Blog: Medieval romance launched the first of Cupid’s arrows

To mark the Global Day of Love, St Valentine’s Day, the University of Northampton’s Senior Lecturer in History, Dr Rachel Moss explores the history of Saint Valentine and origins of traditional declarations of love in the following blog:

Firstly – Happy St Valentine’s Day everyone!

Love it or loathe it, Valentine’s Day is a holiday that’s hard to escape. However, you might be surprised to learn it hasn’t always been that way. In fact, it turns out we may owe our celebration of the holiday to none other than one of the fathers of English poetry – Geoffrey Chaucer.

How did this happen, you may ask? Who was the real Saint Valentine?

Well, the key answer is that there were several St Valentines in Church history.

Valentius, from the Latin valens, or ‘strength’, was a popular male name in antiquity, and there are records of multiple saints of that name in the days of the early church. However, the saint whose feast day falls on 14 February is a St Valentine who was believed to be Bishop of Terni, Italy in the third century.

One common legend is that Valentine was arrested for evangelising his faith in an era before Christianity was the official religion of the Roman empire (how very scandalous). Valentine ended up converting the judge and his whole household to Christianity by curing the judge’s daughter of blindness through faith healing. Later, continuing to evangelise, Valentine was supposedly arrested and put to death.

So far, this is not so very romantic…

Later embellishments of this legend claims he performed clandestine marriages for secret Christians in the Roman army.

In the Middle Ages, if you knew St Valentine, it was primarily as a martyr.

The very first reference anyone has been able to find to St Valentine’s Day as a day celebrating romantic love is in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls – published way back around 1381.

The Parliament of Fowls is a dream vision poem, where Nature convenes a court to help all the species of birds find their mate. The court meets, according to Chaucer, “”on Saint Valentine’s Day / When every bird comes there to choose his match”.

The way Chaucer phrases it suggests it’s a long-established custom, but many scholars now think that he made it up!

It’s believed the poem may have been written in honour of Richard II’s marriage to Anne of Bohemia in January 1382, and certainly the theme of young love would fit, as the couple tied the knot around the age of fifteen.

Their marriage, however, did not start on the best note – Anne’s ship, according to the chronicler Walsingham, was wrecked as soon as the party disembarked, which would have been seen as an ill omen – but it seems that their union was a happy one. When Anne died twelve years later, a grief-stricken Richard ordered the manor house in which she had died to be torn down.

Once we get into the early fifteenth century, Valentine’s Day was well and truly settled as a popular custom. Charles, Duke of Orleans, wrote a poem referring to his “sweet Valentine” when he was a prisoner in the Tower of London following the Battle of Agincourt in 1415:

I am already sick of love,
My very gentle Valentine,
Since for me you were born too soon,
And I for you was born too late.
God forgives him who has
Me from you for the whole year.

(Translation by Sarah Peverley)

This sweet poem is the first known Valentine’s missive. Unfortunately for Charles, his love story did not have a happy ending – his wife Bonne d’Armagnac died before he was released from prison.

By this point, the fashion for Valentine’s Day was well established, record found in an English letter. This was by Margery Brews, a young gentlewoman, who wrote to her suitor John Paston in February 1477.

She addressed him as “my right well-beloved Valentine” and said – regretfully – that her father could not pay any higher dowry than he had already promised. She hoped that “if you love me, as I trust truly that you do, you will not leave me for that; for if you have not half the livelihood that you have, for to do the greatest labour that any woman alive might, I would not forsake you.”

Safe to say, it must have worked a charm, because they were married later that year!

And so, if you’re looking for a note to charm your loved one this Valentine’s Day, you can’t go wrong by following Margery’s handwritten and heartfelt words.

All the best to you and yours for this Valentine’s Day.