The Green Ages
By Jonathan H. Jones
Jonathan H. Jones has recently reviewed The Green Ages by Annette Kehnel (Brandeis University Press, 2024) for Medieval World: Culture & Conflict, issue 17.
There is so much original information in this book about how people related to each other economically and communally in the medieval period. It leads the reader into a reappraisal about how ordinary people lived in those times and how they bonded through co-operation and a network of indebtedness between all levels of society, which fueled the workings of business trade and human wellbeing.
Contemporary historians often dig deeper into primary sources, more so than their predecessors. In the course of studying information on the workings of the Assyrian court from about 1000 BCE, I was struck by how the translation of thousands of cuneiform tablets had opened a door onto the lives of merchants and judges, farmers and traders from a world 3000 years from our own. Such sources offer insight into daily concerns and family lives.
Anette Kehnel has undertaken a similar depth of research in The Green Ages. The lives of ordinary shepherds, male and female merchants, farmers and tradesmen have emerged from the records of local councils, courts, and the working agreements of local people banded together to protect the ecological future of their fishing businesses or the protection of their woodland.
The banks called Monte di Pietà (mountain of piety) grew in medieval Italy. Poor people received loans with affordable interest rates. These banks used funds from the rich and the Church as capital, lending the money to the poor to protect them from loan sharks. Debtors offered valuable items, jewellery and furniture and even clothing as collateral, allowing the Monte di Pietà to operate almost as a pawn broker.
At the time, the Church, often heavily criticised for oppression and corruption, showed a kinder face in its dealings with the mass of the people. Popes supported Jewish money-lenders to make the system run efficiently. All of this activity boosted the growth of the financial sector in Italy, contributing to the commercial Revolution of the thirteenth century.
I few years ago I attended a talk by the eminent British Tudor Historian David Starkey. Starkey said “that when he was studying history at Cambridge University there was little understanding of the importance of religion in Tudor society - that was particularly true of the Professor of Religious history.”
Kehnel makes it very clear in this book that the Church played a major role in binding society together, sometimes benevolently and sometimes oppressively. And the Church was not always resistant to new ideas.
The Franciscans enter onto the stage of mediaeval Italy almost as the Hippies did in the 1960s.The young Francis, after a rather dissolute start, embarked on a life of extreme simplicity. He spurned his former rich clothes and the ownership of any personal property for a simple, coarse monk’s habit. Dedicating himself to the poor and then to a life immersed in nature as an early ecologist, he served as a model t others. Thousands of young men joined the movement across Europe. They were embracing a minimalist way of life that had been pioneered by the Greek philosopher Diogenes (at the time of Alexander of Macedon) and the Cynics who came after him.
The disapproval of the older generation was predictable, but the Church took a surprisingly tolerant stance to the Franciscans and supported their promotion of the simple life. The Franciscan order encouraged the establishment of Monte di Pietà, and they preached a penniless life of simplicity dedicated to God: although as the order became more established, the degree of poverty varied.
We are living in a very different age now from the Middle Ages. In the last fifty years, humanity (at least in the wealthiest parts of the world), has pursued a policy of heedless hedonism very different from those medieval people who tried to preserve their means of making a living for themselves and those who came after them.
The human race has more than doubled in size in the course of my own lifetime, and the finite resources of our world have been ruthlessly plundered. In the Western sphere, religious institutions do not currently hold such great influence over society, but the role (in its benevolent form) that they once played has not been taken up effectively by any other societal force.
The Green Ages is an important book coming to us at an important time in our own lives. The reader would do well to contemplate some of the lessons from the Middle Ages and see how they may help us reshape our current precarious world.
Jonathan H Jones is a historian and writer. His work in international commerce has given him an insight into many cultures across the world.