The Early Medieval World

  • Days of the week are derived from the names of Saxon gods:

    • Tuesday - Tiw

    • Wednesday - Woden

    • Thursday - Thor

    • Friday - Frigg, Woden's wife.

  • The Saxon word bury can be translated as “fort”.

  • The Saxon word chester can be translated as “camp”.

  • Churls were free men who owned farms of 90-100 acres.

  • Anglo-Saxon law was based on the idea of the wergeld, or “life price” of an individual.

  • The epic poem, Beowulf, provides an account of a Scandinavian warrior who rids a community of monsters that have ravaged the land.

  • One of its most notable literary features, common to Old English literature, is its reliance on compound phrases, or kennings, substituted for the usual name of a person or thing.

  • Around 563, an Irish monk, Columba, founded a monastery on the Scottish island of Iona. Augustine is credited with building a cathedral at Canterbury and a church dedicated to St. Paul in London.

  • Bishop Eadfrith designed the Lindisfarne Gospels.

  • The first Celtic cross was made by St. Patrick who made the mark of a Latin cross through the circle on an ancient standing stone monument.

  • On Christmas day, 800 CE, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor of the Roman Empire.

  • Roland’s horn was made from the ivory of an elephant's tusk.

  • The strict and unwritten code of conduct that guided a knight consisted of:

    • Courage in Battle

    • Loyalty to his lord and peers

    • A courtesy verging on reverence toward women

  • The rule of Benedict of Nursia was imposed on all monasteries throughout Charlemagne’s Frankish kingdom.

  • The dining hall where monks ate their meals was known as the refectory.

  • Hilda, abbess of Whitby, ran one of the most prominent Anglos-Saxon monasteries. A community of monks and nuns.

  • A neum refers to a musical note used in Gregorian chants.

  • The Bayeux Tapestry documents the Norman invasion of England in 1066.

  • The Domesday Book resulted from a call by William I of Normandy for a complete survey of England so that he could more accurately determine how much tax he could raise to provide a new army.

  • Chartress claimed as its relic the tunic that the Virgin Mary wore when she gave birth to Christ.

  • Vezelay claimed as its relic the bones of Mary Magdeline.

  • The barrel vault is the elongated masonry structure spanning an interior space and shaped like a half cylinder.

  • The voussoir refers to wedge-shaped stones that form the arch in a Romanesque church.

  • The mandorla refers to an almond-shaped oval of light signifying divinity, imported from the Far East through Byzantium and commonly used by Romanesque artists.

  • Pope Innocent III was the author of On the Misery of the Human Condition, whose message was adopted as an official doctrine of the Western Catholic Church.

  • The translation for memento mori is the reminder of death.

  • Odo of Cluny is often credited with developing one of the first effective systems of musical notation a method which used letters A through G to name even notes of the Western scale.

  • Guido of Arezzo introduced the idea of depicting notes on a staff of lines so that the same note always appears on the same line.

  • Venice manipulated the Fourth Crusade to its advantage, resulting in its becoming one of the most powerful city-states in the eastern Mediterranean.

  • In the decade that she lived at Poitiers, Eleanor and her daughter, countess of Champagne, established that city as the center of a secular culture that celebrated the art of courtly love.

  • Beatriz de Dia composed “Cruel Art the Pains I’ve Suffered”.

  • Chretien de Troyes composed Lancelot, which centered on the adventures of a knight in King Arthur’s court.

  • Lancelot is considered an example of a “medieval romance”.

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