Friday Faction: Weird Medieval Guys

As the ideal suitor, if male, you should cut your hair in the chic bowl—or pudding bowl—style, and ideally have golden hair, and wear a houppelande, a long loose gown with flowing selves. Red is a good colour for men, indicating vitality, kingliness, and power. Blue is good for the ladies as it indicates expense. Should you ever suffer from cancer of the mouth, then you may be fortunate to receive a visit from the Virgin Mary, who will bestow upon you a kiss that will you heal of it. And should you want to press your ardour—perhaps as a show of thanks for her beneficence—there will be an angel on hand to prevent you from doing so. In order to launch a crusade, there are certain requirements which need to be fulfilled first, including equal measures of hardship and oppression, a pinch of famine, all of Europe’s collective sin and religious guilt, a helpless labouring class, a new and bordering anti-Christian empire, one Pope (never two), and an impending apocalypse. Preparation time is a single decade. Cooking time is three years. Serve with the death of thousands, including kings and princes, garnish with plunder, and four Crusader kingdoms with uncertain futures. In the event of an encounter with wolves—such as when the River Seine froze over in 1338, allowing them to race across the river and attack the citizens of Paris and dig up the city’s corpses—always remember to see the wolf before it sees you because it will lose its courage if it sees you first, plus if it sees you first, you will struck dumb, be unable to cry for help and the wolf will bite you. However, all is not lost, because if you strip down to your underwear, grab a pair of rocks and bang them together, the wolf will turn tail and run away. Lastly, if you happen to have a weapon to hand, at least a dagger, do take the time to kill the wolf. The wolf will not be happy about this and will not want you to feel happy about it either. This is a trick. Do not fall for it. Fortunately, wolves have no legal protection and you can definitely kill a wolf with that handy dagger. Which is all the sort of thing you will know because you are a weird medieval guy. Or rather, none of this is weird whatsoever, because you are a medieval guy, and all of this—and more—is the subject of Weird Medieval Guys.

Weird Medieval Guys: How to live, laugh, love (and die) in dark times is a guide to life and living in the Medieval era by Olivia W. Swarthout. Drawn from a swathe of period manuscripts on numerous visits to the British Library, and originally posted on the Weird Medieval Guys Twitter account, combines images from the manuscripts and facts from the history to present a punchy, easy to read book that takes the reader from the moment of creation itself to the end of the world with the coming of the Four Horsemen and the apocalypse, and in between, the reader from his birth to his death—and in between that there is a lot that can happen. The book is profusely illustrated, so no aspect of Medieval life goes undepicted in the rich colours of the manuscripts. Having begun with the creation of everything, Weird Medieval Guys gives you life and so lets you pick a name, learn some useful slang—such as ‘Merobia’ for a woman who likes strong wine or ‘Sterilis Amator’ for that lover who has no money, choose your astrological sign and patron saint, determine where you live in the first of the book’s several short quizzes—the options being Constantinople, London, Paris, and Venice, suggests several jobs you like, and more. It is not all hard work, as there are examinations too of play and romance, but the latter all too soon feels like hard work, what with the need to make a love potion, which whilst a lot quicker than mounting a crusade, involves a dog, some rope, a hunting horn, an ivory stake, and a mandrake, does not take into account the fact that dogs—as noted in the section on play—do not like the horn being played. Then there are possible causes of marital difficulties and if it really does not work out, the possibility of a divorce, which comes with a handy flow chart to determine if you can get a divorce, the answer of course, being mostly no, that is also the counterpart to the handy flow chart to determine if you can court the lady of your affections… Of course, it all has to come to an end and the question of your death is raised before Judgement Day is raised. Hopefully with dignity before you get caught up in a civil dispute. Perhaps here the weirdest means of settling such a dispute, in combat, between a man and a woman, is for the man to be placed in a pit up to his waist where he must fight from there with a club, whilst the woman is armed with a big rock in a clock bag and allowed to roam the ground around the man. The illustrations would not look out of place in a wrestling match.

A good half of Weird Medieval Guys: How to live, laugh, love (and die) in dark times is devoted to a bestiary. Divided into several subsections—‘Beasts’, ‘Birds’, ‘Fish’, and ‘Serpents’. Each entry is catalogued and categorised, with strengths and weaknesses, and even some Medieval stats in the form of ‘Virtue’, ‘Beauty’, and ‘Danger’. The creatures range from the ordinary, such as the lion, the wolf, and the hedgehog to the fantastic, like the manticore, the mermaid, and the amphisbaena, the latter a snake with two heads. These are all presented from the Medieval point of view, of course, such as the bat being classified as a bird and cats as being extremely dangerous. There is, of course, a section devoted to the snail and plenty of images of knights versus snails. Sadly, there is no similar section on rabbits, and that perhaps is really the only omission from Weird Medieval Guys.

What really stands out in Weird Medieval Guys is the artwork, which is of course, drawn from the source material, the manuscripts. It is fantastically colourful, profusely illustrated and all annotated in a wry tone.

Weird Medieval Guys joins a growing list of works interested in the minutiae of Medieval life and the Medieval outlook and the colourful marginalia of period manuscripts. For example, How to Slay a Dragon: A Fantasy Hero’s Guide to the Real Middle Ages by Cait Stevenson, any number of enamel pins, and the more recent The Medieval Margin-agerie – Volume 1 from Just Crunch Games, which turns those marginalia into gameable content. Of course, Weird Medieval Guys does not do that, but what it can do is influence the portrayal of the Medieval world by the Game Master, perhaps even inspire an encounter or scenario or two. Weird Medieval Guys is a wry look at the fantastically strange world of the Medieval man and woman, what they knew and what they thought, how they lived, brought to life in the artwork of the period. For anyone with a casual interest in the Medieval period, Weird Medieval Guys: How to live, laugh, love (and die) in dark times is a perfect, vividly visual introduction to its oddness and oddities.