Back home again.

Break was much too short.

I spent one entire day working on income taxes. Although in the past I've always kind of looked at the paperwork and gone "Challenge...accepted" I think next year I may consider hiring someone. I'm getting tired of giving up an entire day of a too-short break to figure out the legalese on some of the more esoteric forms I have to fill out. (Also, I did a standard IRA to Roth conversion last year, so, ouch. I hope my financial advisor is right, that I will be happy for having done that later on.)

I also met with one of my dissertation-committee members; she is doing some research similar to some I've done down here and wanted a consult on techniques. And while I was over there, I popped in to say hi to my graduate advisor (who is now retired - but the department he was in has had such attrition - I think he said six tenure-track positions in the past few years - that there are enough offices for retirees to maintain one.) He's still got some projects going but lamented that not having students meant he did all the fieldwork himself. (Well, I do a lot of my fieldwork myself, but that's because I'm kind of a control freak and twitch if someone does something in a non-standard way, or if they're careless with the equipment or something).

Retirement must be weird. I can't quite feature NOT working. I like having time off - and as I said, this break seemed too short to me - but I can't see having every day off. I think I'd have to either continue research (if I were still sufficiently able-bodied to do so) or do volunteer work or SOMETHING. (I've contemplated the idea of getting the necessary training to do literacy work in retirement. Or do something like a chaplaincy somewhere. Maybe even have an entire second career, but one I don't necessarily need to do for the money)

I suppose you get trained, and it's hard to uncouple from work. (Then again, there'd be something to be said for having enough money - and having the necessary benefits planned out - so that you could say "Forget it" and walk away if one of your bosses just got too difficult to take, or if the rules became too draconian).

(Well, we'll see how this summer goes; I'm not teaching but am doing research and planning to revamp at least one of my classes. So I'll be in the office (or field) most days, but will be able to take full days off here and there as I see fit).

I finished reading "1066." It's funny how you don't really think about some historical events you learn about - the author made a considerable point of how William was coming in to a country that was resisting, rather than welcoming, to him, and how much carnage there was, and how disrupted life was in the British countryside after the invasion. (Many of the towns, the tax revenues they submitted were half or less of what they were before the invasion - suggesting that many people had died or left, and that the land was far, far less productive than it had been - and the peaceful (or so the author described it) world of English country life was much changed).

I also started reading "A Distant Mirror," which is appropriately (or I now think, halfway in) subtitled "The calamitous fourteenth century." For one thing, there was the Plague, which later led to want in some areas - because there were few left to farm the land in some places, there was near-famine. And the Plague recurred periodically - it would burn out for a while (especially in winters; fewer fleas, I suppose) and then flare up again. And of course, no one really knew the mode of transmission and there was no way to treat it...)

And life was pretty horrible for women in the lower nobility - your value was pretty much as either a sex-object or a bearer of children. And many of the nobles apparently beat their wives, and everyone looked the other way. (It seemed that peasant women actually fared better; in a sense they were more equal to their menfolk - they worked in the fields alongside them, got paid for their work (though less than a man would), and in some cases, even seemed to have somewhat happy marriages). "Courtly love," now that I know what it REALLY is, is kind of strange and disappointing: court marriages were for land and power, not for love...so "love" came in the form of adulterous affairs with knights. I admit it, I was kind of a ninny about the idea previously - but then, I had seen mostly the "sanitized" version in the bowdlerized fairy tales I read. I had pictured courtly love as sort of an elaborate crush, with the typical pining and sighing that crushes bring...but also, like many crushes, the fact that the object of the crush is unattainable (because, in courtly love, she was MARRIED, see?), they went unconsummated. Or maybe I - at 12, 13, and 14 - kind of overlaid my own way of thinking on the idea. (And yes, in a lot of cases, the unattainability is a feature of the crush - I think, in fact, if some of the chaps I had crushes on in those days had shown up on my doorstep and said, "I'm yours," I would have run away and hid. [Heck, even at my advanced age now - and yes, I still occasionally develop crushes - I would likely WANT to - if not in actual fact, did - run away and hide if the object of my crush happened to reveal an interest in me]. So I saw courtly love as something much more...chaste...than what it actually was.)

(So much about that era seems so contradictory. Adultery was a major sin, and yet, among the nobles, the Church apparently looked the other way. And it also makes you wonder how many of those "noble" youths were actually the sons of their mother's husbands...)

And you can see some of the roots (well, they had probably already been established during and after 1066) of the English - French hostilities. And the rise of anticlericalism in France - some of the priests and upper hierarchy were shockingly corrupt.

And there was just sort of a casual violence in everyday life that's kind of dismaying to read about. There were the Jacqueries, a peasant revolt that turned into a brutal, unconscionable slaughter (in one case, it's reported - and this may or may not have been embroidered truth - of a knight being roasted on a spit, and his lady being forced to eat of his flesh before she was violated and killed). Yes, the peasants had been badly treated, but the level of some of the atrocities to which they rose...

And then there were the "companies," apparently roving bands of unemployed mercenaries who brutalized the countryside, attacking pretty much anyone, burning crops, stealing what they could take, killing many people and in general committing pretty horrifying acts. (Tuchman says that some of the later "Crusades" - which were aimed not at the Middle East, but at "Christianizing" groups like the Hungarians - were a way of trying to move the "companies" away from the French countryside. They were still being brutal, but they were being brutal elsewhere...)

The "companies" had little respect for anything - they even slew people worshipping in church. (And yet - they either bullied or bribed priests into giving them Last Rites when they were close to death.)

As bad and as ugly as some aspects of the 20th and now, 21st, centuries are, still, the past was hardly a Golden Era - and I would dare to say, the 14th century was worse, in terms of widespread misery to all the "estates" (clergy, nobles, and working-class).

There were some bright spots - there were priests and monks who were good and holy men concerned more for the souls of those around them than for their own enrichment. And men - some nobles, some from the working-class, who distinguished themselves with what we would even now consider noble acts. And a few women...one (Christine de Pisan) was able to make her life as a writer (Tuchman quotes part of a poem she wrote shortly after her beloved husband's death) and another, Novella D'Andrea, who was a lecturer at an Italian university. (She was reportedly so beautiful that she wore a veil when she lectured - so that her (entirely male) classes would not be distracted by the sight of her. Funny, I think I'd find someone lecturing wearing a veil far, far more distracting than even the best-looking lecturer. But maybe the wearing of veils by women was more common in that era.)

That said, I can see why for so many of the lesser-noble women, becoming a nun would have had a certain attraction: true, you had to take a vow of poverty and could own no property, but generally in those days, I do not think women "owned" much more than the clothes on their backs, or at least, the men to whom they were tied could take her property if they needed the money or wanted to "punish" the woman. And you would be taken care of: meals, meager as they might be, would be provided, you'd have a roof over your head. You'd be freed from the worry and danger of childbearing - or the alternate worry, of what would become of you if you proved to be barren.

Also, as Tuchman points out, at least in those days, the contented rarely wrote of their lots in life - so we may get a "worse" picture of history, based on what is left to us. (But still: I am glad not to be living in the 14th century. The level of casual violence that seemed to happen, even among the supposed 'gentry,' rivals that of the worst gang violence today.)

I did also do some knitting...pictures will come later, when my camera has charged back up.