’Tis the season to be jolly drunk
If you think Christmas is indulgent, remember the Land of Cockaigne
I’m looking at a picture of three wellpadded chaps lying on the ground beneath a table laden with pies and poultry.
These overindulged revellers planning to sleep it off might seem a familiar enough scene. But the artist has added some peculiar touches.
In the foreground, what appears to be an egg, its top removed and a knife dug into it, has sprouted legs and is skipping over to the man who lies spread-eagled, staring at the sky.
Behind the prone figures is a pig, trotting along with a knife inserted in his side. In fact, as a slice out of his back shows, this pig is already cooked, a pork chop available on demand.
This is no Christmas lunch, that single day of letting yourself go and never mind the waistband. It’s the year-round medieval fantasy of the Land of Cockaigne, as painted by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in 1567. A pretty good idea of what Cockaigne was supposed to be like is given by its Dutch name, which supplied Bruegel’s original title: Het Luilekkerland – the lazy-yummy-land.
First surfacing in the 13th century (the Carmina Burana has a character who calls himself the ‘Abbot of Cockaigne’), the appeal of Cockaigne spread through Italy (Bocaccio called it Bengodi, ‘where the vines are tied up with sausages’), Germany, England and the Low Countries.
Scholars disagree over writers’ aims in their portraits of Cockaigne – were they celebrating a fantasy or warning of the unchristian perils of self-indulgence? – but the themes remained pretty constant: more food and drink than you could shake a pitchfork at, no work, and sex on demand.
The British Library has a 15th-century manuscript of a poem about Cockaigne in Middle Dutch, which is pretty representative, as translated by the Dutch literary historian Herman Pleij: Beautiful women are seen everywhere. This is the land of the Holy Ghost; Those who sleep longest earn the most. No work is done the whole day long, By anyone old, young, weak, or strong. There no one suffers shortages; The walls are made of sausages. Windows and doors, though it may seem odd, Are made of salmon, sturgeon, and cod. The tabletops are pancakes. Do not jeer, For the jugs themselves are made of beer.
Sounds like heaven – though a rather more earthy one than that conjured up by the Church, or by Dante, whose Empyrean seems to be populated exclusively by ancient and medieval celebs, like a roped-off section of a Gothic nightclub.
Cockaigne sounds as if it was meant for people who hadn’t had much chance to choose the path of wisdom or temperance because they were too busy grafting and wondering where the next meal was coming from.
If we think we know today about the ‘shortages’ the poet mentions, we are of course kidding ourselves: to a medieval peasant, even a thinned-out supermarket shelf would look like Cockaigne.
Plenty wasn’t alien to medieval experience, but it was exclusive. It is notable how many chivalric vows seem to have taken place at exotic banquets, for example: from the vow of the peacock to the vow of the pheasant, where knightly virtue was inspired by the appearance of the next course.
By the time Bruegel was painting it, Cockaigne was on the way out. The artist was probably satirising overindulgence rather than celebrating it anyway.
It is tempting to conclude that what did for Cockaigne was the Reformation, elements of which encouraged all sorts of crackdowns on simple pleasures, from dancing to football. But the Church had always seen Cockaigne as disreputable, which was part of its appeal.
The reason for its demise probably has more to do with Cockaigne’s replacement by a different fantasy land, in the New World. Columbus described South America as ‘a veritable Cockaigne’, and wildly inaccurate and fantastical reports of the cornucopias on offer (and easily dealt-with or completely ignored original inhabitants) are a feature of explorers’ accounts and imperial cheerleading from then on. No matter that early settlement, at least, was fraught with hardship and danger, from Roanoke to Jamaica. The propaganda kept coming.
For all the desperation – and the inhumanity – there certainly were goodies on offer. If we’re looking for Cockaigne, a good place to start is the origins of our Christmas lunch. Of all the old favourites – our turkeys from Central America, roast potatoes from their northern neighbours, Christmas pud spiced with the bounty of Madagascar, Indonesia and Sri Lanka – just about the only dish a medieval reveller might recognise would be the Brussels sprouts.
Spices, though known, were so exotic as to be out of reach to almost everyone, and their origins were mysterious enough to make them appear to be the harvest of Luilekkerland anyway. In the 13th century, a crusader reported the tale that cinnamon was gathered in nets at the source of the Nile.
As you hover over that extra mince pie, emulate your medieval forebear – and tuck in.