Open Writing

I have just finished what will almost certainly be my last book. Oddly it is not the writing I will miss. My blog uses up a week’s intellectual energy. The great joy of authorship is researching, gradually assembling the building blocks of books. The excitement of discovering gems of information which others have missed; of gradually bringing your subject to life.

The best time was researching my book on Owain Glyndwr when for two years or more I immersed myself in medieval life. I share the Buddhist belief that there is no such thing as death. Everything else in nature recurs. Why not the human spirit? Since it has no physical substance it cannot decay as the body does. I think we have lived in every age since time began so that researching the lives of people in the fourteenth century was more remembering than discovering.

Living in the Middle Ages was pure joy. There was something deeply endearing about its inhabitants. It is like living in Christmas before it became a vulgar sales opportunity. Even the carols are better and plain song is music at its most harmonious.

The medieval Chronicles were pure tabloid journalism. Adam of Usk’s writings were a series of the sort of page leads the Mirror used to produce in the days when it was a newspaper. He described the ceremony of proving the Pope was a man by examining his private parts whilst he was seated on a commode like seat, before an audience of thousands. When th Priest announced “ He Has Balls” the congregation roared back “ God Be Praised”,He wrote of a hound devoted to Richard II until he was deposed when it left him for his successor Henry IV.

So obsessed did I become with Medieval monk artists that I made a collection of facsimiles of their breath-taking illuminated manuscripts; the books of hours with lively pictures of peasant life; the Psalters where the margins are filled with drawings of piety and the scribbles of fornicating monks at play. But above all I loved the Bestiaries in which the fact they hadn’t seen so many of the beasts did not prevent the scribes from describing them.

Thus the beaver, whose testicles are used in medicine and eagerly sought.When it is pursued it bites them off and throws them to their hunter. Chased a second time, it stands on its back legs to demonstrate it no longer possesses them.

Elephants, which are unable to bend their legs, sleep leaning against trees. Hunters are advised to partly saw the trunks of trees so that they will break under the elephant’s weight and the beast fall over.

The panther, which is prey to all creatures because of the sweetness of its breath, eludes capture by throwing crystal balls as it flees. The hunters pause and, mistaking their reflection for a rival, stay to fight it whilst the panther breathes a perfumed sigh of relief. The ibex has two horns which are so strong that when it falls from a high precipice its horns bear the weight of its body and it escapes unhurt. Or my favourite:

“The unicorn, which is also called the rhinoceros in Greek. It can be caught in the following fashion; a girl who is a virgin is led to the place where it dwells and left alone there. As soon as the unicorn sees her it jumps into her lap and embraces her and goes to sleep there; then the hunters capture it.”

My most exciting find was a sort of medieval “Health and Safety” regulations for waging war.It was an insert folded into the Black Book of the Admiralty . Making war on holy days is forbidden and the discomfort of being under siege can be eased. The siege is lifted until an agreed date. If the town is not relieved by that date it surrenders.

War was taken very seriously. When Edward I captured a Scottish castle he invited its constable to a sumptuous feast.

But when he saw the amount of supplies in the castle Edward decided that the Constable could have opposed him more vigorously. He had him beheaded for not resisting the king’s attack.