– Katherine

What is it we are looking for? Not a time when life was easier. It is as if we have some fundamental “hard wired” hunger for elements of that past time: for a knowledge of herbs, for loyalty to a personally known and nearby figure of leadership, for clothing that celebrates the human shape instead of merely covering it, or concealing it.

For a social system that is knowable: for a system where we are not cast out at the end of high school or college into a vastly complex world where we must sink or swim. In the Middle Ages, and for eons back through time, men and women knew their place in the world from birth, though there was room for the energetic and ambitious to move upward, or the very unfortunate to move downward.

But for most people life was going to be what it was for their parents. What old people knew had value because the world had not changed so greatly during their lifespan as to make their experience irrelevant. The young could feel comfort in the wisdom of their parents.

It is this comfort of continuity, I believe, that we seek in the Middle Ages. We have the traditional culture imprinted within us. We are drawn to it as a magnet draws iron.

For the last third of a century I have spent my most contented hours researching the life and times of Simon de Montfort. His life was far from happy, the complexities that beset him were very “modern”: in addition to his loving the wrong women, he struggled with high interest rates and the jealousy of his fellow lords — what amounted to his co-workers.

But though his problems were not so different from current issues, his solutions — honor, truthfulness, care for his family, fidelity to the principles he had come to believe in — are eternal and yet seem to be slipping from view in our current time amidst the hurly burly of ambition, insecurity and a culture that seems more and more to be holding greed and celebrity as the principal virtues.

How can we capture for ourselves what we perceive to be of worth in the Middle Ages?

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Eight hundred years later, the site of Simon’s death is still a destination for pilgrims who believe in miracles.

There is an entire book, written in the decade after Simon’s death, cataloging the miracles attributed to Simon. It’s title is ‘The Chronicle of William de Rishanger, of the Barons’ War: The Miracles of Simon de Montfort’. ed. J.O. Halliwell, Camden Society, 1840.

As the suppressing power of the British Crown has faded, Simon might be recognized as a saint at last.

When the battle was ended, monks from the nearby abbey came out to bury the dead. As they lifted the man’s stripped and mangled torso from the ground, a spring of water flowed up from beneath the body. A blind old monk, accidentally splashed with the spring’s water, suddenly could see. Soon the blind from all over England came to the miraculous spring and were cured. So says the Chronicle of William Rishanger, who was there.

Thousands came to the spring. The man who had died there was hailed as a saint, as The Angel with the Sword of the Apocalypse, or perhaps even the risen Savior Himself. And so King Henry III made it criminal to take water from the spring, and a hanging crime of treason to speak the dead man’s name.

Today, though few know of him, we have all been touched by him. For it was he who founded, fought and died for a new form of government — one elected by the people.