Hildegarde

It’s Sunday, and on Sunday I have a ritual–actually, it’s less a ritual than a desperate attempt not to let myself burn out. 

My instinct seems to be, for some reason or the other, to overwork.  What’s more, I don’t just overwork at writing, I overwork at everything.  This has a tendency, if it isn’t broken up at regular intervals, to make me feel as if my head were about to explode.

Anyway, on Sundays, unless I have an urgent deadline urgently looming, I take the day off.  On the seventh day He rested, the verse says, and then the Christians changed that to make it the first. 

Or something.  I’m not really entirely sure how they worked that out.

What I do to take a day off is to put music on and read whatever book I’m reading, in reasonable peace when not interrupted by offspring who think they have emergencies.

With my two, emergencies often come down to “can we eat in the family room tonight and watch Die Hard for dinner?”

Since the answer to this is, on a Sunday, almost always no–exceptions are made for times when I have a bad flu–the relaxation thing can give way to a lot of tedious disputation.  Both of my sons seem to have inherited what their father called “lawyer blood.”

There were no such disputations this morning.  My calm was unbroken, and I put on two Anonymous 4 CDs–first Origins of Fire and then 11,000 Virgins–to provide the back up music for my book, which is the John Guy biography of Thomas Becket.

Anonymous 4 is a group of four women who sing Medieval music both secular and religious a capella.  The two CDs mentioned above are religious music written by–wait for it–Hildegarde von Bingen.

And maybe I should say used to sing, since the group broke up some years ago.

Still, the fit was near perfect, and it would all have been more perfect still if I’d had a copy of The Lion in Winter to watch this afternoon.  But that is one of the movies we’ve yet to replace on DVD, and it isn’t up on Netflix at the moment either.

I’ll think of something.

For what it’s worth, The Lion in Winter is one of only two reasonably accurate depictions of the Middle Ages I’ve ever seen on film, the other one being the movie of The Name of the Rose, and in both cases the reason for accuracy is the refusal to sentimentalize the period. 

The real Middle Ages bear little or no resemblance to what goes on in fantasy novels–even in Tolkein.  And one of my frustrations with Tolkein is that, unlike most of his many imitators, he knew better.

Right now, though, I want to put all that aside.  Yes, I know–there were no antibiotics, no modern medicine.  Women died more often from childbirth than from any other cause, and I myself would definitely have ended up dead at my first attempt.  There was no central heating, and even the largest fireplace failed to keep the nobility warm in what was a little ice age.  Children were born with birth defects that could not be ameliorated and then hounded and abused because of them.  Almost everybody, including the nobility, was illiterate.

So, as I said, I don’t want to sentimentalize the Middle Ages.

It did occur to me, though, this morning, reading the Becket biography, that if I consider the issues that bother me most in today’s society and today’s government–

If I think first about the administrative state and the way in which it attempts to regulate every aspect of private life, no matter how minor–

Then the people of the Middle Ages, at least in England, were better off than I am now.

In both the h istory of events and the  history of ideas, we tend to concentrate on the Big Questions–freedom of speech, for instance, and freedom of conscience.

And in Medieval England, you could certainly get into a lot of trouble for those things. 

Contrary to the mythology, there really wasn’t much in the way of witch hunting in England in that period.  Still, religious dissidents could get into trouble with both the ecclessiastical authorities and the civil ones, and religious minorities (like Jews) could have their property confiscated or even be banished from the kingdom.

And I’m me.  I can’t shut up and I tend to be a contrarian, which means I probably would have been in trouble from off.

Even so, the areas of private life and private action that were untouched and unscrutinized by any authority are truly breathtaking to contemplate.

You raised your children as you saw fit to raise them, educated them (or not) as  you saw fit to educate them, had them trained for a trade or not as you saw fit to train them.  What went on inside the privacy of your own home was your business.  A man’s home is his castle, the English said, and by that they meant something far more absolute than anything we can contemplate now.

Some people will respond to this by saying that some of the things that went on in those castles were violent and unjust, that child abuse was rampant, that domestic violence was the rule rather than the exception.

I’d say that a large part of our perception of this period on issues such as these comes from the fact that we have changed our definitions of these things, and continue to change them. 

But it’s the change in approach that bothers me, and not just as it relates strictly to private conduct in private homes.

Our child abuse legislation, for instance, assumes that children belong to the state and that the state may exercise “oversight” of their uprbringing, with “professional judgment” substituted for parental and allowed to override it on virtually any pretext.

And it’s not just the relationship between parents and children that are assumed to be properly subjected to this oversight.  Relationships between grown children and parents and between spouses also come under scrutiny.

“Domestic violence” is what the state says it is, regardless of the wishes of any of the parties involved–and in no case are the parties to be allowed to settle such issues among themselves.

People are arrested and jailed for things that were not crimes and not considered crimes at all only 20 years ago.

Spit on somebody?  That’s assault!  Have a fight with another kid on the playground?  Either or both of you is a bully!  You need therapy! Have a fight with another kid in the neighborhood?  That’s assault!  Kiss your girlfriend when the security cameras are on?  That’s sexual assault, and  you’re on the sex offender registry until you’re forty.

This approach to handling everyday life has become so ubiquitous, we forget that it wasn’t always that way.  When men got liquored up and went at each other in barroom parking lots, they mostly weren’t arrested.  If the cops came, they broke up the fight and sent the participants on their way.  Then everybody rolled their eyes and told the two of them they were idiots.

Certainly I don’t want to go back to the days when a woman could be brutally beaten by her husband over and over again while the cops refused to do anything about it even when she wanted him arrested.

Nor do I want to go back to a time when children were the property of their parents to the point that the parents could kill them if that’s what they wanted to do.

But both those things were minority cases, and I do think we’ve given up far too much in the way of personal liberty to insure that any member of that minority does not slip through the cracks.

Hell, we haven’t even managed to insure that.  There is no evidence whatsoever that social policing has reduced the number of severe abuse and neglect cases by even a single child or a single battered adult.

There are other areas of personal liberty we’ve lost as well–the right to decide who will or will not be served in the restaurant you own, and under what conditions; the right to make our own decisions about our own bodies in myriad ways.

In Medieval England, if you could afford to buy the alcohol you could drink it–and if you could make it on your own it was your business and nobody else’s.  If you owned a little house in town you could turn it into a boarding house on any terms you wanted, and you could pick and choose who to rent the rooms to if that was what you wanted.

I can hear the chorus of objection all the way from here–people got food poisoning! people were discriminated against because of prejudice!

Yada yada yada.

The real question, for me, is whether the things we’ve gained are worth the liberty we’ve lost.

And, I’ll admit it, I don’t think they are in most cases.