WHAT TO DO WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU CHERRIES by Amy Jeffs
The author, artist and art-historian finds joy in medieval souvenirs
Hi friends,
When I first moved to Somerset I very quickly got to know one of my neighbours called Amy Jeffs. Amy is many things: an art-historian, gifted artist and prolific author who is able to confidently guide us modern folk around the forgotten myths and legends of our shared past. When we first met she was heavily pregnant AND getting ready to publish her first book STORYLAND. I marvelled at her tenacity at the time and haven’t stopped pestering her since.
To absolutely nobody’s surprise, STORYLAND swiftly became a Sunday Times bestseller and she now has legions of fans who I’m sure are thrilled by the publication of her latest offering - SAINTS: A New Legendary of Heroes, Humans and Magic, which is stuffed full of wayfaring monks, oak-felling missionaries and mighty martyrs, alongside her own artwork.
Amy kindly agreed to let me share this excerpt of SAINTS with you as part of my maternity-leave bandwagon. So I hope you enjoy this foretaste of her latest tour de force.
Grace
P.S SAINTS is out now! Order here or through your local independent bookshop.
In the British Museum's department of Britain, Europe and Prehistory, a storage chest of drawers holds over seven hundred medieval pilgrim souvenirs and secular badges.
There is one that has intrigued me for years. It shows a hood with its face-hole stuffed full of cherries, to judge by their long stems. A ribbon designed to hang from the point of the hood fastens the neck of the collar. If you turn the badge so that the hood is at the bottom and the collar is at the top, it looks like a makeshift sack, an item of clothing roughly converted to hold fruit. From the decorative 'dagging' on the hood's ribbon, it is datable to the later fourteenth or fifteenth centuries.
It is not the only surviving 'hood-of-fruit' image. I came across a similar example in the margins of the Luttrell Psalter (c. 1340). They ramble with bizarre hybrid beasts, episodes from saints' lives, and scenes from agricultural and noble life. Underneath the text of folio 196v, there is a lively illustration of a boy high in the branches of a wild cherry tree.
His pointy-toed shoes lie abandoned on the ground. His left hand and red-socked feet rest on woody knots. He wears a collar and hood, which he has yanked round to hang against his chest, so that he can fill the hood with cherries. His right hand reaches to pick more, his cheeks bulge with fruit and his lips touch another cherry dangling near his face.
Apparently he has scaled the tree to eat and gather as much of its fruit as he can before the owner, already running along the ground towards him, waving a stick with rage, forces him to flee. In this illustration, the hood enables the boy to take advantage of an unexpected harvest that must be enjoyed immediately or lost forever. Could the hood in the badge have a similar meaning?
There was a legend about a cherry tree that had a brief season of popularity in fifteenth-century England. One of its sources is the late medieval N-Town Plays (the 'N' being an 'insert-name-here' instruction in the manuscript). In the scene for the Nativity, Mary and Joseph encounter a tall cherry tree while on their way to a chilly Bethlehem. It bursts into fruit, despite the wintry season. Joseph refuses to pick the cherries on account of the height of the tree and the difficulty of the task, so one of its boughs descends, and Mary and a sheepish Joseph gather their fill.
The story derives from the apocryphal gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, in which the tree is not a cherry tree, but a date palm. However, in an English context the cherries would have made better sense, drawing on existing associations and even allowing actors to use the branches of real cherry trees, if the performance coincided with the cherry season.
The cherry, as we presumably all know, is small and scrumptious. It grows wild in north-western Europe, littering woodland floors with red, orange and yellow fruits during early summer. The fruiting season is brief but abundant and medieval cherry fairs took advantage of it. This led to the cherry season and the fairs as metaphors for life's fleeting pleasures. In the 1470 morality play Mankind, the character of Mercy says:
So help me God, it is but a cherry time!
Spend it well.
And in a fifteenth-century poem, How the Wise Man Taught His Son, the narrator warns:
Therefore beware the world's wealth,
It passes like a cherry fair.
Perhaps a late medieval badge showing a hood full of cherries reminded wearers to gather their earthly joys, however fleeting. This sentiment is echoed in a line of medieval graffiti in the parish church of Little Dunmow in Essex. It is an instruction that, not denying the darkness, still gives us permission to be joyful, to fill our hoods and pockets with life’s simple treasures, when we find them in our path:
Dum sumus in mundo vivamus corde jocundo
'While we are in this world, we should live with a happy heart'.
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