Winters in the World Read online

  WINTERS

  IN THE

  WORLD

  WINTERS

  IN THE

  WORLD

  A JOURNEY THROUGH THE

  ANGLO-SAXON YEAR

  ELEANOR PARKER

  REAKTION BOOKS

  For my parents

  Published by

  REAKTION BOOKS LTD

  Unit 32, Waterside

  44–48 Wharf Road

  London N1 7UX, UK

  www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

  First published 2022

  Copyright © Eleanor Parker 2022

  All rights reserved

  Page references in the Photo Acknowledgments and

  Index match the printed edition of this book.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

  Page References in the Index Match the Printed Edition of this Book.

  Printed and bound in Great Britain

  by TJ Books Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  eISBN 978 1 78914 671 4

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  INTRODUCTION: THE ANGLO-SAXON YEAR

  WINTER

  1 FROM WINTER INTO WINTER

  2 MIDWINTER LIGHT

  3 NEW YEAR TO CANDLEMAS

  SPRING

  4 THE COMING OF SPRING

  5 CHEESE AND ASHES

  6 EASTER

  SUMMER

  7 BLOSSOMING SUMMER

  8 FESTIVALS OF THE LAND AND SKY

  9 MIDSUMMER

  AUTUMN

  10 HARVEST

  11 FALLOW AND FALL

  12 THE MONTH OF BLOOD

  REFERENCES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  INDEX

  PREFACE

  This book is a guide and introduction to the Anglo-Saxon year, and my hope is that it will also serve as an introduction to the immensely rich and creative literature of Anglo-Saxon England – a treasury of poetry and thought, profoundly rewarding to explore but not easy for many people to access today. Quotations and references have all been chosen with this purpose in mind, prioritizing what will be most useful for the general reader. For reasons of space, it hasn’t been possible to give every quotation in the original Old English as well as in translation, but for selected short quotations I’ve included the original text too, to allow interested readers to get a flavour of the language. Many Old English words can be readily recognizable for speakers of Modern English, especially once you know that the unfamiliar letters þ (thorn) and ð (eth) are both pronounced ‘th’. Unless otherwise noted all translations are my own, so not every poem quoted is referenced in the endnotes, but all can be found in the ‘Further Reading’ section of the Bibliography.

  A famous preface from Anglo-Saxon literature, introducing one of the books which formed part of Alfred the Great’s programme for rebuilding education among the English in the late ninth century, compares the act of translation to going into the woods to collect timber, gathering materials for building and coming back laden with branches. The translator collected as much as he could carry from the original texts, he says, but still wished he could have brought more: ‘in every tree I saw something I needed at home.’ So he recommends every reader to go to the woods – the forest of books – and gather for themselves:

  I advise everyone who is able and has many wagons to make his way to that same wood where I cut these posts, and gather more for himself and load up his wagons with fine timbers, so that he may weave many elegant walls, and establish many a noble house, and build a fine homestead, and there dwell in happiness and peace both summer and winter.

  I’ve tried to make it possible for every reader of this book to do the same.

  INTRODUCTION: THE ANGLO-SAXON YEAR

  Winter byð cealdost,

  lencten hrimigost – he byð lengest ceald;

  sumor sunwlitegost – swegel byð hatost;

  hærfest hreðeadegost; hæleðum bringeð

  geres wæstmas, þa þe him God sendeð.

  Winter is coldest,

  spring frostiest – it is longest cold;

  summer sun-brightest – the sun is hottest;

  harvest most glory-blessed; it brings to men

  the year’s fruits, which God sends them.

  These lines are from an Anglo-Saxon poem called Maxims II, sketching a word-portrait of the cycle of the year. The four seasons are given the very briefest of descriptions, and each has one superlative, summing up its essential characteristic in a single word. Though they might sound like obvious statements, they’re not as straightforward as they seem. The cold of winter, the brightness of summer, the abundance of autumn, all immediately make sense – but is frostiest really the first thing that leaps to mind when you think of spring, the season of daffodils, blossom and baby lambs? Perhaps not. These lines offer a picture of a cycle we know by heart, and even some familiar words: winter, sumor, sun. But this is not quite our year, and the round of seasons this poet knew was both like and unlike our own.

  In this book, we’ll explore how poets like the anonymous author of Maxims II and the writers of other works from Anglo-Saxon England – histories, scientific texts, sermons and many more – thought about the cycle of the seasons. We’ll look at the festivals and traditions they associated with particular times of year, considering how the changing seasons affected patterns of work and religious custom, as well as investigating the language these English writers used to describe their experience of the year. The six centuries we today call the Anglo-Saxon period – six hundred summers and winters – were a formative time for English society, in which many things first took shape which, after the passage of centuries, are still to some degree recognizable as those the Anglo-Saxons knew: the English language; the settlement and naming of most of our cities, towns and villages; the monarchy; the national church; and England itself. Among the most enduring aspects of English life that evolved in the Anglo-Saxon period was the cycle of the year that we’ll be exploring in this book. Through the four seasons described by Maxims II, weaving in and out of the circling months, there developed a yearly round of feasts and festivals, celebrations and customs, which still forms the basis of our own seasonal cycle. Christmas and Easter, Candlemas and Whitsun, Michaelmas, Lent and Lammas – all these first began to be celebrated in this country during the Anglo-Saxon period and owe their names to the Anglo-Saxons. The later Middle Ages added more festivals to the calendar, the Reformation swept many away, but through more than a thousand years of religious, political and social upheaval the basic pattern of the festival year remained a stable part of life. Well into the twentieth century, it provided the shared cycle of high days and holidays, as well as all the common waymarkers in the agricultural, legal and educational year.

  Over the past hundred years, it has grown increasingly unfamiliar: many of us have lost touch with the agricultural calendars that determined these cycles of feast and fast, and in modern secular Britain we now celebrate a wide and diverse range of festivals alongside these older feasts. Even if the calendar is changing, though, our year is still shaped by the rhythms of the seasons, and as we go on our journey through the Anglo-Saxon year we’ll encounter some familiar sights: poets finding ways to capture in words the beauty of glittering ice, blossom and birdsong, green summer meadows or the falling leaves of autumn. There are also aspects of their year which can seem strange to modern eyes, and intriguingly so. We’ll see writers imagining the calendar imbued with divine power, as if time its
elf can be sacred; we’ll hear them explaining the close kinship between humans and the natural world, recognizing our own experiences of growth and decay reflected in the cycles of the sun and moon and the waxing and waning of plants and trees. We’ll explore an understanding of the world in which human life as lived through the seasons was one part of an organic whole, inseparable from the patterns of nature, where the natural, the human and the holy were interrelated in the most essential ways.

  THE MONTHS OF THE ENGLISH

  Let’s start by thinking about time. In modern Britain, the calendar in most widespread use is the Gregorian calendar, which, though devised in the late sixteenth century, has its origins in the Julian calendar used in the Roman Empire. It’s a solar calendar, following the cycle of the sun rather than the moon, and it has twelve months, whose names in Modern English also derive ultimately from the Latin month-names of the Roman calendar. We have four seasons in a year, though ideas about when they begin vary. While the Gregorian calendar is our common standard, though, many people live simultaneously according to other calendars too: different religious calendars, solar and lunar, which determine the dates of fasts and festivals, the calendars that structure school and university terms, the legal calendar, the tax year. Even the football season has a fixed calendar by which many people track the passage of time. All this may seem self-evident, but as we’ll see, the seasons of the Anglo-Saxon year don’t map directly onto any modern pattern – so it’s helpful to start by recognizing that our own calendar is a human construction, like any other, and not the only or the obvious way to organize the passage of time.1

  When considering Anglo-Saxon England, we should also think of a diversity of calendars, used by different groups in society for varying purposes. Farmers and monks, kings and labourers, would all have experienced the seasons in different ways, depending on the patterns of work that gave shape to their months and years. Nonetheless, there were some calendars that affected everyone. In the Middle Ages, the agricultural year was much more fundamental to most people’s lives than it is today, and some awareness of it would have been general. Even kings had to know how the harvest was going and order their plans by it; at times when labourers were needed for the harvest, they weren’t available to fight in their kings’ wars. For the majority of the Anglo-Saxon period, the liturgical year of the Christian calendar was also observed by society in common. Everyone kept the same seasons of fasting or observed religious holidays at the same time, since these dates were not a matter of personal choice but enforced by royal decree. When we talk about the agricultural and church calendars in a medieval context, we’re talking about communal structures of time that were shared across society.2

  Agricultural cycles were a constant, but when it came to the religious calendar, the Anglo-Saxon period witnessed a radical shift in the reckoning of time. At the start of this period in the fifth century, the peoples of Anglo-Saxon England were predominantly pagan; over the course of the seventh century they converted to Christianity, and with the new religion came an entirely new calendar. All our surviving written sources on this subject date from after the conversion, so it’s difficult to get a clear picture of what the structure of the year might have been like beforehand. For that we’re largely dependent on one important source, a short chapter in a work by the Anglo-Saxon historian Bede. Around 725, Bede wrote a book called De temporum ratione (The Reckoning of Time), a learned discussion of the calendar and the principles by which time was calculated in the medieval church.3 In the early Middle Ages, this was the science of computus, a source of endless fascination to mathematically minded medieval scholars. Computus was important because it taught you how to calculate the date of Easter – crucial for working out the dates of other key festivals in the church year – but there were many other aspects to this study too. It involved understanding the cycles of the moon; calculating leap years; knowing the proper dates of the months, seasons, equinoxes and solstices; and measuring periods of time from the briefest to the longest, the instant to the aeon.

  All these topics are explored in Bede’s De temporum ratione. One purpose of his text is to explain that there are many different ways of reckoning these things across different cultures; his discussion shows that calendars are the product of convention and human reasoning, so they’re culturally determined and prone to change, error and correction. But for Bede, as for other medieval scholars, the study of time was not just a human science, but a sacred pursuit. In their eyes, the structure of the year reflected profound truths about the nature of the universe, planned and created by God, which found expression in every detail of the calendar. Time was part of God’s creation; to study it was to learn something about the mind of its divine creator.

  In discussing the year’s structure in different cultures, Bede lists the month-names of the Hebrew, Roman, Greek and Egyptian calendars and adds a brief chapter about the ‘months of the English’ in ancient times, before the Anglo-Saxon conversion to Christianity. ‘It did not seem fitting,’ he says, ‘that I should speak of other nations’ observance of the year and yet be silent about my own.’4 What he tells us about the pre-conversion calendar is a tiny part of a lengthy work, and it doesn’t take long to summarize. Before the conversion, he suggests, the Anglo-Saxons used a lunisolar calendar and divided the year into two seasons, summer and winter. Winter began on the full moon of the month roughly equivalent to October in the Julian calendar, which for this reason was called Winterfylleð. The two months around each solstice shared a name, suggesting that these were important turning points of the year, and Bede says that the year began on 25 December (that is, probably the winter solstice), which was called Modraniht, ‘mothers’ night’. He then lists the names of the months in English and offers an explanation for each name. As the calendar was lunisolar, these wouldn’t be exactly equivalent with the months in the Julian calendar to which Bede matches them, but from his information we can construct a list (see table).

  We’ll explore the names he provides in more detail as we go on. Some of Bede’s suggested etymologies are convincing, but others, as we’ll see, have been challenged by modern scholars.5 Most likely Bede wasn’t relying on personal knowledge but was using a written source for the month-names and adding his own speculations about their meaning – and in some cases he may just have been guessing. This means that although this is a very useful and interesting list, it has to be taken with some caution. These names don’t seem to have been in widespread use in Anglo-Saxon England, at least after the seventh century; Bede implies they had already fallen out of use by the time he was writing, and in our surviving written sources they have been replaced for most practical purposes with the Latin month-names from the Julian calendar. When writers do use the Old English names recorded by Bede, it’s typically as a kind of scholarly curiosity. They appear alongside the Latin names in English calendars as late as the twelfth century, sometimes with month-names in Hebrew and Greek too, for those who really wanted to show off their calendrical learning. But the people who wrote those calendars were usually copying from Bede, so these sources don’t tell us that the names were actually in general use in Anglo-Saxon England, any more than the Hebrew and Greek ones were.

  Latin month English name Bede’s interpretation

  December and January Geola named after the winter solstice

  February Solmonað ‘month of cakes, which they offered to their gods in that month’

  March Hreðmonað named for a goddess, Hreða, ‘to whom they sacrificed at this time’

  April Eastermonað named for a goddess, Eostre, ‘in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month’

  May Þrymilce ‘because in that month cattle were milked three times a day’

  June and July Liða ‘gentle’ or ‘navigable’, because calm weather made these months good for sailing

  August Weodmonað ‘month of weeds, because they are very plentiful then’

  September Haligmonað ‘month of sacred rites’
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  October Winterfylleð because winter began on the full moon of this month

  November Blotmonað ‘month of sacrifices’, because cattle slaughtered then were consecrated to the gods

  What’s more, though Bede presents this list as ‘the months of the English’, it’s likely that there was originally a fair amount of diversity in month-names, rather than one unified system. Each region of Anglo-Saxon England (in Bede’s day, a group of separate kingdoms) spoke its own dialect of Old English, and Bede’s list may well record a system used in only one area. Some alternative Old English month-names are recorded in other sources, including Hlyda (March), Rugern (August) and Hærfestmonað (September), which seem to have been in use in other parts of the country. We should conclude, perhaps, that Bede isn’t describing to us the Anglo-Saxon year, but only one version of it, and there may have been other calendars of which we now have no record.

  Nonetheless, Bede’s evidence is very helpful, since some aspects of the system he describes seem to have endured for centuries – long after the Anglo-Saxons adopted Christianity, and with it the Julian calendar. He appears to be right, for instance, when he says that the Anglo-Saxons originally had a two-season year, summer and winter, which was replaced with the four-season structure with which we’re now familiar. This four-season pattern is used in a number of Anglo-Saxon texts (like Maxims II, the poem with which we began), and where these specify dates for the seasons, the transition usually occurs roughly halfway between the solstices and the equinoxes: winter starts on 7 November, spring on 7 February, summer on 9 May and autumn on 7 August. This means that the solstices and equinoxes fall at the middle or height of each season, rather than (as often today) marking the beginning. Bede discusses alternative systems for dating the seasons in De temporum ratione, but recommends this structure, which he attributes to ‘the Greeks and Romans’.6 Following his lead, calendars in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts frequently use these dates to mark the beginnings of the seasons. Some poems employ this system too, especially those most influenced by Christian learning and the liturgical calendar.