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So, how effective was archery on medieval battlefields?
It seems like the kind of thing you need a large well trained group to be able to use effectively.
Also livestock can be more easily stolen then crops, so that may explain the slow adaptation of the practice.
Medieval Europe was a very backwards time socially and economically yet they had lots of the trappings of civilization from leftover accomplishments of the roman empire, so it's easy to see why it is popular in fantasy.
I've been quiet in this thread so far because I don't know enough about most of the topics, but I feel like this is something I can actually answer.
The longbow was an extremely powerful weapon. Rapid firing, long range, accurate, everything. There really wasn't anything better until repeating rifles came along more than 500 years later.
The problem was, it was also an extremely expensive weapon. First you had to basically train for your entire life to be proficient, the extent that medieval skeletons were deformed by the strain of the bow. Then you needed large numbers of people to produce and transport all the arrows, and an even larger number of peasants to feed all those people. At the end, they were almost as expensive as a fully armored knight. The English made longbows work by warping their whole economy around it, sort of like how cars are so integrated into every aspect of the american economy.
Also, although everyone learns the legend of Agincourt where longbows slaughtered knights, we hear less about that battle of Patay. By that point, armor technology was good enough to protect the knights and their horses very well from arrows, and there was wide open terrain there for the knights to exploit, so they crushed the longbowmen.
Interestingly, one of Colombus' first statements about the indigenous populations of the Americas was how fantastic they would be as slaves.
Then they all died out, and the Spanish had to import slaves instead.
In some places, exposure to European diseases wiped out like 99% of the population. It was a truly phenomenal die-out. Conquest of the Americas might not have happened as quickly or as smoothly as it did without the Europeans' microbial allies.
It's not just a question of numbers. You're talking about complete societal collapse where formerly sophisticated and organized cultures basically died overnight. Pretty horrible, but completely inevitable. Sooner or later, someone from Eurasia was going to make contact with the New World, and that would be that.
Yeah, Europeans were lucky that the Mongols and Muslims got hit with the plagues at the same time. If not, the same thing could have happened to them (imagine plague resistant Mongols ravaging the Black Death stricken Europe).
Europe got lucky that Genghis died when he did. His descendants weren't able to keep expanding his empire, and Western Europe escaped conquest. The embyonic institutions that would lead to the Renaissance likely wouldn't have survived a Mongol conquest.
Edit: When Ogedei Khan died, his forces were on the verge of conquering the rest of Europe, but they then withdrew to choose the new Khan and never regained their momentum.
Also, I think they realized that western europe wasn't worth conquering. When Ogedei died, Hulagu had just crushed baghdad and was making a push towards egypt, and the golden horde had beaten a German/Polish somewhere in eastern europe.
The new khan decided to focus on conquering China and Japan. The europeans definitely dodged a massive bullet.
I don't think they could have, even if they'd wanted to. Their massive mounted armies just wouldn't work in western Europe- not enough space, not enough grass, and too many fortifications. They'd be stuck fighting on foot. They did do that, especially in China, but they wouldn't be any better at it than the Europeans. Combine that with the long distance away, and I think the khans realized that it would be impossable.
Well, they would have never been able to conquer and hold Western Europe, but they could have plundered it pretty thoroughly. But China and Baghdad were more tempting targets. If they hadn't begun to fight amongst themselves they probably would have given it the ol' Mongol try, after all the logistical difficulties of invading Japan, Java, Burma, India, Syria, and Eastern Europe were fairly significant, yet it didn't stop the Mongols from trying.
So, how effective was archery on medieval battlefields?
It seems like the kind of thing you need a large well trained group to be able to use effectively.
Also livestock can be more easily stolen then crops, so that may explain the slow adaptation of the practice.
Medieval Europe was a very backwards time socially and economically yet they had lots of the trappings of civilization from leftover accomplishments of the roman empire, so it's easy to see why it is popular in fantasy.
I've been quiet in this thread so far because I don't know enough about most of the topics, but I feel like this is something I can actually answer.
The longbow was an extremely powerful weapon. Rapid firing, long range, accurate, everything. There really wasn't anything better until repeating rifles came along more than 500 years later.
The problem was, it was also an extremely expensive weapon. First you had to basically train for your entire life to be proficient, the extent that medieval skeletons were deformed by the strain of the bow. Then you needed large numbers of people to produce and transport all the arrows, and an even larger number of peasants to feed all those people. At the end, they were almost as expensive as a fully armored knight. The English made longbows work by warping their whole economy around it, sort of like how cars are so integrated into every aspect of the american economy.
Also, although everyone learns the legend of Agincourt where longbows slaughtered knights, we hear less about that battle of Patay. By that point, armor technology was good enough to protect the knights and their horses very well from arrows, and there was wide open terrain there for the knights to exploit, so they crushed the longbowmen.
Right, for all the credit the longbow gets, it was the pike and musket that killed heavy cavalry. Simple to learn, effective, requires no special physical ability, and you could train an unskilled person in a month in their usage (it pretty much came down to convincing the pikemen not to run from a charge).
So, how effective was archery on medieval battlefields?
It seems like the kind of thing you need a large well trained group to be able to use effectively.
Also livestock can be more easily stolen then crops, so that may explain the slow adaptation of the practice.
Medieval Europe was a very backwards time socially and economically yet they had lots of the trappings of civilization from leftover accomplishments of the roman empire, so it's easy to see why it is popular in fantasy.
I've been quiet in this thread so far because I don't know enough about most of the topics, but I feel like this is something I can actually answer.
The longbow was an extremely powerful weapon. Rapid firing, long range, accurate, everything. There really wasn't anything better until repeating rifles came along more than 500 years later.
The problem was, it was also an extremely expensive weapon. First you had to basically train for your entire life to be proficient, the extent that medieval skeletons were deformed by the strain of the bow. Then you needed large numbers of people to produce and transport all the arrows, and an even larger number of peasants to feed all those people. At the end, they were almost as expensive as a fully armored knight. The English made longbows work by warping their whole economy around it, sort of like how cars are so integrated into every aspect of the american economy.
Also, although everyone learns the legend of Agincourt where longbows slaughtered knights, we hear less about that battle of Patay. By that point, armor technology was good enough to protect the knights and their horses very well from arrows, and there was wide open terrain there for the knights to exploit, so they crushed the longbowmen.
Right, for all the credit the longbow gets, it was the pike and musket that killed heavy cavalry. Simple to learn, effective, requires no special physical ability, and you could train an unskilled person in a month in their usage (it pretty much came down to convincing the pikemen not to run from a charge).
The pike and shot combined arms infantry formations didn't really kill the idea of heavy cavalry. It just removed it as the most dominant arm of the military. There were still heavily armoured cuirassier squadrons well past the development of the tercio. Up till the Thirty Years War. Napoleon used heavy cavalry as a shock weapon.
Another example to look at is the Battle of Formigny. Armour developed to a point that even the longbow couldn't penetrate it. There were crossbows with immense draw weights, more powerful than the longbow, but they were expensive, hard to use and took a long time to load.
Also, longbows needed carefully chosen terrain. Looking at the battles at Crecy, Poiters, Agincourt, Aljubarrota. Secured flanks, an open field of fire, prepared field works and preferably a lot of mud made the weapon absolutely deadly. With little time to prepare the field and solid ground like at Patay and Formigny, the archers could be ridden down in masses.
Didn't cavalry persist far beyond that? I'm only tangentially familiar, but there was the very famous Charge of the Light Brigade, and I seem to remember the Polish army sending cavalry against mechanized weaponry?
Didn't cavalry persist far beyond that? I'm only tangentially familiar, but there was the very famous Charge of the Light Brigade, and I seem to remember the Polish army sending cavalry against mechanized weaponry?
The Polish army had cavalry(as did many less modernized forces, usually deployed as dragoons, which fought on foot), which was used to attack German infantry. It then got engaged by tanks. They didn't charge the tanks as lancers. Someone just thought that'd be a cool story to tell.
Horses move faster than men, so cavalry wasn't obsolete until well into the 20th century, when motor-vehicles became common. Obviously, WW1 showed everyone that the Napoleonic style of cavalry use was over, though.
Cavalry is useful anywhere where there aren't good enough roads for tanks and or motorized divisions. The Ruskies and Chinese used them during their civil wars. We also used cavalry quite extensively in our civil war, as well. The rebel cavalry ran rings around ours (sometimes literally), but by the end of the war we had fairly decent cavalry. It was mainly used for either scouting or as mounted infantry, though. Don't think there were very many cavalry charges. Might have been a few, though.
It should be noted that the Charge of the Light Brigade is famous because it was a mistake, and fought in an outdated way. They were supposed to harass enemy troops attacking the allied artillery, but instead did an old fashioned charge into the enemy guns and got destroyed. That was in Crimea, about a decade before the American Civil War, which the above poster has mentioned.
Didn't cavalry persist far beyond that? I'm only tangentially familiar, but there was the very famous Charge of the Light Brigade, and I seem to remember the Polish army sending cavalry against mechanized weaponry?
The Polish army had cavalry(as did many less modernized forces, usually deployed as dragoons, which fought on foot), which was used to attack German infantry. It then got engaged by tanks. They didn't charge the tanks as lancers. Someone just thought that'd be a cool story to tell.
Horses move faster than men, so cavalry wasn't obsolete until well into the 20th century, when motor-vehicles became common. Obviously, WW1 showed everyone that the Napoleonic style of cavalry use was over, though.
Yeah, "cavalry" usually refers to a soldier who fights from horseback, while "mounted infantry" refers to a soldier who uses a mount for mobility and then fights on foot.
The latter persisted much longer than the former in the various militaries of the world.
Having seen photos of WW1 lancers, I've been wanting to look up whether they were ever deployed that way, or they were just ceremonial. I can't imagine that they were, at least, in the western front (all the photos I saw were of Belgian, German, and French lancers), but it would be pretty cool if it happened.
It's still relevant, as those slave-run plantations were a part of the immediate post-medieval world. It's not like serfdom / wages in Europe happened because of some high-minded philosophical reasoning; it was just easier, less risky, and more profitable (in those situations) than subjugating people. As I pointed out earlier, serfs were on their way out due to economic factors (it being easier to raise livestock than tend the land).
The states of the day were perfectly happy to force people into labor where it became cost-effective.
Slavery in the New World came about due to different economic conditions, though. The sugar/rum/slave economic triangle was pretty much perfect for encouraging slavery, for example. Merchants would make a profit at each stop. Plus, there was a demand for labor in the New World that simply could not be filled by the immigration of free labor. And the native populations had been nearly wiped out in many places due to disease and horrible labor conditions. The New World was like a perfect storm of slavery.
Additionally you couldn't get free labour to work in the old style sugar plantations and processing sites at pretty much any price, because working there fucking killed you.
Unarmored mounted infantry would continue to be useful as late as WWII; the basic point is just mobility. The Japanese used bicycles to great effect.
Actual heavy cavalry charges used as shock troops were used to successful effect as late as WWI, as far as I know; principally on the Eastern theater, which was too large an area to be defended via trenches. Trenches, barbed wire, and machine guns obsoleted the heavy cavalry.
But all the stuff worth plundering was locked up castles, which the Europeans were pretty good at defending.
The Mongols were also pretty good at siege!
Fun fact: during the battle for Xiangyang, the Mongols built and deployed over five thousand trebuchets.
What would have actually caused problems for the Mongols would have been the lack of forage for their horses in the European woodlands, which stalled the Magyars and the Huns before them.
Having seen photos of WW1 lancers, I've been wanting to look up whether they were ever deployed that way, or they were just ceremonial. I can't imagine that they were, at least, in the western front (all the photos I saw were of Belgian, German, and French lancers), but it would be pretty cool if it happened.
I believe that in the opening, fluid, moments of the war cavalry squadrons came into contact with each other and full mounted skirmishes, firing from horseback and charging with lance, took place.
What I find so frustrating about that time was the illuminations that were applied to books - sure it looks pretty, but all I can think about is that in the time the monks wasted painting pretty pictures in the margins, they could have made ten copies of the book. Today the dissemination of the information would by the top (or, really, only) priority but back then they had these weird hang-ups. I suppose part of it was the notion that illumination demonstrated the copyist's respect for the work - and perhaps helped to engender respect from others.
A few things here. First, it's important to understand that parchment was a very expensive and quite limited resource -- it's just not the case that the monasteries (in the early middle ages) and the universities (in the later middle ages) could have increased ten-fold the number of books they were producing, because every single book required the killing and skinning of one or more calves or lambs. I don't remember the exact details, but the University of Paris, for instance, required an enormous number of stables and animal hands to produce books. Increasing their book producing ten-fold might well have required half the city of Paris to be employed in preparing parchment.
There's also a misconception that every book had these beautiful ornamentations. Some did, certainly -- especially Bibles -- but many did not. Especially once you get to the universities in the 13th century, copyists were largely working much too fast and making horrendous errors all over the place. The poorer university students would often hire out their services to copy books for their wealthier classmates; the generally poor quality of these manuscripts is why, for instance, it's taken the Vatican over 100 years to piece together what Thomas Aquinas really wrote: we have dozens, if not hundreds, of copies of his works, but all of our copies are flawed in evident ways. The trick is to compare the copies against each other so as to make the flaws drop out.
But all the stuff worth plundering was locked up castles, which the Europeans were pretty good at defending.
The Mongols were also pretty good at siege!
Fun fact: during the battle for Xiangyang, the Mongols built and deployed over five thousand trebuchets.
What would have actually caused problems for the Mongols would have been the lack of forage for their horses in the European woodlands, which stalled the Magyars and the Huns before them.
Horses were always a double-edged sword for armies. They give you mobility and used to be great tools when it came to shock effect. But they require a lot of food, and if you just feed them grass they tend to get weak and sickly. During the Civil War, something like 60% of Northern rail capacity was used to move food for Union army horses.
For medieval people, maintaining a horse in battle-ready shape was probably as onerous a job as keeping an Abrams tank running today. Between a blacksmith to make horseshoes, stable boys to keep the horse fed and clean and various craftsman to make saddles, stirrups and armor for the beasts, they probably had a similarly large support contingent.
Modern Man on
Aetian Jupiter - 41 Gunslinger - The Old Republic
Rigorous Scholarship
I would like to say as someone that has taken "The west and the rest" in college, that the idea of Europe as a starving backwater is quite exagerated. For most of the Dark Ages peasants had quite the surplus of food and people around 1000AD where as healthy as we where. Combined with advancing agriculuture food managed to keep up with population until the High Middle Ages, thats where the starving peasant trope came into being. Then the black death happened and we all know how that turned out.
In any case Europe had compared to the rest of the world relativly few famines, Few as in once every 10-20 years instead of every 3 year or such. Our picture of peasant destitution comes more from high medieval scholars(when Malthus had kicked in).
Also 1) people then to forget that Europe had vast fishing stock to fall back on. China and India had nothing compared to North Atlantic cod supplies. When Columbus discovered America, he also laid the groundwork for the Great Banks fishing of the coast of North America.
2) Enclosures where more a 16-18 century thing in England, then a Mediveal European thing.
Kipling217 on
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
But all the stuff worth plundering was locked up castles, which the Europeans were pretty good at defending.
The Mongols were also pretty good at siege!
Fun fact: during the battle for Xiangyang, the Mongols built and deployed over five thousand trebuchets.
What would have actually caused problems for the Mongols would have been the lack of forage for their horses in the European woodlands, which stalled the Magyars and the Huns before them.
Horses were always a double-edged sword for armies. They give you mobility and used to be great tools when it came to shock effect. But they require a lot of food, and if you just feed them grass they tend to get weak and sickly. During the Civil War, something like 60% of Northern rail capacity was used to move food for Union army horses.
For medieval people, maintaining a horse in battle-ready shape was probably as onerous a job as keeping an Abrams tank running today. Between a blacksmith to make horseshoes, stable boys to keep the horse fed and clean and various craftsman to make saddles, stirrups and armor for the beasts, they probably had a similarly large support contingent.
The armoured war horse of the European knight when plate was in vogue sure, but the average hore didn't require that much maintenance. Its just that the mongols and similar steppe armies would have 7-10 horses per man that would cause the problems.
In any case Europe had compared to the rest of the world relativly few famines, Few as in once every 10-20 years instead of every 3 year or such. Our picture of peasant destitution comes more from high medieval scholars(when Malthus had kicked in).
People might bitch about European weather now, but it laid the foundations for northern European power and the egalitarian political traditions we have today. In europe it rains like all the time - you never had to rely on irrigation systems owned and managed by a political elite, someone comes and burns your crops and you can just grow them again the following year (unlike wrecked rice paddies), you can just leave tubers in the ground, its chilly enough that things don't rot quickly. You could have high levels of food surplus without the levels of centralisation and social stratification the high productivity systems of Asia required.
Also 1) people then to forget that Europe had vast fishing stock to fall back on. China and India had nothing compared to North Atlantic cod supplies. When Columbus discovered America, he also laid the groundwork for the Great Banks fishing of the coast of North America.
I read an article a while back about evidence of Portugese and Anglo-Irish fishermen landing on Newfoundland as early as the 11th-12th Century. They would just dry and salt their cod catches on the beaches, then return home. The prime fishing grounds were a gold mine, so they would have kept their mouths shut about the discovery of new land.
I imagine a number of travellers from Europe and Africa found their way to the New World much earlier than was generally thought. But they either weren't able to return, or did return but nothing ever came out of it. The Spanish were able to exploit the New World because of reliable ocean-going ships and because they had a bunch of landless soldiers post-Reconquista who needed to be given something to do to prevent them from causing trouble back home.
Modern Man on
Aetian Jupiter - 41 Gunslinger - The Old Republic
Rigorous Scholarship
People might bitch about European weather now, but it laid the foundations for northern European power and the egalitarian political traditions we have today. In europe it rains like all the time - you never had to rely on irrigation systems owned and managed by a political elite, someone comes and burns your crops and you can just grow them again the following year (unlike wrecked rice paddies), you can just leave tubers in the ground, its chilly enough that things don't rot quickly. You could have high levels of food surplus without the levels of centralisation and social stratification the high productivity systems of Asia required.
Apart from in Scotland where it rains faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar to much. Scotland has more than 90% of all the water in Britain, Lochness has twice the volume of water than England and Wales combined. IT just rains far too much and land that should have been prime agricultural land was sodden an unfarmable except by the awful runrig system. The greatest invention for Scottish agriculture happened in the early 1800's (yes that late) when James Smith invented a subsoil plow allowing farmers to drain excess water through the clay level and into underground drainage ditches.
The management of Scotland's 'natural' water is absolutely jaw dropping, rivers are literally switched on at the weekend for white-water enthusiasts.
What I find so frustrating about that time was the illuminations that were applied to books - sure it looks pretty, but all I can think about is that in the time the monks wasted painting pretty pictures in the margins, they could have made ten copies of the book. Today the dissemination of the information would by the top (or, really, only) priority but back then they had these weird hang-ups. I suppose part of it was the notion that illumination demonstrated the copyist's respect for the work - and perhaps helped to engender respect from others.
A few things here. First, it's important to understand that parchment was a very expensive and quite limited resource -- it's just not the case that the monasteries (in the early middle ages) and the universities (in the later middle ages) could have increased ten-fold the number of books they were producing, because every single book required the killing and skinning of one or more calves or lambs. I don't remember the exact details, but the University of Paris, for instance, required an enormous number of stables and animal hands to produce books. Increasing their book producing ten-fold might well have required half the city of Paris to be employed in preparing parchment.
There's also a misconception that every book had these beautiful ornamentations. Some did, certainly -- especially Bibles -- but many did not. Especially once you get to the universities in the 13th century, copyists were largely working much too fast and making horrendous errors all over the place. The poorer university students would often hire out their services to copy books for their wealthier classmates; the generally poor quality of these manuscripts is why, for instance, it's taken the Vatican over 100 years to piece together what Thomas Aquinas really wrote: we have dozens, if not hundreds, of copies of his works, but all of our copies are flawed in evident ways. The trick is to compare the copies against each other so as to make the flaws drop out.
The extremely fancy books were usually meant for extremely rich people who could afford to pay monasteries to do the expensive work required to make a blinged out Bible. The monasteries also made them for themselves as fancy shit that looked nice and impressed people when read.
The cost of parchment was why there is a ton of writings where the person scraped off the previous writings. Because the erasure wasn't complete, new texts can be found under the current writing depending on the condition of the manuscript.
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HedgethornAssociate Professor of Historical Hobby HorsesIn the Lions' DenRegistered Userregular
What I find so frustrating about that time was the illuminations that were applied to books - sure it looks pretty, but all I can think about is that in the time the monks wasted painting pretty pictures in the margins, they could have made ten copies of the book. Today the dissemination of the information would by the top (or, really, only) priority but back then they had these weird hang-ups. I suppose part of it was the notion that illumination demonstrated the copyist's respect for the work - and perhaps helped to engender respect from others.
A few things here. First, it's important to understand that parchment was a very expensive and quite limited resource -- it's just not the case that the monasteries (in the early middle ages) and the universities (in the later middle ages) could have increased ten-fold the number of books they were producing, because every single book required the killing and skinning of one or more calves or lambs. I don't remember the exact details, but the University of Paris, for instance, required an enormous number of stables and animal hands to produce books. Increasing their book producing ten-fold might well have required half the city of Paris to be employed in preparing parchment.
There's also a misconception that every book had these beautiful ornamentations. Some did, certainly -- especially Bibles -- but many did not. Especially once you get to the universities in the 13th century, copyists were largely working much too fast and making horrendous errors all over the place. The poorer university students would often hire out their services to copy books for their wealthier classmates; the generally poor quality of these manuscripts is why, for instance, it's taken the Vatican over 100 years to piece together what Thomas Aquinas really wrote: we have dozens, if not hundreds, of copies of his works, but all of our copies are flawed in evident ways. The trick is to compare the copies against each other so as to make the flaws drop out.
The extremely fancy books were usually meant for extremely rich people who could afford to pay monasteries to do the expensive work required to make a blinged out Bible. The monasteries also made them for themselves as fancy shit that looked nice and impressed people when read.
The cost of parchment was why there is a ton of writings where the person scraped off the previous writings. Because the erasure wasn't complete, new texts can be found under the current writing depending on the condition of the manuscript.
Also, when books were ordered to be destroyed (because the writer was declared a heretic, say), frequently they just cut the pages into strips and used those strips for binding materials for other books (again, because of the cost of parchment and bindings). There have been a number of late medieval works that had been rediscovered in recent years in just this way -- someone starts examining the binding of some other manuscript and finds a lost work by someone like John Wyclif.
Didn't cavalry persist far beyond that? I'm only tangentially familiar, but there was the very famous Charge of the Light Brigade, and I seem to remember the Polish army sending cavalry against mechanized weaponry?
I'm refering to heavy cavalry. That is, cavalry intended to break through the enemy, shock troops. As opposed to light cavalry which were primarily intended to scout for and screen the army while harassing the enemy. The French had cuirassiers, heavy cavalry, up until the beginning of the First World War, the Germans and Russians even longer. The Poles used lancers against the Germans in the Second World War.
What I meant is that heavy cavalry existed long after the invention of pike and musket formations. The knight disappeared but the fully armoured horseman remained on the battlefield for another hundred years. It's use changed though. It became extremely imprudent to send cavalry straight against formed infantry with the universal adoption of the pike and musket. It was still an important part of armies though. Heavy cavalry had the edge against light cavalry in battle and could smashed through weakened, disintegrating formations of infantry. It's psychological impact should not be underestimated.
Interesting thread. And good timing since I just finished re-reading The Name of the Rose last week. It doesn't much talk about life outside of that in an Abbey, but it is detailed and the theological debates are kind of interesting.
Which also ties back into what Richy was talking about and the standardisation of text, since much of the Abbey's life revolves around the library and the production of books. What I find so frustrating about that time was the illuminations that were applied to books - sure it looks pretty, but all I can think about is that in the time the monks wasted painting pretty pictures in the margins, they could have made ten copies of the book. Today the dissemination of the information would by the top (or, really, only) priority but back then they had these weird hang-ups. I suppose part of it was the notion that illumination demonstrated the copyist's respect for the work - and perhaps helped to engender respect from others.
Haha I'm currently reading that book myself. That might be why I thought of starting this thread.
In that book, characters say that they really don't want to disseminate information too much. They really thought it should be restricted do just an educated few, which is part of the reason they wrote in latin. And of course they had a holy duty to make the books beautiful, even if noone ever saw them.
I find medieval theology absolutely fascinating, even though I'm an atheist. It has this bizarre logic to it, like a twisted version of a mathematical proof. "Jesus never laughed, and he was the perfect man, therefore we should all try to never laugh".
Interesting thread. And good timing since I just finished re-reading The Name of the Rose last week. It doesn't much talk about life outside of that in an Abbey, but it is detailed and the theological debates are kind of interesting.
Which also ties back into what Richy was talking about and the standardisation of text, since much of the Abbey's life revolves around the library and the production of books. What I find so frustrating about that time was the illuminations that were applied to books - sure it looks pretty, but all I can think about is that in the time the monks wasted painting pretty pictures in the margins, they could have made ten copies of the book. Today the dissemination of the information would by the top (or, really, only) priority but back then they had these weird hang-ups. I suppose part of it was the notion that illumination demonstrated the copyist's respect for the work - and perhaps helped to engender respect from others.
Haha I'm currently reading that book myself. That might be why I thought of starting this thread.
In that book, characters say that they really don't want to disseminate information too much. They really thought it should be restricted do just an educated few, which is part of the reason they wrote in latin. And of course they had a holy duty to make the books beautiful, even if noone ever saw them.
The answer to the question is really that there is no virtue in creating inferior quality copies instead of the quality work of an artisan. To the laborer, in this case, the scholar, his work is the essence of his caste. Just like the knightly warrior caste finds meaning in battle, the scholar finds his meaning in studying and reproducing wisdom. He puts that effort into his work because that is how he finds spiritual enlightenment.
Scarcity is of no concern at all. Nor, particularly, is limiting circulation, as other castes are either illiterate, or not particularly interested in pursuing interests outside of their duty.
Scarcity is of no concern at all. Nor, particularly, is limiting circulation, as other castes are either illiterate, or not particularly interested in pursuing interests outside of their duty.
I apologise for tmming the quote from Eco down a little, but wanted to stick my head over the parapet on this one. The question of non-clerical literacy rates in Late Antique through Late Medieval Europe is one which is desperately undecided. It's been a while, but the last time that I did any work in the area, the question was around how 'literacy' was defined.
Whilst Eco is correct in the assertion that high-level, 'elite' philosophy, economic and civic texts were typically generated and read only by an elite, there is storng evidence to suggest a very 'functionally' literate populace throughout western europe, in the form of letters (both personal and business), commercial receipts, graffiti, scrawled notes, and so on - the example that came to mind was the birchbark texts fro Novgorod, which can be parallelled nicely with the Antique letters from Vindolanda.
As mentioned above, the purpose of illuminated manuscripts is archival, status related, and commercial - the rich purchased illumed manuscripts to demonstrate their wealth, and monasteries did so for both religious and secular reasons (to demonstrate their work). What we need to consider is the other forms of cmmunication, the ephemeral, which may be far more useful in judging the day-to-day condition of much of the Late Antique and Medieval worlds - these are actually much rarer than the (already rare) surviving manuscripts, simply because they were used and then disposed of; parchment was for something to be stored permanently, scraped bark, wax etc for ephemera - but it is this day-to-day ephemera which can provide a revealing insight into the non-elite of the period.
Croaker- it seems like you've studied this a bit. So I'm glad you weighed in on the subject.
But, I really wish you wouldn't use the quote tags to write something that I never said. That's not even paraphrasing what I said at all. I was just repeating something I read in a work of fiction.
Bugger. Apologies, my fault for reading swiftly whilst in the office. If I can figure out how to edit posts, I'll sort it out to make the attribution clearer.
As a tangentially related aside, it may also be worth considering the wax and wane of 'sacred' and 'secular' spaces. Literacy wa soriginally considered a 'secular' activity, in the sense that it wa spractised largely by elites and also by the larger population; however, as secular power focii faltered, the more formalised expressions of literacy-as-power were subsumed into the growing sacred space, whilst ephemera remained 'below the radar'.
As catholicism became the sole recognised church, and continued to absorb previously secular activities into itself, its use of literacy as an elite marker was (functionally) identical to the Roman use of paideia, that is, the assumption of shared cultural values. Churchmen could read (indeed, this was a test for whether a man could be tried in a church court, during some of the period), and they could all read the same thing, and they could all read in the same language.
Reading thus became more secular again, and promgulated back out into the wider elite circa the Renaissance (iirc)
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The longbow was an extremely powerful weapon. Rapid firing, long range, accurate, everything. There really wasn't anything better until repeating rifles came along more than 500 years later.
The problem was, it was also an extremely expensive weapon. First you had to basically train for your entire life to be proficient, the extent that medieval skeletons were deformed by the strain of the bow. Then you needed large numbers of people to produce and transport all the arrows, and an even larger number of peasants to feed all those people. At the end, they were almost as expensive as a fully armored knight. The English made longbows work by warping their whole economy around it, sort of like how cars are so integrated into every aspect of the american economy.
Also, although everyone learns the legend of Agincourt where longbows slaughtered knights, we hear less about that battle of Patay. By that point, armor technology was good enough to protect the knights and their horses very well from arrows, and there was wide open terrain there for the knights to exploit, so they crushed the longbowmen.
I don't think they could have, even if they'd wanted to. Their massive mounted armies just wouldn't work in western Europe- not enough space, not enough grass, and too many fortifications. They'd be stuck fighting on foot. They did do that, especially in China, but they wouldn't be any better at it than the Europeans. Combine that with the long distance away, and I think the khans realized that it would be impossable.
Right, for all the credit the longbow gets, it was the pike and musket that killed heavy cavalry. Simple to learn, effective, requires no special physical ability, and you could train an unskilled person in a month in their usage (it pretty much came down to convincing the pikemen not to run from a charge).
The pike and shot combined arms infantry formations didn't really kill the idea of heavy cavalry. It just removed it as the most dominant arm of the military. There were still heavily armoured cuirassier squadrons well past the development of the tercio. Up till the Thirty Years War. Napoleon used heavy cavalry as a shock weapon.
Another example to look at is the Battle of Formigny. Armour developed to a point that even the longbow couldn't penetrate it. There were crossbows with immense draw weights, more powerful than the longbow, but they were expensive, hard to use and took a long time to load.
Also, longbows needed carefully chosen terrain. Looking at the battles at Crecy, Poiters, Agincourt, Aljubarrota. Secured flanks, an open field of fire, prepared field works and preferably a lot of mud made the weapon absolutely deadly. With little time to prepare the field and solid ground like at Patay and Formigny, the archers could be ridden down in masses.
The Polish army had cavalry(as did many less modernized forces, usually deployed as dragoons, which fought on foot), which was used to attack German infantry. It then got engaged by tanks. They didn't charge the tanks as lancers. Someone just thought that'd be a cool story to tell.
Horses move faster than men, so cavalry wasn't obsolete until well into the 20th century, when motor-vehicles became common. Obviously, WW1 showed everyone that the Napoleonic style of cavalry use was over, though.
The latter persisted much longer than the former in the various militaries of the world.
Additionally you couldn't get free labour to work in the old style sugar plantations and processing sites at pretty much any price, because working there fucking killed you.
The Mongols were also pretty good at siege!
Actual heavy cavalry charges used as shock troops were used to successful effect as late as WWI, as far as I know; principally on the Eastern theater, which was too large an area to be defended via trenches. Trenches, barbed wire, and machine guns obsoleted the heavy cavalry.
Fun fact: during the battle for Xiangyang, the Mongols built and deployed over five thousand trebuchets.
What would have actually caused problems for the Mongols would have been the lack of forage for their horses in the European woodlands, which stalled the Magyars and the Huns before them.
I believe that in the opening, fluid, moments of the war cavalry squadrons came into contact with each other and full mounted skirmishes, firing from horseback and charging with lance, took place.
I'lll see if I can dig out some references.
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A few things here. First, it's important to understand that parchment was a very expensive and quite limited resource -- it's just not the case that the monasteries (in the early middle ages) and the universities (in the later middle ages) could have increased ten-fold the number of books they were producing, because every single book required the killing and skinning of one or more calves or lambs. I don't remember the exact details, but the University of Paris, for instance, required an enormous number of stables and animal hands to produce books. Increasing their book producing ten-fold might well have required half the city of Paris to be employed in preparing parchment.
There's also a misconception that every book had these beautiful ornamentations. Some did, certainly -- especially Bibles -- but many did not. Especially once you get to the universities in the 13th century, copyists were largely working much too fast and making horrendous errors all over the place. The poorer university students would often hire out their services to copy books for their wealthier classmates; the generally poor quality of these manuscripts is why, for instance, it's taken the Vatican over 100 years to piece together what Thomas Aquinas really wrote: we have dozens, if not hundreds, of copies of his works, but all of our copies are flawed in evident ways. The trick is to compare the copies against each other so as to make the flaws drop out.
For medieval people, maintaining a horse in battle-ready shape was probably as onerous a job as keeping an Abrams tank running today. Between a blacksmith to make horseshoes, stable boys to keep the horse fed and clean and various craftsman to make saddles, stirrups and armor for the beasts, they probably had a similarly large support contingent.
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In any case Europe had compared to the rest of the world relativly few famines, Few as in once every 10-20 years instead of every 3 year or such. Our picture of peasant destitution comes more from high medieval scholars(when Malthus had kicked in).
Also 1) people then to forget that Europe had vast fishing stock to fall back on. China and India had nothing compared to North Atlantic cod supplies. When Columbus discovered America, he also laid the groundwork for the Great Banks fishing of the coast of North America.
2) Enclosures where more a 16-18 century thing in England, then a Mediveal European thing.
The armoured war horse of the European knight when plate was in vogue sure, but the average hore didn't require that much maintenance. Its just that the mongols and similar steppe armies would have 7-10 horses per man that would cause the problems.
People might bitch about European weather now, but it laid the foundations for northern European power and the egalitarian political traditions we have today. In europe it rains like all the time - you never had to rely on irrigation systems owned and managed by a political elite, someone comes and burns your crops and you can just grow them again the following year (unlike wrecked rice paddies), you can just leave tubers in the ground, its chilly enough that things don't rot quickly. You could have high levels of food surplus without the levels of centralisation and social stratification the high productivity systems of Asia required.
I imagine a number of travellers from Europe and Africa found their way to the New World much earlier than was generally thought. But they either weren't able to return, or did return but nothing ever came out of it. The Spanish were able to exploit the New World because of reliable ocean-going ships and because they had a bunch of landless soldiers post-Reconquista who needed to be given something to do to prevent them from causing trouble back home.
Rigorous Scholarship
Apart from in Scotland where it rains faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar to much. Scotland has more than 90% of all the water in Britain, Lochness has twice the volume of water than England and Wales combined. IT just rains far too much and land that should have been prime agricultural land was sodden an unfarmable except by the awful runrig system. The greatest invention for Scottish agriculture happened in the early 1800's (yes that late) when James Smith invented a subsoil plow allowing farmers to drain excess water through the clay level and into underground drainage ditches.
The management of Scotland's 'natural' water is absolutely jaw dropping, rivers are literally switched on at the weekend for white-water enthusiasts.
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Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
The cost of parchment was why there is a ton of writings where the person scraped off the previous writings. Because the erasure wasn't complete, new texts can be found under the current writing depending on the condition of the manuscript.
Also, when books were ordered to be destroyed (because the writer was declared a heretic, say), frequently they just cut the pages into strips and used those strips for binding materials for other books (again, because of the cost of parchment and bindings). There have been a number of late medieval works that had been rediscovered in recent years in just this way -- someone starts examining the binding of some other manuscript and finds a lost work by someone like John Wyclif.
I'm refering to heavy cavalry. That is, cavalry intended to break through the enemy, shock troops. As opposed to light cavalry which were primarily intended to scout for and screen the army while harassing the enemy. The French had cuirassiers, heavy cavalry, up until the beginning of the First World War, the Germans and Russians even longer. The Poles used lancers against the Germans in the Second World War.
What I meant is that heavy cavalry existed long after the invention of pike and musket formations. The knight disappeared but the fully armoured horseman remained on the battlefield for another hundred years. It's use changed though. It became extremely imprudent to send cavalry straight against formed infantry with the universal adoption of the pike and musket. It was still an important part of armies though. Heavy cavalry had the edge against light cavalry in battle and could smashed through weakened, disintegrating formations of infantry. It's psychological impact should not be underestimated.
In that book, characters say that they really don't want to disseminate information too much. They really thought it should be restricted do just an educated few, which is part of the reason they wrote in latin. And of course they had a holy duty to make the books beautiful, even if noone ever saw them.
I find medieval theology absolutely fascinating, even though I'm an atheist. It has this bizarre logic to it, like a twisted version of a mathematical proof. "Jesus never laughed, and he was the perfect man, therefore we should all try to never laugh".
The answer to the question is really that there is no virtue in creating inferior quality copies instead of the quality work of an artisan. To the laborer, in this case, the scholar, his work is the essence of his caste. Just like the knightly warrior caste finds meaning in battle, the scholar finds his meaning in studying and reproducing wisdom. He puts that effort into his work because that is how he finds spiritual enlightenment.
Scarcity is of no concern at all. Nor, particularly, is limiting circulation, as other castes are either illiterate, or not particularly interested in pursuing interests outside of their duty.
I apologise for tmming the quote from Eco down a little, but wanted to stick my head over the parapet on this one. The question of non-clerical literacy rates in Late Antique through Late Medieval Europe is one which is desperately undecided. It's been a while, but the last time that I did any work in the area, the question was around how 'literacy' was defined.
Whilst Eco is correct in the assertion that high-level, 'elite' philosophy, economic and civic texts were typically generated and read only by an elite, there is storng evidence to suggest a very 'functionally' literate populace throughout western europe, in the form of letters (both personal and business), commercial receipts, graffiti, scrawled notes, and so on - the example that came to mind was the birchbark texts fro Novgorod, which can be parallelled nicely with the Antique letters from Vindolanda.
As mentioned above, the purpose of illuminated manuscripts is archival, status related, and commercial - the rich purchased illumed manuscripts to demonstrate their wealth, and monasteries did so for both religious and secular reasons (to demonstrate their work). What we need to consider is the other forms of cmmunication, the ephemeral, which may be far more useful in judging the day-to-day condition of much of the Late Antique and Medieval worlds - these are actually much rarer than the (already rare) surviving manuscripts, simply because they were used and then disposed of; parchment was for something to be stored permanently, scraped bark, wax etc for ephemera - but it is this day-to-day ephemera which can provide a revealing insight into the non-elite of the period.
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But, I really wish you wouldn't use the quote tags to write something that I never said. That's not even paraphrasing what I said at all. I was just repeating something I read in a work of fiction.
As a tangentially related aside, it may also be worth considering the wax and wane of 'sacred' and 'secular' spaces. Literacy wa soriginally considered a 'secular' activity, in the sense that it wa spractised largely by elites and also by the larger population; however, as secular power focii faltered, the more formalised expressions of literacy-as-power were subsumed into the growing sacred space, whilst ephemera remained 'below the radar'.
As catholicism became the sole recognised church, and continued to absorb previously secular activities into itself, its use of literacy as an elite marker was (functionally) identical to the Roman use of paideia, that is, the assumption of shared cultural values. Churchmen could read (indeed, this was a test for whether a man could be tried in a church court, during some of the period), and they could all read the same thing, and they could all read in the same language.
Reading thus became more secular again, and promgulated back out into the wider elite circa the Renaissance (iirc)
Goodreads
SF&F Reviews blog