Nah. I know they didn't have horses, and used coconuts instead.
Arabs had nothing to do with the invention of the modern place-value based, base-10 numerals which replaced the cumbersome and impractical Roman numerals. Guess the original source of that invention...
A lot of men also go bald around the middle ages.
I think the Powers That Be want to bring back serfdom — and the next version of serfdom is probably going to be a lot less pleasant than the Medieval version.
That was fun. Thanks.
“Come and see the violence inherent in the system!!”
Middle Ages thread means Monty Python. It’s tradition.
“Bring out your dead!” (Clang)
Nah. I know they didn't have horses, and used coconuts instead.
This article is so wrong about a number of things, that there’s no saving it.
#6 was the best one and most accurate, at least in my own opinion.
Oldplayer
I first read the title wrong....I thought it stated The Myths of Middle Age!
D’oh!
People knew the Earth was spherical long before mohammed came along.
Good article! I can vouch for a number of the things mentioned. The Church did indeed keep the flame of literacy and scholarship alive in the western half of Europe. Likewise, European knights were often more like a biker gang than anything in Mallory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. Always looking for a rumble, and not always very nice to innocent bystanders.
I also agree with the part about life being better for the average peasant than is sometimes believed. It was not an easy life, to be sure. The diet was bland and the work was hard. A crop failure meant disaster. Then there was that whole serfdom thing. But in good years, life was better than one might suspect. English peasants in particular, lived pretty well by the standards of that age. I recently read an article that stated English peasants in the mid-late Medieval period actually had a higher standard of living than many citizens of 3rd world countries today.
I think the sections on women in Medieval Europe and the part about sexual beliefs of the times are a little bit incomplete. What they have is true, but both topics were a bit more complicated and involved than the article is making out, IMHO.
An interesting element of the pre-Industrial age that was so typical that nobody made a point about it, had historians puzzled for many years. They kept noticing references to “first sleep” and “second sleep”, until finally it clicked.
Almost nobody slept the night through. Halfway through the night, everybody would get up for an hour or three, to stoke the fire, go to the toilet, likely prepare bread that would be risen in time to bake fresh for breakfast, whatever; and then they would all go back to bed until before morning, when they would get up for pre-dawn farm chores.
Such a sleep pattern made all sorts of sense when you lived an agrarian life. However, with industrialism, people would “work all day and sleep all night.”
However, after all those years on a two-sleep pattern, we seem to have physically and psychologically adapted to it; which may explain all the sleep problems that exist today.
But what about people who still live an agrarian life? The answer to that is that the two-sleep pattern only seems to have existed in the Temperate climates. North of there, darkness prevails much of the year, so the middle of the night is the same as the middle of the day. And South of there, in more Tropical climate, different sleep patterns as well, because of an abundance of light.
But Industrialism came to the Temperate climates first.
No where in this article was this time period defined and in one reference was commingled with the “Dark Age(s)”. So basically this writer is describing myths in a period ranging from 450 to 1550 or so in Europe. Try defining something like that for the past 1100 years in our country. History miss-mash at best.
Watch out for the rabbits from that time
extremely vicious.
I automatically take with a grain of salt any article written by a foul-mouthed lout purporting to set out facts about anything.
I can tell by the smarmy style in which it is written that it is all a load of crap. People were not often living into their 70s. I would not trust this source for any conclusions about anything
Mostly I picture the very very big beds and the exciting underwear and the spanking.