We are led to believe that Pantaleon was convinced that faith was more important than medicine and he duly accepted a rather gruesome martyrdom.  Many of the stories that circulate about martyrs under Diocletian are faintly ridiculous.  They all have common themes about saints having their heads cut off or being boiled alive and yet somehow miraculously surviving, etc.  Whoever told the story of Pantaleon got very carried away because he was pretty much subjected to every horrific mode of execution you could imagine and yet proved impossible to kill.  Only when he himself consented to die, did the blade cut his head off – out of which, by the way, spouted a mixture of blood and milk.

This is a statue I found in Portugal but he also features in the stained glass windows of Chartres cathedral and his relics are scattered from Armenia to Italy.  In the latter country, there is a belief that Saint Pantaleon will very obligingly come to you in your dreams and tell you the winning lottery numbers.  He is presumably very selective about how many people he visits during their slumbers.

Saint Pantaleon

In the crusader era, nobody thought the bloodier passages of the Old Testament were allegorical. On the contrary, they were an object lesson on how to deal with the wicked enemies of Christianity – ie, the Saracens.  For Saracens, read Canaanites and every other tribe that opposed the children of Israel.

However, there have been tender souls throughout the Christian era who have found the violence in the Bible a little hard to handle.  And different solutions to the conundrum have been offered.  In the earliest years of Christianity, there were conflicts between two groups called the Ebionites and the Marcionites.  The former believed Jesus was the fulfilment of the Old Testament prophecies and was essentially a Jewish figure.  The followers of the thinker Marcion of Sinope decided that the Old Testament was such a ghastly, blood drenched text that the Christian god could not possibly have inspired it.  The solution: lose the Old Testament entirely.

In the second century AD, this was fiercely opposed by Origen – who is not a saint because he thought Jesus was inferior to God the father (tut tut in later Catholic eyes).  Along with the fifth century theologian Augustine, he argued that these were illustrative stories.  Sure the Israelites went off and smote people in foul ways that would have landed them in a tribunal at the Hague in our own time….but these tales are simply pointing us towards better behaviour.  So – for example – the Israelites finding and killing five kings in a cave – it’s not what it looks like.  No, the five kings (Origen tortuously explains) are the five human senses which dwell in the cave of our mind.

That didn’t wash with the Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century – including a couple of the Founding Fathers of the United States.  The writer and fervent supporter of the American revolution, Thomas Paine, even said that the god of the Old Testament was so abhorrent that he had little by way of moral virtue.  He should be completely discarded.

In a book out last year called ‘Laying Down the Sword: Why we can’t ignore the bible’s violent verses‘ – Philip Jenkins says it’s pointless trying to ignore the insanely vicious nature of some of the bible.  He argues that the bible is actually more violent than the Koran, it’s just that Christians have gradually eased away from the tribal conflicts that obviously fired up some of the book’s many authors.  Parts of the Old Testament are borderline genocidal and Jenkins asks us to try and look at the Israelites through the eyes of the Canaanites – and imagine how scary they would have seemed.

Several blogs give almost amusing examples of the psychotic behaviour of God.  For example – he leads his people out of captivity in Egypt.  A joyous occasion for the world to be sure.  Unless you happen to be King Og of Bashan and his people whom God took a dislike to and ordered the Israelites to slay en masse not leaving a single person standing.  Expanding in to Palestine, God ordered his people at various times to wipe out entire populations including the citizens of Jericho.  The prophet Samuel instructed Saul to kill all the Amelakites….and he meant all of them.  Men, women, children, babies in arms, herds, flocks, camels, asses, etc   Quite how a camel had offended God is anybody’s guess.

Or how about Isaiah on what should happen to the good folk of Babylon: “All who are found will be stabbed, all who are taken will fall by the sword, their infants will be dashed to the ground before their eyes…”

Nice.

Critically for the Templars, Bernard was a massive advocate for the Templar order – and exercised a significant influence on Innocent.  This would signal a decisive turn for the warrior knights.

The first Grand Master Hugh de Payens had been a tireless promoter of the Templars around Europe and his successor Robert de Craon was better connected and ready to take the order to the next level.  He was more blue-blooded than Hugh and able to network to far greater effect.  As the First Crusade drew to a close, the confidence of the Templars and their numbers were increasing, as was their wealth and prestige.  What they needed was a massive dose of papal approval.

Robert made a bee-line for Innocent, who was now safely established in Rome at the Lateran Palace.  The Order wanted a degree of independence to be able to function more effectively.  In Jerusalem, they were pulled this way and that by the crusader king of Jerusalem and the Christian patriarch.  In the west, they wanted to be able to run their estates and manage the affairs of their preceptories without having to answer to local lords and bishops.

For a pope who’d had to struggle against many foes to get control of the church, the idea of having a military order of sword wielding monks being wholly loyal to his person alone must have been very appealing.  Never mind about the feelings of local bishops, the pope needed strong armed support and the Templars looked like just the ticket.

The perks he now showered on the Templar Order would ultimately prove to be its undoing and there were some grumbles at the time.  They could appoint their own chaplains, build their own churches, exempt themselves from taxes and tithes, ignore local prelates and bury their own dead.

The Templars would not have to pay homage to anybody on earth except the pope and nobody could force them to swear an oath – except the pope.  Robert de Craon wasted no time in making sure the world knew about this highly agreeable state of affairs.  To the chagrin of clergy and nobility alike, he put the papal bull in to practice with gusto.

Even to the point of pushing the newly translated Templar Rule (Latin to French) in to areas it’s doubtful Innocent could have approved of.   For example, the Rule now said that the Templars could recruit the excommunicated – those whom the church had rejected and punished with damnation.  Did the pope ever really intend that?  Doubtful. Most likely it was a way in which the Templars chose to use their newly found independence to do what would previously have been unthinkable.  Was this kind of boldness that would eventually rebound on them?

William’s elder brother, Geoffrey, is now the Earl and relations between him and his brother are strained.

William was fighting on crusade in outremer but has been forced to return to England in disgrace.  His Templar superiors have told him he will never return to the Holy Land.

To find out more about William and his story – join him now on Facebook!

Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Cambridge

The church was founded with the blessing of the abbot of nearby Ramsey Abbey at around the time the Templars were founded.  A confraternity linked to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem is mentioned.  Nobody seems to know what this confraternity was – which of course begs the question whether it was the Templars.

The church was renovated in the 19th century and for once, the Victorians seem to have got it right.  The work done was sensitive to the original design and the overall impression is authentic to the period.  Worth a visit!

For all you incurable romantics – here is Arthur and Guinevere portrayed by different actors.

A Yuletide feast at the court of King Arthur is interrupted by a strange figure who enters on horseback.  He has a green beard, green robes and is riding a green horse.  He has a holly branch in one hand and an axe in the other.  The only thing that isn’t green are his eyes, which are red.  But this is undeniably – the Green Knight.  A threatening chap who throws down a challenge to the knights of the Round Table.  One of them should strike a blow at him and in a year’s time, he will strike a blow of equal force back at his assailant.

All the knights look at him askance. So he starts to mock their fabled courage.  So much for King Arthur and his glorious knights.  Well, the king isn’t going to take that kind of talk lying down so he gets up to strike the Green Knight.  However, just as the monarch is about to defend his honour, Sir Gawain insists that he put things right and with that Gawain chops the Green Knight’s head clean off.  That should have been an end to the matter but rather unexpectedly, the Green Knight’s now headless body walks over to the head, picks it up and informs Gawain that the challenge still stands.  See you in a year.

As the time draws near to meet the Green Knight, Gawain embarks on a long journey to meet him at a place called the Green Chapel where he will have to meekly receive the strike that is owed.  Gawain, no doubt with an eye on his immortal soul and possibly hoping for some divine intervention this side of the grave, tries to be chivalrous and noble.  But things go a bit wrong on that front when he ends up staying at a castle where Christmas is once more being celebrated – as it was a year before in Arthur’s court.

The lord of the castle is an amiable enough noble, called Bertilak de Hautdesert, who convinces Gawain to stay.  The Green Chapel, he explains isn’t far away and so he shouldn’t fret about making it there on time.  He then strikes a rather odd bargain with Gawain.  Bertilak explains his daily routine of hunting in the forests and suggests that when he returns, the two men should share whatever gain they have made during that particular day.

Sure enough, Bertilak goes off hunting leaving Gawain to snooze in bed – where the lord’s wife pops in to get better acquainted.  Gawain tries to resist her charms. But in the end he concedes a single kiss from her.  When Bertilak returns, he gives Gawain some venison he has killed.  Gawain responds by….giving him a kiss!  On the second night, he concedes two kisses to Bertilak’s wife and when the lord returns once more from hunting and gives Gawain a wild boar he has bagged, the slightly less chivalrous knight gives him two kisses.  On the third occasion when Bertilak has gone off hunting in the early morning and Gawain is left with his wife, she wants to exchange a love token. But he refuses a ring which is too valuable.  However, she then offers her green girdle which has magical powers and will protect him from all harm.  Well, Gawain can hardly refuse given the predicament he is about to face.

Bertilak comes back to the castle with a dead fox and gives Gawain the pelt.  The knight gives him three kisses.  But he does not give him the green girdle.  Incidentally, you might have thought all these kisses from Gawain would have aroused some kind of suspicion in Bertilak but at this stage in the story….apparently not.

It’s the appointed time to meet the Green Knight and Gawain goes off to find the Green Chapel with the Green Girdle wrapped twice around his waist.  He chances upon the mouth of a cave which he decides must be the chapel and indeed, the Green Knight appears with a freshly sharpened axe.  Gawain stretches out his neck to receive what will surely be the death blow but in an act of shameful cowardice, ducks the axe.  The Green Knight is rather annoyed and Gawain apologises as he bares his neck again.

The Green Knight brings the axe down a second time but then pauses, the blade just inches away, saying he was just testing Gawain’s nerve that time….what an irritating man!   But we then move on to the third attempt – things always happen in three’s in medieval legends – and now he does make contact with the axe.   But he only inflicts a minor wound.

Gawain grabs his shield and makes to defend himself as the bargain has now been met – in his view.  The Green Knight tells him to cool it.  It’s all over as far as he’s concerned too.  Suddenly, the Green Knight reveals that he is Bertilak transformed in to the shape of the Green Knight by the sorceress Morgan le Fey, wicked sister of King Arthur.  She had been in disguise as an old lady in Bertilak’s castle and the two of them had cooked up this (rather pointless?) scheme.

The first two blows had not succeeded because Gawain had kept his promise to exchange the gains of the day but on the third day, he had kept the Green Girdle.  Only because this was to protect himself and not out of criminal intent did the Green Knight spare him.  Otherwise he’d have been groping around for his head by now.

A new article in History Today points out that we wouldn’t even know about this story if it hadn’t been for the bravery of a librarian in the eighteenth century.  In the year 1731, a terrible fire burnt down the Cotton Library – an incredible collection of books that over a hundred years before had been amassed by Sir Robert Cotton.  This gentleman of the Tudor/Stuart period had basically hoovered up as many books and manuscripts as he could find from the old monasteries, that Henry VIII had closed down.  Each of the bookshelves in this collection was topped by a Roman emperor’s bust and the indexing was linked to this so the Gawain story is referred to as ‘Cotton Nero A.X.’  It’s the only copy of the story and if it had disappeared, we wouldn’t know this tale from the Arthurian cycle.

The language used is a Middle English dialect from the north of England that reads and sounds bizarre:

The January 2012 edition of History Today speculates that the inspiring figure in this story could have been the fourteenth century prince and super-politician John of Gaunt.  The Green Girdle strikes History Today as being a reference to the Order of the Garter established by Gaunt’s father, king Edward III.  So, although this is notionally about Arthur and his knights lost in the mists of time, the references are firmly in the fourteenth century.

Well, that’s one theory among many and rooting around online you’ll find plenty of discussions among Gawain obsessives as to what this story is really all about.  Here’s a recent BBC documentary shedding some light on the mystery.

And here’s an animated cartoon of the story

There was a boy called Richard, son of John le Mazon, who was only eight years old and after a meal was making his way to school, walking across London Bridge – in the year, 1301.  On a sudden impulse, he decided to grip a beam on the side of the bridge and just hang there by his finger tips. Regrettably, he couldn’t keep his grip and fell down in to the river Thames and drowned.

In 1322, on the Sunday before the feast of Saint Dunstan, a group of boys were laying on a pile of timber. One was a seven year old called Robert, son of John de Saint Botulph and they continued to mess around until a heavy piece of wood tumbled on to Robert’s leg.  His mother, Johanna, arrived and managed to release her son’s leg which was fractured. Now, breaking a leg is not the end of the world in our modern age, but in the 14th century, this was a medical disaster. The child lingered on until the Friday before the Feast of Saint Margaret, at which point he died.

This is a rather odd story – in 1324, a five year old called John, son of William de Burgh, was at the property of Richard Latthere when he got it in to his head to steal a small amount of wool and try and hide it in his cap.  Richard’s wife, Emma, saw what he did and cuffed him hard round the ear.  He clearly made quite a din as a result and bawled his eyes out.  John’s mother raised the hue and cry – that is, she alerted other townsfolk to her plight by screaming her head off – and the boy was carried away.  At around the curfew bell of the same day, John died.  Emma fled though subsequently surrendered herself to the prison at Newgate.

Norman England in the 12th century was surprisingly cosmopolitan though not necessarily for the nicest of reasons.  French settlers were encouraged by England’s overlords to dilute the old Saxon ruling class.  Winder says that it was noticeable that foreign merchants could obtain royal permits to trade with relative ease compared to the local Saxons who were still mistrusted. Through the ports of London, Bristol and Southampton came goods – and people….from Flanders, France, Genoa and Venice.  Flemish masons worked on cathedrals and castles while German copper miners instructed locals how to dig for the precious metal. The Germans and Dutch were also very prolific in the beer trade.

Edward III was so impressed by the contribution being made to the country’s well-being by the foreigners that he even joined a Flemish guild.  However, lower down the social scale, there were plenty of English folk who resented the obvious wealth of these merchants who had come from strange lands overseas. To the Saxon poor, it looked like they were literally fleecing the country – benefiting from the great wool industry run by the Cistercian monks who then sold their produce to the Flemish weavers.  This did lead to what we might call in modern parlance ‘race riots’ against merchants from Europe and that did include lynchings and pogroms. England wasn’t the only country to see this kind of xenophobia – but it certainly shocks many English today to know it happened.

One community though suffered from growing hatred and suspicion more than any other. Initially brought over and nurtured by the Norman kings after the conquest of 1066, they found that success came at a cruel price.  The Jews of England engaged in what we might call ‘usury’ but was a primitive form of banking finance.  They did this partly because they were barred from other professions and also because of Christian prohibitions on the flock earning interest from transactions – similar to Islamic prohibitions still in force today.  So the Jews set up a network of financing that would be the germ of what London is today – the financial capital of Europe, if not the world.

Aaron, a moneylender in Lincoln, financed the building of the local cathedral – which remains a glory on the skyline.  He lent to the King of Scotland, the Archbishop of Canterbury and several Cistercian monasteries.  When he died, his estate was taken over by the king and an entire department of state – the Scaccarium Aaronis – was required to work its way through his holdings.

The Jews were effectively the property of the King and harming them was in effect, damaging the king’s property. Rates of interest were undoubtedly high – though comparable to some credit cards today!  Typically, a noble might expect to pay back double the original loan by the end of the year. However, money was needed and wasn’t always readily available in the medieval economy so the Jews were on to something of a winner.

Some of the most prolific moneylenders, according to Winder, were women.  Licoricia of Oxford gave two thousand, five hundred pounds towards the building of Westminster Abbey.  Did she care about such a building? No. But it certainly helped her relations with the King, who was after all her protector. Fund his pet projects and life could go on as usual. Belaset of Wallingford was another women in the usury game and her name is assumed to mean ‘nice assets’ – a little bit of medieval humour there!

It’s crucial to point out that not every Jew in England was a moneylender. Some were, needless to say, rabbis but there were also doctors and shopkeepers and artists.  But it’s the money lending that brought them most in to the public eye.  Certainly the king’s eye.  Increasingly, the Norman and then Angevin kings decided that it would be far more advantageous to tax the Jews instead of borrowing from them.  After all, a king can do that kind of thing.  So the Jews suffered an ever growing tax burden – which they no doubt passed on in part to their increasingly disgruntled customers.

Even a king like Henry II – a friend to both the Jews and the Templars – drained Jewish finance for his own needs.  His son Richard the Lionheart was brutal in squeezing the Jewish community – and the rest of England – to fund his crusades against Saladin.  In fact, it was in the year of Richard’s coronation – 1189 – that the first serious outbreaks of violence against Jews in England erupted.  Most appallingly was the death of 150 Jews in York herded in to a castle tower and murdered.  Elsewhere, the Jews were able to take refuge in castles and nobles felt obliged to extend the King’s protection over them.  But the writing was on the wall – things were going to get a lot worse.

Matters were not helped by a series of so-called ‘blood libel’ incidents across northern Europe.  In Norwich, a child called William was found crucified and his blood drained allegedly by the Jews. Similar cases occurred elsewhere.  I think it’s safe to say these were completely fabricated but they gave the mob a very good excuse to attack Jewish property.

The nail in the coffin was a hardening of attitude on the part of the Angevin kings.  John badly needed finance and even had one Jewish moneylender in Bristol tortured till he handed over ten thousand Marks.  The method of torture was to have a tooth extracted every day until he agreed.  He apparently got to the seventh tooth before giving in!

Henry III personally attended the torture of a Jewish man – Copin of Lincoln – accused of another blood libel against a child called Hugh.  Torture extracted the required confession and he was dragged through the town then hanged.  This legitimised assaults and murders on Jews and in 1263 on Palm Sunday in London, about four hundred Jews were slaughtered.  Winder makes the point that this event hardly figures in most England history books.

The kings were simply moving towards confiscation of Jewish wealth – no more borrowing or taxation – just seizure.  The Templars, of course, would also see opportunistic monarchs grab their holdings and eventually terminate the Order.  In 1275, the final act in this tragedy unfolded as Edward I issued his Statutus de Judeismo which stated:

Forasmuch as the King hath seen that divers evils and the disinheriting of good men of his land have happened by the usuries which the Jews have made in time past, and that divers sins have followed thereupon albeit that he and his ancestors have received much benefit from the Jewish people in all times past, neverthless, for the honour of God and the common benefit of the people the King hath ordained and established, that from henceforth no Jew shall lend anything at usury either upon land, or upon rent or upon other thing.

So Edward basically said – thanks for everything you’ve done in the past but I’m now ending it all for you.  Already Jews had been banished from several towns, now they would be forced to wear identification badges – so the Nazis weren’t the first to invent this:

And that each Jew after he shall be seven years old, shall wear a badge on his outer garment that is to say in the form of two tables joined of yellow fait of the length of six inches and of the breadth of three inches.

Measure by measure was enacted against the Jews, eventually banning their religious customs. In 1290, they were given a deadline of the first of November, All Saints Day, to leave England.  One captain ferrying a boat load of Jews across the wide Thames estuary hit a sandbar and invited his passengers to get out and stretch their legs.  He then sailed off, leaving them stranded, shouting obscenities to the effect that they could pray to Moses to save them.  All of the passengers drowned.

It would take four hundred years and the rule of Oliver Cromwell in the 17th century for Jews to be  re-admitted to England.