Did medieval peasants travel? Jason Kingsley answers, I add marginal notes

Did medieval peasants travel?
25th April 2022 | Modern History TV
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvbm84iN7qk

The one comment where I disagree is the last separate one cited here at time signature 9:06:

I

1:42 I will give you a little hint about travel speed on foot.

In 2004, I made a pilgrimage to St. James in Galicia. Most km in hitchhiking, but last c. 750 on foot. The on-foot part involved two fairly short hitchhikes and took me 50 days including some days spent in rest, for one thing I came to Ponferrada a little before I could go to the dentist there, so, I had to wait (going on would have involved the risk of getting to a village on the Monday, where there wouldn't have been one). 15 km / day is a fair estimate of the medium.

While 5 km/h is fairly attainable, I took rests and I also followed people walking, since I arrived without resources and had to get what I could by being hopefully at least moderately pleasant company.

If you are still into miles, that's about 10 miles a day, a bit more than 3 miles an hour.

No GPS for me, if there weren't yellow bricks like in Oz, there were however lots of yellow arrows.

"Seguir las flechas amarillas, seguir las flechas amarillas, seguir las flechas amarillas, a Sa-an-ti-a-go" (melody see "Glory, glory Hallelujah").

5:28 The way stations have been reconstructed in the shape of "albergues de peregrinos" (at work at least during "años Jacobeos" / "anos Xacobeos", like 2004 was, when St. James, 25.VII, was a Sunday.

6:50 sticks are a very good way not just of being safe, but of walking. A long stick about your own length takes one stride while you take four steps, it helps (as with the guys who use ski sticks when walking) and I had the 4/4 rhythm very well into my organism, as well as a good singing voice.

"muß i denn" taught by Elvis Presley, "red river valley" and obviously "hark when the night is falling" as well as "in Dublin's fair city" ...

II

3:54 I wonder how a man from Yorkshire was going to fare when getting into Kent!

There was no Standard British English mediatised by schools, radio, newspapers, comic books, films and TV back then, and there was this very well known episode just before Caxton started when the dialectal forms "eggs" vs "eyren" came into the way of understanding.

Oxford Street and London Road have counterparts in France. In central Paris, there is a road called Rue de St. Denis, later on Rue de Faubourg de St. Denis, and it would seem if you go on even further, you get to the exact same St. Denis where lots of kings are buried (I usually take or took the transports there).

9:44 Yeah, like I said about "eggs" and "eyren" .... Chapter two of The Hobbit is so right in this respect.

Though to be fair, today it is like going from a place where they speak Danish, to, across the frontier, one where they speak German, after next frontier Dutch, then French, and after Hendaye, at Irún, the language I had been apprehensive of not speaking it good enough - my first try at oral Spanish was a relief, but it was also not bad that lots of people spoke lots of different languages from elsewhere, on the Camino. The most major language change in Spain itself was, in Bierzo and in Galicia, they speak Galego (a graffiti in El Bierzo : "O Berzo xa fala galego") but that was optional, all Galician speakers speak Spanish as well. Plus, in León on the way back, in a homeless shelter, I heard the expression "un cafetín" used as the Mexican "un cafetiiito".

Back then it would have been involving a bit of a language course where the target language was always changing a bit from day to day.

III

9:06 Look, Chaucer doesn't say the Knight is right against the Pardoner!

He's just saying what each of them is saying ... and even if he did say that in his own right, this doesn't mean the knights were right, it may have been a prejudice.

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.