nichols

WOMEN IN SPORT: IMAGES FROM THE LATE MIDDLE AGES

JOHN A. NICHOLS

HISTORY DEPARTMENT

SLIPPERY ROCK UNIVERSITY

SLIPPERY ROCK, PA 16057

Email: john.nichols@sru.edu

Did you ever wonder what people did for entertainment in times past? For a number of years, as part of my research on the history of women, I have been collecting images of medieval women in manuscript illuminations and church sculptures. I was struck by the quantity of scenes in which women were physically engaged in sporting activities. My definition of sport in this regard is a term that applies to games, play, pastimes, and recreational amusements. I am aware that the modern definition of sport would not take these activities into consideration but the idea of a physical contest requiring highly trained athletes in an organized competition is, with the exception of the tournament, rarely to be found in the Middle Ages. Rather than use our twentieth century definition of sport, what I am offering is an alternative way to look at the manner in which women physically participated in activities that had them throwing, running, jumping, riding, etc. in behavior that aids in understanding the roles of women in this past time period.

Medieval society was divided into two classes: the aristocracy and the commoners. Since the duties and responsibilities differed for these two classes, it is evident that the pastimes and physical activities would differ for the women of these classes as well. Before illustrating the differences, however, I want to touch on some of the games or sports from the twelfth through fifteenth centuries that were enjoyed by women of both the common and the upper class especially in the countries of northern France and England.

The sport most everyone participated in was ball games. In a famous, illustrated manuscript in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University there is a medieval group of clergy playing at one such ball game. The person at bat is a Franciscan friar while the catcher with the ball in her hand is a Benedictine nun. The fielders consist of more nuns and priests who have their hands up ready to catch the ball. In ball games such as this, the balls were small about the size of a modern baseball so they could be batted or thrown. But if the ball game required the participant to kick the ball it was made of pig's bladder filled with dried peas and covered with a cloth. In Scotland, for example, there was an annual football contest in which single women played against married women. According to medieval records, the playing fields for football were very large, extending from one village to another, to accommodate great numbers of participants. The object was to kick or carry the ball across the opponent’s goal, which might be a known landmark such as a church or craft hall. Such football games were played with few rules. So violent was the sport that the local authorities tried to limit the play to specific days of the year. If that did not work then contests were permitted only for a short time period such as in the afternoon from five o’clock until sunset.

Another ball game enjoyed by all was bowling. The object of the game was to hit something by rolling a ball on the ground. In modern bowling, of course, the object is to knock over bowling pins. In the Middle Ages, however, the object is to hit a person since the bowlers tried to hit one another much like in a game of dodge ball. Persons hit by the ball were out of the game and the winner was the one who avoided being hit. Another version found in medieval illuminations is a sport called stool ball that was played between young women and men for a prize of kisses. The women would sit on milking stools and the men would roll a ball trying to hit the stool legs which the women would defend by kicking the ball away. If the legs of the stool were hit the woman had to give the man who tossed the ball a kiss. Medieval bowling was a simple game with the contestant aiming the ball at an object. Yet as with most sports it required skill, dexterity, practice, and coordination to become expert. Who would have dreamt that such ability would evolve into modern day events in which professional athletes would be given million of dollars to do something that was once enjoyed for fun.

Balls were not the only objects kicked or thrown, however, for during the winter months in northern Europe, snowball fights were enjoyed by both sexes and all classes of persons as documented from other manuscript illuminations. In a fifteenth-century letter, we are told that a young woman named Marietta had snowballs thrown at her by some young men and she counterattacked and played so skillfully that, as the letter reported, to the "contentment of all, this pleasant sport came to an end." The physical activity of playing in the snow was not limited to this one sport but included skiing and ice skating as well. In the twelfth century, William Fitzstephen wrote that the Londoners went outside the walls of the city to the great marsh that was frozen in winter where the skaters attached the shinbones of horses or cattle to their feet and by using poles made of iron would push themselves across the ice. Archaeology confirms both the manuscript illuminations and Fitzstephen's description in that many skates for men, women and children have been discovered at different sites in Europe. In 1899, an excavation at College Street in Ipswich uncovered the skeletal remains of a medieval woman who had drowned in a river. The mud not only revealed the body but also the ice skates that were attached to her feet when she apparently broke through the ice and drown.

Dancing was another pastime in which women of all classes excelled. In the accompanying illustration [FIGURE 1]

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can be seen a popular form called the round dance. In such a dance one would find a chain of dancers, sometimes open but usually closed to form a circle, who held hands or linked arms. They took three steps to the left, while their leader, who usually stood outside the circle as seen here, but might be a member of it, sang a lyrical stanza. Often musicians accompanied the activity by playing flutes, drums or stringed instruments. Some other illustrations document that both the peasants, as well as the nobility, enjoyed the round dance. Another form of dance was masked dancing in which the couples wore masks usually of animal heads to conceal one's identity. Dances of this type usually got completely out of hand because the masks made it impossible to identify the mischief of the dancer. For this reason masked dances were normally forbidden by the church except one day of the year called Mardi Gras or in English, Fat Tuesday, the day before Lent. With the passing of years the manner of dancing changed depending on ones social class. During the fifteenth century, for example, "…dances of the aristocracy lost their simplicity and became more elaborate and precise. The court dances..., became slow, grave, and stately, with extensive, accompanying gestures."

While women of both classes of medieval society enjoyed similar activities, only women of the common class could turn professional. For example, some women dancers of the lower class became so expert that they danced for money. Lords and ladies paid entertainers to come to their castles for festive occasions. Minstrels and jesters, in other words "fools," wore bright colored patchwork suits of green and yellow which symbolized freshness and youthfulness. Often their hoods and hats were adorned with bells that tinkled as the men or women jumped around in their skintight trousers. In addition to minstrels and jesters there were those who danced, pranced and somersaulted in the great hall. "Medieval dancing was so closely associated with acrobatics, when performed by professionals, that the seventh-century Anglo-Saxon translators of St Mark's gospel described Salome as jumping and leaping, rather than dancing before [King] Herod" in order to have John the Baptist beheaded for his slanderous remarks. In some manuscripts one can notice that Salome has swords in her hands which is another type of dance called the sword dance which was a favorite balancing accessory for a dancer. From a wooden carving found on the underside of a choir stall in a medieval English cathedral can be discovered a scene in which Salome is depicted as doing a back flip in front of Herod's table.

Teresa McLean wrote in her The English at Play that "fourteenth-century illustrations show both men and women tumbling, in all sorts of costumes, and often naked, and in all sorts of positions, some of them very gymnastic. Tumbling was popular because it was spectacular, either gymnastically or buffoonishly. [King] Edward II [of England] kept tumblers, one of whom used to amuse him by falling off his horse, for the handsome fee of twenty shillings a time. Women tumblers, by contrast, made a specialist art of keeping their balance. Sometimes balanced on tight-ropes, sometimes on the shoulders of male partners, often alone, to the sound of drums and pipes and the jingling of the little bells attached to their costumes.... They were more likely to have worn short, close-fitting tunics and coloured leggings, their hair tucked into sequined nets or plaits."

While some of these activities and sports described above relate to the common class, the pastimes or games of the aristocratic class differ in some degree. The reason is that members of the noble class did not perform manual labor but rather trained as knights which required them to become proficient with shooting arrows, wielding swords, riding horses, and hunting. All these activities are considered sports today but in medieval times were nothing more than an extension of a noble's livelihood.

While I am sure that you are aware that men were so active, what you might not realize is that women became equally adept at these same activities. Skill as an archer was important to knights but ladies also mastered this weapon. While the cross bow was popular with women and boys because it was easy to carry and excellent for shooting fowl, images survive that show that the long bow could also be drawn by women. The long bow was about six feet high and about one-and-a half inches wide at the center. It was usually made of ash or mountain yew. The strings were of hemp or flax. For maximum power the bow was drawn back to the ear, not the breast. The arrow made of oak or ash was from twenty-seven to thirty-nine inches long depending on the length of the woman's arm. The arrow feathers were from the brown wing feathers of a peacock. Targets were rose garlands, artificial parrots, dead or wooden roosters, human-shaped figures wrapped in cloth, and wooden pegs called "pricks." These targets were attached to wedged-shaped mounds of peat moss called butts. Archery was so popular an activity that we still have a number of expressions in English that relate to it: "high strung," "bracing" oneself for something, "being a butt" for someone's joke, and knowing the "upshot" of something.

Life in medieval times was dangerous and it was not always possible to have adequate protection. For this reason it made sense for a woman not only to carry daggers and swords but also be able to use them. In FIGURE 2,

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you can see a woman defending herself at the gatehouse of her castle. While knights fight one another inside of the crenellated walls of the castle and outside of the towered keep, a woman stands ready to fight with her broad sword in her right hand. Obviously women had to fight like men when called upon to do so.

Riding a horse was one means of getting from one place to another in the Middle Ages. As with most sports the ability to excel requires training and practice. As soon as aristocratic girls were old enough to ride they were allowed to do so on ponies. As they grew older the size and temperament of the horse was selected to match the rider. The breed of the horse determined its use. Fast running horses were arabian, those not so fast but with stamina were called palfreys, and the great war horses that carried the armed knight into battle were called destries. In FIGURE 3,

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we find a woman riding astride. Like the knight she hands a sealed charter to, she sits on a saddle and has her feet in stirrups. The bridle is held in her left hand and by this means she is able to controls her palfrey by way of the bit that is in the horse’s mouth. Until the last quarter of the fourteenth century when King Richard II’s wife, Ann of Bohemia, introduced riding sidesaddle in England, women rode astride like Chaucer’s wife of Bath "who sat her ambler easily."

Descriptions such as fighting and riding as given above do not allow us to presume that women were active participants in the preparing for war. Staged combat known as tournaments and the jousting that went on in them were the exclusive domain and sport of men. "These games trained and glorified knights and would-be knights, and from the mid-thirteenth-century onwards were run according to an increasingly elaborate code of chivalrous conduct." The first tournaments were held in open fields where teams of knights fought one another in a general melee. Later wooden barriers about seven feet high to stop horses from jumping out were erected. These structures marked the boundaries or field of what came to be known as a list. Tournaments could be fought to the death or for pleasure, yet even in the case of the latter, however, one could be hurt or even killed. By 1300, there was less group and more one-on-one combat to be seen with a fixed set of methods in determining a winner. The contest was to have three events with lances, three with sword, and three with axes. One would continue to fight until there was either a winner or the match ended in a draw. Women participated more as spectators, as seen in FIGURE 4,

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who cheered on the contestants and gave presents to champions. Far from being passive at these contests, the women in this illumination express their emotion by clapping their hands together, pointing out details of the melee, and covering their mouths to suppress perhaps a scream or cry. When the day was done, women also dressed the wounds of the defeated and, if called to do so, mourned the dead. The role of spectator must not be underestimated because as Allen Guttmann has pointed out "the presence of upper-class women at tournaments plainly signals transformation in function. The perfection of military prowess became ancillary and the tournament became a theatrical production in which fitness to rule was associated with fineness of sensibility." In other words, without the female spectator the tournament would not have evolved into "the" sporting event that has become synonymous with the Late Middle Ages.

The last sport I would like to mention in which medieval women actively engaged was hunting. I am afraid that most persons have the opinion that women did not enter into this sport or that their participation was limited. But this is far from the case and there is even an English woman, Dame Juliana Berners, who is reputed to have written a whole book on hunting in 1496. The book's hunting vocabulary and attention to detail prove that Dame Juliana was more than a late fifteenth-century sports writer but a hunting enthusiast herself. She identified three categories of hunting. The first was hunting with dogs that could either be done on foot in dense forest areas that required weapons of slings, spears, short bows and crossbows, hunting swords and knives, and three-pronged forks or on horse in the open country using all these weapons and also long-bows and javelins. The game was deer, wild boar, hares, fox, and the like.

The second manner of hunting was by using birds of prey, trained hawks, to bring down birds that flew beyond the range of arrows. Juliana Berners gave a list of medieval persons and the type of hawks suitable for each. She said the lady should hunt with the merlin, a small rapid-flying falcon that was excellent for catching birds in size from a thrush up to a partridge. In the thirteenth century "ladies had seals engraved, showing them with a bird on their fist." And in a French poem two ladies argue over whether hounds or falcons are better in hunting. They can not decide so a messenger is sent to John II, count of Tancarville, to ask his opinion on this matter. When the messenger is admitted into the lord’s chamber he found the count with a hawk on his fist thereby settling the issue. "Juliana was particularly fond of ... hawking which was the sport of both sexes but was a feminine specialty because it used small, graceful animals and because female falcons were better chase birds than male falcons." Hawking and falconry are interchangeable terms. The training, buying and keeping of both falcons and hawks was very expensive which made it an aristocratic sport.

The third area of hunting might come as a surprise, it is fishing. Commercial fishing has always seemed to exist, but a study in 1985 proved that fishing became a leisure activity in England, France, and Germany by the thirteenth century. Dame Juliana said that fishing was her favorite sport. "It will be a very great pleasure," she wrote, "to see the fair bright shining-scaled fishes deceived by your crafty means and drawn to land." While fishing requires but water, fish, pole and bait, the use of a boat seems to aid one in catching fish. Problems can develop, however, as evidenced by coroner rolls of thirteenth-century England which list five accidental deaths of women involving water. In two different occasions women, who may have been fishing, drowned when their boats capsized. While the other three cases record the death of women who drowned when they went swimming alone.

To sum up, sport is more popular today than at any other time in history when judged by the record attendance at athletic events, the huge revenues generated by sporting contests, the high salaries paid to top professionals, the intense competitions to own athletic teams and the passionate campaigns to stage international games such as the Olympics. The effects of this pervasive cultural activity demand the attention of professional historians, especially in the area of human relationships.

The presence of women’s sports has received wide recognition in recent years. But the role of women in a predominately male domain of sport is not confined to the twentieth century. In fact women participated in ancient sports, and some scholars of the history of sport have written about these women. On the subject of women in sport in the Middle Ages, however, few scholars have studied this topic. The purpose of this short illustrated article was to focus on some of the physical activities or sports in which medieval women participated.

I am not so naive as to think that all the manuscript illuminations I have shown you are of real life situations. While more work is needed to obtain the accuracy of these images, the predominance of images of women at play in church sculptures and manuscript illuminations, real or not, suggests a society which saw women as physically active. Yet I do not want to leave you with the impression that representations of women in art is the only proof that I have about women in medieval sport. Space does not allow me to cite more written evidence, which would confirm some of my conclusions, nor does space allow me to explore all the physical activities in which women participated. Yet I feel I have established that women did engage actively in my definition as sport during the Late Middle Ages. In trying to determine relationships in past societies, historians of women's history attempt to weigh the roles of men and women. If women were barred from engaging in specific activities it tells us about the status of women in that particular society. But if it can be established that women participated in activities that seemed to be the domain of men, such as sport, then we can conclude that such a society was more egalitarian when it came to relationships between men and women. The study of women in sport requires our attention if for no other reason than it helps us to understand such relationships in past civilizations and cultures.

Photo Credits:

The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, Figure 1 (M.667, f.137 detail); Figure 2 (M.806, f.148v detail); Figure 3 (M.806 f.259 detail); and Figure 4 (M.806, f.239v detail).