DAY 1 CONTINUED: OF SLIGHTLY LESS MOULDY OLD MEN WHO WERE'NT MARTYRS

DAY 1: FROM 14:00 until 19:00 = 1350 until 1500 AD

Introduction: After finishing off lunch in the Rome of the Dark Ages, we can zoom off to our next time period... The Middle Ages. This time was brimming with suicide, although perhaps not as obvious as that of modern-day times. Nobles didn't poison themselves (although murder by poison was very popular then) or impale themselves on swords, but they had plenty other ways of self-homicide: the crusades, jousting, duelling, war, etc etc. Peasants, also known as serfs, had less noble options... they committed suicide in secret, and generally by hanging. But the most well known suicides are again of religious nature: monks and nuns ended their lives both in groups or individually, inspired by mysticism or despair. These isolated people still remained the few privelidged enough to read, write and teach.



Locations:

1. Year of 1412, Northern France, City of Rouen, Church of St. Ouen: This is where the cleric, artist and architect John Mignot hanged himself. To stifle the scandal, the judge of the diocesan court ordered that his body be buried in the cemetery at night. This proved useless, because when the affair was discovered, the cleric's body was reburied in unconsecrated ground at crossroads. The cemetery, then believed to have been "polluted by his sin", was reconsecrated. At this Church, which took a little less than two centuries to build, we can wander through the gardens and meandering corridors, and visit his small room... where his body was found swaying from the rafters by his fellow clerics.
2. Year of 1351, France, Paris, Building overlooking Les Halles: This is where Phillipe Testard, a man over a hundred who had been prevot to the archbishop of Paris, threw himself out of the window in the middle of the night after getting up to go to the bathroom. He survived the fall to the street below but, while recovering, stabbed himself. To avoid confiscation of his estate, his heirs pleaded insanity: "He did so many silly things that everyone said he was out of his senses."
Here, we can end our first day of the Seven Days Of Suicide Tour by partaking of supper under the stars and discussing the examples of suicide in literature of the Middle Ages.