Shadiversity on Medieval Guilds

What were Medieval Guilds really like? | Medieval Misconceptions
28th Jan. 2022 | Shadiversity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWyXhaHOq7Q

10:16 Weren't there also opening fees?

Theodor Mommsen was in general against the guild system, but he argued, allowing just anyone to open a bakery in Leipzig would be stealing from those who had paid an opening fee (if that's the term) to the bakers' guild, under the up to then system (prior to 1848).

10:35 I think you are somewhat mistaken.

In Germany - HRE - all sub-guilds were part of a set number of big guilds and one of the things about running Strassburg was determining to what greater guild a certain trade belonged.

Imagine book printing is invented. Does it belong with bookbinders and book copyers already extant or with something else?

And all trades without exception were run by these larger guilds, Zünfte.

In France, some trades were guild compulsory, some trades were free, and some were "guild possible". The guilds in any place would be way more numerous than in a German city.

What you are saying reads a bit like "Germany developed into France" which is as inaccurate on this theme as in general.

100 -> 350 = more trades became guild trades. Less remained guild free.

Both numbers reflect the idea that guilds are organised, as usual in France proper (not parts of HRE that only later joined France) were organised as a trade seemed to need it.

In Germany or HRE, the "umbrella guilds" remained few up to the end. And, correspondingly, big.

Wait, 100, 90, 70 guilds ... wouldn't these still often be sub-guilds of larger guilds, something like 24 or so overall (Hamburg, Lubeck, Cologne were obviously HRE, not France)?

Obviously, all German cities did not have the same constitutions, one often copied one was the Magdeburg constitution, which was copied a lot in Eastern Europe (Vilnius, Prague too, I think ...) so it could be that the ones you mentioned had other constitutions than the one I knew (from a book the French author of which would have known of the Germanies most intensely the parts that are disputed 1681, 1870, 1919 and again 1940-45).

24:28 If it's spelled "Hinkmer" or "Hincmer" you pronounced it correctly.

There is another form, Hincmar, and you pronounce the syllables hink and mar, and the first one somewhat stronger.

Medieval literacy

Medieval Misconceptions: EDUCATION and LITERACY
Shadiversity | 13.II.2020
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-abyQLl8mPI

I

1:52 Nice to see two channels I like together!

[To clarify, Shadiversity as providing this video above, and the Modern History TV with its video on Did they have soap in medieval times?]

II

7:07 Guilds - Germany and France differred.

In Germany, the overall guilds for a certain number of trades were involved in the administration, hence everyone was in a guild, as he was burgher of his city.

In France, trades were going in and out of the guilds. There were from St. Louis IX to Louis XVI diversity of trades between unrelgulated, semi-regulated and guild regulated. In these last, you needed to be a master approved by the guild to open a shop.

III

10:48 You are omitting, in the Anglo-Saxon period there were Anglo-Saxon translations of Gospel texts.

Here is a fairly late example:
Wessex Gospels c.1175 Textus Receptus Bibles
http://textusreceptusbibles.com/Wessex/40/24

Up to 800, Latin was the written form of the vernacular in France.

Alcuin of York was imported to Tours in order to teach pronouncing Latin as a foreign language, that year, and 813 in that same city, a council decided after the Gospel people would be needing a paraphrase in vernacular.

This was the start of the divorce between French and Latin.

IV

10:20 "It was even heresy to translate it into other languages"

That's not generally true for the Middle Ages as a whole.

11:25 Unauthorised version of the Bible banned in 1199 - this implies there were authorised translations.

11:33 "and those who translated them punished"

Well, that is really very different from country to country. If you thought of Tyndale, he would have been punished in England for translating the Bible, he fled to Flanders, and there he was punished for something else. As we have his inquisitor's refutations of his arguments, we know that James Latomus was more interested in his Protestant understanding of Romans 3.

11:44 I think the idea of non-Latin versions of the Bible having been uncommon in the Middle Ages depends a bit on who was looking.

In the Konvertiten-Katechismus by Jesuits in Paderborn, 1950, it says Luther's unauthorised translation came only after 14 High German and 4 Low German authorised ones.

Authorised by the Catholic Church.

There was also a brief of Biblical History, the Historia Scholastica, which was translated to Flemish at least as the Rijmbijbel.

And, both the Historia Scholastica and the Rijmbijbel were authorised. Obviously.

Other Promotion : Bec. Some Think Medievals Had No Hygiene

Medieval Misconceptions: FEASTS, DINING, ETIQUETTE and FOOD, filmed at the Abbey Medieval Festival
Shadiversity | 6.VIII.2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrroWt3xjVU

Cloaks with Shadiversity

How MEDIEVAL CLOAKS affect SWORDS and COMBAT
Shadiversity | 2.VIII.2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcoXRknPipo

5:10 Actually, I think the main technology replacing cloaks is better facilities for getting out of the way of the weather.

Like cars, trains and hotels, when travelling.

10:09 If a magical hood makes you invisible, presumably the invisible hood is not blocking your vision at all?

12:19 Problem two : looks like a recipe for cutting up your cloak, drawing it from a back-scabbard.

I think back-scabbards may be better suited for fantasy settings in which a muscular barbarian wears nothing on the torso.

Middle Ages - Warlike or Peaceful? Comparison with Modern War

Why medieval people loved WAR
Shadiversity | 7.IX.2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ut1-IgyfVU8

I

2:26 "when WW-I broke out everyone cheered, when WW-II broke out, everyone cried"

One guy who didn't cheer in 1914 : Pope St Pius X, who died of broken heart after not stopping WW-I.

II

3:04 "mortality rates were so much higher"

Everyone died, and for all except the present generation, this has always been so.

1900, with very few exceptions, everyone died. 1880, with no exception, everyone died. A mortality rate of 100% cannot be topped by Medieval mortality ...

3:10 Don't overdo the difference modern medical technology has done.

1) It's counterbalancing the pandemics of modern communications; 2) the lowering of child mortality (which really was higher) has more to do with advanced hygienic practises, but also with forbidding and stopping people from having children in situations where they cannot afford them; 3) and apart from child mortality, known Medievals seem to have lived perhaps a decade shorter than people today.

My material, gathered from wikis, involve more people the the medical study of 40 - 60 skeleta and assessment on the age when the died, which has been challenged by a dentist making a different assessment.

3:14 How available food was?

Seriously, while starvations happened in episodes, both man made in sieges and acts of God in bad crops, they never reached the murderous proportions of manmade starvations like Irish potato famine (the farmers had been growing wheat which the landlords didn't allow them to eat, bc the contract provided for them to eat potatoes and let landlords sell the wheat in England) or Holodomor (where Ukraine was similarily deprived of the wheat it grew by Soviet policies).

There is no indication that Medievals were permanently starving.

3:26 If you want to see someone worried about freezing to death, look at the next homeless guy - and remember how the Medievals looked at almsgiving, do thou likewise!

III

4:58 What you are really after is death was much more public in the Middle Ages.

You have a corpse at home one morning? You call the hospital, an hour later the doctor, after attesting death, gets the corpse to the morgue.

You had a corpse at home one morning then? You did the washing and everything else up to burial, arguably with neighbours and friends helping out.

Similarily with executions, now a man will die in an electric chair or gas chamber with a few officials looking on and then telling news media "yes, the execution happened" while, back then, a hanging or beheading was public, partly because it was in terrorem for other evildoers, and partly because some of the victims might like cheering. Did you notice when Saddam Hussein was hanged? Some tribes in Iraq were dancing and shouting and sending each other dates and toffee and "cors de gazelle" or whatnot.

But in this sense, the Middle Ages are still not over everywhere and weren't over to very recently on the West either.

They might not be over everywhere in the Ozarks. They are not over in Africa. What you refer to as "Middle Ages" is on this item a very much broader thing.

And what adult in our times has not experienced the death at least of some grandparent?

Obviously, often in hospital, so, less close at hand.

IV

6:24 Are you quite sure the soldiers on the other side were always people just like you?

I mean, in France, the soldiers of English occupant were arguably not married stable guys trying to raise their families, but adventurers who had come to loot your country. Oldcastle, on whom Falstaff is based, is one example.

St Joan of Arc was pretty clear, she didn't know if God loved the "godots" (God wot's!) over in England, she was just sure, He was, through her, chasing them off France.

Obviously they were not drafted normal people.

Look at some volunteers getting back from Iraq, now ISIS is beaten ... I was against ISIS while it lasted, but some of them are looking for any ex-ISIS not regretting (including a married woman, as you may have heard of), and any para-ISIS, any meta-ISIS and so on ... they have been to war for a decade, some of them, and they don't always retain perfectly normal reactions.

I am not saying they should be shut up in mental hospitals, I am just saying, look out a bit ...

One thing, very many wars in the Middle Ages (excluding Crusades) were fairly short things. Chesterton described them as a time when peace could always break out ... if the Christmas of 1914 had been Middle Ages, there might have been peace talks between Kaiser Willy and Clémenceau ongoing from dec 24 to jan 13 ... and they could have succeeded.

But Willy was not a perfect Medieval, neither was Clémenceau. While their religious outlooks differed, neither was a Catholic.

V

9:50 You might know that St Thomas Aquinas was born in a noble family which still lives on (Corazón Aquino on Philippines was the wife of some great grand nephew several generations later), so he was born to show one upmanship.

If he didn't quite like getting physical, he clearly did it in argument ... if you have any kind of interest in philosophy, don't miss out on this knight's son and knights' brother gone theologian and friar.

Summa Theologiae http://newadvent.com/summa/

Also helps to give insights on what the Middle Ages were like ....

VI

12:32 (2*616 if you like) on the "dehumanise and vilify" note, Vikings were (previous to becoming Christians) pretty good at dehumanising monks for "chanting galdr" and "being unmanly" ...

Hence, they were very mercilessly looting ... it seems one who had gone Catholic on Sicily temporarily forbade a Greek monastery to celebrate Greek liturgy, which led to reprisals by Michael Caerularius in Constantinople, which led to schism still ongoing.

What some missed is, the Greek monastery by intervention of bishops and so got back its right to celebrate Greek liturgy.

"about our past"

OK, noted, Russian Revolution, expropriations of German nobility in Slovenia etc are in the past. So is every expropriation which has already happened, and therefore all until the next one happens.

VII

13:43 Bad people are going to exist in the world all the way up to Harmageddon.

Christian Middle Ages were comparatively mild.

From 13th to 20th C, perhaps with "doldrum" in 15th or 16th, certainly with one in 19th, European wars have taken higher and higher percentages of European population, and 17th C was the record previous to 20th. Perhaps because Thirty Years War

In Roman to Frankish times, probably "defending your country" was less important than defending your faith.

Huns were un-Christian. Visigoths were Arian.

Once it was clear that Clovis was becoming Catholic, there was no big deal, a few arrangements of giving away land to his troops, when he became king. Oh, of course some learning "German or Dutch" as well, characterising his language very anachronistically, but it would have been called Theodisc or Thiudisc ... and your needs of learning it would depend on your ambitions.

People like them learning Latin with an accent was probably one reason why we have Provençal and French losing so many syllables of Latin.

If you say "ego habeo illum librum" as "egoaveoilolibro" you may land at "io ho il livro" a few centuries later. If you say it as "ego-HAV-eoillo-LIV-ro" you are better headed for "j'ai le livr'".

We are again living in times when the Catholic faith has enemies.

14:53 For instance, arguably, up to conversion of Clovis, a victory by him over Roman defenders headed by bishop St Remigius would have looked about as bad as Constantine IX loosing to the Turks, i e, as "Antichrist won".

Apocalypse 13:7 And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them.

You know, while the Western civilisation was concerned with this, it lasted as a Christian one.

Did Bl. Karl of Austria Use Poison Gas?
Tumblar House | 10.III.2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejyOmKPq9zg

We are told that Woodrow Wilson allowed his navy to use poison gas, that he allowed them to torpedo civilian boats, that he opened the way for Hitler and Stalin by forcing Germans and Austrians to get rid of their monarchs.

And some virtues of Venerable Charles the First. (I am not sure if Pope Michael has made him blessed yet).

I

The kind of source who says Charles of Austria used poison gas (bc his ally Willy did), it might be the same kind of source that considers Austrofascists differed from National Socialists in name, but not in deeds ...

II

Woodrow Wilson ... do you know what he had more in common with the Kaiser?

The Kaiser sent Lenin on a train to Russia.

Wilson (probably) sent Trotski on a plane to Russia.

I once calculated some abbreviation of it (Woodrow Wilson) as either 666 or 616, but I seem to have forgot how, might want to try with Atbash cipher and Albam cipher ... before applying ASCII of course.

III

3:31 Isn't there a statue of Wilson next to his ally Trotski?

You know, the gentleman who allowed Makhnow to kill off some Czarist troups and then killed of Makhnow, the fine civilised type who recruited the proto-type of KGB (CheKa, back then, right?) from the Rayon, where lots of Jews who had felt bad about being second rate citizens if as much were eager to get "even" with Christians.

On Folded Steel and Related Subjects

How do I say NO to Masonry? · On Folded Steel and Related Subjects

The mysteries of folded steel in swords REVEALED! #katana
Shadiversity | 7.XI.2017
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLqZdfcVoV8

Highlighting a bit of your words ...

11:15 "folding of steel is only necessary if you have imperfect steel in the first place"

11:22 "and in fact, taking good quality steel and folding it opens up to more detrimental results"

11:26 "it develops possibility for scale to be caught inbetween the folds"

11:28 "and scale is bad..."

11:31 "...right, rusty bits of steel inbetween the folds"

11:34 - 35 "and it also creates a higher level of decarborisation, through the forging process"

11:41 "so, far from the pop culture idea of 'forging steel makes it better' - no"

11:47 "forging good quality steel has higher chances of making it worse than what it was"

11:53 "and therefore the only reason you'd want to do it is for the artistic, beautiful result of the pattern"

So, if for instance a network were thinking of me as a bit of steel needing forging, and I don't like the pattern they are trying to impose, and think of myself as if not best quality steel, at least lots better than they reckon with, I have every reason in the world to persist in a NO THANKS ... or even a very steelhard NO?

On Susan's Bow

Two Takes on Susan, My Takes on Them · On Susan's Bow

Best medieval weapons for WOMEN
Shadiversity | Ajoutée le 22 déc. 2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSy9GLi2H44

3:24 I think Susan was given a bow because it is not a melee weapon.

Suppose pulling a bow needs same strength or greater strength than swinging Peter's sword Rhindon.

Even so, Susan only pulls it once in order to get rid of two Telmarines (one preferring to flee, when other was down, hit on helmet), while Peter needs to swing his sword clearly more than once in fighting Miraz (and even then was on the loosing edge, if it hadn't been for Glozelle and Sopespian).

5:17 Noting that when a girl uses a weapon to threaten, not attack, Jill is using a dagger, held against the throat of a sleepy guard, not a bow held back more than 30 seconds.

I suppose C. S. Lewis, being an ancient* military, did know what one could expect a girl to achieve with either weapon type.

Would you say Tolkien (also ancient* military) gets anything wrong? Obviously, elves using bows is no problem, since Legolas is obviously stronger, though not looking like it, than Orlando Bloom. Same for dwarfs. And hobbits are mostly using, if anything, short swords (but one bow held in menace, Scouring of the Shire, was it a cross-bow?)

6:01 You just made the case for Susan's archery.

* old, former. I am pansing in terms of Francey ... "ancien militaire"!