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Grittiness, realism, honor, and the life in the middle-ages


Green Gogol

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We can get a quite small margin of error for the early imperial Rome census - for Rome herself,

And "small marigin" here i "within sa, 20%" since again, the roman census didn't count individuals, but households.

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I've skimmed the thread, so I might well have missed something. Apologies if I say anything that's previously been mentioned.




I've looked a bit around on threads, blogs and wikipedia, and there's a lot of debate going on, but mostly it seems opinions with little real knowlegde about what it was really like in the middle-ages. I've read a short article somewhere on the net where it said that if ASOIAF would have been realistic, it would have been boring. I would like to learn more about life in the middle-ages, what it was like, because I want to be able to judge for myself the level of realism in different fantasy novels and series. Can anybody point me toward serious books or documentary that will help me learn more about the real life and values of the middle-ages?



Perhaps the first thing to bear in mind is that the Middle Ages were long and multifaceted. By the most common definitions they lasted around a thousand years; even if you exclude the Migration Period and most of the Early Middle Ages as a different and poorly-documented period (what I still think of as the Dark Ages) there's still a good 600 years there. Conditions would vary very widely from time to time and from place to place. It also meant that there was space for myth and legend to grow up within the Middle Ages itself. Much of the Arthurian legend was created in the 12th century, and Camelot was actvely mimicked in the English court in the 14th century. While there was never a time when the Arthurian legend could have borne a massive realistic semblance to contemporary reality, periods of prosperity (like the 12th century) would have generally been much more pleasant to live in than periods badly afflicted by plague or warfare, to the point where Camelot and the like was aspirational rather than fantastical.



Particularly by the 14th century, the notion of "chivalry" as a code of honour had caught on as a great idea. As always, some knights would have taken this quite seriously, and others would have paid lip service to it or ignored it. This itself though was a carry-over from a romanticised version of early Middle Ages history, much in the way that Victorian romanticism tried to draw on the Middle Ages themselves.



What really doesn't help is the way that in the popular consciousness (and the Victorian romantics and Whig historians must bear a lot of the blame here) the whole period has kind of got mulched in together. Combined with an absence of reliable contemporary documentation for much of the period, this means it's quite difficult to portray the period "realistically". Even the modern revisionist portrayal of "the Dung Ages" probably swings too far the other way, because they're still portraying a particular facet of a particular period or location as the universal norm. There are probably elements of truth within both the romantic mediaeval archetypes and the "Dung Ages" of modern popular conception.



All too often I see someone trying to explode a particular myth or archetype or perception by drawing on a specific example, but the distance in time and location makes it meaningless. For instance, "it stretches credibility to accept that a privileged middle-class man in his late 20s like Adelstein could have typed this post on a computer in 2014, because the middle classes were held in contempt and in any case didn't have access to electricity during the Hungarian uprising of 1848." Obviously nonsense. But for some reason we'll accept an example from the fifteenth century to challenge information about the thirteenth, or vice versa. This isn't an issue that affects academics so much, obviously, but in popular history, it's a problem I see all the time.





Also, we get to read about battles with big melee that goes on and on for days. I don't know much about medieval battles, except that I read somewhere they were mostly done in 20 minutes, and were more about looking threatening enough to make the opponent give up than huge amount of bloodshed. I have also been a martial artist for a big part of my life, and can assure you that fighting for more than 5 minutes is quite exhausting. I can't imagine doing it for hours at a time. Especially wearing armor and wielding weapons.




Yes and no. It depends on the battle - many battles would have been quite small-scale, with only a couple of hundred men on each side at most. Logistically it would just have been too difficult to raise, equip and manoeuvre large armies on a regular basis. Battles themselves were actually pretty uncommon: most combat was in terms of raiding parties or chevauchees which would avoid direct combat with opposing armed forces, and concentrate on attacking food supplies and the like. As a singular example, Simon de Montfort was renowned as a potent warrior for much of his career, but didn't fight an actual battle until almost the very end of his life.



Nevertheless, battles on a large scale with thousands of men on either side did happen, and those battles could last for hours, or even in some rare cases days. In these instances it's probably wrong to imagine though that any individual is fighting all day or for more than a few minutes at a time: there will be rest periods and lulls in the fighting where one side or the other withdraws to regroup and regain their breath before starting a fresh attack. The relatively primitive means of communication available to armies limited the degree to which strategy and tactics could be centrally coordinated, so big battles were often essentially an exercise in attrition. However, if one side gained a decisive advantage then the battle could be over very quickly. Sometimes this could be spectacular, but such instances were rare.



It's also worth bearing in mind that mediaeval individuals were on average much stronger and fitter than people are today. For many peasants, their working days were long and hard and including a lot of backbreaking manual labour, with no automation to assist them. Much of the nobility - the part that actually fought battles, at least - would have spent an awful lot of their time training or actually fighting, and this process would have started in prepubescence or early adolescence. So feats of endurance that seem unlikely might not actually be so.





I know that the values we have right now are probably different from what there was in the middle-ages, but I tend to find people in fantasy like Lord of the rings more realistic than those in ASOIAF. Thinking about what I do every day, what my family and friends do, how they act seems much closer to how Frodo, Aragorn, Gandalf and cie act, than the actions of Tyrion, Jaime, Ned and the rest. In fact those characters seems to me in serious need of a therapy. I would be surprised to learn that the average male in the middle-ages had the urge to rape, kill, steal and the like. Especially considering how much religion was important at that time.





I think you'd be surprised. Mediaeval society was much more violent than our present one, and there are a lot of factors that will affect that, but I'll focus on one just to start with. Most crime that is committed is either a crime of passion in which the individual doesn't concern himself with the consequences, or a crime where the individual believes they will get away with it. Incidentally, this is why increasing the severity of punishment for crime doesn't tend to result in a meaningful drop. Whether or not the crimes of passion were more common (and society was on the whole younger and thus more intemperate for most of the period, so it might be a factor), the latter is the real issue. The system of criminal justice was really very primitive, with no forensics or even a police force, and most of the power for punishment vested in the hands of local magistrates who would usually be a part of the community and know all the parties personally, as would any jury that was called. Obviously, there was no witness protection. If you were a powerful or well-respected individual, it wouldn't be difficult to prevent the case ever coming to court. Getting away with crime was just much easier, and people took advantage.



Then you have to take into account the odd and/or superstitious nature of view on a lot of crime. Rape is an obvious example, but I don't want to send the thread down that particular tangent again by going into detail. Suffice to say that, as a victim, the odds were not on your side. Religion wasn't necessarily helpful. If a criminal was seriously concerned about the state of your soul, he confessed and were given penance and/or made a donation in exchange for a pardon. Note: you could buy pardons in advance.



If you were to remove all the social constraints that make up our current society I think the degradation in law and order would quite rapidly become apparent.


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