by Félicité Schuler-Lagier, Interpreter and Lecturer at the Centre international du Vitrail
courtesy of Chartres Sanctuaire du Monde
(Suite)
Three illegal trades: Butchers
In the Middle Ages, butchery was one of those activities forbidden to clerics, because it was violent and transgressed the blood taboo. Meat, perceived as linked to the sin of the flesh, was forbidden on certain days of the religious calendar (mainly Fridays, the day of Christ’s death, during Lent and on the days of the Four Seasons). The Church expressly forbade butchers from displaying and selling meat on days of fasting and abstinence from fatty foods.
Fig. 9 : Butchers displaying their meat. On the stall, set up on two trestles, we can see (from left to right) a knife, a calf’s head, a knife block (the Middle Ages really invented everything!), a piece of rare meat and, hanging in the background, a pig carcass. The figure on the right, pointing to an apparently empty white money bag, is dressed in green and yellow, an infamous color combination that marks him out as a cheat. The man seated on the left, whose cap and fur-lined coat indicate authority and power, is barefoot, suggesting that he is doing penance. Are they referring to the literally “out-of-frame” coins under the table, which could indicate illicit earnings from the sale of butchery products on forbidden days? Detail of stained glass 38.
Calling someone a butcher, carnifice (a term also used to designate the executioner), was the most pejorative of connotations. Thus, the assassins of Archbishop Thomas Becket, despite their status as court knights, were called butchers, aulici dogs, dogs in rage seeking to please the prince.
Fig. 10 : Butchery scene expressing unprecedented violence. The hollowed-out pig carcass clearly evokes the sin of lust, detail of stained glass 103.
Fig. 11 : The butcher/equarer, cutting up the carcass of a pig, is dressed in a short monochrome yellow tunic and green socks, infamous colors in this context. He is the image of unrepentant sinners, who do not respect the prescriptions of fasting and abstinence, detail of stained glass 38.
In the chancel lancet, featuring the prophets David and Ezekiel (in his vision of the Temple, he evokes the priests approaching the Lord in the sanctuary, where they will place holy things), a butchery scene unfolds, just above the high altar where the non-bloody sacrifice of the Eucharist is celebrated. But this scene is only visible from the choir, a sanctuary once reserved for the clergy. Here we see a butcher, holding an axe upside down above his head with both hands, preparing to stun a calf. A hollowed-out pig carcass hangs by its two hind legs from a hook. A dog, seated in the lower right-hand corner, his body tense and ready to pounce on the prey, looks eagerly towards the scene that precedes the slaughter.
In the Christian symbolism of the Fathers, the calf, symbolizing Christ’s gentleness, also evokes his Passion and sacrifice. The Fathers interpreted the calf as the figure of Christ’s death, just as the lion evokes his Resurrection and the eagle his Ascension. The butcher in this scene is likened to the wicked who persecuted Christ, and whose violence is reprehensible. The slaughter of the calf also evokes the victims of the bloody sacrifices of the Old Law, abrogated once and for all by the sacrifice offered by Jesus Christ, the innocent victim.
The dog, voracious and avaricious, accustomed to licking bleeding meat, is one of the animals generally taken in the wrong way, due to the passages in the Bible where this animal, considered impure, feeds on waste and carrion. It symbolizes perverse infidels and aggressors gathered to kill Christ. In Psalm 21, which describes the humiliations and sufferings of Christ’s passion and is recited on Holy Thursday when the altars are stripped, verse 17 evokes the dogs of Hell, the persecutors who surround the innocent victim.
The pig, an impure animal in Mosaic law and a sacrificial animal among the pagans, is always devalued in medieval Christian symbolism and taken in the wrong way. In the parable of the Prodigal Son, to keep pigs is to have fallen into total degradation, because the pig symbolizes the sins of the flesh, filth and gluttony. The pig always symbolizes sin and sinful men.
To be continued…
Original article published in the Lettre de Chartres Sanctuaire du Monde (December 2021)