Medieval Historian Answers The Most Asked Questions About Medieval Life
History Hit | 19 Aug. 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5S5m_LpTS0
0:56 In the Middle Ages, children in cities were generally going to at least elementary school, since the literacy revolution in the 1200's.
Grammar schools are actually a step beyond that, it implies you were learning Latin, here is what wiki had to say:
Although the term scolae grammaticales was not widely used until the 14th century, the earliest such schools appeared from the sixth century, e.g. the King's School, Canterbury (founded 597), the King's School, Rochester (604) and St Peter's School, York (627)[1][2] The schools were attached to cathedrals and monasteries, teaching Latin – the language of the church – to future priests and monks.
Parts of the future clerics were certainly younger sons to richer parents. But parts were also people from poorer classes whom the already extant clergy considered fit.
Obviously, the nobility shared the education.
7:32 No, the hairline is further to the front.
Your arrow was where there was a limit between tightly held down hair and a big bulge of it all coming out ... (hairdressers will probably kill me if they read this comment, given my apparently unappreciative and certainly inaccurate terminology).
The big bulge is actually a head covering.
8:54 "If you could afford to waste cloth"
When pieces of cloth are sewn, some pieces that are left over are simply too small to use in sewing.
Dito when cloth gets worn.
Giving linen to paper mills or using left over cloth for sanitary purposes isn't really waste ... however, the man who could afford cloth in this situation was probably using cloth bought from several people ...
10:50 Poorly recorded ... not really. Both melodies and performance style are on the contrary very well recorded.
According to the reading of Farya Faraji, it was up to c. 1400 a bit closer to Near Eastern music than one might expect:
Bardcore & Neo-Medieval vs Actual Medieval Music
Farya Faraji | 28 June 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6_8ZEhmaGE
11:04 We have both liturgical and secular music written down.
You may have thought of Goliards:
The Goliards were itinerant poet-musicians of Europe from the tenth to the middle of the thirteenth century. Most were scholars or ecclesiastics, and they wrote and sang in Latin. Although many of the poems have survived, very little of the music has. They were possibly influential—even decisively so—on the troubadour-trouvère tradition which was to follow. Most of their poetry is secular and, while some of the songs celebrate religious ideals, others are frankly profane, dealing with drunkenness, debauchery and lechery. One of the most important extant sources of Goliards chansons is the Carmina Burana.
But compare the Trouvères:
The trouvères and troubadours shared similar musical styles, but the trouvères were generally noblemen.[52] The music of the trouvères was similar to that of the troubadours, but was able to survive into the thirteenth century unaffected by the Albigensian Crusade. Most of the more than two thousand surviving trouvère songs include music, and show a sophistication as great as that of the poetry it accompanies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_music
(my emphases in each quote)
13:41 Which capital was best, I would say Paris was lots better than London.
London had a few fires in Anglo-Saxon times and yet one in the time of John Lackland (who had permitted the reckless habit of building wooden shacks on London Bridge), and I think even one more before the turn of Modern Ages (when you have another fire in London in 1666).
Paris had no city fires in the Middle Ages. Toulouse had one, very late, houses were lost but lives weren't.
Grenfell Tower is also London, not Paris.
Un incendie dans un immeuble d'habitation a fait sept morts dans la nuit du mercredi 17 au jeudi 18 juillet 2024 à Nice (Alpes-Maritimes), ont annoncé les pompiers de la ville. C'est le plus grave incendie en France depuis celui du 9 août 2023 dans un gîte près de Colmar (Haut-Rhin), qui avait fait onze morts.
Grenfell, I think it was 77 ...
16:22 "but for a time, the Anglo-Saxons were Pagans before they were re-christianised"
You mean before England was rechristianised?
The Anglo-Saxons were Pagans when they arrived.
Possibly Mercia had a Pagan revival under Penda, but that was possible because they hadn't been thoroughly Christianised that far West yet.
Despite these apparent instances of warfare, relations between Penda and Oswiu were probably not entirely hostile during this period, since Penda's daughter Cyneburh married Alhfrith, Oswiu's son and Penda's son Peada married Alhflaed, Oswiu's daughter. According to Bede, who dates the events to 653, the latter marriage was made contingent upon the baptism and conversion to Christianity of Peada; Peada accepted this, and the preaching of Christianity began among the Middle Angles, whom he ruled. Bede wrote that Penda tolerated the preaching of Christianity in Mercia itself, despite his own beliefs:
Nor did King Penda obstruct the preaching of the word among his people, the Mercians, if any were willing to hear it; but, on the contrary, he hated and despised those whom he perceived not to perform the works of faith, when they had once received the faith, saying, "They were contemptible and wretched who did not obey their God, in whom they believed." This was begun two years before the death of King Penda.[62]
So, Mercian Anglo-Saxons only began to be Christianised in the time of Penda. You could of course argue they descended largely from Celts who had been Christians in Subroman times, before the Anglo-Saxons.
Penda was the last great pagan warrior-king among the Anglo-Saxons. Higham wrote that "his destruction sounded the death-knell of English paganism as a political ideology and public religion."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penda_of_Mercia
He died in 655. The reference to Higham goes:
Higham, The Convert Kings, pp. 218–219.9 Higham accepts that Penda acknowledged Oswald's supremacy, but points to what he calls "the apparent failure of Bernician Christianity to penetrate the central Midlands" as evidence against assuming a great deal of authority exercised by Oswald over the Mercians during this period.
19:08 Not just monks, but also people going to Mass (the bells would tell) or academic lectures (the bells would tell c. a quarter of an hour in advance).
Mechanic clocks are a late Medieval invention.
In 1283, a large clock was installed at Dunstable Priory in Bedfordshire in southern England; its location above the rood screen suggests that it was not a water clock.[36] In 1292, Canterbury Cathedral installed a 'great horloge'. Over the next 30 years, there were mentions of clocks at a number of ecclesiastical institutions in England, Italy, and France. In 1322, a new clock was installed in Norwich, an expensive replacement for an earlier clock installed in 1273. This had a large (2 metre) astronomical dial with automata and bells. The costs of the installation included the full-time employment of two clockkeepers for two years.[36]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock#Fully_mechanical
1283? Sorry, High Medieval. But I think the oldest survivng one is in Prague, and that one is Late MedievaL
Sorry again, Salisbury Cathedral:
The Salisbury Cathedral clock, built in 1386, is considered to be the world's oldest surviving mechanical clock that strikes the hours. [see above]
Prague is only third oldest, and it's the town hall, not the cathedral:
The clock was first installed in 1410, making it the third-oldest astronomical clock in the world and the oldest clock still in operation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_astronomical_clock
22:26 Statistics on childbirth, check wikipedian entries for royalties.
I did find a few queens of France and related who died after their first or second child had been born or after a stillbirth. Not many, but even so.
A factor making it I think overall less risky was marrying earlier.
When a woman has her first child at 30, she depends a lot on modern hospitals. Maria Theresia was married at 18 going on 19, had her first child next year and went on to have a total of 16 children, of whom 10 survived her.
Another Holy Roman Empress, Mary of Spain, married just after her twentieth birthday, had her first child next year, had a total of ... also 16 children. The last daughter was born 1568 and she herself died 1603, 23 years after this daughter.
The wife of Lewis the Bavarian, also a Roman Emperor, married at 13 to 16 depending on the date of her birth, and had her first child next year, a total of ten children.
29:42 I wouldn't call an amount of wine obscene, unless it's at the consumption end in relation to too few persons.
Remember that monasteries sold wine and still do.
In Scotland or Scandinavia, you couldn't grow wine.
For Mass, you had to import it. Wine was (among other reasons for this one) one of the things that the Middle Ages actually did mass produce.
The infamous monk who's sipping the wine may simply have been doing his normal job of quality testing.
Or he may also have been a person who was portrayed as "an exemple not to follow" ...
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