The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (40 page)

Seventeen years before Katelijne was taken
in 1345, church inspectors had visited the Bruges beguinage.
⁶
They reported that
the house had been set up by two countesses ‘by divine inspiration, as it is
piously believed’, to preserve the respectability of women who couldn’t
marry, couldn’t afford the ‘dowry’ needed to enter a convent and who
were about ‘to go begging or shamefully support themselves’. The beguinage
allowed them to ‘support and clothe themselves by suitable work, without shaming
themselves or their friends’. Each woman had her own routine of washing wool and
cleaning cloth, each had her own garden to grow food, working in silence on a diet of
‘coarse bread and pottage’. No beguine could spend a night in town without
the permission of the mistress of the court, and nobody could leave even for an hour
without beguine companions; and out
in town
they wore coarse, frumpish clothes to disguise any individuality; all the town would see
was that they were a beguine.

This is the time when people flowed, steady
as a river, out of the countryside and into the towns, pulled by the prospect of wages,
independence, work in the new small factories that made cloth and needed hands. Life for
those newcomers was not easy, especially not for women, and at the beguinages they knew
they were among friends. Newcomers accounted for half the women in some city beguinages.
In the beguine courts, a woman knew she would never need a bit of prostitution on the
side, or face a time of going hungry when things were slow. She could survive a crisis
in her trade, and if she was sick, when she was old, she had a home. Women rebuilt their
families in the safety of the court, mothers with daughters, aunts with nieces, sisters
together.

Sometimes they shared a single house, more
usually they had courtyards like villages inside the cities, closed off from the outside
life and big enough to have streets and their own church, hospital, school. They could
come and go, they could change their minds. Usually, they did not have to buy their way
into a community, unlike novice nuns, who needed sponsorship, cash or land to enter a
nunnery. They might be widows under pressure to marry one more time, a woman like
Katelijne who might be marketed any day as a wife; there was protection with the
beguines.

Out of a pious duty, they took on the tasks
other people did not want. They were the ones who handled the dead, laid them out and
made them ready for the grave, and they nursed the living dead, the lepers in their
colonies outside the towns. They also tended the sick in their hospitals, but since they
were not meant to nurse men, they had to leave the beguinage if their fathers needed
help.

They were teachers; when the priest Lievin
vander Muelene wrote his last will in 1559, he acknowledged ‘a good and devout
little beguine’ as his spiritual mother, ‘often punishing my misdeeds in
writing or speech, correcting me and leading me towards virtue’.
⁷
Some were
housekeepers in the city; the Paris gentleman who laid down instructions for his wife in
Le Ménagier de Paris
around 1392 has a whole list of duties for ‘Dame
Agnes the beguine’, who is there to
teach the wife ‘wise and ripe behaviour and to serve
and train you’. Dame Agnes hires the maids, supervises them, counts the sheep in
the country, takes out stains on dresses with warm wine, keeps the keys, puts out the
fires at night and goes round ‘with a lighted candle, to inspect your wines,
verjuice and vinegar, to see that none has been taken away’.
⁸

They went out from the edge of the city to
herd animals, grow vegetables, raise chickens. More usually, they worked in the textile
trade: they spun wool and finished cloth, were tailors and embroiderers, sometimes
weavers even when that had become an officially, overwhelmingly male trade. The new and
growing towns gave everyone a chance, and women most of all. Men, after all, had a habit
of being distracted by war or civil strife.

Material possessions were not important;
they owned nothing much, just the pots, knives and plates that each stored in her
section of a special divided cupboard, known to this day as a beguine cupboard. The
poorer women lived from wages, the richer women sank their money into houses they often
shared with other beguines. That did not stop them being very successful in the new
commercial world around them; the beguinage of Sint-Truiden was attacked and plundered
in 1340 by townspeople furious at how well the women were doing, especially since they
were free of some taxes.
⁹
Some of them were traders, not just
artisans. Mergriete van Ecke in 1306 complained to the commissioners of the Count of
Flanders that his bailiffs had destroyed some fine white wool cloth of hers because they
mistakenly thought it was not made in Ghent. She said she had sent it to a friend in
Antwerp but he thought it was too expensive, and so it had come back, but she insisted
she had ‘proved sufficiently by a weaver and a fuller that the cloth was made,
woven and fulled in Ghent’. If she had to find witnesses then she wasn’t the
one making the cloth; she was the merchant.
¹⁰

Beguines were chaste, but it was not out of
terror of the flesh. At Mechelen, around 1290, the rules said a beguine who fell
pregnant had to leave ‘as soon as her condition becomes obvious’ and stay
away for a year, after which she could come back ‘if she demonstrates good
behaviour attested by good witnesses’; she had to stay inside the
compound for six months afterwards, but she could raise her
child there. The same applied in 1453 at Tongeren, unless the woman’s partner had
been a married man or a priest. In some places the rules were stricter – a pregnant
beguine was banned for life at ’s-Hertogenbosch – but it was quite usual to have
children playing between the houses of the beguinage and usual for the women to tolerate
other women’s mistakes. The one great sin was questioning the authority of the
grand mistress of the beguinage; that always meant a lifetime ban, everywhere.
¹¹

You couldn’t be so very practical as
this without annoying anyone who liked the comfort of strict rules that they were never
likely to disobey. Go to the theatre and you’d hear catcalls and snickers the
moment a beguine character came on stage; some of the oldest farces in Middle Dutch have
beguines fucking so hard their beds come crashing through the floor. You couldn’t
be a learnèd woman, teaching Latin and even theology to girls, without being mocked for
it.

Carnival parades at Huy in 1298 included men
who ‘had shaved their beards and dressed as ladies or beguines, marching through
the streets two by two as if in a procession, some singing, others holding an open book
in their hands as if they were reading’.

There was a quarrel even over the word
‘beguine’: whether it came from
benignitas
, which is
‘goodness’, or as one Benedictine said from
begun
, meaning
‘dung’.
¹²
Its most likely origin is a word
for a mumbler, someone whose speech you can’t quite hear and can’t check or
control. That was especially worrying when the speech was prayer, which was meant to be
spoken loud and clear in a church; the beguine’s prayers were between her and God,
not laid down or certified by authority. She could be telling God anything.

There was also the beguines’ licence
to moralize, even over the trading they did so well and the profits they made. Some were
most unhappy that their parents made money by lending money, although richer beguines
loaned out money themselves; quite aside from helping other women in the court, two
beguines of Arras lent two hundred pounds to the town of Calais in 1300, a solid deal at
10 per cent, which was at least a lower rate than usual. Still, Ida of Louvain thought
her merchant father’s wealth was ill-gotten, was only mildly
relieved to be told that usury was not involved and made her
opinion so obvious to her father that ‘losing all restraint, day after day he
would beat with the harsh blows of his curses this girl so innocent, so commendable, so
unused to answering back’. He bought casks of wine to sell at a profit, and she
disapproved, offering to buy only what she could use, which made her father furious.
When the wine went off, miraculously or not, lost colour and flavour and started to
froth, her father was growling with fury. Ida saw her father grieving and said her
prayers, and the wine was made good. ‘She completely forgot about the wrongs her
father had done her,’ her biographer says.
¹³

The beguines were in need of a history, any
man could see that: something less spontaneous, more miraculous, involving the suffering
that women were meant to endure as part of their spirituality. The beguines talked of
the ecstasy of their love for God, but obviously they meant pain.

Various sympathetic priests began to tell
their stories, to make them fit the Church.

In place of the scatter of communities,
women choosing their own rules and their own way of life, there had to be a founder
saint: St Begga, a seventh-century abbess who married the son of a saint, whose father
had been a great local power under the Merovingian kings and who had nothing much to do
with beguinages except living in roughly the same part of Flanders.
¹⁴
The spontaneity of
the beguines’ story was weighted down with royal connections, saintliness and the
rigid governance of religious orders.

The written stories of early beguines, in
texts that went back and forth across the North Sea in Middle English as well as Latin,
allow nothing at all ordinary; they seem to doubt that work, calm, prayer and kindness
could be enough. They take the women out of the world. One, Elizabeth of Spalbeek,
becomes a phenomenon, a woman with the stigmata of Christ; ‘in wounds and in pain
she affirms the faith of the Passion’, as her story says.
¹⁵
If women put their
whole bodies and souls into their faith, if they were as vivid as the poet Hadewijch
when she writes of ‘a whirlpool turning so fearfully
that heaven and earth might wonder at it and be
afraid … the deep whirlpool that is so fearfully dark that is divine union in
its hidden storms’,
¹⁶
then obviously faith must hurt.
Elizabeth became famous for knowing women who were suffering even more than she was.

Another, Christina Mirabilis, starts her
life by dying; her terrified sister sees the body fly to the rafters of the church,
where Christina is given a choice between Heaven and Earth and chooses Earth. She is
raised from the dead, and goes about as a creature on the edge of madness. She has to be
chained because she keeps going to high places, towers or trees, and she lives for nine
weeks on nothing but her own breast milk. She goes into red fire and iced water and
comes out unscathed, which must mean God’s approval as it does in ordeals. She
begs alms, so she has to live as a man because women were almost never given a papal
licence to go out and beg; but she tactfully does not preach because that is a
man’s work. Her wildness is personal; she never joins any kind of community,
although she does at one point go to Germany, as did some other holy women, to be with a
famous anchorite called Jutta. There is nothing to say she was a beguine, but she is
written into stories about beguines, and she brings with her all the sulphurous
reputation of mystics, madwomen, women who won’t be happy being women.
¹⁷

Marie d’Oignies is a very different
story. For a start, she was married at the age of fourteen to a man called John, which
meant she no longer owned her own body, and as a kind of penance she ‘wore
discreetly under her smock a rough, sharp cord tied tight around her’; her
biographer, the beguines’ advocate Jacques de Vitry, insists he isn’t
‘praising the excess but telling her fervour’. She’d been a serious
child, unhappy with bright clothes and the company of vain girls, and although now she
knew the ‘hard heat of burning youth’ she decided that what she wanted in
marriage was chastity.
¹⁸
Her husband agreed to treat her as
though she were his ward, not his wife.

This was dangerous thinking, close to the
heresy of the Cathars and their dislike of the flesh and their insistence that sex was
fine for anything except making babies, which was the exact opposite of the
Church’s teaching that procreation was the only excuse. Marie was suspected of
sharing their error. The problem was not so much that
she chose chastity, because virginity at best and chastity
if you couldn’t manage virginity were virtues. Marriage was an expedient for weak
persons, and the best kind of childbirth was virgin birth, bringing nothing but virtues
into the world.
¹⁹
The problem with Marie’s version was the fulminous
atmosphere of her times, when an age was supposed to be coming to an end, and maybe the
world with it.
²⁰
In his first letter to Timothy, St Paul writes that ‘in the
latter times some shall depart from the faith’ and one sign will be
‘forbidding to marry’.
²¹
Preaching chastity within marriage
came to much the same thing; it could bring on the end of everything.

Marie persisted. She and her husband went to
serve in a leper colony. Their relatives ‘respected them rich, but afterward
despised and scorned them’. She moved on to Oignies, a place she didn’t know
and hadn’t seen, and she again worked with lepers; it was there that she set up
what must have been the first beguine house.
²²

She worked with her hands: sewing, weaving,
nursing the sick, but sometimes healing sickness just by her touch. She went through the
whole psalter on her knees, beating herself between psalms, so she could certainly read,
and her deathbed words are written in Latin even in the Middle English version of the
text, although earlier in her life she could not make sense of Latin words. She had a
bed in her cell made of straw, but she went without sleep, ‘she served our Lord in
the night watches’. She dealt with demons by long fasts and direct confrontation;
she saved one nun simply by running a demon through by the sheer force of her prayer so
‘it seemed that he had cast out all his bowels and he was wretchedly carrying on
his neck all that was within him’. Then she asked a ‘familiar friend and
master’ what to do with the demon, and then she checked with a man who was an
intimate friend; she deferred to men.