I am writing some dnd and I was wondering how in the medievil times people might prove their good favour with a person of authority. For instance would they be given badges or sigils to prove they had good standing with a particular organisation? I suppose they would have used paper documents to prove qualifications with embossing/ wax seals and those kind of things? How would you know a letter or emissary from a king person of repute was trustworthy? Also did they have passports or could you go wherever you liked? How did people prove their identity or did they not need to? How would they track down criminals (was it just peoples visual memory of what they looked like?)
Sorry if thats too many questions.
This is actually pretty simple: people knew each other. Nobility was a peerage, that is, it's a system of social and familial relationships that are reinforced by custom and by cultural patterns of behavior. Nobles marry each other, attend the same feasts and festivals, compete with one another at tournaments, fight with one another in wars, foster their children in the same courts, and appeal to the same authorities in personal disputes. They have families that mingle together socially and look to marry one another, and pressure for good marriages expands their peer group to foreign lands and to lower (but possibly richer) social classes. In short, nobles never really have to "prove" their status, because their status is known to everyone at the time of their birth. Noble men and women would be raised in particular ways and taught particular skills along gender lines, but both would also learn to dance and sing and recite poetry, and all were given many opportunities to embody or display those skills as a matter of socialization and custom. Nobles exchanged letters together, did business together, hosted each other when they traveled, exchanged gifts.
There was some element, too, of legal restrictions on dress and accoutrements. Sumptuary laws, the laws that governed who could wear what without risking fines or other punishments, would give a literal visual code to anyone you might encounter in a city, based just on the richness of the cloth, the color of their dyes, and the type of fur or hat they could wear. It should also be said that sumptuary laws were often ignored or deliberately broken by those with money but not social station, but that's another question.
This was true, too, of other classes. Merchants and even rural peasants all would have moved within extremely strong social networks of peers, whom they relied on for marriage, socializing, financial assistance, and shared labor. Merchants knew merchants, guildsmen knew guildsmen, knights knew knights, peasants knew peasants, courtiers and servants knew other courtiers and servants. These networks also always sought expansion, predominantly through marriage or business relationships. It's when these networks expand that documentation was often needed; a young nobleman journeying to a distant foreign court would likely bear letters of introduction, written by someone known to both parties. An uncle, say, or a cousin, who had some relationship to members of the court and could vouch for the newcomer.
In short, this is sort of like asking how a distant cousin of yours might "prove" that they're related to you. If they start naming your other cousins and aunts and uncles and knows your mother and father and some family history, are you going to go out of your way to ask to see their driver's license? The context of the meeting is what proves the relationship, generally.
With regard to criminal apprehension, yes it's mostly just the constable or the reeve asking around and getting visual descriptions. This is still how much police work is done, and more ironbound proof of guilt, like security cameras and phone records and DNA, et al, collected only after a reasonable suspicion of guilt is established. I've written more extensively on pre-modern officers of the peace here.
If you're interested in reading about how some of these peer networks worked, I would highly recommend Three Behaim Boys by Steven Ozment. Covering three generations of the Behaim trader family from Nuremberg, and gives extensive documentary examples of how a rather wealthy trader family operated.
There was little to no social mobility for the lower classes during the medieval era (up until and including the 18th century). Fantasy world inspired by the Middle Ages give us a very anachronistic picture of what travelling in the Middle Ages was. If nobody could vouch for you or knew who you were, if you were not part of a community (attending mass every Sunday, participating in yearly celebrations since you were a child), you would then be considered as someone dubious at the very least. You could only prove your identity if a well-established member of the community recognized you and eased every body’s worry. Where you were didn’t matter as much as who you knew.
I’d like to delve into the topic by first looking at some geographical considerations, then presenting shortly how people travelled in the Middle Ages, and finally by considering some issues that came up with the lack of modern bureaucracy.
Geography didn’t make the cut as one of the seven liberal arts. I would even go as far as to say that it was of little to no concern to the people living between 500 and 1500 CE.
When Charles IV of the Holy Roman Empire (1316-1378) wrote his autobiography as a young prince of Bohemia (the narration stops right before he’s elected as emperor), he mentioned many locations all over Europe. He visited Italy, France, Hungary, the Low Countries and Germany—obviously—but what struck me is that he doesn’t really care to describe or differentiate those places. He doesn’t bother with elevation, climate, landscape or scenery. It would be a mistake to generalize his lack of interest in geographical details to all his contemporaries. The crusaders, for example, were quite struck by the setting of the Holy Land—true, they were in what they could consider as a true ‘foreign land’. However, I would argue that Charles IV’s viewpoint is characteristic of the period.
Medieval maps are downright awful if you look at them from our modern and scientific standards. I mean… even Tolkien’s map of Middle Earth is far more inspired from maps of the Early Modern Times than they are from actual medieval maps.
For a very long time the world was mapped out from a ‘TO’ model, which was popularized by Isidore of Seville (c. 560-636). That model shows a circle cut in three parts: a half circle on top and two quarters at the bottom. It looks like a circle in which a ‘T’ has been drawn hence its name: the ‘TO’ map. On that map Asia is on top of Europe and Africa and Jerusalem is depicted at the centre of the world. Did Isidore believe this map to be an accurate depiction of the Earth? It didn’t matter. What mattered was the spiritual and symbolic implication of that depiction. Jerusalem isn’t at the centre of the Earth for no reason. It is where Christ was resurrected.
The map was copied many times through the centuries in various manuscripts (like this one) and made it to print in 1472 as the first map ever printed in Europe.
Spiritual matters trumped all material concerns and Charles IV’s autobiography lean in that direction too. The reason he writes his autobiography in the first place is to remind his children of spiritual matters. Life is a series of chaotic and puzzling events but God and His truth await those who seek Him.
Charles IV ranked among the most privileged man in Europe at the time and it gave him the unique opportunity to roam Europe many times over. However, he saw no benefit in that and mostly focussed on God and His truth. Sure, he was a very devout ruler, but still…
Were there, now, other people who travelled a lot and cared to depict the foreign lands they discovered? Did anyone have any geographical interest at all? Before the Portuguese endeavours to circumvent Africa or the humanist passion for old books, old maps and the re-discovery of Ptolemy’s depiction of the Mediterranean—all of which happened in the late 15th century—Muslim scholars were the ones to come up with a more topographical approach of the Earth.
(Heck! The map that serves as a banner to the AH subreddit is actually Al-Idrisi’s map, drawn in 12th century for the Norman ruler of Sicily, King Roger II. You might say it is ‘upside-down’—Africa being on top and Europe and Asia at the bottom, the whole of it ‘on its head’—but we can simply remind that it was centred on and ‘facing’ Mecca.)
I wouldn’t dare to forget Matthew Paris who drew a map of the Great Britain in the 13th century [we have several copies of it; one was digitized as a ‘clickable map’] but his work as a chronicler remains rather unique and outstanding for a Christian monk. His exception doesn’t break the rule: geography wasn’t popular and a spiritual reading of the world prevailed.
[Read also: How do ancient/medieval borders work?]
