beuningen Collection, inv. 1709 (Kunera 00130). Photograph courtesy of Family Van Beuningen Collection.
- 30. What Are Medieval Badges? 13 once ubiquitous symbolic language is done by deciphering the references be- ing made, usually not a difficult task because so much comparable medieval material survives and because the languages of symbolism and imagery in which the badges participate were not meant to be esoteric or secretive but rather to communicate easily and well. Even obscene badges, for which the hypothesis must be entertained that the graphic, yet abstruse nature of the imagery is intentionally enigmatic, do not overthrow the thesis that badges were intended to communicate meaning easily and well.19 The manner in which obscene badges combine a variety of symbols and elements for the viewer to decode, rather like a riddle, suggests that these badges deliberately toyed with the cultural expectation that badges would be easy to read. The passage of time has made it more difficult to understand what schol- ars call the pragmatics of badge use and their symbolic systems of meaning- making.Badges were worn: they were made to be worn,they are shown being worn, and the fact that they are found hundreds of kilometers from the sites to which they refer shows us that they were carried and worn far from their sites of origin. Badges were selected, worn, and used by people to communi- cate something about themselves to others. Badges established a relationship between the wearer and that which was being referenced by the image itself, which might be referring, for example, to a pilgrimage site designated by a saint,or to a lordly household,or to a voluntary,civic association.Why would the badge wearer choose a specific badge, and was wearing a badge always a voluntary choice? Perhaps badges allowed their wearers to make statements to the world about the wearer’s beliefs, experiences, and status.A badge from Mont-Saint-Michel or from Compostela suggested that its wearer had been on pilgrimage; a badge,or device,sporting a Lancastrian rose denotes that the bearer supported or belonged to that noble English household; a penis badge might have been acquired during carnival (no evidence survives regarding the actual use of such sexual badges but for a variety of reasons that are discussed in Chapter 8, this scenario is at least plausible). The badge’s function to re- lay a message about its bearer tells us that there was a social dimension of meaning-making at work. A badge communicated meaning, not only to the person wearing the badge but above all to everyone who viewed the badge as it is worn.Did the viewer validate,share,or reject the proffered meaning? The creation and negotiation of shared, symbolic meaning was constantly in play. The meaning produced by badges was profoundly dynamic and social, and understanding the pragmatic, communicative aspect takes the scholar and the reader into the very fabric of late medieval social life, which was compli- cated and contradictory.
- 31. Chapter 1 14 Let us return for a moment to the badges shown in the altarpiece The Seven Works of Mercy (plate 1 and figure 1.4). The badges that the Master of Alkmaar chose to show on these panels represent Alkmaar’s charismatic pilgrimage site, the Eucharist miracle at the Cathedral of Saint Laurence, alongside some of the best known and most widely visited pilgrim sites in Europe—Rome, Compostela, and Aachen. The depiction of badges on the altarpiece is part of a theological argument about the efficacy and benefits of performing corporal acts of mercy. Crucially, on the panels no cleric mediates these pious acts being carried out by the good burghers; there are no priests, monks, or nuns. Rather, Christ himself is present, a symbolic depiction that removes from the image institutional mediation in the form of the church of- ficials, so that in the painting Christ and Christ alone directly sanctifies these ordinary, civic acts of mercy. (The missing element of institutional mediation would have been powerfully present, of course, in the staging of the altar- piece in its church setting and liturgical use.) The depicted badges participate in the painting’s theological argument that works of mercy inherently merit forgiveness of sins, a view strongly rejected by the Lutheran Reformation. The badges clarify for the medieval viewer that the persons wearing them are pilgrims and therefore fitting and needy recipients of the burghers’ civic acts of religious charity. The depicted badges also close the distance between the faraway and powerful holy sites where they originated and Alkmaar itself, bringing the aura of divinity of those distant shrines directly into Alkmaar’s city streets and further sanctifying the secular street space where these acts of mercy are taking place. Secular-themed badges communicated in similar ways. They were often related through shared iconography to the dense and profuse world of medi- eval heraldry,whose symbolism pervaded the world of elites both secular and religious across Europe. Heraldic symbols were designed following a tightly scripted language consisting of colors, shapes, and symbols to indicate to the initiated (i.e.,those who could read the signs),for example,the bearer’s pater- nal and maternal lineage or his corporate belonging. Heraldry included the use of what are known as devices, meaning a flexible symbol or image, indi- vidually designed to connote a specific person, household, or elite association and sometimes created to mark special events, such as a grand wedding or an important peace treaty. Devices were identity markers, claims that signaled belonging and that communicated important messages about the wearer. Many surviving badges were devices. An example of a personal device can be found in the portrait of Henry V of Mecklenburg, The Peaceful (1479–1552),
- 32. What Are Medieval Badges? 15 who in this artwork from around the year 1510 appears to have adopted a late medieval weapon axe as a personal device (plate 2).20 The portrait features three images of the device, which is probably a voulge, a type of polearm, an axe-like weapon head mounted on a long pole. (Being designed to attack opponents wearing plate armor may account for the voulge’s unsettling resemblance to an old-fashioned can opener.) Life- sized depictions of a voulge decorate the robe Henry V is wearing, perhaps appliqued onto or woven as part of the fabric. The one on the right is fully visible; the one on the left, partly glimpsed. A third, miniature voulge, in the form of a shiny metal badge, hangs as a pendant from a chain around Henry’s neck, positioning the miniature sharp, deadly, cleaving weapon at Henry’s throat. Sacred or Profane? As the reader will have discerned in the preceding paragraphs, this book treats all badges as a single object category that shared modes of manufacture, purpose,and function in order to explore the argument that medieval badges, whether secular or religious (or both), operated as a kind of pan-European, symbolic mode of communication. At the same time, in its argument the book often distinguishes between badges whose function was primarily reli- gious and those whose function was primarily secular, or profane. Using these two broad categories provides a measure of clarity when grappling with such a vast amount of material. The online database Kunera, which provides annotated images of over fifteen thousand individual badges and is an invaluable resource for studying badges, is organized according to the categories, religious and secular, allowing a systematic disposition of a vast amount of material. Most scholarship on medieval badges treats either religious badges—pilgrimage badges mainly—or secular badges, such as devices, without considering any overarching shared characteristics. A dif- ferentiated approach often makes sense. Religious badges were overwhelm- ingly associated with saints, divine personages, holy sites, and charismatic religious centers. They participated in the medieval Christian faith world, an extensive,shared,and changing network of stories,legends,theology,phi- losophy, belief, and practice, sometimes overlapping, sometimes contradic- tory. This web of story, doctrine, and practice was managed, usually locally, by the many, varied, and sometimes competing institutions of late medieval
- 33. Chapter 1 16 Catholicism. Many of the profane badges, on the other hand, were bound up with aspects of quotidian life, for example, with city governance, with chivalry and knighthood, with lordship and political power, with civic asso- ciations and festivities. Compelled identity markers such as Jewish badges, which are discussed in more detail in Chapter 4, could be considered a sub- set of these political badges. That being said, new scholarship on the Middle Ages has profoundly unsettled the modern distinction between religious and secular culture on which so much modern historical work about both the near and distant past is based. When studying medieval badges, the problem with relying on a near absolute and categorical distinction between the sacred and profane constructs an opposition that misrepresents the medieval world. Seeing the secular and religious spheres in the medieval world as distinct and in opposi- tion to one another has played a role in creating a modern vision of medieval culture as animated by a power dynamic in which the secular world is dom- inated (indeed oppressed) by the religious orthodoxy of a powerful, unified Church. Over and against such a vision of past oppression, the modern, sec- ular world can create an emancipatory story about itself, emancipation above all from the oppression of a totalitarian-like Church. This modern vision of the medieval past pervades modern culture. Ask students in North Amer- ica or Europe at the beginning of class about people who lived in the Mid- dle Ages, and they will usually say that medieval people were God-fearing, pious, and uncritically submissive to religious authority, religious ideology, and oppressive religious dogma, which in turn ruled the secular world.What students say sums up modern misconceptions about the past that flourish in spite of having been overturned by the scholarship of the past forty years. Like the work of social history out of which it grows, the study of medieval badges demonstrates the limitations of framing the medieval past in terms of a putative opposition between a weak, submissive secular realm and an ideo- logically unified, politically dominant religious realm. Setting aside one view allows another view to emerge of the fundamental historical and cultural uniqueness of the late medieval European world, which was characterized by the mingling of disparate religious and secular cultures through conflict, competition, negotiation, and disputatiousness. In the Middle Ages, the sa- cred and the profane overlapped and interacted in ways that are invisible or alien to modern people: obscenity in sacred spaces; profane parodies of the sacred; what many modern people would define as superstition integrated into the sacred realm; symbols and images moving back and forth between the religious and the secular worlds.21 When studying medieval badges, it
- 34. What Are Medieval Badges? 17 quickly becomes apparent that the distinction between sacred and profane badges is useful primarily as a heuristic or organizing device. Used as an in- terpretive model, this categorical distinction obscures more than it reveals. Whether sacred or profane, badges were all manufactured and designed in similar ways. They shared symbols and participated in extensive, shared networks of stories and beliefs. All badges functioned and created meaning in similar ways. Religious and secular badges (even sexual ones) cohabitated the same world, as the fictional sketches imagining a roadside encounter in France or the lead foundry workshop on Mont-Saint-Michel are meant to suggest. They were disparate pieces of a social whole.All badges, whether sa- cred or profane, were signs of belonging whose display was also about power. All badges,whether sacred or profane,were media that participated in widely held medieval beliefs about the intimate connections between the natural and the spiritual worlds and about the struggle between various supernat- ural forces of ascendancy over human beings. All badges, whether religious or profane, were designed as media with these struggles in mind. Explor- ing the many, fundamental ways in which all badges resembled one another means this book sets aside the modern presumption of a clear, bright line distinguishing magic from religion, because in fundamental ways all badges, including the religious ones, participated in what modern people might call magic.Some badges represented humankind’s effort to control the visible and invisible forces within and around them. Other badges represented human beings’efforts to create and project into the world visible, collective identities. All badges were a way of doing something. They took action. In a complex world fraught with perils natural and supernatural that was at the same time a world of opportunity and possibility, badges took a stand. Why Badges? Badges have intrigued me for the past ten years, since I, a literary scholar, stumbled more or less by accident over these material objects that are more usually studied by art historians and historians of religion. Around 2005, I was writing an article on three short, anonymous, late medieval, obscene Ger- man tales that featured human genitalia (male and female) wandering about a fictional landscape as speaking, mobile protagonists in their own right, each with the pronounced character profile of a beguiling if rather bad-mannered trickster-rogue.22 An illustration in a scholarly article on these texts showed images of small objects, badges as it turned out, that were exactly the kind of
- 35. Chapter 1 18 fantastical penises and vulvas wandering about the world on their little legs and feet that were featured in the literary texts.23 There was no discussion of the images per se, and of their connection (or lack of it) with the texts; they were just there. I was immediately curious. What were these objects? Where were they from? How were they used? What did they mean? Following the footnotes led to a small but significant body of scholarship on what are known as sexual badges: articles, catalogues, modern databases. But the answers that I found through my research did not take me far enough.After giving a num- ber of lectures and presentations on the sexual badges, it dawned on me that one way to understand the sexual badges would be to study them, not in the context of texts with which they shared motifs and iconography but in the context of all badges, whether religious or profane. I realized that all badges were radically similar in key ways regardless of their widely differing images: they were made in the same way and from the same materials; they were of similar sizes and were worn in the same way; and they alluded in similar ways to larger, shared spheres of shared meaning. Surely if they shared so much, their cultural functions must have been similar even though their meanings were manifold. As I sought to understand this unique, copious, and understudied body of evidence and my exploration widened to include all badges, I have be- come, in some sense, a North American champion of badges. Badges need champions because time has cost them the very qualities that made them eye-catching and engaging in the past. The surviving badges are downright ill-favored. They are so small that they are hard to look at when displayed in a dimly lit museum vitrine. Chemical changes to the lead-tin alloy have made them not bright and shiny but darkened and tarnished. Their once bright, crisp images are often eroded and blurred, as can be seen in plate 12b. Any paint, paper backing, or other embellishment is gone (with only a hand- ful of exceptions). As they survive today, badges lack nearly all the qualities possessed by those surviving medieval objects that most capture and hold the modern imagination, such as medieval cathedrals, altarpieces, paintings, statues, precious illuminated manuscripts, and tapestries (think of the Uni- corn Tapestries, for example) usually brilliantly restored. Badges have little in common with these; they are not big or bold or colorful or even restored. To engage with badges requires patience, understanding, and imagination. Once extended, however, these habits of mind will be rewarded with new insights into medieval culture and into a fascinating chapter into the history of the way human beings use objects to create and share meaning.
- 36. What Are Medieval Badges? 19 Informed Imagination as aWay of ThinkingAbout Badges One answer to the problem of making badges accessible and interesting to modern people is to imagine badges in use. Each chapter of this book, which is primarily a scholarly study, opens with a fictional sketch of my invention, in which I imagine specific badges in specific, everyday moments of late me- dieval life. The stories take place in northwestern France and Belgium (en- compassing but not limited to Flanders), which is the setting of the sketch at the beginning of this chapter, and in southwestern Sweden. All the fictional scenarios take place in the same roughly one-hundred-year time frame, from about 1375 to 1475. The formative political event in French and Belgian set- tings is the violence of the Hundred Years’ War. The Swedish stories are set during and after the Kalmar Union, the union of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway under one royal crown, which in Sweden dissolved into peasant up- risings and civil war after the death of Queen Margaret I in 1412.Badges were in widespread use during this time, not only in the urban and manufacturing heartland of northwestern Europe,represented here by the cloth-making city of Ypres, but also on its edges along the Baltic and in Scandinavia. To write these fictional sketches, I relied on the same research, scholar- ship,and informed analysis that underwrite the chapters in this book.Learn- ing more and more about the past, about everything from bell-making to theological discourses on free will, stirs the imagination in unexpected ways. A dialogue or conversation opens up in the mind, as the detail and frame- works gleaned from reading scholarship vivify the landscape of the past. The fictional scenarios are a product of that dialogue, a process that I call in- formed imagination. They began to assert themselves as I started to write the scholarly study in earnest. The badge material I was reading, analyzing, and integrating into my own thought insisted on suggesting stories, and those murmurings became impossible to ignore. I decided to experiment by inter- lacing storytelling and fact-finding in order to make the process, or method, of informed imagination legible to the reader. I hope that the fictional sce- narios will draw readers in and provide an animated backdrop, as it were, for the scholarly chapters that make up the bulk of this book. I also hope that the fictional scenarios will encourage readers to similarly deploy informed imagination when they encounter objects and stories from the past. I am not the first scholar to make such an attempt. Others, such as Barbara Hanawalt with her study Growing Up in Medieval London, have tried something similar to mixed reviews.24
- 37. Chapter 1 20 Many scholars read historical novels for pleasure, some scholars write them, and historical novelists mine the work of scholars for their own writ- ing.Yet in our finished products scholars tend to hold far apart these two ap- proaches to the past: fictional reimagining and historical scholarship. It is as though they meet offstage, as though they confer behind the scenes, a secret conclave or exchange of information whose continued and necessary existence can only be traced by the initiated through encoded references in a book’s or an article’s acknowledgments. The relationship between the two is not precar- ious; it is robust. But it is also private. It is as though they have not been able to settle on a public means of communication.The form I have adopted in this book takes another step toward putting this conversation in the open. Using a fictional as well as a scholarly approach to the distant past seeks to capitalize on the strengths of both. Scholars and students alike owe an enor- mous intellectual debt to the careful,detailed,patient work of decades of schol- ars, toiling away in libraries, classrooms, and field sites across Europe, North America, and farther afield. Their sustained attention to evidence of all kinds within the context of the ethical frameworks of inquiry demanded by scholarly disciplines is foundational to our work.Yet scholarship is necessarily disparate and fragmentary, held separate in discrete disciplines by the very techniques and testable methods unique to each discipline that give them integrity. Scholarly ways of studying the past foreground difference. Scholarship challenges the researcher to become aware of and set aside her own assump- tions about the past,and about the objects or thought or events she is analyz- ing. It seeks to inhibit quick and facile judgment or understanding based on what the scholar already knows or believes to be true. Instead, it deliberately slows down the process of comprehension by asking the researcher to pains- takingly learn and follow the research methods and evidence of her disci- pline and to thoughtfully engage with positions, interpretations, or schools of thought contrary to her own. These protocols, if you will, are forms of applied reasoning. Scholarship based in a disciplinary framework employs tools intended to open up a space that allows the mind to reassemble the object of study with attributes and meanings made visible through the schol- arly process itself. Reason, emotional distance, and objectivity privilege the discontinuity between the past and the present. Scholarly practices create a bridge between past and present that recognizes separation yet creates con- nection so that lost meanings and beliefs can be partially recovered, can be- come partially visible or audible again. The researcher, however, partially and imperfectly attempts to make space in which to voice the uniqueness, the incommensurability of the past.25
- 38. What Are Medieval Badges? 21 It is a truism useful to repeat that all knowledge is partial, fragmentary, limited. The surviving evidence, in whatever state of present-day muteness, is residue of a time that was. Once it all existed, not as the kind of harmonious or unified whole that the ordering and systemizing patterns of our research methods and disciplines impose on it, but rather in the kind of fractious im- mediacy of competing realities,unexamined certainties,and disjunctive beliefs of terror, piety, injustice, doubt, and delight commingled that characterize our experience of the world even now. There is no way back to this fractured state of contradictory wholeness,at least through the lens of scholarship,which as I said above must for its own health and integrity insist on difference,on discon- tinuity between past and present. Yet fiction and storytelling take a different path to the past. Sharing the scholar’s belief that the structures of fissure, rup- ture, and completeness are indelibly unique for each time and place, the writer animates that place and asks the reader to engage his or her own imagination as well. The writer imagines the past. This act places its trust in continuity, at worst in a belief that people in the past were exactly like ourselves, at best in a belief that the human spirit can grant access to the lived experience of the past across the unbridgeable gap of time and space. The topic of badges lends itself particularly well to adopting the method of informed imagination to move between fictional scenarios and scholarship because the objects are numerous, compelling, and ordinary, yet direct evi- dence concerning their use and the beliefs attached to them is limited. Most of what can be surmised about badges is based on indirect evidence. It con- sists largely of the badges themselves, the sites where they have been found, images from medieval paintings (including illuminations in late medieval books), an extremely limited number of texts, such as surviving documenta- tion from legal disputes that touched on badges. The nature of the surviving evidence sets radical limits on what can be known for sure. Only a few writ- ten texts or documents have survived that might afford a glimpse of a medie- val person talking about badges or their reasons for making, wearing, gifting, or not wearing a badge. There are no letters from mothers scolding their sons for wearing lewd badges; no young husband’s journal detailing the badges he has brought back for his wife from pilgrimage; no reforming mendicant’s treatise recounting the social rituals and practices of the devout city guilds and what their badges signify.There are no coming-of-age novels reminiscing about boozy good times had at carnival and the badges that accompanied them. And it goes without saying that there are no interviews or consumer surveys: What is your age, sex, ethnicity, and profession? When did you first see or become aware of badges? At what age did you first acquire a badge?
- 39. Chapter 1 22 Was it a religious, political, or lewd badge? Did you acquire it through pur- chase, gift, or by some other means? Did you wear it? Gift it? Carry it in your belongings? Use it in a different way? When and where did you do so? How many badges did you own or use in the past? How did you dispose of them and why? How many do you own now? Such questions, impossible to answer, circle around and lead back to the most important questions to which this book seeks answers: Why did me- dieval people make and use badges? To whom were they speaking when they used them? To themselves, to neighbors, friends, or strangers, or to the su- pernatural forces beneficent and malignant that in their belief crowded the world? What acts were they performing with badges, and what were those acts saying about the world,about religion,magic,nature,and sexuality,about their own bodies and the bodies of others, about their identities and those of others? Badges have much to teach about medieval views of the world: beliefs about religion and magic; beliefs about the interconnections between the nat- ural and the spiritual world and the ways in which human beings can inter- vene in them; medieval understandings of personhood at the intersection of individual and collective identity; and so on. Fiction informed by scholarship imagines ordinary medieval people with their badges, and these acts of imag- ination, however limited, can work together with scholarship to bring the reader a little closer to the lived reality of medieval people. This book experiments with both scholarly and fictional writing, to see if they can cohabitate between the same covers. At the same time, and in the interest of clarity, the book clearly marks the difference between the genres of fiction writing and scholarly writing by keeping the two separate. A fictional scenario or sketch opens each chapter, and it is followed by academic writing. I have used this format to show that the two genres are doing different kinds of work. The fictional sketches present context and set the stage for analysis by imagining in detail medieval people using badges, both religious and sec- ular. The subsequent analyses follow best practices for academic writing by presenting the reader with claims, arguments, and evidence drawn from the methods, work, and findings of different fields of studies, including art his- tory, visual studies, literary studies, religious studies, history, anthropology, and gender studies.
- 40. 23 2 How Do We Know About Medieval Badges? The city of Ypres, on the Ieperlee Canal, the first Sunday in August, 1394 The evening breeze brings the scent of marsh and the far-off sounds of the Thundach festivities to the deck of the gently rocking barge. The young man has been given guard duty so that the rest of the crew can join the throngs to cheer the jousts between the teams of Ypres and Lille before lining up for the free beer that the city fathers dispense on tour- nament day. They have handed him a fat cudgel, worn deep brown with age, as a sign of his new office and as a defensive weapon. How they laughed, roared really, at the sight of him weighing in his slight hands the heavy thing, now lying at his feet. He is so young that they call him mama’s boy, and thin as a reed. The litheness gained in a childhood and youth spent tumbling and balancing is no use to these brawny dockers hauling barrels, bales and crates, animals and people, onto and off of the barge. Luckily the barge dog, a cranky old fellow with a bad eye, worse breath, and the worst temper, took to him from the start. He pats the dog’s head.He cannot haul and lift,but he has earned the place he begged from the barge owner whose wife found him hiding between the barrels of wine last spring.He had crept there from the inn where he and Pa had been left behind by the troupe as Pa’s fever worsened. He had no money for the hostel and no coins for the priest for burial, so he had tracked the sums in his head as Pa’s delirium increased. He was the only object of value left. The innkeeper’s wife, who smiled and gave him milk now and again, knew that, too. He had caught her glancing his way while chatting with the brothel keeper from up the river. Quietly, in the night, death took Pa, and quietly he slipped away and let the darkness swallow him, too. On the barge, he has kept the promise he made to the barge owners. He has made himself useful. He has eavesdropped on traders haggling at the market and on the merchants whispering among themselves. He has memorized the numbers on their accounting sheets, never hidden from the sight of an untutored street lad like himself. And then he has
- 41. Chapter 2 24 done sums in his head. He has whispered better numbers to the owner while he is bargaining, and he has kept them from being cheated by flashy city merchants and folksy con men alike. They are making more money, and the six of them—the owner and his wife, their three-year- old daughter, the two dockers, himself, even the dog—all eat better. Now he leans cross-legged on a barrel, the dog’s back resting against his leg while he shapes with a carving tool the little plank of oak. It is for the servant girl he has been meeting for a year. He smiles, remember- ing that moment in the fall when they met for the fourth time as if by chance in the alley leading from the wharf to the market. As if by chance? And she was again, as always, carrying the fish market shopping basket. They had walked through the cold drizzle and then sought refuge—at least from the wet, if not from the cold—inside a church to resume a conversation that seemed to have never stopped since they first met in June. There she shyly told him that she had taken on the unwholesome chore of fish market bargaining so that she could keep an eye on the river traffic and spot his barge. Since then they have been making plans. There is urgent work to be done on the barge; the wife’s second confinement approaches, and another docker has been hired. The barge owner has agreed that a hard- working, healthy young woman may join them on board if it causes no trouble. She must lawfully leave her employ, and, as always, no woman who is shared by men—common women as they are called on the farther reaches of the Rhine—is allowed on his barge. Marriage then.Why not? It is true that during the festivities, all after- noon and night, girls like her will have been roving through the crowds, looking for a quick partner or two from elsewhere for a small fee. She is smart about it,though.She does not drink away the money but sets it aside for their future.She is careful to avoid the drunken brawlers and homeboys who take without paying, and quick to outwit unscrupulous con men who seek to capture girls like her and haul them far off to brothel servitude in other cities. She and the young man hide nothing from each other. Marriage then. He is good at sums, she is strong and resolute, and they have a promise of shelter and work on the barge. Around dawn the dockers and the owners will stagger back reeking of wine and beer, and then they will sleep like the dead. No telling when the new wares will finally be loaded. She will be waiting for him in the little glade just beyond the city ramparts, and he will bring her this gift and with it his proposal.
- 42. How Do We Know About Medieval Badges? 25 The small piece of oak has a fine shape now, narrow and rising to a point like the beautiful, towering windows in the great church, and with a small rim framing its center. Figure 2.1. Wooden plank, carved in shape of Gothic window with Holy Blood religious badges (top, Wils- nack; bottom, Blomberg) affixed, 1475–1524, found in Amsterdam, 35 × 32 mm. Amsterdam, Bureau Monumenten & Archeologie, inv. MW2-6 (Kunera 04673). Photo- graph courtesy of Monuments and Archaeology, City of Amsterdam.
- 43. Chapter 2 26 He takes from one pocket the two bent nails hidden there, and from another a small badge retrieved from the reedy riverbank where a drunken bargeman tossed it, shouting an oath. The pendant is shaped like a shield, with a fine embossed, raised edge, and it hangs from a little chain whose eyelet can be fastened to the board by a nail. The shield is bright and shiny, silver-white, and it frames two tiny figures, the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Christ Child, she who protected Ypres’s ramparts and saved it from the English besiegers just ten years ago, a great victory and endurance now being celebrated again in the town. They shine, too, like the frame and the little lions (how they resemble the old dog!). It is true that the holy ones are a little off-center, as the bargeman shouted in fury, claiming to have been cheated, to have purchased a remade thing, not a new one. The Christ Child is off to one side, almost peeping out from behind the shield’s edge.A tiny shard of broken glass is wedged in the upper corner. But what of it? The Virgin Mary is smiling and so is her Child. They are safe within their little world, for a shield is a kind of rampart, a thing of strength and protec- tion. They bring safety and blessing to those who care for them. He takes the nails, and with great care he centers the badge and fas- tens it top and bottom to the little plank. It is a lovely sight. The badge has depth, and the Virgin and her Child hover between their white Figure 2.2. Pewter badge, enthroned Madonna with Christ Child on her left in shield-shaped pendant topped by facing lions, pendant, origin unknown, 1325– 1374,Ypres, Belgium, 44 × 25 mm.Yper Museum, SM 003510 (Kunera 06596). Photographer: Els Deroo. Photograph courtesy of Yper Museum.
- 44. How Do We Know About Medieval Badges? 27 shield and the warm brown tones of the oak. The gift is done. Hung on a wall or set upon a table, it is a little chapel of one’s own, where private prayers can be said. He speaks to it now. May the Blessed Virgin Mary and her Child bless his words and strengthen his entreaties and may they convey to his sweetheart the sincerity of his words. For he has told her the truth, that he sails on a barge that moves from this small river to the great ones beyond, that it is a good life, moving goods and people as the season demands and the weather permits, and that she can come with him and marry him and they will make their own way together. • Collecting and Cataloguing Medieval Badges n important entry point into modern interest in medieval badges is Paris in the 1850s, when the French archaeologist Arthur Forgeais (1822–1878) began retrieving, preserving, and collecting ancient and medieval artifacts that were emerging in Paris as a result of the massive public works program of rebuilding and redesigning central Paris, which was un- dertaken in the 1850s and 1860s under the directorship of Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809–1891).1 Many of these artifacts, including huge numbers of medieval badges, were found in the Seine River, which was being dredged and rechanneled and over which new bridges were being built. Forgeais’s col- lection must have been enormous.Along now-obscure pathways and via var- ious Parisian art dealers over many decades, the river was most likely the ul- timate source for hundreds of medieval badges in major museum collections. In Paris, parts of Forgeais’s collection went to the Musée de Cluny–Musée national du Moyen Âge and to the Musée Carnavalet. In the first decades of the twentieth century, museums in Berlin and Prague acquired badge collec- tions from French art dealers that had previously been in private hands, parts of which probably also go back to Forgeais. As the collection records of the British Museum in London show, from the 1830s on, badges from France, perhaps connected to Forgeais, were donated to its collections as well.2 The majority of surviving badges have been found in or alongside riv- ers, in archaeological sites, and by collectors using metal detectors, who are known in the United Kingdom as mudlarks because their primary“hunting grounds”are the mudflats of such tidal rivers as the Thames.In London,their finds, as well as badges uncovered during construction and archaeological ex-
- 45. Chapter 2 28 cavation, are mostly housed in two large badge collections at the Museum of London, one belonging to the museum itself and one part of the Museum of London Archaeology. Similar collections based on local finds are housed in regional museums in England, the Low Countries, northern France, and northern Germany.The preservation of badges in museums has continued in these regions of Europe to the present day, supported there in part by vari- ous frameworks that encourage people to come forward with their finds. For example, in Denmark treasure and finds of historical importance are known as Danefæ and belong to the state.Finds are assessed and compensation (godt- gørelse) can be paid by the state to the finder.3 In England,Wales, and North- ern Ireland,the PortableAntiquities Scheme is a voluntary program designed to encourage finders to report small finds of archaeological interest, such as badges. Because badges rarely contain more than ten percent precious metal, they are not considered treasure, which is subject to the United Kingdom Act of Parliament Treasure Act of 1996. This legislation establishes a legal obligation that finders of objects meeting various criteria (more than three hundred years old, more than ten percent precious metal, other provisions for prehistoric material) report their finds for valuation and possible reward. Antiquarian interest in medieval badges continued into the twentieth century, but there was never much scholarly interest. They thus remained marginal to the scholarly research and teaching that came to shape modern perceptions and beliefs about the Middle Ages. Things began to change in the 1970s with the pioneers of modern badge research who emerged in Ger- many, the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands. Beginning in the late 1980s, major museum and exhibition catalogs began to be published. Scholars who were key to this change include professor and librarian Kurt Köster (1912–1986). A German pioneer in the field of pilgrim badge research on many fronts, Köster recognized the value for badge research of medieval church bells,of which thousands survived,in use,into the twentieth century.4 Medieval bellmakers cast medieval pilgrim badges into the bells themselves. Köster’s systematic database for pilgrim badges, completed after his retire- ment and now housed at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, was the basis for the online German reference tool, the Pilgerzeichendaten- bank (database of pilgrim badges). Another pioneer in the field of badge research was the historian Brian Spencer (1928–2003), who was the keeper in charge of Medieval Collections at the Museum of London Archaeology from 1975 to 1988. He recognized early on the historical value of the pilgrim badges that were turning up regu- larly in archaeological digs and being found by mudlarks in the tidal flats of
- 46. How Do We Know About Medieval Badges? 29 rivers such as the Thames. After publishing catalogs of the badge collections in the Kings Lynn Museum in Norfolk (1980) and the Salisbury Museum (1990), his catalog of the badge collection of the Museum of London Archae- ology saw a first edition in 1998 and a second edition in 2010.5 In Scandinavia, the historian LarsAndersson published in 1989 a thorough catalog of religious pilgrim badges held in museums large and small across Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.6 TheFrencharthistorianDenisBrunapublishedacatalogfromthe first major exhibition of badges in France in 1996; his catalog of the collection in the Musée de Cluny–Musée national du Moyen Âge appeared in 2006.7 In 2004,Arnaud Tixador published a catalog of the badges that had emerged from extensive archaeological excavations in the cloth-making city of Valenci- ennes in northern France.8 In 2013 and 2016,Henryk Paner published two cat- alogs of medieval badges found in Poland,where there are especially rich finds from the former Hansa city of Gdańsk (in German, Danzig).9 Finally, the large and diverse assemblage of religious and secular badges, administered by the Medieval Badges Foundation in the Netherlands,was collected actively by Hendrik-Jan van Beuningen (1920–2015) from the 1960s until his death.10 In 1993,van Beuningen began the process of making the collection accessible and visible by publishing the first volume of the catalog Heilig en Profaan (Sacred and Profane), of which there are now four volumes (1993, 2001, 2012, 2018). The print catalogs and monographs edited or authored by Andersson, van Beuningen, Bruna, Paner, Spencer, and Tixador remain primary refer- ence materials for badges. Yet the ongoing process of classifying, ordering, and making accessible this scattered and essentially visual evidence presents a challenge.Tens of thousands of badges survive, and that number constantly grows because of new finds. Badges were made and found across a wide geo- graphical area. These locations matter for understanding their manufacture, use, and meaning. Because each badge is a miniature, mass-produced, sculp- tural object that communicates visually, a picture is truly worth a thousand words. Badge research has profited immensely from the foresight of scholars who realized that these challenges could be handled by the new forms of classification, publication, and accessibility made possible by computer tech- nologies and the internet. The most prominent example of using modern technology to construct a reference work for badges is the database Kunera (Centrum voor Kunst- historische Documentatie, Radboud Universiteit, Nijmegen, Netherlands). Planning for Kunera began in 1998, and the database was launched shortly thereafter.11 This immense and invaluable resource organizes images, doc- umentation, and bibliographies regarding individual medieval badges in a
- 47. Chapter 2 30 searchable, online database. Willy Piron and A. M. Koldeweij keep Kunera updated by continually adding new bibliographic items, photographs, and objects to its database, whether from private collections, museums, or new finds. Kunera features dynamic maps showing badge find sites when known. In December 2012, the Kunera database contained 10,734 images of religious badges (8,006 from known find sites; 2,728 from unknown sites) and 2,805 secular badges (2,490 from known find sites; 315 from unknown sites); in Oc- tober 2020, that number had grown to a total of 15,407 images, comprising 12,069 images of religious badges (9,079 from known find sites; 2,990 from unknown sites) and 3,338 images of secular ones (2,974 from known find sites; 364 from unknown sites). TheDatabaseof PilgrimBadges(Pilgerzeichendatenbank)ismuchsmaller, containing about 1,500 images of religious badges found in German-speaking lands and in central and eastern Europe. It is now housed and maintained at the Museum for DecorativeArts (Kunstgewerbemuseum),which is part of the State Museums of Berlin (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) transforming Köster’s pioneering research into an accessible and expandable reference tool. The work of cataloging medieval badges remains far from complete. Me- dieval badges continue to be found. They routinely come to light during con- struction work in the Low Countries, in northern Germany, and around the Baltic, for example, areas where they were widely used; engineering and con- struction work in and around historical harbors and waterways turns them up. The arrival of cheaply available metal detectors has only increased the volume of discoveries. Badges in regional museums and private collections in northwestern and eastern Europe await classification and cataloging, as do eastern European cast imprints on surviving medieval bells. Study of and interest in medieval badges,from an ever-wider range of approaches,enriches our understanding of these objects and their manifold functions and mean- ings, while at the same time the actual number of known medieval badges available for study continues to grow. Approaches to Studying Medieval Badges Bearing vivid images that were designed and produced at a specific holy site or in a specific city or region, medieval badges are nearly always identifiable in the sense that in most cases a badge’s image can be recognized and con- nected to a specific place. The tight connection between a specific image and a specific place is especially true of religious badges. Most churches and holy
- 48. How Do We Know About Medieval Badges? 31 sites in medieval European Christendom venerated specific, local saints or wonder-working objects that were deeply connected to local legends and de- votional practices, creating a unique site profile within the overarching matrix of Christian doctrine and liturgy.Administrators and officials of the holy sites where religious badges were sold guarded the rights to design and manufacture badges, trying to ensure that badge designs capitalized on unique features of a site.12 That most religious badges can be identified even today testifies to their success. The local holy site also received some portion of the revenue stream generated by badge sales and controlled those sales, which were limited to the immediate environs of the site. As far as we know, religious badges were sold only at the site for which they were made.A badge’s devotional efficacy was in- extricably entwined with the shrines at the holy site from which it originated. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule of easy badge recognizability. Secular badges are often more difficult to connect to a known great house- hold, civic group, or large city, in part because less research has been done on them and in part because the visual images they employ (a rose, for example) are often more generic. Some religious badges cannot be connected to a spe- cific holy site, often because that site was obscure, short-lived, or left little or no trace in the written record, or at any rate none that can be related to the badge imagery. Many local pilgrimage shrines in northern Germany and Scandinavia, for example, ceased when the Reformation took hold, and their lore and legends disappeared from memory. The normal ease of identifying the specific holy site from which a religious badge originated means that much can be learned from paying attention to the places where religious badges were found. Pilgrims purchased badges at holy sites, and then they transported those badges with them as they trav- eled, often eventually disposing of them.13 The sites where badges are found and the numbers of specific badges found at those sites can tell us a lot about where medieval pilgrims went and how popular different religious sites were. Such analysis corroborates written evidence to make visible, for example, the popularity of such holy sites asWilsnack and Canterbury or the interconnect- edness of specific sites into regional pilgrim routes, and it can also create new knowledge about local pilgrim sites and shrines that disappeared from view.14 The growth of research interest in medieval badges that began in the 1970s was fueled in part by fundamental, postwar shifts in the field of history in North America and Europe away from political history and toward social history. To use a visual metaphor, the field moved from a close focus on the top of the political and social order (kings and popes) and on abstract think- ing (clerical writing and theology) to a wide-range lens that encompassed the
- 49. Chapter 2 32 study of everyday life and social structures in the Middle Ages. To the fore came such topics as the study of women, children, sexuality, pilgrimage, pop- ular forms of piety, the urban poor, medieval slavery, and medieval peasants, as well as the study of everyday, widely available things, often made of cheap materials, a category of objects to which badges belong. The past twenty years have also witnessed renewed interest in the study of material culture.This trend encompasses modern and contemporary stud- ies as well, yet it is particularly well suited to studying the distant past. This approach depends to a certain extent on archaeology and art history and on their processes of collection,preservation,and conservation.15 Contemporary work in the field of material culture goes decidedly beyond the close study of historical artifacts, exploring rather the ways in which practices of collecting and preservation, both institutionally and as practiced by individuals, inter- sect with the assumptions of changing regimes of representation. Located at the intersection of art history, archaeology, museum studies, and cultural studies, groundbreaking work in the field of material culture often focuses on quotidian objects of all kinds, across cultures and times, and explores the kinds and modes of meaning-making that are assigned to these objects.16 In medieval studies, this trend has encouraged new research on badges be- cause it has created a larger scholarly conversation around the nature of the surviving things, whether precious or ordinary, that medieval people made and used, asking not just about their functions but also about the beliefs and practices attached to them.17 Badges and Archaeology Because badges are objects made of metal, they can be examined using mod- ern scientific isotope analysis, which was undertaken and documented for many badges cataloged in the Heilig en Profaan series. The findings suggest, among other things, that badges were routinely made from recycled metals, which suggests in turn that badges were recycled themselves. The study of badges is hindered by the frequent lack of archaeological context. Archaeological evidence, when known, is extremely valuable for understanding medieval badges. Knowing and recording exactly where an ancient object is found, and its relationship to other objects and traces in its vicinity, remains the bedrock of modern archaeological analysis. In this regard, badges have suffered. The retrieval, collection, and preservation of badges began in the early nineteenth century, preceding the emergence of the modern science of archaeology and its scientific practices of excavation that systemically capture data. For most surviving badges, this means that rich
- 50. How Do We Know About Medieval Badges? 33 data about their find sites are lacking. In many cases, little more than the find site’s geographical name (for example, the river Thames or the city of Bruges) survives; in many other cases even that is unknown. Badges are often found in waterways, which does not tell very much about them beyond what an identification of the image on the badge indi- cates about the distance between the place where the badge originated and where it was found. Badges are often discovered as single finds outside the limited confines of a scientific excavation.When a find site is known,or when medieval badges are found as a part of archaeological excavations in constella- tion with other surviving artifacts and sometimes within the surviving traces of medieval habitations and then excavated, recorded, and studied according to the methods of modern archaeology, much can be learned about the ways medieval people used badges. Take as an example the small, carved wooden plank shown in figure 2.1.18 It is a created ensemble of objects. It includes two readily identifiable badges, the uppermost one from Wilsnack in northern Germany and the lower one from Blomberg (Lippe, North Rhine-Westphalia), both associated with ven- eration of the Holy Blood.These are affixed to a small wooden board,crudely yet effectively carved in the architectural shape of an arch and furnished with a hole at the top to facilitate mounting it in some fashion on, perhaps, a post, frame, or wall. Theobjectisoneof aboutthreesimilarwoodenobjectsfoundinwaterways intheLowCountries.Thisone,discoveredintheAmstelRiverinAmsterdam, could easily have been made somewhere else given Amsterdam’s prominence as a harbor trade city in the Middle Ages. The carved board’s origin must be described as unknown but there is still much that can be learned from it. The badges affixed to the board are from late medieval holy sites; Wilsnack was a flourishing pilgrimage site by the first decade of the fifteenth century, while the Blomberg holy site was not active until the 1460s. The Blomberg badge provides a rough date for this specific object,which cannot be older than 1460. (I have taken liberties by using the idea of affixing a badge to a homemade, carved board to illustrate a scene that would have occurred nearly one hun- dred years earlier; the youth cannot be making this particular object, but he is making something like it.) The considerable distances between Amsterdam where the carved board with affixed badges shown in figure 2.1 was found and the holy sites associated with its badges—about 335 kilometers separate Amsterdam and Blomberg and about 600 kilometers separate Amsterdam and Wilsnack—indicate that someone carried these badges from one place to the other.
- 51. Chapter 2 34 Most intriguingly, the board was purpose-carved, as is indicated by the wall-mount hole and the careful creation of a framed space imitating an ar- chitectural feature associated with high-value stonework and also commonly seen in late medieval, painted altarpieces, where saints are shown enclosed in arched, crowned niches. The board may be a homemade altarpiece or icon intended for intimate or domestic use, built up around the badges, which occupy the spatially honorable position within the arch. Someone carefully crafted this object to give the badges a similar function to that of saints in an altarpiece or niche. The entire ensemble is a fine example of the popular piety for which the late Middle Ages are so well known and provides more evidence that badges, which were personal and portable, played a role in this religious development.19 Three modern archaeological excavations have yielded rich knowledge of the production and function of badges: excavations at Mont-Saint-Michel; in the city of Valenciennes in the 1990s; and in the so-called“drowned meadows” excavations inYpres (Ieper),Belgium,which took place in the 1970s.At Mont- Saint-Michel, a badge-making workshop was abandoned precipitously in the fifteenth century, most likely in response to an English assault on the abbey and village that took place in 1434 during the Hundred Years’War. From this abandoned workshop survive a range of molds, sometimes complex, which demonstrate the range of badges and objects and the techniques of mass pro- duction being used in a single workshop (these are discussed in more detail in Chapter 3).20 InValenciennes,the found badges are also linked to manufactur- ing but not their own.21 Valenciennes was a cloth-producing city in the Middle Ages,and the excavations turned up numerous small,ground-level workshops containing one or two large looms.The badges found in these rooms probably belonged to the people who worked and traded in them, perhaps the weavers. The case of Ypres is of special interest, both because so many badges sur- vive from the city and because the rich archaeological evidence is still not fully analyzed with regard to badges. To understand the significance of the Ypres finds, a little historical background is in order. The prosperous, walled cloth manufacturing and trading city of Ypres, on the banks of Ieperlee Canal and thus connected via the Ijzer (Yser) River to the North Sea, was embroiled in the events of the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453), which was fought primarily between England and France.22 In July 1383, Ypres was besieged by the English army of Henry Despenser, Bishop of Norwich, in league with Ypres’s archrival, the city of Ghent. The siege lasted for eight weeks, until Ypres’s French ally, the Duke of Burgundy, marshaled a large army intending to attack the besiegers, causing the English
- 52. How Do We Know About Medieval Badges? 35 to raise the siege and recross the channel by the end of October in defeat. Ypres’s victory, traditionally attributed to the protection given to the city’s ramparts by the BlessedVirgin Mary,was celebrated annually for generations thereafter in Ypres as Thundach (modern Dutch, Tuindaag) in the first week of August. Why does this history matter to understand medieval badges? Because it is part of the story of significant archaeological excavations at a site known as the “drowned meadows,” which was on the south side of Ypres at the Rijselpoort, which opens onto the road to Lille, France. Medieval Ypres was a walled city. Over the course of the High Middle Ages, suburbs sprang up around the outside of the city walls, flanking the roads leading to the city gates and spilling out from there,a normal pattern of urban development for late medieval European cities. By the year 1383, how- ever,Ypres’s suburbs appear to have been shrinking,a sign of the city’s gradual economic decline.23 When the English siege began, the suburbs were aban- doned, and the English occupied the vacant suburbs instead. After the siege was raised, some of the suburbs, including those south of the city, were aban- doned for good. Over the course of centuries, habitations crumbled, rotted, and disappeared, and the ground, which became progressively marshier, was used as animal pasturage, conveniently located just outside the city gate. In the nineteenth century, Ypres began to grow again. The train station was lo- cated just west of the old city walls; new suburbs with multistory apartment buildings sprang up to the east and north. The drowned meadows south of the city remained unbuilt, perhaps because of the marshy conditions that rendered the area an unfavorable or expensive site for construction. In World War I,Ypres was on the front line.Shelled and bombarded con- tinually, by the time the war was over, the city had been entirely destroyed by German shelling (today’s enchanting medieval city was painstakingly rebuilt in the 1920s and 1930s).Because of its position in a kind of no-man’s-land be- tween the city and the front line of the German army, however, the drowned meadows were not shelled and remained nearly untouched. The excavations, which took place in the 1970s,yielded,among other things,a rich store of me- dieval badges, some three hundred in all, both religious and secular. Because of the meticulous care taken to document the excavation,it might be possible to place the badges found here in rich contexts of habitation and possible use—an exciting prospect indeed. Badges survive in unexpected contexts as well. In his study of medieval pilgrim badges in Scandinavia, Lars Andersson records thirteen religious badges found during the restoration of medieval churches and altarpieces that had been hidden close to or in an altarpiece or its base or found under the
- 53. Chapter 2 36 choir floorboards.24 Badges under floorboards may have been dropped or lost, of course, but the other badges must have been deliberately tucked away into the spots where they were found centuries later. These religious badges from distant holy places found their way into new sites of divine power. Perhaps craftsmen, artisans, parishioners, or priests deposited the badges in these places, as part of rituals or actions whose purposes can never be known to us. The example of religious badges cast into medieval bells supports the notion that religious badges were deliberately placed in hidden places, with medieval craftsmen and artists seeking to provide divine protec- tion by placing a religious badge in their works. One of the most interesting and unexpected sources of information about medieval badges comes from medieval church bells, which survived in large numbers across northern Europe into the twentieth century.According to historian Cornelia Oefelein, the first church bells that had pilgrim badges cast into their fabric were made in Cologne foundries in the fourteenth cen- tury; the practice was most popular in northern and central Germany and Scandinavia.25 An example of such a bell is shown in figure 2.3. It was cast in the fifteenth century for a Franciscan monastery in the prosperous northern German trading city of Lübeck.26 Figure 2.3. Medieval bell, Saint Catherine’s Church, Lübeck, Germany. Photograph courtesy of photographer: Dr. Jörg Ansorge, Horst, Germany.
- 54. How Do We Know About Medieval Badges? 37 In the Middle Ages, large bells were not usually produced centrally and transported long distances but rather were made on site. This means that the master craftsmen, called bell founders, whose foundries or workshops spe- cialized in this complex, difficult, and expensive manufacture traveled from place to place, following commissions and work. The evidence of late medieval bells suggests that medieval bellmakers often cast religious badges into the fabric of the bell by carefully pressing a badge into the clay bell mold; when the molten ore was poured in,the badge melted,leav- ing an indelible, clear impression inside the bell.27 Another technique was to imprint the clay with the badge and then keep the badge for reuse; it is nearly always impossible to tell which technique was used. In any case, it is often possible to recognize and identify a religious badge from the impression left in a bell. The Wilsnack badge impression on the bell from Saint Catherine’s in Lübeck (figure 2.4), for example, is clearly recognizable, as is the impression of a Saint Odile badge (figure 2.5) that was cast into a medieval bell from the village of Schlatkow (Mecklenburg–Western Pomerania), Germany. Many medieval bells contain more than one cast of a religious badge. One bell from 1473 in the parish church of Uggerby, Denmark, a village on the northern tip of the Jutland peninsula, shows traces of six religious badges cast Figure 2.4. Medieval bell, detail showing cast of badge from Wilsnack, Germany, Saint Catherine’s Church, Lübeck, Germany. Photograph courtesy of photographer: Dr. Jörg Ansorge, Horst, Germany.
- 55. Another Random Scribd Document with Unrelated Content
- 56. forgiven Penelope for her desire to obtain five pounds. She put it down altogether, now, to the poor thing’s poverty, and hoped that the transaction would never be known. Annie Leicester had not yet arrived, but was expected. Susanna, the most to be feared, perhaps, of the four girls who had given Penelope the money, had gone abroad for the holidays. Thus, all was sunshine on this first evening, and when Penelope found herself joking and repeating little bits of school news and some of the funny things which had occurred between herself and Mademoiselle, the others laughed heartily. Yes, that first evening was a golden one, long to be remembered by the somewhat lonely girl. When she went to bed that night, she was so tired that she slept soundly until the morning. When the morning did arrive, and she was greeted by a smiling housemaid and a delicious cup of tea, she felt that, for the time at least, she was in the land of luxury. “I’ll enjoy myself for once,” she thought, “I’ll forget about school and that I am very poor and that I am disappointed with Brenda, and that Brenda is staying at Marshlands, and Mademoiselle, too, is staying at Marshlands. I will forget everything but just that it is very, very good to be here.” So she arose and dressed herself in one of the new white linen dresses which Mademoiselle had purchased for her out of Mrs Hazlitt’s money, and she came down to breakfast looking fresh and almost pretty. “You do seem rested—I am so glad!” said Honora. “Oh, no, we are not breakfasting in that room. Father and mother and the grown-ups use the front hall for breakfast in the summer, and we children have the big old school-room to
- 57. ourselves. You didn’t see it last night; we had so much to show you, but it is—oh—such a jolly room. Come now this way, you will be surprised at such a crowd of us.” As Honora spoke, she took Penelope’s hand, and, pushing open a heavy oak door, led the way through a sort of ante- chamber and then down a corridor to a long, low room with latticed windows, over which many creepers cast just now a most grateful shade. There were several boys and girls in the room, and a long table was laid, with all sorts of good things for breakfast. Amongst the boys was Fred Hungerford and a younger brother called Dick, and there were three or four boys, brothers and cousins of Honora herself. There were altogether at least thirteen or fourteen girls. The two little Hungerfords flew up to Penelope when they saw her. They seemed to regard her as their special friend. “Honora,” said Pauline, “may we sit one at each side of Penelope and tell her who every one is and all about everything? Then she’ll feel quite one of us and be—oh—so happy!” “That’s an excellent idea, Pauline,” said Honora. “Here, Penelope, come up to this end of the table, and I’ll jog the children’s memories if they forget any one.” So Penelope enjoyed her first breakfast at Castle Beverley, and could not help looking at Honora with a wonderful, new sensation of love in her eyes. Honora, whose dazzling fairness and stately young figure had made her appear at first sight such an admirable representative of the fair Helen of the past, had never looked more beautiful than this morning.
- 58. She wore a dress of the palest shade of blue cambric and had a great bunch of forget-me-nots in her belt. Her face was like sunshine itself, and her wealth of golden hair was quite marvellous in its fairness. Her placid blue eyes seemed to be as mirrors in which one could see into her steadfast and noble mind. All her thoughts were those of kindness, and she was absolutely unselfish. In fact, as one girl said: “Honora is selfless: she almost forgets that she exists, so little does she think of herself in her thought for others.” Now, Honora’s one desire was to make Penelope happy, and Penelope responded to the sympathetic manner and kindly words as a poor little sickly flower will revel in sunshine. But Pauline presently spoke in that rather shrill little voice of hers: “We are happy here: even Nellie’s better, aren’t you, Nellie?” “Yes, I suppose so,” said Nellie. She looked across the table at Pauline, and gave half a sigh and half a smile. “Of course you are happy, Nellie,” said Honora. “You’re not thinking any more about that bracelet, are you?” “I do wish I could get it back,” said Nellie, “but, all the same I am happy.” “But please, Penelope, tell us about your sister,” said Pauline. “Oh, do you know—” “Yes—do tell us that!” interrupted Nellie. “Why, Fred saw her yesterday at Marshlands-on-the-Sea,” continued Pauline. “She’s quite close to us—isn’t it fun? Fred
- 59. came back quite interested in her—he thinks her so very pretty!” “Whom do I think pretty, Miss?” called out Fred from a little way down the table. “No taking of my name in vain—if you please.” “You know, Fred,” said Pauline, in her somewhat solemn little voice, “that you think dear Penelope’s sister sweetly pretty.” “I should think so, indeed!” said Fred, “and, by the way, she is at Marshlands. She had three of the funniest little girls out walking with her yesterday that you ever saw in your life. Did you know she was going to be at Marshlands, Miss Carlton?” “Yes,” said Penelope, feeling not quite so happy as she did a few minutes ago. “We’ll ask her up here some day to have a good time with us, dear, if you like,” said Honora. “Thank you,” replied Penelope, but without enthusiasm. “I spoke to her yesterday,” said Fred. “She really did look awfully nice; only they were the rummest little coves you ever saw in all your life—the children who are there.” “They are her pupils; they’re the daughters of a clergyman,” said Penelope. “I don’t care whose daughters they are, but they go about with your sister, and they do look so funny. I told her you were coming and she gave me her address. Would you like to go in to see her this morning?” Penelope trembled.
- 60. “Not this morning, please,” she said. She felt herself turning pale. She felt she must have one happy day before she began to meet Brenda. She had a curious feeling that when that event took place, her peace, and delight in her present surroundings would somehow be clouded. Brenda was so much cleverer than she was, so gay, so determined, so strange in many ways. Oh, no; she would not go to see her to-day. “If you like,” said Honora, observing Penelope’s confusion, and rather wondering at it, “I could send a note to your sister to come up to-morrow to spend the day here. We’re not going to do anything special to-morrow, and mother always allows me to ask any friends we like to the Castle. We have heaps of croquet courts and tennis courts, and the little girls could come with her, for of course she couldn’t leave them behind. How would that do, Penelope? Would that please you?” “I don’t know,” said Penelope. Then she said, somewhat awkwardly: “Oh, yes—yes—if you like—” Honora had a curious sensation of some surprise at Penelope’s manner; but it quickly passed. She accounted for it by saying to herself that her friend was tired and of course must greatly long to see her only sister. “She’s not absolutely and altogether to my taste,” thought Honora, “but I am just determined to give her the best of times, and we can have the sister up and the funny children for at least one day. What’s the good of having a big place if one doesn’t get people to enjoy it?” It was just then that Nellie said:
- 61. “I do wish, Penelope, you had not done one thing.” “What is that?” asked Penelope, who had hardly got over the shock of having Brenda so soon with her. “Why did you bring Mademoiselle to Marshlands? We don’t care for Mademoiselle, do we, Pauline?” “No, indeed,” said Pauline, “and she took my hand yesterday and clutched it so tight and wouldn’t let it go before I pulled two or three times, and oh! I’m quite positive sure that she’ll find us out, and I wish she wouldn’t!” “Frankly, I wish she wouldn’t too,” said Honora, “but I do not see,” she added, “why Penelope should be disturbed on that account—it isn’t her fault.” “No, indeed it isn’t,” said Penelope, “and I wish with all my heart she hadn’t come with me to Marshlands-on-the-Sea.” When breakfast was over, all the young people streamed out into the gardens with the exception of Honora and Penelope. “One minute, Penelope dear,” said Honora. “Just write a little line to your sister and I will enclose one, in mother’s name and mine, inviting her to come up with the children to-morrow. Here are writing materials—you needn’t take a minute.” Penelope sat down and wrote a few words to Brenda. For the life of her, she could not make these words cordial. She hardly knew her own sensations. Was she addressing the same Brenda whom she had worshipped and suffered for and loved so frantically when she was a little girl? Was it jealousy that was stealing into her heart? What could be her
- 62. motives in wishing to keep this sister from the nice boys and girls who made Castle Beverley so charming? Or was she—was she so mean—so small—as to be ashamed of Brenda? No, no—it could not be that, and yet—and yet—it was that: she was ashamed of Brenda! The children she was now with belonged to the best of their kind. Penelope had lived with people of the better class for several months now and was discerning enough to perceive the difference between gold and tinsel. Oh, was Brenda tinsel; Brenda— her only sister? Penelope could have sobbed, but she must hide all emotion. Her letter was finished. She knew how eagerly Brenda would accept and how cleverly she would get herself invited to the Castle again, and again, and again. Honora’s cordial little note was slipped into the same envelope. Penelope had to furnish the address, and, an hour later, Fred and his brothers, who were going to ride to Marshlands in order to bathe and to spend some hours afterwards on the beach, arranged to convey the invitation to Brenda which poor Penelope so dreaded. “Now we have that off our minds,” said Honora, “and can have a real good time. What would you like to do, Penelope? You know you must make yourself absolutely and completely at home. You are one of us. Every girl who comes here by mother’s invitation is for the time mother’s own daughter and looked upon as such by her. She is also father’s own daughter and, I can tell you, he treats her as such, and the boys are exactly in the same position. We’re all brothers and sisters here, and we love each other, every one of us.” “But would you love a girl, whatever happened?” asked Penelope, all of a sudden.
- 63. “Oh, I don’t know what you mean—whatever happened— what could happen?” “Nothing—of course—nothing; only I wonder, Honora. I never seemed to know you at all when I was at school. I wonder if you could love a girl like me.” “I love you already, dear,” said Honora. “And now, please, don’t be morbid; just let’s be jolly and laugh and joke; every one can do just what every one likes—this is Liberty Hall, of course. It’s a home of delight, of course. It’s the home of ‘Byegone dull Care’;—oh, it’s the nicest place in all the world, and I want you to remember it as long as you live. I am so glad mother allowed me to ask you! Now then, do see those youngsters, Pauline and Nellie, tumbling over the hay-cocks: how sunburnt they are! such a jolly little pair! I am sorry about Nellie’s bracelet; the loss of it makes her think too much of that sort of thing. I am quite afraid she will never find it now. What would you like to do, Penelope? You looked so happy when you came downstairs, but now you’re a little tired.” “I think I am a little tired,” said Penelope. “I think for this morning I’d like a book best.” “Then here we are—this is the school library: every jolly schoolgirl’s and schoolboy’s story that has ever been written finds its way into this room. Run in, and make your choice, and then come out. The grounds are all round you—shade everywhere, and pleasure, pleasure all day long.”
- 64. Chapter Fifteen. The Seaside. Brenda and her three pupils had arrived two or three days before at Marshlands-on-the-Sea. It cannot be said their lodgings were exactly “chic,” for the Reverend Josiah could not rise to apartments anything approaching to that term. He had given Brenda a certain sum which was to cover the expenses of their month’s pleasure, and had told her to make the best of it. Brenda had expostulated and begged hard for more; but no—for once the Reverend Josiah was firm. He said that his suffering parishioners required all his surplus money, and that the girls and their governess must stay at the seaside for five guineas a week. Brenda shook her head, and declared that it was impossible; but, seeing that no more was to be obtained, she made the best of things, and when she arrived at Marshlands just in the height of the summer season, she finally took up her abode at a fifth-rate boarding-house in a little street which certainly did not face the sea. Here she and her pupils were taken for a guinea a week each, and Brenda had the surplus to spend on teas out and on little expeditions generally. She was careful on these occasions to be absolutely and thoroughly honest. She even consulted Nina on the subject. She was exceedingly polite to Nina just now and, at the same time, intensely sarcastic. She was fond of asking Nina, even in the middle of the table d’hôte dinner, if she had her pencil and notebook handy, and if she would then and there kindly enter the item of twopence three farthings spent on cherries,—quarter of a pound to eat on the beach,—or if she had absolutely forgotten the fact that she was obliged to provide a reel of
- 65. white and a reel of black cotton for necessary repairs of the wardrobe. How Nina hated her pretty governess on these occasions! how her little eyes would flash with indignation and her small face looked pinched with the sense of tragedy which oppressed her, and which she could not understand. The commonplace ladies who lived in the commonplace boarding-house were deeply interested in Nina’s extraordinary talent for accounts. They gently asked the exceedingly pretty and attractive Miss Carlton what it meant. “Simply a little mania of hers,” said Brenda, with a shrug of her plump white shoulders, for she always wore décolletée dress at late dinner and her shoulders and arms were greatly admired by the other visitors at the boarding-house. Nina began to dread the subject of accounts. Once she forgot her notebook and pencil on purpose, but Brenda was a match for her. She asked her in a loud semi-whisper if she could tot up exactly what they had expended that day, and when Nina replied that she had left the notebook upstairs, she was desired immediately to go to fetch it. The little girl left the room on this occasion with a sense of almost hatred at her heart. “Fetch that odious book! oh dear, oh dear!” She wished every account-book in the world at the bottom of the sea. She wished she had never interfered with Brenda. She wished she had never made that terrible little sum on the day when Brenda went to Hazlitt Chase. She was being severely punished for her anxiety and her sense of justice. Brenda had determined that this should be the case, and had given her small pupil a terrible time while she was spending that seven pounds, sixteen shillings, and eleven- pence on extra clothes for her pupils.
- 66. She took them into a fashionable shop, for, as the money had to be spent, she was determined that it should be done as quickly as possible. As she could not save it for herself, she wanted to get rid of it, it did not matter how quickly. Therefore, while Fanchon stood transfixed with admiration of her own figure in a muslin hat before a long glass, and eagerly demanded that it should be bought immediately, it was poor Nina who was brought forward to decide. “It is becoming,” said Brenda, gazing at her pupil critically; “that pale shade of blue suits you to perfection; and that ‘chic’ little mauve bow at the side is so very, very comme il faut. But that is not the question in the very least, Fanchon —whether it becomes you or not. It is this: can we afford it —or rather, can Nina afford it? Nina, look. Can you afford to allow your sister to buy that hat?” The serving-woman in the shop very nearly tittered when the plain, awkward little girl—the youngest of the party— was brought forward to make such a solemn decision. Nina herself was very sulky, and, without glancing at the hat, said: “Yes, take it, I don’t care!” “Very well, darling,” said Brenda. “You can send that hat to Palliser Gardens—9, Palliser Gardens,” she said to the attendant. “Nina, enter in your account-book twelve shillings and eleven-pence three farthings for Fanchon’s hat.” “I want one like it!” cried Josie. “Oh—I’m sure Nina won’t allow that!” exclaimed Brenda. “I don’t care!” said Nina.
- 67. In the end each girl had a similar hat, and Nina had to enter the amounts in her horrible little book. The hats were fairly pretty, but were really not meant for little girls with their hair worn in pigtails. But the only thing Brenda cared about was the fact that a considerable sum of Mr Amberley’s money was got rid of. “Now,” she said, “we’ll consider the dresses.” And the dresses were considered. They were quite expensive and not pretty. There were also several other things purchased, and Nina grew quite thin with her calculations. All these things happened during the first days of their stay at Marshlands-on-the-Sea. But now the toilets were complete. It was on a scorching and beautiful morning after Brenda, becomingly dressed from head to foot in purest white, had taken her little pupils in check dresses and paper hats down to the seashore, had bathed there and swum most beautifully, to the delight of those who looked on, and had returned again in time for the mid-day meal, that she found Penelope’s letter awaiting her. It was laid by her plate on the dinner table. She opened it with her usual airy grace and then exclaimed—her eyes sparkling with excitement and delight: “I say, girls—here’s a treat! Our dear friends, the Beverleys, have invited us all to spend to-morrow at the Castle. We must accept, of course, and must drive out. Mrs Dawson,”— here she turned to the lady who kept the boarding-house —“can you tell me what a drive will be from here to Castle Beverley?” “Five shillings at the very least,” replied Mrs Dawson. She spoke in an awe-struck voice. There were no people so respected in the neighbourhood as the Beverleys, and Mrs
- 68. Dawson—a well-meaning and sensible woman—did not believe it possible that any guest of hers could know them. “Really, Miss Carlton,” she said, “I am highly flattered to think that a young lady who stays here in my humble house —no offence, ladies, I am sure—but in my modest and inexpensive habitation, should know the Beverleys of Castle Beverley.” “We don’t know them!” here called out Josie. Brenda gave Josie a frown which augured ill for that young lady’s pleasure during the rest of the day. She paused for a minute, and then said modestly: “It so happens that my dear sister is a special friend of the eldest Miss Beverley. They are at the same school. My sister is staying at the Castle at present, and I have had a letter inviting me to go there for to-morrow. It will be a very great pleasure.” “Very great, indeed,”—replied Mrs Dawson—“a most distinguished thing to do. We shall all be interested to hear your experiences when you return in the evening, dear Miss Carlton. Hand Miss Carlton the peas,” continued the good woman, addressing the flushed and towsled parlour maid. Brenda helped herself delicately to a few of these dainties and then continued: “Yes, we shall enjoy it; my dear sister’s friends are very select. I naturally expected to go to Castle Beverley when I heard she was there; but I didn’t know that the Beverleys would be so good-natured as to extend their invitations to these dear children. Even the little accountant, Nina, is invited. Nina, you’ll be sure to take your book with you, dear, for you might make some little private notes with
- 69. regard to the possible expense of housekeeping at Castle Beverley while you are there. You, dear, must be like the busy bee; you must improve each shining hour—eh, Nina? eh, my little arithmetician?” “I am not your arithmetician; and I—I hate you!” said Nina. These remarks were regarded by the other ladies present as simply those of a naughty child in a temper. “Oh, fie, Miss Nina!” said a certain Miss Rachael Price. “You should not show those naughty little tempers. You should say, when you feel your angry passions rising, ‘Down, down, little temper; down, down!’ I have always done that, and I assure you it is most soothing in its effects.” “But you wouldn’t if you were me,” said Nina, who was past all prudence at that instant. “If you had an odious—odious!” here she burst out crying and fled from the room. “Poor child! What can be the matter with her?” said a fat matron who bore the name of Simpkins, and had several children under nine years of age in the house. “Aren’t you a little severe on her, Miss Carlton? Strikes me she don’t love ’rithmetic—as my Georgie calls it—so much as you seem to imagine.” Brenda laughed. “I am teaching my dear little pupil a lesson,” she said. “That is all. I have a unique way of doing it, but it will be for her good in the end.” Soon afterwards, the young lady and her two remaining pupils left the dinner table and went up to their shabby bedroom, which they all shared together at the top of the house. Nina was lying on her own bed with her face turned
- 70. to the wall. The moment Brenda came in she sat up and, taking the account-book, flung it in the face of her governess. “There! you horrid, odious thing!” she said. “I will never put down another account—never—as long as I live! There—I won’t, I won’t, and you can’t make me!” “I am afraid, most dear child,” said Brenda, “I should not feel safe otherwise. I might be accused of dishonesty by my clever little Nina when I return to the dear old rectory and to the presence of your sweetest papa. But come, now— let’s be sensible; let’s enjoy ourselves. We will drive out to Castle Beverley to-morrow, of that I am determined, even though it does cost five shillings. But we’ll walk back in the evening—that is, if they don’t offer us a carriage; but I have a kind of idea that I can even manage their extending their favour to that amount. It is all-important, however, that we should arrive looking fresh. Now, girls—this is a most important occasion, and how are we to be dressed?” Nina said that she didn’t know and she didn’t care. But Josie and Fanchon were immensely interested. “There are your muslin hats,” said Brenda—“quite fresh and most suitable; and your little blue check dresses. The check is very small, and they really look most neat. They’re not cotton, either—they’re ‘delaine.’ Dearest papa will be delighted with them, won’t he? He’ll be quite puzzled how to classify them, but I think we can teach him. You three dressed all alike will look sweet, and you may be thankful to your dear Brenda for not allowing you to racket through your clothes beforehand. Well, that is settled. You will look a very sweet little trio, and if Nina is good, and runs up to her own Brenda now, and kisses her, she needn’t take the account-book to Castle Beverley. Just for one day, she may
- 71. resign her office as chartered accountant to this yere company.” Brenda made her joke with a merry laugh and showed all her pearly teeth. “Come, Nina,” said Josie, who was in high good humour, “you must kiss Brenda; you were horribly rude to her.” “Oh, I forgive her—poor little thing,” said Brenda. “Little girls don’t like the rod, do they? but sometimes they have to bear it, haven’t they? Now then, you little thing, cheer up, and make friends. I have found a delightful shop where we can have tea, bread and butter and shrimps, and afterwards we’ll sit on the beach—it’s great fun, sitting on the beach—and we’ll see nearly all the fashionable folks.” The thought of shrimps and bread and butter for tea was too much for Nina’s greedy little soul. She did condescend to get off the hot bed and kiss Brenda, who for her part was quite delightful, for the time being. She even took the account-book and pencil, and said that they should not be seen again until the day after to-morrow. Then she washed Nina’s flushed face, and made her wear the objectionable pink muslin with the folds across the bottom in lieu of flounces, and that little straw hat, which cost exactly one- and-sixpence, including its trimming. Afterwards, they all went down on the beach, and presently they had tea. Then, in good time, they came back to supper, and after that, the delightful period of the day began for Fanchon, and the trying one for her two sisters— for Fanchon was now regularly established as Brenda’s companion when she went out to enjoy herself after supper, and the two younger girls, notwithstanding all their tears and protestations, were ordered off to bed. It was odious to
- 72. go to bed on these hot, long evenings, but Brenda was most specious in her arguments, and Mrs Dawson and Miss Price and Mrs Simpkins all agreed with the governess—that there was nothing for young folks like early bed. Mrs Simpkins even repeated that odious proverb for Nina’s benefit, “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” In short, Brenda had broken in her pupils to her own satisfaction; and when she had seen them into their “nighties”—as she called those garments,—she and Fanchon, dressed in their very best, went out on pleasure intent. It was a pretty sight to see the elegant-looking young governess and her somewhat gauche pupil wander down to that part of the pier where the band played; and it was truly edifying to perceive how Fanchon anxiously copied Brenda on these occasions. She imitated her step, her walk, her hand-shake—which was of the truly fashionable kind, stiff, and rising high in the air. Fanchon’s heart beat with pleasure when she perceived how very much Brenda was admired, and, as Brenda could do anything with her pupil by means of flattery, the young lady was by no means unhappy about herself. On this special night—the night before the visit to Beverley Castle—Fanchon felt even more delighted than usual, for she was allowed, at the last moment, in the close little hall of the boarding-house, to slip the precious, the most precious bangle on her sunburnt wrist. “I always said you should wear it,” said Brenda, “and you shall to-night.” Fanchon fairly trembled with happiness. “It feels delightful,” she said. “It’s like a tonic, which gives me tone. I don’t think I should be afraid of anything if I could always wear this.”
- 73. “Some day you shall, if you remain faithful to your own Brenda.” “You know, Brenda, I would do anything for you.” “Well, it seems like it at present,” said Brenda, “but of course I have to think of the past. You were not so absolutely perfect on a certain occasion not very long ago, were you, dearie?” Fanchon coloured. “Don’t let’s think of that now,” she said. “If ever any one was unjustly suspected, you were that person, Brenda. Oh, how Nina hates herself for what she did! But aren’t you rather over-punishing the poor little thing?” “I shall cease to punish her in a few days, but she must learn a lesson. Now then—I should not be the least surprised if Harry Jordan was at the band to-night. You know we saw him to-day, but we couldn’t take much notice with the other girls about. I have begged of him never to speak to me when Josie and Nina are present, for I can’t tell what a child like Nina may be up to. But I rather fancy he’ll be here on the promenade this evening, and I asked him to bring a friend for you to talk to, Fanchon; you don’t mind, do you?” “A friend!” cried Fanchon. “Oh—I hope you don’t mean a man! I’d be terrified out of my seven senses even to address a word to a man.” “Dear Fanchon,” said Brenda, “you’ll soon get over that. Well, here we are—and I do declare if that isn’t Harry himself coming to meet us, and—yes—he’s brought a very nice youth with him. Now, Fanchon, you will have a pleasant
- 74. time too. Not a word, ever, to your sisters, or to dearest papa!” “Oh, trust me,” said Fanchon, holding her head high, and feeling that she must survive the dreadful ordeal of talking to a man, whatever her sensations. Now Harry Jordan happened to be a sleek, fat youth of about twenty years of age. He was well off, in fact he was doing a thriving trade in the draper’s business, but in a distant town. Brenda had not the least idea what his business was. He told her vaguely that he was in business, and she pictured him to herself as a merchant prince, and who in all the world could be more honourable than one of the merchant princes of England? But, be that as it may, she enjoyed Harry Jordan’s admiration, and if he were to like her well enough to ask her to marry him, why—she would probably say yes, for it would be infinitely better than remaining as governess at thirty pounds a year to Mr Amberley’s little daughters. Now, Harry was a youth who enjoyed a flirtation as much as anybody, and as Brenda had hinted that they could not be perfectly free and happy if Fanchon was listening, he brought a friend of his along—a certain Joe Burbery—to engage the attentions of that young lady. Accordingly, the four met, and Joe Burbery, a most sickly youth of seventeen, was introduced to both ladies, and after Brenda had said one or two words to him, quite enough to turn his head, he was deputed to his rightful place by Fanchon’s side, who racked her brains in her vain endeavour to say a word to him at all, and would have figuratively stuck in the mud altogether, but for his loud exclamation of delight when he saw her bracelet. “I say!” exclaimed the youth, “what an elegant article—is it real?”
- 75. “Real!” said Fanchon, facing him with her little eyes flashing. “It’s eighteen carat.” “Oh, is it?” said Joe. “I see. I never touched eighteen carat in my life—more likely to be nine carat.” He winked hard at Fanchon as he spoke. Fanchon, in her rage, took the bracelet off and asked him to examine the hall-mark under the next lamp-post, which he accordingly proceeded to do. He discovered that she was right and handed it back to her with great respect. “How did you come by it?” was his next enquiry. “It is a present—I mustn’t say how I came by it.” “Eighteen carat gold,”—murmured Joe Burbery. “Eighteen carat, and a very large and specially fine turquoise. Why, there’s a thing advertised for exactly like that. I remember it quite well; I saw it in the Standard and the Morning Post and even in some of the local papers here—a bangle just like this which was lost—supposed to be lost in a railway carriage. How funny that you should have one which so exactly answers to the description!” “It is, isn’t it?” said Fanchon, laughing with the utmost unsuspicion. “Well,” she continued, “I am glad mine isn’t lost; I am frightfully proud of it; I shall love it all my days; I don’t mean ever to part from it. Even if I get a very rich husband some day, and he gives me lots of jewellery, I will always keep my beautiful bangle. Brenda says that it is the sort you need never be ashamed of.” “It is that,” admitted Joe. “So she admires it—she knows a good thing when she sees it, doesn’t she?” “Oh, yes—she is very clever—” “And a stunner herself, ain’t she now?” said Joe Burbery.
- 76. “I suppose so,” replied Fanchon, who did not feel interested in praises of Brenda from the first young man who had come into her life. He ought to be too much devoted to her and her most elegant bangle. The walk came to an end presently. It was necessary in Mrs Dawson’s establishment for the young ladies to come in not later than half-past ten, and at that hour the two girls appeared in the hall. Mrs Dawson herself was waiting for them. As she proceeded to lock and chain the front door, she also saw the flash of the bangle on Fanchon’s wrist. She immediately exclaimed at its beauty, and asked to have a nearer view of it. “Why, I say,” she cried, “what a truly elegant thing! Does it belong to you, Miss Amberley?” “Yes,” replied Fanchon. “It was given to me by a great friend.” Here she looked meaningly at Brenda. “Come up to bed, Fanchon, do!” said Brenda. “You look dead tired and won’t appear at your best to-morrow at the Castle. Good-night, Mrs Dawson.” Mrs Dawson said nothing further, but she thought for a minute or two and then went into her private sitting-room and opened a Standard of a few days old and read a certain advertisement in it without any comment. After a time, she put the Standard carefully away and went up to her own room, for she had doubtless earned her night’s repose. As they were going upstairs, Brenda said in a somewhat fretful voice: “Fanchon—I do wish you would not let people think that I gave you that bangle.”
- 77. “But why should you not let them think it?” asked the astonished girl. “Well—of course people couldn’t expect a governess like me to give you such really expensive things.” “Oh—but they don’t know what a darling you are,” said Fanchon, springing suddenly on Brenda with the sort of affection of a bear’s cub, and crushing that young lady’s immaculate evening toilet. Now, Brenda was decidedly cross because Harry Jordan had not been as pointed as usual in his remarks, and she disliked—she could scarcely tell why—the expression in Mrs Dawson’s eyes when they had rested on the bangle. She was, therefore, not at all prepared for Fanchon’s rough caress, nor for Fanchon’s next words. “I do wonder if you would be such a duck of a thing as to let me wear the bangle at Castle Beverley to-morrow.” “Wear it there!” cried Brenda, real terror for a minute seizing her. “Of course not—could anything be more unsuitable! You must appear at Castle Beverley as the innocent little girl you are. You must not think of jewellery. You mustn’t allude to it, nor to your evening walks, nor to anything we do when you and I are enjoying ourselves together. Come, Fanchon, give me the bangle; I allowed you to wear it to-night as a great treat; but I want to put it away.” Fanchon looked decidedly cross. “I should so like to wear it to-morrow,” she said, “and I can’t make out why you won’t let me. If it is my bangle, mayn’t I wear it when I like?”
- 78. “But it isn’t your bangle—at least at present, and it won’t be yours ever if you make a fuss. Come, Fanchon, do you want to quarrel with me? and oh—I am so tired! My dear child, give it here—I will take it.” Brenda snatched the bangle from her pupil’s wrist. “It would be such a pity,” she said, “if anything destroyed our fun—and any one could see with half an eye that Mr Burbery was greatly struck with you. Harry told me as much. Mr Burbery is going to be exceedingly rich some day; he also is in the mercantile world: there’s no other world worth considering, I can tell you that, Fanchon.” “He knows a lot about bangles, anyhow,” said Fanchon, “for he was greatly struck with mine; indeed, I was thankful he was, for I couldn’t utter a word, and didn’t know from Adam what to say until he began to talk of it. And he said—oh, Brenda! that there is one advertised for in all the papers just like mine. I told him I wasn’t a bit surprised, for mine was so very beautiful.” Brenda’s heart sank down to her very boots. Her rosy, radiant face turned white. “There!” she exclaimed, “I see you are nothing whatever but a gossip. I don’t know when I will be able to let you have the bangle again. But now let’s come to bed, and let’s tread softly—we can manage without a light of course; it wouldn’t do to wake Josephine and Nina.” So the girls slipped into the darkened, hot bedroom and presently got into bed, Fanchon to sleep and dream of Joe Burbery and the lovely bangle, and the sad pity it was that she could not display its charms to-morrow—but Brenda to lie awake; fear—dull dreadful fear tapping at her heart.
- 79. Chapter Sixteen. A Scrumptious Day. Notwithstanding that fear, however, on the following morning the pretty governess looked gay enough. They were to have a delightful day; there was no real danger; no one could prove in all the world that the bangle was not her own, or at least, her pupil’s. But she would not allow Fanchon to wear it again. She must not be seen in it, that was plain. As the horrid, odious thing was being advertised for, it was highly dangerous that Fanchon should wear it. Brenda could not enough regret her imprudence in having allowed her pupil to appear in it on the previous night. But how could she guess that that uninteresting youth, Joe Burbery, would have noticed it and seen the advertisement —the advertisement! oh, how perfectly dreadful! Why did rich people bother when they lost such a simple thing as a little gold bangle with a blue stone in it? Why could not they allow poor folks to have their chances? And Joe Burbery had seen—had seen—this horrible advertisement! Well, of course that meant nothing at all. Brenda could not guess that a far worse enemy in the shape of Mrs Dawson had also observed it. All she could do at present was to lock the bangle carefully up in one of the drawers of the humble little chest of drawers which the four had to share between them in their horrible hot bedroom. She whispered a word to Fanchon not to breathe the subject of the bangle at the Castle, promising her as a reward that it should be hers absolutely, all the sooner. She then proceeded to make a most careful toilet herself and to superintend those of her pupils. She was really anxious that the three little Amberleys should look their best on this
- 80. occasion. So she took their red hair out of the tight plaits in which they generally wore it, and combed it out and caused it to ripple down their backs. This delighted Fanchon, and also Josephine, but Nina was greatly bothered by the heat of her thick fleece of red hair and would have infinitely preferred its being plaited tightly and tied with the old brown ribbon which generally adorned it. Nevertheless, when Brenda assured her that she was most elegant and altogether superior to most girls in her appearance, she decided to endure the unwonted heat. A carriage from the neighbouring livery stables was sent for, and the three drove off in state to Castle Beverley, just in time to arrive on the scene between twelve and one o’clock; and Mrs Dawson, Miss Price, Mrs Simpkins, and all the little Simpkinses saw them off and wished them well, and a happy day; and when the carriage had turned the corner, Mrs Dawson was congratulated by the other ladies on her distinguished visitors. Mrs Dawson, however, made few replies, for she was considerably occupied with the thought of that advertisement and what it meant, and how it was that a commonplace child like Fanchon Amberley should wear so handsome a bangle. “For my poor husband was in the jewellery line when he lived,” thought the widow to herself, “and I know the best gold and real good stones when I see them.” Mrs Dawson’s feelings, however, have little to do with the really interesting events of this wonderful July day. The colour rose becomingly into Brenda’s cheeks as she thought of all that lay before her, and when the hackney carriage drew up outside the Beverleys’ house, she stepped lightly to the ground, and her pupils, with extreme awkwardness, followed her example. Josephine managed, in her exit from
- 81. the carriage, to tear her delaine frock, which was decidedly annoying; but nothing else untoward occurred. Honora was there and so was Penelope, and so were several other of the girls; and they all swept Brenda and her little charges under their wings. Honora saw that the torn flounce was immediately mended, and then they went into the cool shady grounds. The three little Amberleys were introduced to girls corresponding to themselves in age, and were led away to enjoy several games. Fanchon for a time tried to observe the grown-up manners which Brenda had endeavoured to instil. She could not forget, either, that on the previous night she had worn a real gold bangle, and talked to a real man—for seventeen years of age seemed very old and grown-up to her fourteen summers. But Josie and Nina had no intention of doing anything but enjoy themselves. After the first few minutes of shyness, Nina complained bitterly of the heat of her hair and said she wished Brenda had not taken it out of its plaits. “Why,” asked little Nellie Hungerford—“don’t you always wear it like that down your back!” “Oh, never,” answered Nina. “It’s screwed up into tight, tight plaits, and tied with some sort of string at the end. That’s how I like it,” she answered. “I am so hot with it falling all over my neck and shoulders—I wish I could cut it off.” “Oh, no—it is so pretty,” said Nellie. “I tell you what,” she added, “I’ll plait it for you, if you like.” “Will you!” answered Nina, “I wish you would.” “All right—I’ll do it right away, this very minute. And, Pauline darling, you can run into the house for a piece of
- 82. ribbon. What colour do you want, Nina?” “Oh, anything will do,” said Nina—“a bit of grass, anything.” “Well, I tell you what,” said Nellie; “we are a good way from the house at present, and I have some string in my pocket, so we’ll tie it with that, and afterwards you shall have a piece of ribbon before we go down to lunch.” So Nina’s hot, red hair was very badly and unevenly plaited. It hung rather crooked, much more to the left shoulder than to the right, and the string was not becoming, but that did not matter at all to the emancipated little girl. When Nellie had plaited Nina’s hair, she suggested that she should perform the same office for the other two girls. Josie longed to accept, but did not dare. Fanchon answered, “No, thank you, I prefer my hair down until I can put it up properly. I long for the day when I can put my hair up. Don’t you?” she added, looking round at the little group who were surveying her. “Indeed, no,” answered both the little Hungerfords. “We should hate to be grown up. We love being children, don’t we, Pauline?” “Yes, yes,” said Pauline. It was just then that her beautiful little bangle with its ruby heart flashed in the sun. Fanchon noticed it; it was so very like her own—so like, but with a marked difference. She could not help saying: “What a very pretty bangle you have got!” “Yes—isn’t it?” said Pauline, but she spoke in a low voice, and pulled Fanchon a little aside. “Don’t speak of it, please,” she said. “I often feel that I oughtn’t to wear it.”
- 83. “Do you, indeed?” said Fanchon, “I can’t understand why. It looks most elegant, and it gives such tone, doesn’t it, now?” “I don’t know anything about that,” said Pauline; “it is just a pretty little ornament. Mother gave it to me.” “Well, I’m sure you ought to wear what your mother gave you. It must be so sweet to get presents of that kind; why don’t you like to?” “I will tell you, if you’ll not say anything about it, and at the same time, when I tell you, I want you to promise me something.” Fanchon coloured with delight. Pauline belonged to the county, and there was quite a subtle difference between her and Miss Fanchon Amberley, which that young lady herself appreciated, struggled against, and detested, all at the same time. “Of course I won’t tell,” she said, “it is very nice of you to trust me. Have you a secret? It seems to me that most people have.” “Oh dear, no; I haven’t any secret in all the world,” said Pauline. “I wouldn’t; it’d be too horrid.” “Then why mustn’t I tell what you say?” “Because it would hurt my darling Nellie?” “Your sister?” “Yes.” “And why ever would it hurt her? Is she jealous because you have got something—something so very, very pretty,
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