Global Britain? A Medieval Perspective

This spring, the PMC’s Public Lecture Course – a series of free public talks, each given by a different expert – looked at the theme ‘Britain and the World in the Middle Ages’. The series explored how the medieval ‘British Isles’ were places of exchange, where art, ideas and rare materials came together from all over the world. In this feature, Tom Nickson, Senior Lecturer in Medieval Art and Architecture at the Courtauld Institute of Art, shares insights from his lecture, which examined five objects and their biographies to trace Britain’s connections across the medieval globe. Recordings of the full six-part series are now available on the PMC’s YouTube channel.

What was ‘global’ about Britain in the Middle Ages? To recover the ways in which the wider world was imagined in medieval Britain, we can turn to the tales of hostile lands and monstrous races found in the British Library’s Marvels of the East; or the stories of the legendary Christian ruler Prester John; or John Mandeville’s fictitious fourteenth-century travel memoirs. Or we can look to maps: Matthew Paris’s itineraries to the Holy Land, created in the mid-thirteenth century and now also in the British Library, links London to Jerusalem via a chain of cities stretching across Europe and the Mediterranean. Medieval mappaemundi, in contrast, commonly centre on Jerusalem, with Britain near the edge and monsters beyond. Such maps served as tools of the imagination and contemplation, offering – from the security of the cloister – opportunities for ‘virtual’ pilgrimage, or a God’s-eye view of the world, its past and its future.

Page 12 Detail of Mappamundi from the ‘Map Psalter’, after 1262, perhaps copied from a wall painting in Westminster Palace. The British Library (Add. Ms. 28681, fol. 9r). Image courtesy of The British Library Board.

Britain’s ‘globality’ can also be traced through the movement of luxury goods. Already in the mid-twelfth century, laws for London traders refer to pepper, cumin, ginger, alum, brazilwood, resin and incense, many of which originated from the Indian Ocean region. It can also be tracked through material culture. It was a common medieval trope that great patrons could summon artists and materials from afar, and we see this realised at the very centre of power in medieval England, Westminster Abbey. Construction of the abbey began in 1245 based on designs that fused French and English architectural traditions. By 1269, its eastern parts were complete and the great Westminster retable – England’s oldest surviving altarpiece, painted on panel – was set on the high altar. At the retable’s centre, Christ holds the orb of the world. His robes are painted with blue lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, while those of St Peter, to the left, are fringed with pseudo-Kufic embroidery. The retable’s architectural frame is inspired by the western portals of Amiens Cathedral, and is ornamented with Roman cameos and with gold, much of which probably originated in sub-Saharan Africa. Before the high altar, Westminster’s sanctuary pavement was laid by Italian Cosmati craftsmen, who employed marble sourced from across the Mediterranean, including porphyry from Egypt. Behind the high altar was the chapel of St Edward the Confessor, his body wrapped in silk from al-Andalus or Byzantium, and enshrined in yet more Cosmati marble. Among gifts to the shrine, recorded in Henry III’s accounts, were: rubies, probably sourced from India; a cameo set with emeralds, perhaps from Russia, Afghanistan or southern Africa; and a great sapphire, originally from Sri Lanka or Madagascar. An ostrich egg – almost certainly from the Arabian ostrich, now extinct – was mounted in silver and also given to the shrine. By the fifteenth century, if not earlier, St Edward’s chapel also housed a number of books, precious goods and relics. Among these were various horns, likely from European buffalo, aurochs, bisons or ibex, all but the latter already extinct by the Middle Ages. In addition, there were two images of the Virgin Mary, carved from ivory that had been carried from western sub-Saharan Africa; ‘a round balle of crystal’, perhaps rock crystal from Madagascar; and numerous textiles of unknown but distant origin.

Such objects were prized for their rarity, but the origins of most would have been a mystery to all. It was no obstacle that some came from non-Christian contexts. Indeed, in many cases, associations between Arabic culture, science and magic seem to have enhanced the near-magical, apotropaic power of objects from Islamic lands. It did not matter if no one could read the pseudo-Arabic inscriptions on the bead at the centre of the eighth- or ninth-century Ballycotton Cross, found near Cork in Ireland, or on the coins of King Offa of Mercia (r. 757–796). Their ‘co-efficient of weirdness’ (to borrow Bronislaw Malinowski’s memorable phrase) only made such texts more powerful, such as ‘abracadabra’ or the now-nonsensical charms found on medieval swords, rings and talismans. We cannot be sure why monks at Canterbury, in the thirteenth-century, wrapped their wax seals in soft silks from al-Andalus, Sicily and Byzantium, but the Arabic blessings on the heart case of Roger de Norton, Abbot of St Albans (1263–1290), were probably thought to provide some kind of protection. In the fifteenth century, a new leather case was made in England for the ‘Luck of Edenhall’, an enamelled glass beaker originally created in Syria or Egypt in the thirteenth or fourteenth century. The delicate beaker was presumably prized because nothing like it could be produced in England at this date, but its name – which dates back to at least the late eighteenth century – attests to the magical legends that commonly accrued around such rare and marvellous objects.

The ‘Luck of Edenhall’, 13th- to 14th-century, enamelled gilded glass beaker made in Syria or Egypt and 15th-century English tooled leather case, height 15.8 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London (C.1 to B-1959). Image courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

The accumulation of such examples helps to correct prejudices about Britain’s insularity, but cannot do justice to the histories of labour and exploitation that inevitably accompany the extraction, transportation and transformation of precious goods and materials. Nor should it be forgotten that the everyday materiality of most people in the Middle Ages was much more local than it is today. The objects described above were available only to the elite, and suggest a geography – Europe, Africa and Asia – that closely matches that of the mappaemundi. Britain’s position in the trading networks that enabled the movement of such goods and materials was certainly peripheral when compared to the great trading states of the medieval Mediterranean, but the British Isles were also a contact zone for a ‘global North’ that included Iceland, Scandinavia, Russia, Greenland and even North America. The most striking evidence for this comes from carved walrus and narwhal teeth, of which numerous examples survive. The Lewis Chessmen, for example, were carved from walrus ivory (and, in a few cases, whale teeth) in the twelfth century, and were found in 1831 on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. Now in the collections of the British Museum and the National Museum of Scotland, they indicate the wide reach of chess, a game that probably originated in central Asia. Walrus colonies may have been present in the Scottish isles in the Middles Ages, but narwhals lived only in the Arctic Circle. The carving on two long, twisting narwhal teeth in the Victoria and Albert Museum and in Liverpool’s World Museum, has been compared to that on the twelfth-century western portals of Lincoln cathedral, so the teeth were almost certainly carved in England. By the fourteenth century, narwhal teeth were commonly associated with unicorn horns, but these earlier examples may have served as an elaborate form of candlestick.

The silk roads, the Red Sea, and trans-Saharan trade routes had long connected Europe to Asia and sub-Saharan Africa but, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, new advances in navigation and shipbuilding meant that exploration, trade and conquest could occur over far greater distances. For example, Chinese porcelain only rarely travelled to Europe before the fifteenth century, but dozens of such bowls and jugs survive in sixteenth-century London mounts. They probably arrived there having been seized by English pirates from ships from Portugal, which by then traded directly with West Africa and South-East Asia. The late sixteenth century also marks a period of colonial expansion under Elizabeth I, attested by maps and travel accounts of Cathay and the West Indies. Inventories, or such paintings as Holbein’s Ambassadors (1533) and The Paston Treasure (circa 1670), hint at the cosmopolitanism of many great collections in England by the sixteenth century, but it is the coconut that deserves pride of place in the story of global Britain in the Middle Ages. As Kathleen Kennedy has shown, coconuts feature surprisingly often in wills and inventories from the 1250s onwards, often described as a ‘black nut’ or ‘nut of India’. Transported from India to Alexandria, Venice and then England’s ports, coconuts were chiefly valued for medicinal purposes, but once the milk and flesh had been used, their husks were commonly polished and repurposed as cups. They were owned by men and women, fishmongers, merchants, clergy, nobles and wealthy institutions. Only a tiny proportion of those recorded still survive, many of them in Oxbridge colleges or other educational establishments. New College Oxford had seven, of which three survive. Eton College had at least three in the 1530s; one that still survives preserves an inscription recording that it was donated by John Edmonds, who was elected a fellow at Eton in 1491 and died in about 1526. Such objects once jostled for attention on high table with all kinds of precious metalwork, but the wine, salt, sugar, cocoa and spices contained within them tell their own troubled stories of global Britain in the Middle Ages and after.

Coconut shell with silver-gilt mounts, circa 1500-20, height 20.3 cm. Eton College, Berkshire (ECS-S.1.2014). Image reproduced by permission of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College.