Castle Characters - Matilda the Barber

Time to introduce another one of our Castle Characters, one much lowlier than the Knight and Royal Lady that we have met so far. This is Matilda, the Barber, who lived in Newcastle near the Castle itself at the end of the 1200s. Ordinary working people like Matilda often disappear in histories of the medieval period, which tend to concentrate much more on the doings of knights, kings, queens and what have you. But we should not lose sight of the people that it was the work of these ordinary people that kept the whole kingdom running, and they lived lives every bit as interesting as their “betters”.

Woman working as a blacksmith, from a medieval manuscript of c.1330

In the case of Matilda, she appears in only one written record, a document called the “Lay Subsidy”. This is basically a tax record for Northumberland from 1296, just before the wars between England and Scotland began. It gives us a snapshot of what Northumberland was like just before the great war began that was to totally change the lives of everyone living in the north for the next three hundred years. It shows us a prosperous county of small villages, all linked together by feudal duties owed to various landlords and landladies. Yes, landladies too. People all too often treat the medieval period as if it were a time when women were treated as little more than property to be bartered between families, but the truth of the matter is quite different. Women could own and inherit their own property, and often owned and managed their own farms, villages, and estates. This was sometimes due to the early death of a husband leaving a woman in sole control of his property and having to manage it for themselves. But women could be professionals in the middle ages as well. Medieval manuscript images and records show women working not just as weavers, dyers, and embroiderers but as brewers, butchers, blacksmiths, bookbinders, spicers, farriers and innkeepers.

How these women trained for their jobs is a little unclear, as they were not usually apprenticed in the way that boys were. As a boy in the middle ages the usual way that you learned a trade was to be sent away from home when you were about 7 years old to serve as an apprentice to a more experienced craftsman, usually in the same profession as your father – so a blacksmith’s son would be apprenticed to another blacksmith. It seems odd that they did not train their children themselves (although this did sometimes happen). This was probably to help build a network of trusted contacts among the members of a single profession, most of whom would belong to the same ‘guild’. These guilds were a little like medieval trade unions, and controlled who could practice a particular craft within a town, as well as setting prices and providing a form of insurance for the families of guild members, as well as being a social network. Women invariably became involved in the work of these guilds, usually through their husbands, and could take over a business if the husband died and were registered members of guilds themselves.

Eccentric haircuts were all the rage in the middle ages, and the need for monks to have their distinctive ‘do led to the huge demand for barbers

So, how do we know what Matilda did for a living, if she’s only a brief mention in a tax record? That’s where surnames come in. We’ve revealed a little bit about medieval surnames before when talking about “Sir Aymer de Atholl”, and how aristocrats took the name of their main manor or castle as their surname. For ordinary medieval people, the business of surnames could get a little more complicated. At the start of the period, there is really no concept of a ‘surname’ at all, and certainly not a ‘family name’ for ordinary people – after all, if your family aren’t important aristocrats why bother giving the family a name? But with the growth of towns, surnames started to become important. In a small village you might get away without needing surnames, with just “John”, “William” or “Thurketil” being enough of a name to identify your neighbours with. However, if you live in a town of several thousand people, and there’s a limited number of first names, you might run into some problems. Which John? Which William?

The solution to this problem was the surname, which gradually morphed into many of the family names that we would recognise today. But originally a surname wasn’t passed down in the family, it referred only to a specific individual, and they came in a few different forms. First, you have the byname or nickname (Little John in the Robin Hood stories being a prime example). Secondly, geographical, a bit like the names of knights and nobles – so if you moved to the town from the village of Fenham, just outside Newcastle, you might be called Eleanor of Fenham. Thirdly, you might be referred to with reference to your family, for example Thomas son of John (which becomes surnames like Johnson and what have you). Finally, many people were known by their profession – Smith is the most widespread surname in England, but there are a whole load more professional surnames – Wright, Carpenter, Baker…and Barber.

Matilda is listed in the Lay Subsidy as Matilda “le Barber” or very simply Matilda the Barber in English (French and Latin were the official languages used in government documents at the time). So, Matilda ran her own business and worked as a barber. One reason that women all too often disappear from view in discussions of the middle ages is that they are not mentioned in things like tax records if they are married and have a husband who is handling the business. That Matilda appears in the tax records at all means that she was the owner of the property in question – in her case, about £10 worth of property was what she was assessed as owning for tax purposes. Doesn’t sound much, but in the early 1300s £10 was roughly the value of a craftsman’s house and shop – probably the shop on the ground floor with living quarters above and a small garden. I think we can imagine Matilda owning her own shop (rather than renting it) and running her business out of the ground floor. She’s listed in the Parish of St Nicholas, which is the area around what is now Newcastle Cathedral, the parish closest to the Castle itself, which seems to have been the most prestigious part of the town to live and work in. So, moving to her job, what exactly did a medieval barber get up to?

A medieval barber surgeon bleeding a patient.

Some of their duties will be familiar to anyone who has been in a barber’s shop before – they cut hair and trimmed beards. Medieval people were quite fashion conscious, and different beards and hairstyles were always in demand. Barbering also had a boom because of the number of monasteries and friaries dotting the medieval landscape – there were five friaries in Newcastle alone! The monks and friars had their hair cut into a haircut called a ‘tonsure’, and so every monastery needed access to a good barber. It seems to have been this association with monasteries that led to the other role of medieval barbers as medical professionals. If you’re going to shave a beard with a blade, you’re going to need a steady hand, and it would seem that from quite early on barbers used to help monks with minor medical tasks like bleeding, removal of teeth and what have you. But in 1163, a papal decree told monks that they were no longer allowed to shed blood for any reason, leaving this side of medical practice entirely in the hands of barbers. After all, physicians would not touch it – the real university educated doctors of the middle ages stuck entirely to the theoretical side of medicine, diagnosing patients from the appearance of their urine and prescribing medicine and changes in diet. They wouldn’t dream of cutting into someone and getting blood on their hands. So, barbers became the nearest thing that the medieval world had to surgeons.

Bleeding was the most common operation they performed and the one they were most associated with – the famous red and white striped pole that you still see today allegedly represents a pole wrapped with bloody bandages as an obvious indicator of what went on inside the shop. Bleeding was believed to be good for health in medieval times, where all illnesses were believed to be caused by an imbalance of your four ‘humours’ – blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. Physicians preferred leeches for the job of bleeding, but barbers were a bit more hands on, drawing blood with a tool called a fleam and bleeding their patients into a bowl. They also pulled teeth, lanced boils and treated minor wounds. As time went on, they seem to have become more and more professional in their approach, and certainly by the 1300s many of them were literate and have left a wide range of medical texts describing the operations that they had performed. Some of these surgeons, such as John or Arderne, who lived about 50 years after Matilda, started to describe themselves as “Master Surgeons” to show that they regarded themselves as a cut above the common barber, but there were never very many of these educated types – in 1435 there were only about 17 of these surgeons registered in London. For most people in England until well into the 18th century the “barber surgeon” was the front-line medical professional and first port of call for all your cutting, slicing, bleeding and stitching needs.

A medieval surgeon’s tool for extracting arrows

(c) British Library Board. Harley 1736 f. 48v

What is interesting about Matilda is that she lives right on the cusp of a time of huge change, both in her profession and her homeland. In 1296 Newcastle and the North-East of England seem to have been relatively peaceful and prosperous. But within a year, things would change dramatically. Records from the Castle for 1297 show the Sheriff of Northumberland spending huge amounts of money to put the Castle on a war-footing – troops including crossbowmen and heavily armoured sergeants were garrisoned; war machines, including a ballista (a type of catapault) were built and mounted on one of the towers; and wooden walls and reinforcements were constructed around the Castle and its moat. This was all in readiness for an expected attack by the Scots army of Sir William Wallace, who had just defeated the English army in Scotland and was rapidly marching south. In the event, he turned aside from the heavily fortified Newcastle Castle and contended himself with plundering the less well defended villages of Northumberland, but Newcastle itself received a massive influx of refugees fleeing from Scottish raiders. Over the next fifty years or so, Scottish raids would reduce Northumberland to a shadow of what it had been – royal officials struggled to collect taxes from the desperate populace, and villages and farms in the hills were abandoned in favour of more easily defended dwellings. It is hard not to think that the massive social changes and constant warfare on the borders were one of the things driving the improvements in surgery in this period, and the increased demand for barber surgeons who often accompanied armies to perform operations in the field. By the end of the 1300s, barber surgeons had access to an array of complex tools for specialist tasks like setting limbs and withdrawing arrows.

This one has been a bit less of a biography of Matilda and more a look at the context of the time she lived in and the job she did. Sadly, that’s inevitable when you’re looking at ordinary people in a time period where most of the sources ignore their lives. But we shouldn’t lose sight of them whenever we’re looking around the Castles, Cathedrals and other great medieval monuments in our country. Even the small details can often confound the stereotypes we’ve got of medieval people from film, TV, games and other media – like a prosperous medieval woman working as a medical professional in the shadow of Newcastle Castle.