The Threat of the Mortar

 

Gervase of Tilbury preserved an account of a medieval knight who forbade his wife to remarry after his death. When she decided it was safe to forget her promise years later, a crowd of people, including local nobility, watched as a heavy kitchen mortar was raised in the air and brought down to crush her skull. Before she died, she told the horrified onlookers that she (but only she) could see her attacker - the angry ghost of her dead husband. The fact that the murderer wielding the mortar was invisible to all but his victim was not mysterious to the mind of the times. The dead (as the chronicler noted matter-of factly) appear confinibus et amicis – “to relatives and friends.” [1]

 “The threat of the mortar”, as French scholar Jean-Claude Schmitt comments, was a major factor in the minds of survivors in those times. Widows (and to a lesser extent widowers – since men usually died sooner and tended to be the controllers) were very conscious of the psychic presence of their dead spouses, and this greatly influenced their behavior, for better or worse. [2]

It’s worth pausing to consider whether such an "unseen hand" - working perhaps in less spectacular but no less effective ways – may be at work in some of our family dramas today, no less than in the thirteenth century.

1. Jean-Claude Schmitt. Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society. Trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998) 186.
2. ibid, 188