Medieval Historian Answers Google’s Most Popular Questions About Life In The Middle Ages

I mean, people are depressed about

medieval

people, what is all this? They can't do art, they can't do medicine. in The Siege and the Assault, what ceased at Troy. Hi, I'm Matt Lewis, I'm the co-host of the History hits gone

medieval

podcast and I've been invited before you today to try to answer the

most

Googled

questions

about the medieval world. Prepare to hear a lot of I don't know, here it goes, when the medieval era began and ended. It's a really good and really complicated question. We normally date the beginning of the medieval period from the fall of Rome, so around the year 47.

Even that is debated, you know, Rome was sacked several times, but the end of the Roman Empire is considered to be the beginning of the medieval period early, then divided into the early High Middle Ages and the High Middle Ages for a long time, particularly in Britain. guilty of ending the medieval period with the battle of Bosworth in 1485, as if a defeat in one battle were a hard cut to the end of an entire period with the beginning of the chudah, in truth, everything bleeds a little beyond that There really was a difficult ending, but probably at the beginning of the 16th century we began to get closer to the Renaissance period.

I think, what did medieval women look like? I'm not sure they would have looked much different than how women look today, for the

most

part, having a bare head was a sign of a young unmarried woman, most women once they are married and have formed a family, they would cover their heads from then on if you're looking to swipe left or right, you're looking for the ones without a head covering, were they all, uh Wy, pockmarked witches absolutely? Did they all look like a Maran mom in a Robin Hood movie? Probably not, but I'm sure women took With a certain degree of interest in their appearance, we have fashions in things like women's hairlines, so the nobility would tear out their hairlines to move them further and further towards back, but hairlines become a real fashion statement for women, but I think medieval women would have simply looked like Women today in medieval clothing were medieval swords.

Heavy medieval swords come in a variety of types, shapes and sizes. Mass produced swords can be a little clunky, but most swords, if you've invested money in having an expensive sword made for you, this was a work of art, were designed so that the user could handle them reasonably easily in their hand. The point of having the pommel, handle and blade in the lengths, styles and weights they had was that it should be able to be held quite easily in the hand and used comfortably for a long period of time. If you use a huge two-handed sword, then yes, you are potentially getting heavy simply because of the amount of metal involved in putting it together, but then they become quite clunky and unwieldy, so I would say that the best medieval swords should feel comfortable in the hand, what's next?

Why was the medieval period called the Middle Ages? This is a complicated and painful sword that we tend to avoid. From the use of the phrase Dark Ages these days, it was originally coined to talk about the early medieval period as a time when there weren't many recorded sources, we didn't have much written source material, so we don't know much about what's around. happening in various places and so it was obscure to us, but it has since been used as a pejorative term, almost to suggest that people in this period were uneducated and yet we know that there are incredible gems and works of art that arise from this period.

Now we tend to shy away from it, I guess, because it's used to paint these people in a way that we shouldn't try to portray them, and then what did medieval people eat? I mean, it's probably not that different a diet from ours. much less processed food, obviously, perhaps not a very varied diet, many more vegetables if you were not particularly well off, meat was an expensive commodity, so reserved for the tables of the nobility, you displayed your wealth by organizing large banquets with masses of meat roasted and if you could afford to waste it then all the better, it shows how rich you really are, so wasting food was almost an active display.

The poorest people would have lived on bread. The bread would have been a community effort so you could grow your own. wheat, but you would need the miller to grind it for you. You need the baker to bake it into bread for you and they would eat a lot of vegetables, so to make a stew, literally just throw everything in a pot like it's a big stew, uh, and you. keep that moving, you would eat meat whenever you can, but there are tons of holidays and holy days where you wouldn't be allowed to eat meat, so the church discouraged you from eating meat, sometimes you eat fish. but you would normally be expected to replace it with vegetables.

Having said that the calorie intake of medieval people was also huge, it is estimated that between 7 and 9000 calories for a man working in the fields during the day, you could be doing a 12 to 14 hour shift. from hard work in the fields every day, you needed calories to sustain you, so they may have eaten much richer food, we may not consider them very tasty, but they would have eaten a lot and if they were muscular medieval knights, I mean , it's really hard to say what we have left of the people from this period, they're just skeletons and we don't have particularly good art of what they would look like physically.

I would suggest that they were probably incredibly muscular and would have spent periods of each day. practicing fighting learning to hunt learning to wear armor wielding different types of weapons riding horses their days would have been full of physical activity I would suggest that they would have been quite thin people probably quite muscular and yes, a group of medieval knights would probably look something like this like the Avengers today for us, then how did medieval soldiers know who to fight? It's a very good question. You watch a lot of movies and it looks like chaos on a medieval battlefield, but it very rarely looks like that in terms of knowledge. who to fight, normally you would have worn the livery of the Lord that you were fighting for, so you would wear His colors, you would wear His insignia and you would fight close to His Banner and that is the way people identified who was who on a battlefield.

I think it is the equivalent of being in a crowd and being able to spot opposing football fans by the football shirt they are wearing, you would understand what colors their allegiance refers to and thus you would know if that Lord was an enemy of your Lord. and therefore, someone you should be fighting. Medieval battlefields were not chaotic, they were usually well organized with large lines of men moving in blocks, so until you reached a route point at the end of a battle you could usually identify the enemy because they were a large group of standing men. together on the other side of the field waving their swords at you and shouting and then we have how medieval guilds worked.

Guild buses were groups of merchants who operated in a specific trade and banded together to extract their wealth and resources to try to increase the influence of their own activities in order to purchase more goods. If they work together, they could influence city policy and get tax breaks for their particular business. If that was what they were looking for at that time, they would also withdraw their resources to make donations or religious gestures, pay for chapels in churches and things like that, very often you see guilds operating like that, so it is a way for people to get their resources and join together I guess it's similar to a union, but for merchants in the modern world, why was medieval medicine so bad?

I guess we would see medieval medicine as bad because they didn't have any idea about germ theory, they didn't. particularly they used pharmaceutical drugs the way we do, they believed in this ancient Greek understanding of the body as a balance of the four humors. There was Flem, there was oh craigy, what were the four humors, so there's blood. these things were hot or cold or dry or moist substances if you were sick it was because one of those four was out of balance you had too much black bile or not enough phlegm in your system they could bleed you to reduce the amount of blood in your system so it could equalize all those four things and they understood wellness as a balance of things in the body and they had medical treatments and medications, they used herbs and things from the garden to treat certain ailments.

It may not have been as effective as going to the supermarket and buying some Paras today, but they did know how to deal with strange ailments that could be treated with herbs and medicines, that way, that's what leeches do and all that kind of stuff. . but they cut a vein and then the doctor would judge how much blood he thinks he would need to lose if medieval peasants were happy. I mean, this is a really, really difficult question to answer. I guess I'll probably have to go with a general. I don't know, I imagine most people are usually pretty happy as long as they have a full stomach and are reasonably comfortable.

Peasant

life

was hard, it required a lot of work, but most peasants would not have known anything different either. what they expected from

life

this was what their grandparents' life had been like this is what they expected their grandchildren's life to be like you can find ways to be happy within that surely medieval people didn't have weekends so you worked every day That being said there is a lot less work to do in the winter, when the days are shorter and the crops are not growing in the field, you will potentially have a little more time off work than the 12 days of Christmas would have been 12 days of holiday at work when you're expected to just celebrate happiness is a very subjective thing, it's hard to measure how many people in the world are happy today I don't know, I think it would have been pretty similar in the medieval world, you have happy days and you have In the sad days when medieval soldiers were paid this way, it depends on what kind of soldier you were if you lived on a piece of land where your lord required you to do military service in exchange for having that land and it's You may not get paid during that time.

Military service may be restricted to a certain number of days a year where you were required to go and serve in the military, but your payment was having a house to live in. During the medieval period we had a growth in mercenary forces so armies for more and yes you would absolutely get paid if you were a mercenary there in the 100 Years War we see arch roles being hired to go to France and we see their daily pay rates, so they would absolutely pay you. You normally serve in those conditions under a lease, so you would normally ask a Lord to give you military service for a fixed period of time for a fixed daily rate and at the end of that period you would be paid and you would go home or could choose to extend his contract and continue fighting was that the pay is pretty good, yes, we know the pay.

I'm trying to think what it was, I mean it's a good pay, yeah, at a time when a job in a field might earn one or two pags a day, an archer might earn more like 8 or 10 pags a day. You also have the opportunity to do a little loop while you're there so you can supplement your salary a little. Next, we have what medieval English did. It sounds like this and this is quite complicated English as a language has evolved over the centuries, so it would have sounded like different things in different parts of the medieval period.

There is a strong argument that the American accent and American pronunciation are actually quite similar to those of the late Middle Ages. In English, our best guide is probably that medieval written literature in the vernacular tends to be written phonetically, so it is written as you would say it, so if you want to know what it sounds like, I suggest you look up a paragraph of High Medieval English. vernacular writing and just read it as it appears on the screen, try to pronounce it exactly as it says, see in The siege and the assault that ceased at Troy, bored Britain and Brent to the brondes and asz the talk that traon trams They are rooted in what is. judged for his betrayal, the truest Old English on Earth, so early medieval Anglo-Saxon we probably couldn't understand anything today as we move into the medieval period and English becomes more similar to the English we speak today, I guess There will be points where it is equivalent to having some GCSE in French and going to France and trying to understand conversations, you pick up fragments and you might be able to understand the gist of what is going on, but there will still be strange words that you don't anymore. is used and there will be pronunciations that sound really strange to us.

I think thatEnglish sounds different at different times and in different places as the medieval period progresses, we would have understood more than we would have at the beginning. Because? Medieval art was so bad. Wow, I mean we're hard on medieval people here, medieval doctors are horrible, and medieval artists are terrible. I think if you look at some of the illuminated manuscripts that are produced in monasteries even in the early medieval period, I think I would say they are absolutely stunning works of art that have lasted 1500 years and still look absolutely beautiful. I think maybe this question is thinking about why they are not portrait im

ages

as we would expect to see today, as we see emerging in the early modern period.

Very often they are handwritten im

ages

of generic people in the field doing generic jobs and some of them can look very, very good, some are marginal scribbles and that's only as good as the artist. I'm a terrible artist. I can't draw for love or money if I draw you a stick man. He asked me what he was. I think the medieval period lacks this self-obsession. We didn't really worry about authorship of books or ownership of manuscripts and people were less concerned about their names and faces being remembered forever. There was much less concern about painting someone sitting in front of you exactly as they appeared and more concern about conveying images so that you could produce an image that looked like a rural scene and was not intended to represent a single person because there was no such obsession with individuality. that exists today so I don't know if it's bad, I think maybe it's unfair, some of it is absolutely stunning and then we have what medieval beer tasted like, I mean I guess it would taste like beer.

There are many places that claim that the recipe hasn't changed much in centuries. I suppose beer would have been much more prevalent during the medieval period in a land where we probably had more beer than beer. Beer is a continental way of producing that alcohol. and you would have a kind of small beer, which would be much thinner, much more for everyday drinking, and then you would have the stronger stuff that was maybe reserved for the evening after a hard day or for a party where I prepared beer. a way to clean water, they drank water during the medieval period.

It's another myth that people didn't drink water during the medieval period, but you couldn't always be sure of a source of clean water, you couldn't turn on a tap. Go ahead and know that some water company has been responsible for ensuring that it is safe to drink and that the brewing process has the effect of killing the germs found within the water, which the medieval mind would not have understood why what happened that, but nevertheless, you could drink beer made with impure water that could not be drunk alone, it is quite possible that quite young children drank beer during this period and medieval hospitals were clean.

Medieval hospitals were quite complex places to which they were often linked. monasteries staffed by monks and nuns who would have a rudimentary idea of ​​how to care for you are still interested in these four humors to balance all those things can care for lepers in a community they may not necessarily know how to treat such people, but they would feel a responsibility to take care of them in the community, so we know that medieval armies were aware that where they camped they tried to make sure that they were not near stagnant water and that their waste was away from people because it was very easy to introduce diseases, so they I understood that noxious odors and fumes could cause illness and therefore there would be some degree of cleaning in hospitals, but I doubt they were cleaning everything to the extent we would expect people to do today so maybe if you break the arm don't go to a medieval hospital why was medieval torture so cruel again?

Maybe we're being a little mean here, we call it cruel, they'd probably argue that they were just good at it. I don't know if the medieval period was as full of torture as we sometimes think it was; the use of things like the rack and methods to extract confessions from people is actually more of an early modern thing that comes after the medieval period, though. There was undoubtedly cruel and harsh punishment, there was this idea of ​​a type of restorative justice, so that a thief could have his hand cut off if he committed certain crimes, he could be marked with a letter so that everyone would know that he had committed that crime.

Justice was much more of a community problem, so it was actually quite rare for the state to get involved in torturing someone to get a confession or something. If we're talking about why they could be so cruel, I mean, who cares about human rights? In the medieval period, no one told the king that he couldn't inflict pain on someone because it was against his human rights; There was just no mechanism for people to protest that kind of thing, so we know, for example, that blinding is an important political form. of torture in the medieval period and we know that Henry the first allowed an exchange of hostages between some people who were in dispute and one side blinded the son of the other family that they were holding hostage and Henry the first allowed that first family to take two daughters of the second family and not only blinded them but also cut off their noses and those two girls were actually Henry, the first granddaughter, so he allowed this to be done to his own grandchildren because it had that element of restorative justice, but De In fact, I think that torture as a way of extracting some kind of confession is much rarer in the medieval world than we probably think it was if medieval people were dirty.

I mean, people are depressed about medieval people. What is all this? They can't make art, they can. They don't do medicine, they're all trash and they're dirty and they stink at all. They would have worked in the fields all day, so obviously they are going to sweat and get dirty, but their whole way of living and dressing is even prepared to deal with this, medieval people wore a bottom layer of linen garments and the linen It was there to absorb sweat and odor and that was the layer you changed every day or as regularly as you needed. to their outer clothing then they would never touch the sweat they would never become smelly medieval people were almost certainly dirty while working in the fields because they had difficult manual jobs to do but they knew how to keep clean they knew how they washed that dirt off and they knew how to make sure they didn't They smell like sweat at the end of a busy day.

People should not be discouraged by medieval people like this. How did medieval sewers work poorly? Often the sewers could be lowered down the In the

middle

of the streets there would be a canal in the

middle

that would remove all the waste that could be in an area where there are businesses such as butchers that could be animal blood and all kinds of things that are washed away. down the street in the Medieval baths in the middle of a city would be gaping holes and could be over a river or waterway which would take all of that away from you, so they never actually went into a recognizable underground sewer and to some extent , this is a problem that persists.

In the 19th century, you know you think that the big stench in Parliament was essentially because the temps were so full of sewage and rubbish that there was no effective way to get it out of the city as it grew. Huge underground sewers did not exist. In the medieval period, the other way around this is that you have some sort of outside bath and then you have people known as gong farmers. Perhaps one of the worst jobs in the history of the world is surely that of a gong farmer. out there digging up all your neighbors' piles of excrement and taking them away were illiterate medieval peasants yes, for the most part they had very little need to read and write, they had very little time to learn it and no one to teach it to them, you really do I see that literacy It grows throughout the medieval period, particularly with the rise of a merchant class who need to be able to count and reconcile paperwork, and make their books and provide receipts, but if you are a medieval peasant working in the fields, you can read and write not If you're interested, you go to church services on Sunday and the priest tells you what the Bible says, so you don't need to be able to read the Bible, and in fact there was a lot of discussion that medieval peasants should.

You won't be allowed to read the Bible, it shouldn't be in English, it should be in Latin, so the priest will tell you what it is. Medieval churches would have been painted with incredible wall art that tells biblical stories, so again you have it represented visually. you and you would read those paintings rather than having to go away and read the word, so I would say for the most part yes, medieval peasants were overwhelmingly illiterate, what medieval London was like, for example, that the walled city of London , what is still called the square mile, the city of London today was contained within those walls with seven gates around it that allowed people in and that regulated the temperatures of the river and places like Westminster upstream and the Tower of London, on the other hand, they were considered outside the city of London, eh, there was a bridge that crossed the temporary London bridge, on the other side of that was Suuk, which at that time was almost like a small independent city and Suduk was kind of a swampy land there, it's where you went if you were looking for a medieval brothel to have a good time sodic was the place to go so I think medieval London would feel very different to today, but it's still possible If you have the same feeling of being crammed into a small space, it's very busy, it's very hectic, it's quite noisy and perhaps a little disorienting, especially if you normally lived in the countryside, medieval London would have seemed like a completely different world, so why not?

Why did medieval people wear pointed shoes? Why do most people wear sneakers nowadays? Fashions change, so you go through periods in the medieval world. when long shoes become fashionable, pointed shoes become fashionable, rolled shoes become fashionable and these things just move in and out, so we can't say that they wore pointed shoes throughout the entire medieval period, but shoes will also become a key indicator like everything else. The rest you wear is the outer face you present to the world, so they are a good way to show off your wealth and you can get to the point where the longer, pointy or curlier your shoes are, the more expensive they will be for you to show off. like a clown and it would be a great way to announce how rich you are.

We are medieval peasant slaves, but we belong to the medieval period. Yes, in Anglo-Saxon England most peasants were probably in a form of slavery or at least something like that. close to contract service, you had a piece of land that the lord gave to you and he expected you to work that land, you grew your own food on that land, but you would also have to go work on his land in his fields to bring in his crops as part of that deal and they wouldn't pay him to do that. The Anglo-Saxons kept slaves. The Viking economy ran on slavery, so the Vikings traded in the Near East in Constantinople and places like that.

They took the East to exchange money for beads and goods, what they took in the East were slaves because they were the most valuable asset in that part of the world and that is why many of their raids on Britain during this period were aimed at collecting slaves and transporting them to El Near Eastern Christianity tends to disapprove of slavery, so with the Norman invasion of England we see an almost immediate end to slavery as such in England, with the Christianization of the Vikings we see the slave trade disappearing among them, but still there is a long period left. in which there are many ways to be a medieval peasant, you can be a fairly rich peasant and the distinction really is between free men and unfree men, if you are free you can buy a piece of land wherever you want and you can move around it.

You can get better if you are not free, you are still tied to that piece of land that the Lord has given you and you are considered a possession of the lord of the land, in fact you are still in real terms probably in a form of slavery. Deep into the medieval period, the next question, why were medieval times so brutal? I mean, I guess because it's populated by humans and we're a pretty terrible species. I guess we can think of things like punishments. Corporal punishment still existed during this period. Capital punishment. still existed during this period, it is a time when things like branding and maiming were used as forms of punishment and today we consider it brutal, but it is a fairly new phenomenon to consider that to be brutal they were concerned with maintaining Law and Order and Yes I could punish a criminal and protect the entire community, thatit was the kind of balance that I think they were playing with in the medieval mind, so even though we think it's a brutal period, there are long periods of peace, there are plenty of people who would have absolutely done that. they didn't fight in their life, they would have worked in the fields, they worked the land all their lives and they could have lived a life that we would have thought was a lot of hard work, but which could have been quite idyllic, we always think about the time we are living.

It's much better now than in previous times, everyone who came before was brutal and I don't doubt that in 500 years people will think that we were brutal and unnecessary and did incredibly strange things that they don't understand and maybe that's partly as well as seeing with the parts of the medieval world that we study and that we see in the movies, we see battles, we see the bad Sheriff of Nottingham with his acts of cruelty and brutality, we see Edward the first in Braveheart being a vicious man who wants to conquer all these people and he has some pretty brutal and evil ways of doing it, we don't see many three-hour epic movies of people going out into the fields, digging and plowing a bit and then coming home and having a beer and their tea and the next, oh, that's the last question, so those are all the most Googled

questions

about the medieval world.

I hope I found some reasonable

answers

. I didn't answer too many. I don't know if you enjoyed it. Please like and subscribe for more of this amazing content and you can also catch me on the God Medieval Podcast on Tuesdays and Fridays on History Hit.