Margery Kempe: Alewife, miller, mystic

Margery Kempe (1373–after 1438) is one of the most celebrated spiritual icons of medieval England, despite never having taken holy orders. The full text of her Book otherwise known only from excerpts, was not recognised by scholars until 1934^** but it is now regarded by many as the first English autobiography: of a complex, conflicted middle-class secular woman blessed, if that is the right word, with profound visions, revelations and kinaesthetic sensations.

According to her own testimony, Margery was widely reviled by ordinary folk for her outpourings of emotion: weeping, wailing and moaning during church services in sympathy with the sufferings of Christ. She was accused of Lollardy,^†† heresy and hypocrisy, condemned for preaching – against the much-quoted proscriptions of St Paul – and often expelled from fellowships of pilgrims and church gatherings. She was arrested and tried before senior clergy at least twice. She bore fourteen children – one of whom, an emigre to the Baltic coast of Germany, seems to have been the scribe who took down the bulk of her story, not in clerical Latin but in Middle English, the language of Chaucer. She visited the renowned anchoress Julian of Norwich and made several long-lasting friends and supporters in the priesthood. But her own testimony tells of a life of social and emotional conflict, played out in both the public gaze and in her manifold conversations with God.

When this creature^‡‡ was twenty years of age, or some deal more, she was married to a worshipful burgess [of Lynne in Norfolk] and was with child within a short time, as nature would. And after she had conceived, she was belaboured with great accesses till the child was born and then, what with the labour she had in childing, and the sickness going before, she despaired of her life, weening she might not live… This creature was out of her mind and was wondrously vexed and laboured with spirits for half a year, eight weeks and odd days.

And in this time, she saw, as she thought, devils opening their mouths all inflamed with burning waves of fire, as if they would have swallowed her in, sometimes ramping at her, sometimes threatening her, pulling her and hauling her, night and day during the aforesaid time… And also she rived the skin on her body against her heart with her nails spitefully…⁸

This account, which modern readers will instantly recognise as a vivid and expressive description of postnatal depression, precipitated a crisis of conversion in Margery:

When this creature had thus graciously come again to her mind, she thought that she was bound to God and that she would be His servant. Nevertheless, she would not leave her pride or her pompous array, which she had used beforetime, either for her husband or for any man’s counsel. Yet she knew full well that men said of her full much villainy, for she wore gold pipes on her head, and her hoods, with the tippets, were slashed. Her cloaks also were slashed and laid with divers colours between the slashes, so that they should be more staring to men’s sight, and herself the more worshipped.⁹

Margery was, then, very much a secular woman of her class and time. I am particularly intrigued by her account of two commercial ventures, rare and precious first-person evidence for medieval professional women’s view of themselves.¹⁰

Then for pure covetousness, and to maintain her pride, she began to brew, and was one of the greatest brewers in the town of N… [Lynne] for three years or four, till she lost much money, for she had never been used thereto. For, though she had ever such good servants, cunning in brewing, yet it would never succeed with them. For when the ale was fair standing under barm [froth] as any man might see, suddenly the barm would fall down, so that all the ale was lost, one brewing after another, so that her servants were ashamed and would not dwell with her.

Yet she left not the world altogether, for she now bethought herself of a new housewifery.

Anon, it was noised about the town of N… that neither man nor beast would serve the said creature.¹¹

After the apparently providential failure of these two ventures, Margery began negotiations with her husband – which must have lasted many years, since they produced such a large clutch of offspring – to accept a celibate relationship. She took to wearing white robes, which many thought offensively hypocritical for such a productive union.

In about 1413, at the age of forty or so, Margery set off, as the nun Egeria had a millennium before,^§§ on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. She visited Venice, Jerusalem and Bethlehem, returning via a long and troublesome stay in Rome. It is intriguing to compare her brief, highly emotional account of a visit to the Holy Sepulchre with Egeria’s more observational description; intriguing, too, for the aftermath:

When this creature with her fellowship came to the grave where Our Lord was buried, anon, as she entered that holy place, she fell down with her candle in her hand, as if she would have died for sorrow. And later she rose up again with great weeping and sobbing, as though she had seen Our Lord buried even before her…¹²

First when she had her cryings in Jerusalem, she had them often, and in Rome also. And when she came home to England, first at her coming home, it came but seldom, as it were once a month, then once a week, afterwards daily, and once she had fourteen in one day, and another day she had seven, and so on, as God would visit her, sometimes in church, sometimes in the street, sometimes in her chamber, sometimes in the fields, whenever God would send them, for she never knew the time nor the hour when they would come.

Margery must have been a difficult woman to know. She had friends and admirers but alienated many of them, either by taking money from them to give away or by seemingly courting public conflict. She was uncompromising in her outpourings, in her dress, her manners and her denunciations of ecclesiastical authority. By her own admission, most of her travelling companions found her unbearable. But history is much the richer for the survival of her rare and honest testimony.