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Ye Olde Mediæval Thymes
Pi-r8
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Registered User regular
Knights! Castles! Thatched-roof Cottages! Dragons/Black Death!
I'm sure we all learned a lot about the European Middle Ages as kids, but I feel must of what we're taught about it is just myths and romanticizations. Some of that is the fault of historians, who believed for a long time that it was just a thousand-year dark age between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance. Turns out that isn't true at all. I'd like to learn more for myself about what this time was actually like, and how much of what we learn about it was really just a myth.
Possible discussion topics-
Just how much did life suck for the average peasant? The usual story I get is that they were miserably oppressed by the nobles, but I've also read things like this suggesting that it wasn't all that bad. this says that their salary would be about $1000 in today's money- not good, but better than a lot of places today. Then again, what does it really mean to translate medieval money into modern money? Everything they'd buy would be totally different.
Warfare. Was it just constant warfare, or did the peasants mostly live peacefully? Was it really a bunch of knights and longbows like movies suggest, or are those exaggerated by hollywood? Why did the nobles build so many damn castles? Couldn't the invading armies just go around the stupid castles?
Science. Is it true that the church crushed scientific progress with its heavy hand? Or were the church monasteries productive centers of research? What are some of the inventions that came out of this time?
Regional differences. What were the substantial differences between the lands? How did it change over time? Were the kingdoms/countries important, or was it just a bunch of small fiefdoms?
Here's an interesting (and very short) paper to start things off. It argues that the entire point of serfdom was profit, and serfdom ended because it was more profitable to just pay the peasants a wage rather than keeping them as serfs.
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Castles were for fending off raids on wealth, not invasion.
Sure. I just thought that would be a good focus for the thread. Especially because Europe in the middle ages is something that everyone thinks they know about, but really doesn't.
Its Þe.
Bring back Þe thorn!
On the advent of monetary systems, many lords changed the "% of your yield" to an "X gold per year", except they forgot to account for inflation and their income was whittled away over the years.
Eventually it came about that a better (and less expensive) source of income was to throw a fence up and let livestock (sheep) live off the land. They required almost no tending except to harvest milk/wool/whatever. Since the serfs didn't own any of the land, they had no recourse but to move on.
Of course, that plan ended up being various levels of disastrous depending on the country.
No, not the internet you goose. Nor discussion boards or using the colour blue as a background. But the shift from Ancient writing to modern by inventing punctuation, spacing between words and lowercase letters. None of these were part of Ancient writing systems. Everything was written in uppercase with no punctuation or spacing.
CANYOUIMAGINEREADINGATEXTTHATWASWRITTENLIKETHISTHATISWHATITWASLIKEFORTHEANCIENTSNO
WONDERSCRIBESNEEDEDDECADESOFTRAININGDOCUMENTSJUSTWENTONANDONINALONGSTRINGLIKE
THISHEYCANYOUIMAGINEREADINGTHEENTIREBIBLELIKETHISHOWHORRIBLEWOULDTHATBE
It was in Charlemagne who sponsored the writing reforms that led to the more sane writing system we still use today.
I could see it being the case in Medieval times as well, especially in the peasantry.
Also, Richy, you are kinda wrong about the writing thing. It wasn't as simple as no spaces up until Charlemange and then spaces. There were a variety of writing styles in the classical world, and they were different for Greek and Latin. The reason everyone thinks it was all uppercase and no spaces is because that is how inscriptions were written, but there is strong evidence that this wads not necessarily the case for writing in general.
I'm not sure to what extent it's true, but I've always understood that the Black Death was basically what prompted an end to peasantry. The population dropped so much that it created a huge labour shortage, so landowners were forced to offer more competitive conditions, pay proper wages, give benefits, etc. A lot of land got given over to pasture because it was less labour-intensive than farming. Social mobility increased as peasants and labourers moved (were forced to move) to take advantage of better offers and to areas that offered work.
Yeah that's true. All the old chinese writings basically didn't have punctuation, so when they learned about the western alphabet and its punctuation, they thought it was so useful that they copied it completely for their own use.
(1) yes, this is obviously a perspective that doesn't focus at all on the glorious military bits
(2) I underlined two bits which I, personally, think tend to be underestimated in both popular conceptions and other, explanatory conceptions of the period that seek to correct popular conceptions. First, that technological progress was very real, even if international trade and Roman order and cosmopolitanism had collapsed; crop rotations and horse collars do not, of course, require an organized state to execute (in contrast to, say, organized irrigation, which did more or less require a state). Europe in the tenth century did not need the pax romana to maintain the prevailing social order. The barbarians had become much more dangerous while the empire's ability to maintain the institutions of empire only incrementally more so, and so civilization was comparatively expensive, and thus it was not afforded. Were it only a matter of civilizing the invaders, we should have observed a situation like China, where the stable state for much of pre-industrial history really was unified empire and each wave of successful barbarians built a new dynasty. But the Roman Empire never reappeared.
Second, royal courts and battlefields may have been the centers of politics, but not wealth.
I've wondered, before, how much of European development had to wait just because Roman Europe was full of trees. And, therefore, raiders.
We're talking about a time where the state was incredibly decentralized. There was no real bureacracy or law enforcement apparatus to speak of. It's kind of a paradox- though the peasants technically had a lot less rights then people living in a modern democracy, their government was much less intrusive on a day-to-day basis.
Rigorous Scholarship
I've heard the opposite - that taxation was so high that peasant families had less net food than what they needed to survive. They were living below subsistence levels.
Working the fields "on their own schedule" is nonsense. They worked it from the morning to the evening, every day. Sure, they could take their lunch break at the time they wanted, but that's very little consolation for the endless string of long physical work days they had to put in.
Which would be a pretty binding cap, actually - lots of freedom, but the bulk of said freedom-exercising time are pretty limited to farm work and then farming some more.
(And, of course, one is free from the state but not free from the domination of family or local church, and has no protection of the state from either.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGVrVKNagco
- wiki
If peasants had less food than they needed to survive, on a general basis, then we should have observed a steady population decline, yes? Which did not occur?
Other than the usual Malthusian-trap sort of condition, which would bind in the absence of assorted population-control methods regardless of taxation levels. But Malthusian conditions were not binding for much of the European middle ages, except during brief periods of climate-associated massive famine. Population control was via postponing marriage, abortion, and infanticide.
Peasant farmers probably worked hard, but so do modern farmers. But they controlled their own work schedule. There wasn't a boss or government official standing over them demanding they do X at a certain time. And, keep in mind that they would have had little work outside of crop season. When crops weren't in the ground, peasants had a lot of downtime. Furthermore, Sunday was a day of rest and worship. And peasants did not work on a number of feast days enacted by the Catholic Church. On those days, the local lord was required to feed his serfs as part of his religious duties. Did peasants work hard? Certainly. But they didn't work the way we work today, since their economy was quite different.
As for droit de seigneur, there's no real evidence that was a widespread practice, and plenty of things that would suggest the reverse. Banging your serfs' future wives could lead to unrest, piss off your wife and cause problems with the Catholic Church.
Rigorous Scholarship
Travelling would be an option I guess, but given that they had no money or excess food to pack they would have to rely on their lucky star to survive on the road. The same lucky star they would need to trust to avoid the brigands that would have been plaguing the countryside. Then they would reach another city where conditions were the same.
Peasants were tied to their land. They had no freedom, real or perceived.
Peasants of course had no freedom in the modern expansive sense, but I think it is fair to say that, as far as degrees of freedom go, Western European serfs during the 10-15th century were more free than, say, slaves during the Roman era a millenia previously. I did not say that local lords were not extractive; only that the presence of an outside option placed a cap on how extractive they could be. When slaves can flee and no organized state will catch and return them, you can't beat them so much.
I think a lot of it depends on who you're asking and what their pet theory is.
But from an economic standpoint, the advent of money and the enclosure movement was a major factor, though it was a process that happened over several generations.
And the nobles weren't a bunch of useless gits sitting around fleecing the serfs. Their job was to train as soldiers so as to be able to defend their serfs from bandits and barbarians. A noble who let his serfs get killed or taken into slavery would end up starving himself.
Fuedalism was a response to an economic system that didn't allow for much flexibility. Serfs needed to produce food to allow for a surplus to maintain the lord and his retainers who could then protect them from outsiders.
You can't make sea-going ships that big out of wood. Even with much more advanced shipbuilding technology, 17th-19th European ships of the line were smaller than those Chinese junks. Most likely, the junks served as pleasure barges on rivers or were kept in harbors to impress visitors. They weren't sea-going vessels.
Rigorous Scholarship
Oh, yes. This I will grant. The majority of people alive in any given time would continue to live near subsistence until the industrial era. But you have already backpedaled from asserting that "that taxation was so high that peasant families had less net food than what they needed to survive. They were living below subsistence levels", which was patently not true.
(a nitpick: it would not, actually, be right to describe circa 1300ish lords as using knights to enforce their will, but rather lords as using manorial staff to enforce their will. The lord being, quite likely, the knight attached to another hierachy of lords)
Even smaller estimates of the size of Zheng He's ships put them at a scale that dwarfs European ships of the same era.
Regardless, the Europeans were building river ships that big? No, they were still living with their sheep.
Nobles could also be called upon by the King to send troops to his campaign. A nobleman that defaulted when called upon by the King could see his domain taken from him and given to another nobleman. That was a greater concern than losing his serfs to bandits.
The knights that the noble trained weren't just in charge of protecting peasants (or rather, protecting the noble's lands and property against outside raids and incursions). They were also in charge of collecting taxes for their lord. And they weren't very friendly about it. We have this vision today of Arthurian knights boldly defending the weak out of some stringent moral code. In reality, they were closer to mob enforcers.
(1) you may be a little glib in describing just how consensual this arrangement was; it certainly wasn't some kind of social contract enforced by magic or monarchy. Freedmen existed in nontrivial numbers (10%+) throughout 1000-1500 Europe; protection from outsiders is less of a concern when you have little accumulated wealth to steal; that's for nobles and churches to care about. Serfdom was entered into for, more or less, extortive reasons: e.g., bad harvest? Swear your life and the life of all your heirs to me and I'll find you food.
(2) the junks were tax barges, to bring taxes from outer regions of China to the Chinese capitals along the great rivers, and to ensure that the accumulated revenue remained where the people in government were, even as it traveled about the country. Since these were relatively calm rivers and not seas, the ships could be very, very big. These were not only pleasure barges, though, what with the actual use and all.
But, this idea of the Dark Ages descending on Europe is kind of a Western European viewpoint. The Byzantine Empire never really experienced a descent into barbarism like you saw in places like France, and Constantinople was probably the most advanced and cosmopolitan city in the world during that time.
Rigorous Scholarship
So we agree that they were constantly hungry and lived near subsistence level? Because I don't see that as backpedalling from my original statement.
I remember reading that a study showed that given agricultural outputs of the time, a serf family would have needed X land to be a subsistence level, while the lord gave them less than X to live from (the rest of course being harvested for the lord). That's what I was thinking of when I said they lived below subsistence level. I don't think the Easter and Christmas food gifts from the lord would have made much of a difference in there... they survived obviously, but it wasn't a pleasant life.
Are above and below not antonyms for you, or something?
And, yes, peasantry was not a pleasant life.
Rigorous Scholarship
The economics is fundamentally the same as how one might optimize use of a machine; one maintains it, more or less. Peasants are the (only slightly autonomous) capital in a feudal society.
(Malthus determines the long-run dynamic, of course, so all these are short-run "what happens in the face of a shock" dynamics)
This is completely ignoring what is happening in the Americas at the time. So when we examine this question, we do need to ask an extremely narrow viewpoint.
Also, childbirth and so on sucked balls.