Hot answers tagged everyday-life
14
England in 400BC was a broadly Celtic culture with Pictish remnants in the North; 1600 years later it had gained a lot of influence from Roman, German, French, and Norse invasions. Language, food, architecture, laws, and so on were much different. These are the obvious changes.
Your middle age Englander transported to Iron Age England would perhaps guess ...
13
According to historian A. Roger Ekirch's At Day's Close, peoples in pre-industrial societies actually went to bed as soon at it was too dark to work, and slept (and still do sleep in such areas today) in two fourish-hour phases, interrupted by a short period of activity. He found numerous references to this in literature, from Medieval literature to Homer. ...
11
The largest city in Europe was Knossos in Minoan Crete, which according to Wikipedia reached as much as 100,000 people by 1600 BCE (Pendlebury & Evans 2003, p. 35). In comparison, the cities of Ur in Mesopotamia and Memphis in Egypt attained 60,000 people by 2000 BCE.
The Mycenaean culture of Greece is well known to us via Greek legends. A warlike ...
6
When the chimney became popular, 12C for castles and high status buildings, 15-16century for regular houses.
Without a chimney you have a central hearth and the smoke rises to vents in the eaves, so everybody who wants to be warm has to be in the large single room. Once chmineys are invented you need somewhere to build them. If you have a castle you can put ...
6
Harry Gordon Selfridge does appear to be the man responsible.
From Wikipedia's page on Selfridges:
Selfridge's innovative marketing led to his success. He tried to make shopping a fun adventure instead of a chore. He put merchandise on display so customers could examine it, put the highly profitable perfume counter front-and-centre on the ground floor, ...
5
A New York bar's website is one of a few sites which provide the following (seemingly) credible explanation for this practice:
No one is exactly sure of the reasons why larger format bottles were given biblical names. But, according to the Champagne expert Francois Bonal, winemakers in Bordeaux had been using the name Jeroboam for the four-bottle size ...
4
The wiki article on Mayan Trade has a good overview of Mayan social structure. In essence:
The Maya relied on a strong middle class of skilled and semi-skilled
workers and artisans which produced both commodities and specialized
goods.
They also had a large base of slaves and serfs - agricultural specialists. Members of the nobility had specialized ...
3
As it's been already stated, we lack good sources from medieval times that wouldn't come from people of the Church (who surely wouldn't write about such things) or traveling merchants (who didn't have enough local knowledge).
This way I'll go with the source from 1543, which is a book by Mikołaj Rej, called "A Brief Discussion among Three Persons: a Lord, a ...
3
The process of wrapping purchases in paper and twine is called packaging, and the resultant wrapped item is called a package. (You will hear purchases sometimes referred to as packages in old books, TV shows and movies.) It was replaced by self-service shops and sturdy paper bags beginning in the '30s.
To begin with, paper was used as flexible packaging as ...
2
the "high middle ages" were a period of considerable social change and relocation of population groups. It was the growth of the cities and the establishment of a large merchant class that provided for the growth of religion. The farmer tilling his soil had better things to do than contemplate God, a merchant sitting at home at the end of a day after the ...
2
Actually you should specify which medieval society do you mean. Middle ages saw very different societies co-existing. The difference was so high that while some societies had access to extensive literature and philosophy the others even had no writing and no laws.
If you compare say 800AD East Slavic society you possibly would not find much difference with ...
1
The answer appears to be the Venetian Republic was the first nation to hold masquerade balls.
Wikipedia has an article on the history of masquerade
Victorian Masquerade Ball confirms many of the assertions in wikipedia
Samantha Peach has an article that is less well sourced
1
I don't think your theory really holds up to much examination. There's just a huge amount more at work than people having a lack of better entertainment.
Religion 'took hold' long before the high middle ages. In essence, wherever you find civilization, you find religion, and that religion accrued great power to itself from the earliest times. It wasn't for ...
1
In our earliest records of European civilisation in the middle ages religiosity is at the front and centre of everyday lives. This world is a pale shadow of the coming world. The coming world was the determinate ordering of being for everyday Europeans. There was no "turn" to religion. Religiosity was the central moment of being.
(Sources: Monestary ...
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