The Legacy of the Middle Ages in the American Wild West

Author(s): Lynn White, Jr.

Source: Speculum , Apr., 1965, Vol. 40, No. 2 (Apr., 1965), pp. 191-202
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Medieval Academy of
America

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 A JOURNAL OF MEDIAEVAL STUDIES

Vol. XL APRIL 1965 No. 2

THE LEGACY OF THE MIDDLE AGES IN THE

AMERICAN WILD WEST
BY LYNN WHITE, jr

A BLIND spot in the study of the history of the United States is failure to recognize
our detailed and massive continuity with the European Middle Ages. One reason
for this is our angle of vision. The very vocal New England school of historians
naturally has emphasized Puritanism as the basic stratum in our national ideol-
ogy. Unfortunately, however, we have accepted at face value the Puritan's self-
image as a rebel against all that the Middle Ages had stood for. But if we change
our stance and look at the Reformation not from the twentieth but from the
eleventh century, it appears very different: Protestantism becomes the culmina-
tion - or the reductio ad absurdum, depending on one's presuppositions - of the
most powerful religious tendencies of the later Middle Ages: an erosion of the
distinction between the "religious" and the secular life; a reaction against the
institutionalization of religion; a new individuation and inwardness of piety.
St Bernard, St Francis, William of Ockliham, and Gerhard Groote are direct ances-
tors of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards.'
Indeed, a good case could be made for the thesis that today the United States is
closer to the Middle Ages than is Europe. Many of the more thoughtful among
the early immigrants from Britain disliked Stuart efforts to centralize political
authority. In their new home they established loose-jointed late-medieval
communities in defiance of the "modernizing" tendencies in the motherland, and
at the end of the eighteenth century mediaeval pluralism became the cornerstone
of our Constitution. We Americans greatly puzzle Europeans, including Britons,
because whereas every European state assumes absolute sovereignty, even over
religion, we are still happily mediaeval in political concepts and deliberately
splinter sovereignty quite minutely. The central issue in American domestic
politics at the present time is whether, or the extent to which, our mediaeval
legacy of pluralism is still viable.
Because Latin America was not affected internally by the Reformation and

1 See my "The Significance of Medieval Christianity," in The Vitality of the Christian Tradition
ed. G. F. Thomas (New York, 1944), pp. 87-115.

191

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192 Mediaeval Legacy in the Wild West

because it experienced a colonial society established almost on a feudal basis, it

has been easier for scholars to the south of us to recognize the continuity and
vigor of the mediaeval tradition in their nations. The Mexican historian Luis
Weckmann has asserted that
the Middle Ages found their last expression on this side of the Atlantic, where, after the
termination of the mediaeval period in Europe, an appropriate setting for the develop-
ment of mediaeval ideals existed for an extended period in the Spanish New World while,
contemporarily in Europe, the Religious Reformation and the so-termed Italian Renais-
sance were causing the abandonment of the essentials that sustained mediaeval Christen-
dom.2

Most of us Americans would doubtless accept such a view, but it would merely
confirm our feeling that whereas colonial Latin America was a transplant of the
wilting Middle Ages to a new soil which briefly lent fresh vigor to it, the contrast
of our own colonial and frontier experience indicates that on this northern con-
tinent the key to understanding breach with the Middle Ages rather than
continuity. The most famous of contemporary Mexican historians, Edmondo
O'Gorman, agrees: to him, colonial Ibero-America was a mimesis of Europe,
whereas, to the north, European modes of life were adapted to new conditions.
"Latin America," he writes a bit wistfully, "was never a frontier land in the sense
of dynamic transformation that has been given to that term by American
historians ever since Frederick Jackson Turner."3
Surely, however, the critique of Turner's fertile hypothesis over the past
seventy years has gone far enough so that we can no longer (to use the Toynbeean
jargon) regard the frontier as "challenge" and American life as "response." By
far the larger part of a man's ecology is what is inside his skull: a new external
problem rarely begets an authentically novel solution. And what was the mental,
emotional, and technical equipment in the heads of the men and women who
swept the frontier westward?
Obviously the American pioneers took with them, willy-nilly, elements drawn
from every epoch of the past. George H. Williams of the Harvard Divinity School,
for example, has recently shown4 how the attitudes of Americans towards their
own western wilderness were significantly shaped by the ancient Hebrew nostalgic
idealization of the forty years spent in the desert between Egypt and Palestine.
Transmitted and refined by Church Fathers and mediaeval ascetics, elaborated

2 "The Middle Ages in the Conquest of America," sPEcuLum, xxvi (1951), 130; cf. "La edad media
en Mexico," in his Panorama de la cultura medieval (Mexico, 1962), pp. 7-19; also C. Sanchez-Al-
bornoz, "La edad media y la empresa de America," in Espana y el Islam (Buenos Aires, 1943), pp. 181-
199, who considers colonial Latin America the "hija postuma del medioevo hispano;" C. J. Bishko,
"The Iberian Background of Latin American History: Recent Progress and Continuing Problems,"
Hispanic American Historical Review, xxxvi (1956), 50-80. Lewis Mumford, The City in History
(New York, 1961), p. 330, is one of the few North Americans to share Weckmann's view that "In
the New World ... the medieval order renewed itself, as it were, by colonization." Mumford, p. 332,
emphasizes the mediaevalism of the settlement plan of the New England village and its challenge to
"the anti-democratic assumptions of the new baroque order."
8 E. O'Gorman, The Invention of America (Bloomington, 1961), p. 142.
4 Wilderness and Paradise in Christian Thought (New York, 1962), pp. 98-137.

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 Mediaeval Legacy in the Wild West 193

by mystics and especially by the radical Anabaptist wing of the Reformation

which had so many adherents on our frontier, the notion that the wilderness is
not merely a dread place of struggle and suffering but also an arena in which
spiritual perfection may be won - a land where "men are men"-, has played a
great part in American life and emotion. Indeed, without this curious, historically
conditioned, affirmation of wilderness, rooted in three thousand years of a
specialized religious tradition, it is doubtful whether the American wilderness
would have been conquered and settled so quickly.
Yet, admitting that our frontiersmen, whether they knew it or not, were heirs
to the ages, they were particularly beneficiaries of the Middle Ages. Their essen-
tial equipment was very largely the culture of the mediaeval lower classes. Few
who crossed the ocean to the English colonies were educated or prosperous. We
are a nation descended overwhelmingly from peasants and artisans fleeing the
crushing burden of the European Establishment.
The Middle Ages were far from monolithic. Wat Tyler's followers who in
1381 demanded the abolition of the clerical and feudal aristocracy were no less
men of the Middle Ages than were the overlords whom they detested. When our
ancestors thwarted the establishment of bishops in the North American colonies,
and when they sabotaged all efforts to transfer seignorial regimes across the
Atlantic, they stood stoutly in the tradition of the mediaeval proletariat.
Despite its remarkably high general level of erudition, American study of the
Middle Ages today, like most of that in Europe as well, has little relation to the
totality of the Middle Ages as they once existed. Our mediaeval scholarship is
still heavily tinctured by nineteenth-century Romanticism which was compelled
by its own psychic necessities to invent a Middle Ages which never existed but
which had to be created as a weapon in polemic. The most remarkable book
produced in the United States purporting to talk about the Middle Ages, Henry
Adams's Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, tells us nothing believable about the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but is a document fundamental for understand-
ing the trauma of Boston in the generation following our Civil War.5
Part of the legacy of Romanticism in our present mediaeval studies is disregard
for the nine-tenths of the population who worked with their hands, and for their
concerns and creativity. Feudalism and the hierarchical church, scholastic debates
and the aubades of troubadors, had never been the business of the lower classes;
nor did they share in the slightest degree the classicizing enthusiasms of the
Renaissance. Yet it was these horny-handed plowmen and craftsmen who popu-
lated our continent in a vast differential migration which - in sharp contrast to
Latin America' - left the nobility, the bishops and abbots on the east of the
ocean. When this rabble struck into the wilderness they generally followed
mediaeval patterns of action because those were the patterns that they knew.

b L. White, jr, "Dynamor and Virgin Reconsidered," The American Scholar, xxvii (1958), 183-194.
6 Needless to say, proletarianrs with their full technical and mental equipment formed the bulk of
Iberian colonial migration as well; cf. G. M. Foster, Culture and Conquest: America's Spanish Heritage
(New York, 1960).

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 194 Mediaeval Legacy in the Wild West

II

A symbol of the situation is the way they built houses. Until recently we
assumed that the log cabin was such an "obvious," sturdy, and easily constructed
sort of shelter that it appeared by spontaneous generation when Jamestown was
settled or when the Pilgrims stepped ashore. But now, we know7 that nothing of
the sort happened. The first English settlers, as quickly as possible, built beam
and plank houses exactly like those in the Old Country, including the second-
story overhangs so appropriate to the crowded walled cities of the later Middle
Ages. The log cabin was introduced to the shores of Delaware Bay by the Swedes
among whom it was an inherited mediaeval form of construction, but at first it
did not spread among the other colonists who had variant traditions. In the
eighteenth century, Germans and Swiss brought slightly different forms of
mediaeval log cabins to the Middle Colonies; towards the end of the century the
Scotch-Irish immigrants picked up the idea and made the log cabin the typical
frontier house from the Piedmont to the Pacific.
The lesson is clear. There is very little creative adaptation to new circum-
stances. Originality is rare. What the American frontiersman did was to select,
and gradually to elaborate, useful elements in the highly diversified mediaeval
tradition which he took for granted.
I must emphasize that, although of course the Middle Ages had built upon
Antiquity, most of what he took with him into the West was in fact mediaeval.
If Seneca, a Spaniard who thought that one could sail west to find nofvos orbes,8
had persuaded his pupil Nero to anticipate Isabella's patronage of Columbus,
Roman pioneers would have penetrated the American wilderness with an equip-
ment vastly inferior to that which was later available. Let me offer a few deliber-
ately random illustrations of the mediaeval legacy in our Wild West.
Consider, for example, overland transport, a matter crucial for the arid half of
our country where few rivers are navigable. The Romans had an adequate harness
for oxen, but, for reasons which are not clear, they seldom harnessed teams in
tandem.9 Their harness for horses and mules was incredibly inefficient. As a result
Roman wagons were small and light. The two-wheeled carpentum and four-
wheeled pilentum both had arched cloth canopies10 which seem to adumbrate the
Conestoga wagon which became the prime symbol of the American West, but the
reality was very different. While on the American frontier prairie schooners were
often drawn by oxen, horses were greatly preferred, and the real ancestor of the
Conestoga wagon, the longa caretta of the early twelfth century, capable of carry-
ing many persons and heavy loads of goods, did not develop until three other
mediaeval inventions related to horse traction laid the basis for it.1"
The first of these was the modern harness, consisting of a padded collar and

7H. R. Shurtleff, The Log Cabin Myth, ed. S. E. Morison (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), pp. 209-214.
8 Medea, lines 375-79, in Seneca's Tragedies, ed. and tr. F. J. Miller (London, 1927), I, 260.
9 Cf. L. White, jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford, 1962), pp. 42, 45, 153.
10 A. L. Abaecherli, "Fercula, Carpenta and Tensae in the Roman Procession," Bollettino dell'
A8sociazione Internazionale Studi Mediterranei, vi (1935-86), 6.
11 White, op. cit., pp. 57-61.

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 Mediaeval Legacy in the Wild West 195

lateral traces or shafts. The earliest example in Europe is found in a miniature of

ca 800 A.D. It enabled a team of horses to pull between four and five times the
load which they could manage with the Roman harness. The second improvement
was the nailed horseshoe which appears in the 890's and which greatly increased
the staying-power of a horse. The third invention was the whipple-tree, the earli-
est certain evidence of which is a detail in the border of the Bayeux Tapestry,12
now generally dated not later than 1077. Because a furrow is kept straight, a
horse could probably plow without a whipple-tree, but he could not do heavy
hauling. If the traces are attached directly to the load, a left turn puts the whole
strain on the right trace, and vice versa, risking breaking the harness and upsetting
the wagon. The whipple-tree, a grubby but important element in the history of
land transport, is a rod to the tips of which the rear ends of the traces are at-
tached, and which itself is linked, at its center, to the middle of the front of the
wagon. It thus equalizes the pull and greatly increases both efficiency and safety.
With these three elements - horse-collar, horseshoe, and whipple-tree - the big
wagon became feasible. In the early twelfth century it appears13 in essentially the
form which came to dominate the American West in the Conestoga wagon.
Or, ponder the genetic history of the stage coaches which were so spectacular a
part of life in the Wild West before the golden spike, driven at Promontory, linked
the oceans with rails. In 1857 James Gould of Albany, New York, built one
hundred coaches for the Butterfield Overland Mail which ran between Missouri
and California. Just as the contemporary clipper ships were the culmination of
the art of sail, so Gould's coaches exhibit ultimate beauty of functional simpli-
city.14 Since without springs speed is unendurable for any considerable distance
over rutted and pot-holed roads, the essence of the coach is a suspended body.
The first coach had generally been ascribed to the sixteenth century until, in
1959, Margery N. Boyer of Brooklyn College called attention to a remarkably
detailed picture of a coach in a manuscript illuminated in southeastern Germany
between 1330 and 1350:15 the canopied body (seemingly of wicker) seats at least
six persons and is suspended on straps attached to vertical springs rising from the
two axles. Here we have the basic features of the Butterfield coaches, except
mechanical brakes. That this fourteenth-century coach travelled rapidly is made
clear by the fact that on its rear is perched a man with bagpipes to clear the road
ahead and sound a warning as crossroads are approached: the ancestor of the
coach horn and, eventually, of the automobile horn.
So sophisticated an equipage must have had cruder antecedents. The sole, but
significant, scrap of evidence thus far located was published in 1775- a time much
concerned with coaching - by the English antiquarian Joseph Strutt, but has been

12 The Bayeux Tapestry, ed. Sir F. Stenton (New York, 1957), plate 12; p. 11 for date.
11 White, op. cit., pp. 66-67.
14 See the structural diagram in R. P. and M. B. Conkling, The Butterfield Overland Mail, 1857-1869
(Glendale, 1947), p. 111, plate 14.
15 "Mediaeval Suspended Carriages," SPECuLum, xxxiv (1959), 863-364, plate II; for the date an
provenance, cf. K. Escher, Die Bilderhandschrift der Weltchronik des Rudolf von Ems (Zurich, 1935),
p. 29.

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 196 Mediaeval Legacy in the Wild West

forgotten since then. The British Museum holds an Anglo-Saxon manuscript of

the first half of the eleventh century containing Aelfric's paraphrase of the Hepta-
teuch, lavishly illuminated. At one point Joseph, now Prime Minister of Egypt, is
going out to greet his aged father Jacob who has come down from Canaan.'6
Joseph rides in a strange vehicle which, as Strutt remarks, "from the simplicity of
it, . . . may justly enough be esteemed as the first invention of coaches" :17 it has
four wheels; each axle bears a single vertical spring with a hook; and between
these hooks is suspended a hammock in which Joseph sits. Here, surely, is the
germinal idea of the coach which was to reach full bloom and to die in the
American West eight centuries later.

III

A generation ago our thinking about how pioneers mastered the Great Plains
was revolutionized by the down-to-earth insights of Walter Prescott Webb of the
University of Texas. Others had written of Manifest Destiny, international
territorial conflicts, and the like. Webb looked at the matter with the eyes and
concerns of the frontiermen themselves, and pointed to a trinity of gadgets which
were fundamental to the speedy success of the process: the revolver, barbed wire,
and the windmill.'8 Each of these was an elaboration of the mediaeval legacy.
Gunpowder appeared in Europe by about 1260 in firecrackers and rockets, and
by 1327 cannon had been developed.'9 The first firearms were so heavy and cum-
bersome that about one hundred years passed before military technicians began
to make proposals, of slowly increasing practicality, for smaller guns which could
be handled on horseback.20 The problem of reloading while astride a horse long
made the pistol a dubious weapon. Indeed, reloading any kind of gun in the heat
of battle was difficult, and Colt's patent of revolving chambers has a line of
ancestry reaching into the early fifteenth century :21 it would seem that everyone

16 British Museum, Cottonian Claudius B. IV, fols. 60r and 60v. Fols. 68r, 71v and 72r show the
same sort of vehicle but the artist has omitted the end-posts and hooks. Photographs in the Princeto
Index of Christian Art. For the date, cf. N. R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon
(Oxford, 1957), p. 178.
17 J Strutt, A Compleat View of the Manners, Customs, Arms, Habits, etc., of the Inhabitants
England from the Arrival of the Saxons till the Reign of Henry the Eighth (London, 1775), i, 45,
plate ix, fig. 2.
18 The Great Plains (Boston, 1931), pp. 167-179 for the revolver; 295-317 for barbed wire; 335-348
for windmills.
1' White, op. cit., pp. 99, 163. What appears to be the simultaneous emergence of cannon in Europe
and China is puzzling: L. Carrington Goodrich, in Journal of the Amertcan Oriental Society, LxxXIII
(1963), 385, cites a bronze cannon dated 1332 near Peking; cf. Wen wu (1962), no. 8, p. 41.
20 P. SixI, "Entwicklung und Gebrauch der Handfeuerwaffen," Zeitschrift fur historische Waffen-
kunde, i (1897), 278-380, figs. 42-44.
21 P. Sixl, "Mehrlaufige Feuerwaffen in den Handschriften und Waffen-Inventorien," ibid., ii
(1900-05), 231-236, 269-271; "Orgeln und Orgelgeschtitz," ibid., 285-289, 327-329, 361-365; "Mehr-
reihige Orgeln," ibid., iv (1906-08), 24-27, 84-88. By 1607 a pistol firing eight successive shots from
eight fixed barrels had been developed; cf. J. von Kalmban, "Ein Schnellfeuerpistole des 17. Jahr-
hunderts," ibid., Neue Folge, vi (1939) 86; A. Hoff, "Noch ein Schnellfeuerpistole aus dem 17.
Jahrhundert," ibid., 247.

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 Mediaeval Legacy in the Wild West 197

who designed firearms tried his hand at multiple-loading, quick-firing g

the measure of Colt's genius that he cracked a problem which had been under ac-
tive discussion since the later Middle Ages, and which by the seventeenth century
had already produced at least one hand-gun with a single barrel and a rotary set
of chambers.22 When he solved it, Colt's first customers were the Texas Rangers,
who, on the basis of their frontier experience, made suggestions for further
improving his six-shooter.
What about barbed wire? Wire has been used since the beginnings of metal-
lurgy, but for millennia it was forged. The first great improvement, the draw-
plate, appears in a famous treatise on craftsmanship written in 1122-23 by a
German Benedictine, Theophilus.23 The second major innovation was the
application of waterpower to wire-drawing. In 1540 the Italian metallurgical
engineer Biringuccio gives us a clear picture of powered wire-drawing machinery
and tells us that heavy iron wire, as distinct from that in softer metals, could be
drawn only with the aid of waterpower.24 Despite earlier claims, I have not yet
seen firm evidence of a wire mill before 1489-1494 when the young Duirer pro-
duced a watercolor of quite a large one, and explicitly labelled it.25 Smooth iron
wire was therefore available in quantities before America was settled. It
remained for our Mid-West to add the barbs.
The horizontal-axle windmill was invented just before 1185 in the North Sea
region, and quickly became common in the areas from which the majority of our
first immigrants came.26 Webb neglected to mention that since the windmill of the
Great Plains was almost exclusively a pumping device drawing water from a
considerable depth, its effectiveness on our frontier depended on combining it
with another mediaeval invention, the suction pump. Antiquity knew only force
pumps. The suction pump is first found in the notebook of a Siennese engineer,
Jacopo Mariano Taccola, dating from the 1440's.27 Thus all three of Webb's
dominant frontier inventions are extensions of mediaeval traditions into a new
environment.
The distorted and fragmentary image of the mediaeval world which is today
current among educated men and women prevents many from recognizing the
vast accumulation of things on the American frontier (and, indeed, around us
still) which had their roots in the ingenuity and adaptability of the common
people of the Middle Ages. One can point out that a cowboy's stirrups appeared

22A. Essenwein, Quellen zur Geschichte der Feuerwaffen (Leipzig, 1872), plate B. xxvi (a), dating
from 1620 to 1680.
23 Theophilus, On Divers Arts, Bk. iII, c. 8, tr. J. G. Hawthorne and C. S. Smith (Chicago, 1963),
p.87 and note on wire drawing, pp. 87-89; Theophilus, The Various Arts, ed. C. R. Dodwell (London,
1961), p. 68. For the date, see L. White, jr. "Theophilus Redivivus," Technology and Culture, v (1964),
226-230.
24 V. Biringuccio, Pirotechnia, tr. C. S. Smith and M. T. Gnudi (New York, 1942), p. 380.
2 F. Lippman, Zeichnungen von Albrecht Diirer (Berlin, 1873), i, plate 4.
26 White, Medieval Technology and Social Change, p. 87. Hero's windmil was an armchair invention
which was probably never built and had no subsequent influence; cf. A. G. Drachmann, "Heron's
Windmill," Centaurus, vii (1960), 145-151.
27 S. Shapiro, "The Origin of the Suction Pump," Technology and Culture, v (1964), 566-574.

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 198 Mediaeval Legacy in the Wild West

in Europe in the eighth century and his jingling rowel spurs in the late thir-
teenth:28 they still don't seem "mediaeval" to those who have listened only to the
voices of the small minority of feudal and clerical aristocrats during those
Protean centuries, and who have never suspected the surge and sweep of the life
of the masses of mankind whose concern was neither ruling nor praying, but work-
ing. Yet we Americans are biologically descended from those peasants and crafts-
men, and we have no reason to disprize them.

IV

I have spoken of the legacy of the Middle Ages in the Wild West primarily in
terms of gadgetry, and our rough and practical ancestors would have approved
this approach. Nevertheless, more than gadgetry is involved: unconscious
mediaeval patterns of preference dominated the American frontier.
David Belasco, born and reared in San Francisco, concentrated the stereotypes
of the Gold Rush of '49 in his melodrama The Girl of the Golden West, which so
caught Puccini's imagination that he made a mediocre opera out of it. Minnie, the
Girl, runs a saloon on the Mother Lode. Does she serve the miner's wine? Not at
all: that would represent the Roman stratum of our history. Do they drink beer?
Not at all: that goes back at least to the ancient Celts and Germans, although it
may be noted that we have no word of the use of hops, with their remarkable
antibiotic properties for preservation of beer, until St Isidore of Seville.29 The only
beverage for a '49er miner was strictly mediaeval: whiskey. The distillation of
alcohol was invented in Italy, from a wine base, in the twelfth century.30 Its first
use was medicinal, and the new liquid was called aqua vitae, "water of life,"
doubtless because its ability to preserve meat from putrefaction was early noted.
Since the flesh of each of us is so dismally subject to decay, it quickly seemed
prudent to many people to take their medicine regularly. Wine being scarce in the
northern regions, the fermented grain malt used for beer was being distilled in
Bohemia by 1420.31 Such boreal aqua vitae was being made in Scotland certainly
by the last decade of the fifteenth century,32 and the Latin name was translated
into Gaelic as usquebaugh, or whiskey. When the Scotch-Irish reached Pennsyl-
vania, they brought their mediaeval arts with them and extrapolated them with
the invention of corn and rye whiskey, and (once over the Appalachians) of
bourbon. Minnie's saloon is unintelligible apart from the Middle Ages.

28 For the stirrup, cf. White, op. cit., p. 27. In Zeitschrift fur historische Waffen und Kostiimkund
Neue Folge, viI (1940), 30-32, H. A. Knorr summarizes the Swedish publications of H. Olssen
(1936-37) on the origin of rowel spurs as ilustrated by Swedish finds. In the eleventh century prick
spurs were supplemented by spurs having a loose ball or small plate. By the thirteenth century this
had become a horizontal rowel. The vertical rowel begins to come in at the end of the thirteenth
century.
29 F. M. Feldhaus, Die Technik der Vorzeit, der geschichtlichen Zeit und der Naturvolker (Leipzig,
1914), p. 87.
80 R. J. Forbes, Short History of the Art of Distillation (Leiden, 1948), pp. 87-89.
81 K. Sudhoff, "Weiteres zur Geschichte der Destillationstechnik," Archiv fiur Geschichte der
Naturwissenschaften und Technik, v (1915), 283-284.
11 J. Read, "Alchemy under James IV of Scotland," Ambix, ii (1938-39), 63.

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 Mediaeval Legacy in the Wild West 199

Not knowing that he is a stage-coach robber, Minnie falls in love with a hand-
sonme stranger. -le is wounded during a robbery, staggers to her shack to seek
protection and she hides him. The dastardly sheriff (a mediaeval title), who lusts
for her, follows a track of blood to her door and finds the miscreant hidden.
Minnie, a woman of parts, offers to gamble with the sheriff for her honor and her
lover's life. Do they throw dice? Not at all: that would have been old Roman. It is
characteristic of frontier mediaevalism that they gamble with cards, a fourteenth-
century innovation.33 Minnie wins the game by cheating: surreptitiously she
draws three aces and a pair out of her garter. No Roman ever saw a garter, but
about 1348 Edward III of England founded an order of chivalry on one: Honi
soit qui mal y pense!
Minnie has won; her lover is momentarily spared and escapes. But the miners
capture him and decide that he must pay for his crimes.
Men may be killed in many ways. In most societies, however, there are clear
rubrics for execution, a tradition of propriety as to the forms of killings com-
mitted by the group, which the group feels deeply impelled to follow, perhaps,
because to follow them makes the past share the guilt of the execution. To know
the subliminal mind of a society, one must study the sources of its liturgies of
inflicting death.
Throughout the American Wild West the rubric for execution was single and
uniform: hanging by a rope. In Greco-Roman times hanging with a rope or
cincture was common as a means of suicide: one recalls Jocasta and Judas. But it
is important for understanding any society to distinguish the customs of suicide
from those of execution as well as from the rubrics of human sacrifice.
The dismal history of execution has seldom distinguished clearly the various
modes of "hanging," - impalement, crucifixion, suspension by the neck in the
crotch of a tree, or by a rope - and contemporary accounts are normally ambigu-
ous. All Biblical references to hanging appear to indicate exposure of the impaled
corpse after execution, or else crucifixion.34 Execution by suspended strangulation
was not practiced by Greeks or Romans in pagan times. The suppression of
crucifixion, presumably by Constantine, because of religious sensibility, left a void
in the Roman repertory of execution which still existed at the promulgation of the
Theodisian Code in 438, but which had been filled by 533 when Justinian's Digest
systematically substituted furca for crux.35
The furca was a post with the fork of two branches at the top. The culprit was
hoiste(d so that his neck was placed in the fork, a piece of wood (vinculum patibuli)
was nailed behind his head across the fork, and he was left to strangle. Since there
is no oriental or classical precedent for such a manner of execution, and since
gabalus, a synonym for furca, is derived (as is the German Gabel) from Celtic,36

33 C. P. Ilargrave, A History of Playing Cards (Boston, 1930), pp. 39, 88, 159, 223-4, 257.
34 R. von Mansberg, "Die antike Hinrichtung am Pfahl oder Kreuz," Zeitschriftfiir Kulturgeschichte,
vii (1900), 52-80.
35 P. Franchi de' Cavallieri, "Della furca e della sua sostituzione alla croce nel diritto penale
romano," Nuovo bulletino di archeologia cristiana, xiii (1907), 65-78.
36 A. Elrnaut and A. Meillet, Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue latine, 4th ed. (Paris, 1959), s.v.

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 200 Mediaeval Legacy in the Wild West

the new rubric probably came from the north. Tacitus tells us
hanged traitors and cowards from trees,37 presumably furcae.
than the noose, was used for hanging criminals in the Frankish
The first clear evidence of hanging with a rope comes in Oros
account of how, in 105 B.C., the victorious Cimbri, a tribe out of Denmark,
smashed all the arms and armor which they had captured and hanged all the
prisoners in nooses from trees.39 The many finds of deliberately twisted and
broken weapons in the Baltic region indicate clearly that this destruction and
slaughter were an offering to the gods. In later centuries among the pagan
Scandinavians hanging with a rope was a highly specialized rubric of human
sacrifice to the god Odin. Bodies of hanged victims have been found buried,
according to Norse custom, in peat bogs with the noose still around the neck.40
That they were hanged and not simply strangled is known from two pictures: first,
a man hanged from a tree next to an altar, shown on a stone from Hammars in
Liirbro (Gotland), ca 700,41 second, six men hanging from a pair of sacred trees,
shown on a tapestry of the ninth century found in the Oseberg ship burial.42 Even
in the later eleventh century, Adam of Bremen tells us that a Christian who visited
the great shrine at Uppsala counted seventy-two bodies of men, horses, and
hounds hanged as sacrifices on the trees of the temple grove.43
Although the suicide of Judas with a rope had been represented since the fifth
century,44 there is no depiction in Christian art of an execution by hanging with a
rope until the first half of the eleventh century when two appear. One, by a
strange coincidence, is in the same manuscript of Aelfric in which we found the
rudiments of the coach.45 The other is in the Roda Bible46 from Catalonia. There-
after, such representations are common. Most fascinating is an Italian miniature
of ca. 1130-1140: six men are hoisting a victim with a rope around his neck, but

37 Germania, c. 12 (London, 1914), 280: "proditores et transfugas arboribus suspendunt." The

Romans spoke of any sort of crux, furca or patibulum as arbor infelix or infelix lignum; cf. G. Hum-
bert, "Crux," in C. Daremberg and E. Saglio, Dictionnaire des antiquit6s grecques et romaines, i
(Paris, 1887), p. 1575.
38 Franchi de' Cavallieri, op. cit., pp. 87-90.
89 Historiarum adversum paganos libri VII, v, 16, ed. C. Zangenmeister (Leipzig, 1889), p. 164:
"homines laqueis collo inditis ex arboribus suspensi sunt." F. Strom, On the Sacral Origin of the Ger-
manic Death Penalties (Stockholm, 1942), p. 141, in an effort to deny the distinction between sacrifi-
cial and criminal executions, neglects the implication of the smashed booty and credits the whole
episode to furor teutonicus.
40 Excellent pictures of the Tollund find are provided by P. V. Glob in the National Geographic
Magazine, cv (1954), 419-430.
41 Str6m, op. cit., frontispiece and p. 144.
42 E. Oxenstierna, Die Wikinger (Stuttgart, 1959), p. 162, fig.
43 Adam Bremensis, Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum, iv, 27, ed. B. Schmeidler (Hanover
1917), p. 260.
44 Cf. 0. Goetz, "H'ie henckett Judas'," in Form und Inhalt: Kunstgeschichtliche Studien Otto
Schmitt ... dargebracht, ed. H. Wentzell (Stuttgart, 1950), p. 109, note 6.
46 Cottonian Claudius B. IV, fol. 57r; cf. supra note 16; cf. Strutt, op. cit., plate xv, fig. 6.
46 W. Neuss, Die katalanisch Bibelillustration um die Wende des ersten Jahrtausend8 (Bonn,U1922),
plate 40; cf. pp. 28-29 for date.

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 Mediaeval Legacy in the Wild West 201

the rope passes not over the beam of a gallows but over the horizontal rod, al-
ready nailed in place, across the fork of a furca.47 Clearly, the artist knows in
detail, perhaps from pictures, what a furca had looked like, but he no longer
knows how it was used: within his horizon the transition to the new mode of
public execution was complete.
Since the Viking age was a time of great flux in Scandinavia, it appears that by
the tenth century the old line dividing sacrifice from penal execution was crum-
bling, at least among outlying Norse groups: in 922, Ibn Fadlan explicitly men-
tions the rope-hanging of thieves among the Swedes on the Volga.48 As for the
West, the conversion of Danes, Norwegians, and Icelanders to Christianity about
the year 1000, at a moment when Norse influences were prevading much of Eu-
rope, probably secularized the Viking technique of human sacrifice and made it
wi(dely available as a rubric of execution. The persistent mediaeval conviction
that the oak was a good tree for hanging and that gallows should be built of oak
"Eichbaum gibt gut Galgen" - 4 has nothing to do with the tensile strength of
wood. The oak was so widely regarded as numenous that we can scarcely escape
the conclusion that late mediaeval rope-hanging was religious in its origins. When,
about 1060, the enraged Duke William of Normandy swore to hang a recalcitrant
abbot "ad altiorem quercum vicinae silvae,"50 his pagan Norse ancestors may
have been speaking more loudly than he knew.
Where does all this grisly antiquarianism lead us? Whatever its more remote
sources - and doubtless, in time, these will be further clarified - the rubric of
hanging with a rope was not generally accepted in Europe until the eleventh
century. Thereafter it was dominant. The lynching parties of the American
Wild West stood in this later mediaeval tradition.
Lest any of my readers remain apprehensive about the fate of the tenor in La
Fanciulla del West, AMinnie talks the boys out of it.

hIistory is a means of access to ourselves. If we Americans are to understand

ourselves and our nation, we must ponder the American tradition in its widest
context. It is obvious that influences and ideas, as well as people, have flowed con-
stantly in both directions across the Atlantic ever since our settlement began. But
it is not enough to include contemporary Europe in our thinking about our past.
Equally with Europeans, we Americans are heirs of the Middle Ages. Nor is this
vivid legacy from the Middle Ages more intensive on the eastern seaboard than on
a cattle ranch in Nevada: as Julian Bishko of the University of Virginia has

47E. Garrison, Studies in the History of Medieval Italian Painting, ii (Florence, 1956), p. 170, fig.
186; for the date, cf. pp. 228-232.
48 A. Z. V. Togan, "Ibn Fadlan's Reisebericht," Abhandlungen fur die Kunde des Morgenlandes,
xxiv, 3 (Leipzig, 1939), 88.
49 K. von Amira, "Die germanischen Todesstrafen," Abhandlungen der Bayerischen Akadem
Wissenschaften, Phil.-hist. Kl., xxxi, 3 (1922), 89, 93.
10 Ordericus Vitalis, Historia ecclesiastica, Pars ii, Lib. iII, c. 13, in J. P. Migne, Patrologia latina,
CLXXXVIII (Paris, 1890), 267.

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2O02 Mediaeval Legacy in the Wild West

shown,5' the world of the American buckaroo is descended in detail from that of
the vaquero of the high plains of mediaeval Spain. To comprehend ourselves as
Americans we must recover, and relate ourselves to, our deeper past, the Middle
Ages.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, Los ANGELES

11 C. J. Bishko, "The Peninsular Background of Latin American Cattle Ranching," Hispanic

American Historical Retiew, xxxii (1952), 491-515; "The Castilian as Plainsman: The Medieval
Ranching Frontier in La Mancha and Estremadura," in The New Woild Looks at Its History, ed.
A. R. Lewis and T. F. McGann (Austin, 1963), pp. 47-69.

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