Hot answers tagged middle-ages
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The surname 'Hood' implied where the individual was from. For all purposes, there were many people with the last name. The name Robin Hood is accounted as not an uncommon name in the middle ages.
There is a corpus of evidence that there were outlaw stories circulating about a Robin Hood during the reign of King John.
However, there are cases of multiple ...
21
Here is one noting:
The European medieval diet was largely determined by social class. For the majority of the of the people, peasants, a large portion of their daily diet was made up of grains such as wheat, rye, oats or barley(carbohydrates). The grains were boiled whole in a soup or stew, ground into flour and made into bread, or malted and brewed ...
20
The fourth crusade was the turning point. The crusade was high-jacked by Venice to take revenge on the Byzantines for past deeds: imprisonments, break of contract, etc... The crusade was aimed to land in Egypt originally, as it was seen as the main threat to taking Jerusalem back. However, since the crusaders could not pay for the large Venetian feet, it ...
20
There was a separation between the noble french and the vulgar Old English.
Or as I wrote in my comment: Who cares about the language of peasants
I found a nice source for this assumption
Middle English (1100-circa 1500 AD): After William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy, invaded and conquered England in 1066 AD with his armies and became king, he ...
18
I don't think it is possible to idenitify a single point in history as beginning the "slope toward the end". Such thinking results from the simplistic model of an empire's history as consisting of two segements: "growth" and "decline". In reality, the history of the Byzantine empire is a complex sequence of alternating growth and decline.
I'd say that the ...
18
Probably not. It seems to have existed as a traditional right, but was almost never exercised.
Wikipedia denies the existence of this right, citing Albrecht Classen's The Medieval Chastity Belt.
Snopes concurs, citing Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th ed., 10.610:
[The droit du seigneur] is paralleled in various primitive societies, but the evidence of ...
17
"armour" is a bit general, from the fancy gleaming best tournement suit to the few bits of salvaged chain mail stitched onto an archers leather jacket.
Generally the knights and foot soldiers wouldn't march in anything like full armour, medieval battles were fought on agreed sites when the armies were visible to each other - not ambushes or blitzkreig. So ...
16
Actually the motivation is pretty well-known. The motivation for the invasion of Spain was similar to that of all Muslim conquest of the period. Islamic armies under the command of the "The Rightly Guided Caliphs" and the following Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs benefited from a unifying religion to form a large and motivated armed forces, out of what had ...
15
Perhaps you're thinking of a video game, because I'm sure that what you posit makes no sense whatsoever in hand-to-hand combat.
A shield is just movable armor. It's big enough not to require a lot of accuracy in placement, just a shift toward the direction of attack. Its design, at some minimal level, will resist blows from hand weapons passively, i.e. ...
14
Another simple but important reason besides economic changes starting at this time is the spread of printing technique. A scientific community really only works when scholars can cite each other and share their ideas in a cheap and fast way, thats why internet boosted scientific progress in our time. If you study the link, the Gutenberg printing technique ...
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
The "Middle Ages" or medieval period generally refers to the entire time span between classical antiquity and the modern era in Western history. The Middle Ages lasted approximately AD 500 - 1500, from the fall of the (Western) Roman Empire to the fall of the Byzantine Empire and the discovery and colonization of the New World. The Middle Ages are often ...
13
Officially the Knights were disbanded in the early 14th century, beginning in France with King Philip IV prosecuting them for multiple reasons (the Templars had lost standing after the Third Crusade, public mistrust, and the King owed money to the order), with other countries to follow. Pope Clement V disbanded the Order in 1312.
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There are many reasons, and I'm going to present the materialistic one championed by the Marxists (collective thud as the audience of History.SE falls off their chairs and faints).
One of the requirements for having scientific progress is economic - you need enough surplus to enable the resources devoted to scholarship. This was enabled at the beginning of ...
13
Your question embodies large amounts of modern fantasy.
Firstly, imagine that nothing can be bought or sold by the vast and overwhelming majority of the population. Coin does not exist or circulate for most people.
There obviously would have been farmers, creating and selling produce in markets
Nope. Farmers are a modern institution related to ...
12
According to Wikipedia, it was 30 years at birth. However, the reason for such mortality age is due to infant mortality. If you managed to survive until the age of 21, you could expect to live until 45 or (depending on source) mid 60's.
Health A millennium of health improvement
The average life expectancy for a male child born in the UK between
...
11
The Burgundians were originally a Germanic tribe that settled the area that became known as Burgundy. Because it was so deeply in the heart of "French" territory, it adopted the French language and culture as soon as the Franks started pushing back the Saxons under King Charles Martel, and his grandson, Charlemagne. After the death of the latter, it ...
11
Quite the contrary as Rodney Stark pointed out in The Victory of Reason - the Catholic church itself promoted most of the societal conditions that allowed the Middle Class to take hold, and in so doing also promote the nurture of science and industry.
Chief among these were personal property rights (stemming from the idea that we were God's stewards) and ...
11
It would be very interesting to see a chart of rate of innovation over time in western civilization.
Of course, this begs the question of what is "innovation". Do you count number of inventions? Do you give more weight to inventions that would have long lasting significance through history? Or ones that may have been less influential but providing a huge ...
11
Partly it's because you are reading the history books of those countries and a certain amount is spin.
Islamic countries were the principle source of science between the Romans/Greeks and the 16C - inconvenient if you are a christian country and especially if you are a university that is essentially a religious institution. So you claim that these Arabs ...
11
Here are some methods that were used throughout history to fight infection.
Australian Aborigines discovered that eucalyptus and tea tree bark and leaves could ease certain infections. Other aboriginal societies used local herbs to help ease the symptoms of infection. This was typically tribal knowledge passed down through generations of healers.
As ...
10
Actually, Richard had acquired that name before he went on the Crusades. Richard and two of his brothers rose up in rebellion against their father, Henry II. They went to France to obtain the support of Louis VII, and it was Louis who actually knighted Richard. This established his initial ties to the French.
When the brothers set out to attack their ...
10
Robin Hood is an English folk hero and not based in fact.
Robin and his fellows were a popular subject in early printed texts,
with their low price and wide appeal, and it is in the early days of
printing that he finally comes into his own as a literary figure. In
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, antiquarians were especially
invested in ...
10
The first example of catapulting plague victims into a besieged city was that of Caffa (Modern day Fiodosiya) in the Crimea. This was in fact the first account of plague in European history.
Caffa had been under siege by the Mongol (aka. Tartar or Golden Horde) army. The siege had been long a protracted. First starting in 1343, it was lifted by the arrival ...
10
I don't have much historical evidence to bring to this one, but I've worn heavy SCA armour on hot days (hot by British Isles standards) and discussed the problem with people who have done so in hotter climates (Texas and Israel, most notably).
So, first and foremost, they probably would not have worn the armour unless they were expecting to go into a fight. ...
10
That's not exactly how it worked. As not everybody was able to become a knight (especially without richness), many squires were adult, sometimes more than 30 years old, and because of their experience, they were well-trained fighters. Don't think of heavy cavalry only as knights.
For example, the regular heavy cavalry unit in Poland was called Chorągiew ...
9
There were two main issues. The first was that the SWEDISH age of majority was 16. Queen Christina, daughter of Gustav Adolfus, was offered the crown at age 16, but by her own request, her coronation was delayed until she was nearly 18 (so she could finish her education). This was, of course, in opposition to the Norwegian statutes, which had the king's age ...
9
I'm afraid any answer to this question must begin by considering what is understood to be the 'Renaissance' and the 'Scientific Revolution'. And that consideration, in turn, inevitably reveals a number of historiographical difficulties.
The first of these is that neither of these were 'events', at least, not in the sense of a war or an assassination. They ...
9
There are a number of good accounts of the development of warfare in Europe, but the two key things you need to realise are:
a) "morale"
b) "mass"
Much of European warfare has been conditioned by these two abstract concepts. Broadly, morale is the capacity of a unit to continue to engage in what it is doing despite adverse outcomes and mass is the capacity ...
8
One of the events that led to the War of the Roses was the birth of a son, Edward, Prince of Wales, to (Lancastrian) King Henry VI, and his Queen, Margaret of Anjou.
Prior to that time, Richard, Duke of York (a cousin) had been next in line to the throne, and therefore had no incentive to fight. The birth of Henry's son "disinherited" him.
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