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Jamwad Hilder posted:we've found muskets that had been loaded multiple times and never fired
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Mar 16, 2015 21:53
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ManOfTheYear posted:There's a lot of talk about soldiers having PTSD and mental health problems after returning from combat, but I've started to wonder how much there were mental health issues with medieval people due to violence and fighting? Like how unstable would you have to be after surviving several battles where you cut people in two with a sword? So there's a couple of things going on. One is that 'modern' PTSD is tied in some ways to TBI, meaning that the old term 'shellshock' is even more apt than not. So the use of explosives in war is adding a physiological component to the old psychological ones. Some war vets now might face problems more like a football player who has led with his head a few to many times than they do other actual killers. Another is that psychological issues can present in different ways depending on cultural contexts, so that muddies the water a bit. Lastly you have different types of trauma going on. A single incident of complete and total violence can totally gently caress a person up, so can a constant grinding gnawing fear. WWI, Vietnam, and the current Afghanistan/Iraq conflicts are somewhat notorious for this sense of 'never safe' which can gently caress people up pretty well. Past conflicts usually did have most of their deaths outside of the big pitched battles, but some how waiting for the next round of dysentery to hit the camp is different than watching the trees for Charlie and the road for IED's. Rent-A-Cop posted:I've always found this to be weak evidence for a conclusion that soldiers intentionally avoided killing. Muzzleloading firearms can be quite fiddly. Their loading and firing process involves several steps, that if performed incorrectly, would result in a failure to fire or a squib. Loading and firing quickly and consistently under pressure takes a great deal of training that ACW soldiers often didn't have. I find it more probable that soldiers were improperly loading or priming or were firing with malfunctioning locks or broken flints and simply failed to notice under the sensory assault that is massed musketry. It does at least speak to stress and panic.
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Mar 16, 2015 22:28
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ManOfTheYear posted:There's a lot of talk about soldiers having PTSD and mental health problems after returning from combat, but I've started to wonder how much there were mental health issues with medieval people due to violence and fighting? Like how unstable would you have to be after surviving several battles where you cut people in two with a sword? I think it's important to keep in mind that in spite of the apparently endemic nature of warfare throughout the Middle Ages, actual pitched battles were relatively rare, in large part because they were costly and incredibly risky. I can't remember where I read this, but Edward the Black Prince, one of medieval England's most famous military commanders, only fought three battles in his entire life. From this fact, we might infer that the sustained and continuous stress of warfare others have mentioned might not totally apply to medieval soldiers. That said, John Keegan does consider this question a bit in The Face of Battle. His reconstruction of the close quarters fighting at Agincourt sounds pretty harrowing (soldiers crushed together and fighting on top of their friends' bodies, etc.), but he ultimately concludes that because medieval people were more used to violence in their daily lives they would have been less psychologically affected by warfare. I've always found Keegan's explanation unsatisfying and underdeveloped, but there it is. I'm not a military historian, though, so take all that with a grain of salt. deadking fucked around with this message at 22:58 on Mar 16, 2015 |
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Mar 16, 2015 22:55
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deadking posted:That said, John Keegan does consider this question a bit in The Face of Battle. His reconstruction of the close quarters fighting at Agincourt sounds pretty harrowing (soldiers crushed together and fighting on top of their friends' bodies, etc.), but he ultimately concludes that because medieval people were more used to violence in their daily lives they would have been less psychologically affected by warfare. I've always found Keegan's explanation unsatisfying and underdeveloped, but there it is. I think Keegan is wrong here. What kind of daily life involves maces and eyeball stabbing? At least, there must have been a first violent incident for a medieval soldier, that would be a source of trauma, unless medieval children were constantly getting dismembered. One factor that helps in recovering from PTSD is an open support network of fellow victims. Hegel's mercenaries, a knight's retinue, or a city militia would spend years on-and-off campaign as a cohesive group, compared to a Vietnam vet who spends a month in combat, another in a hospital, and then returns home alone.
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Mar 17, 2015 01:16
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:I think Keegan is wrong here. What kind of daily life involves maces and eyeball stabbing? At least, there must have been a first violent incident for a medieval soldier, that would be a source of trauma, unless medieval children were constantly getting dismembered. I'm really curious on how much trauma there could be had, really. If you go today to some really bad modern day ghetto or the worst places Tijuana or Rio you see people dealing with severe violence week in and week out. An average medieval peasant probably grew more or less in a place close to that level of violence, so he has seen/been in numerous fist fights and street brawls and seen duels and public excecutions and wrestled and fenced for fun since he was a kid. I think we start to expect instant mental trauma from experiencing severe violence, but didn't a lot of ww2 vets and Vietnam vets get back relatively healthy? So Keegan necessarily isn't wrong here, but it sure isn't too deeply thought.
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Mar 17, 2015 01:40
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Disclaimer: I'm not a doctor and have never had issues with PTSD personally but I've had a LOT of friends and colleagues suffer through it, so that's about my level of expertise. Broadly speaking PTSD is linked very strongly to fundamental changes in brain chemistry mainly related to adrenaline and cortisol. The reason for this is pretty easy to understand: adrenaline and cortisol (and some other things) are what drive the fight-or-flight response, and when the body is constantly under stressors that drive a FoF reaction, it can change neurological patterns in the brain pretty substantially. The effect is not unlike what alcoholics and drug addicts experience: external stimuli drive chemical changes in the nervous system that can, at any time, permanently change the chemistry of the brain. The more frequent the changes, the more likely long-term problems will result. That doesn't mean that a single incident can't cause symptoms, nor does it mean that many incidents will inevitably cause symptoms, but generally speaking, chances and severity of PTSD symptoms increase with the number and severity of FoF incidents an individual experiences. So, when comparing different eras of warfare I think you can get a pretty good idea about stress levels these guys went through and draw some limited conclusions. For the most part, through roughly the first half of the ACW, warfare was about 50% marching, 49% camping, and 1% actually fighting. The fighting sucked, and was brutal and bloody, but once the day's combat was done, you were generally pretty safe. Armies would literally bivouac within sight of one another and no one was really much concerned with the other side's presence. Contrast this with WWI, where, if your unit was on the line, you were pretty much always under some manner of threat. Or, with OIF/OEF, where there weren't even "rear" areas as such, so if you were in the country, you were under some degree of threat. So, the brain, instead of being in FoF mode a handful of times a year, is wired 24/7, with spikes almost daily. More stress = greater chances of PTSD emerging, etc. The big exception to this would, I think, be sieges, especially for the besieged. For those kind of siege actions that were constantly violent and went on for months or years I suspect the effects were very similar to what we've seen in the industrial age.
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Mar 17, 2015 02:04
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Ok so I'm phone posting so it's hard to cite everyone, but there's a few things I want to make clear: 1. The idea that a majority of combatants don't try to kill each other I find exceedingly hard to believe in any era. However, this is essentially impossible to argue prior to the development of gunpowder arms, when you often had to see your opponent to kill him, because most of the killing was done in a rout. In other words, contrary to Jamwad's assumption, it is actually when you did not have to worry about your opponent killing you that the killing was easiest. 2. Keegan's account of Agincourt is not good. I haven't read it in a long time, but he makes some very bad assumptions. 3. especially in the high Middle Ages, death was a lesser risk for knights than it would be later (see Bremule for an extreme case). This might have made war less stressful for at least the knightly combatants 4. Medieval and early modern warfare also existed outside the battlefield. Though, as deadking rightly points out, battle was rare, skirmish and ravaging were common, as was siege. Louis VI was involved in only two real battles in his lifetime but many more sieges, including (off the top of my head) 3 sieges of Le Puiset, Crecy, Nouvion, Bruges, Amiens, his half-brother's castles, Breteuil, and a couple others I can't remember the names of. I'm also forgetting a few. Of these, a fair few (bruges, two of three at Le puiset, Crecy, and probably a few others) were solved by assaults over a relatively short period of time. 5. in my study of primary sources I've never come across something like ptsd. I'm sure it or something like it was around, and I think I saw it mentioned in a secondary source, but the point is that it's very hard to assess. I will leave with these lines from Gutierre Diaz de Gamez, a man-at-arms, on the stresses of war: quote:Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow; their ease is weariness and sweat; they have one good day after many bad; they are vowed to all manner of labour; they are for ever swallowing their fear; they expose themselves to every peril; they give their bodies up to the adventure of life in death. Mouldy bread or biscuit, meat cooked or uncooked; to-day enough to eat and to-morrow nothing, little or no wine, water from a pond or a butt, bad quarters, the shelter of a tent or branches, a bad bed, poor sleep with their armour still on their backs, burdened with iron, the enemy an arrow-shot off. “Ware! Who goes there? To arms! To arms!” With the first drowsiness, an alarm; at dawn, the trumpet. “To horse! To horse! Muster! Muster!” As look-outs, as sentinels, keeping watch by day and by night, fighting without cover, as foragers, as scouts, guard after guard, duty after duty. “Here they come! Here! They are so many–No, not as many as that–This way–that–Come this side–Press them there–News! News! They come back hurt, they have prisoners– no, they bring none back. Let us go! Let us go! Give no ground! On!” Such is their calling; a life of great fatigues, bereft of all ease.
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Mar 17, 2015 05:31
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:I think Keegan is wrong here. What kind of daily life involves maces and eyeball stabbing? At least, there must have been a first violent incident for a medieval soldier, that would be a source of trauma, unless medieval children were constantly getting dismembered. The overall level of violence in medieval society was roughly a hundred times as much as today. People fought and killed each other over poo poo we'd don't even think about today.
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Mar 17, 2015 10:27
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Paging HEY GAL to the thread. (Not exactly medieval as such, but instructive in discussing the levels of ambient violence in the past, I think!)
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Mar 17, 2015 11:02
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Kemper Boyd posted:The overall level of violence in medieval society was roughly a hundred times as much as today. People fought and killed each other over poo poo we'd don't even think about today. Uh where are you getting this number from? I mean, aside from the fact that not all times of the Middle Ages were equally violent in all places, because duh, thus sounds like an implausibly high number. Maybe you're being sarcastic, but it doesn't seem like it. Also, people sometimes kill each other over things that are petty, sometimes they do not. When Robert Curthose's brothers dumped "fetid water" on his head in front of his companions (all fighting men, in other words) it started a brawl, but it did not go to weapons drawn, as I recall. Of course, we face a larger problem of only having anecdotal evidence prior to the 1300s, which was a particularly bad century. Tomn posted:Paging HEY GAL to the thread. Only in her era, which was (mostly) a time of immense crisis. The arrival of the Black Death alone was a massive societal stressor, and its frequent reappearance provided additional harm. The Reformation and counter-Reformation, Urbanization, and of course the Little Ice Age put tremendous new stresses on European peoples. Rodrigo Diaz fucked around with this message at 16:15 on Mar 17, 2015 |
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Mar 17, 2015 16:08
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:I think Keegan is wrong here. What kind of daily life involves maces and eyeball stabbing? At least, there must have been a first violent incident for a medieval soldier, that would be a source of trauma, unless medieval children were constantly getting dismembered. I don't want to cast myself as a defender of Keegan, because I also disagree with his premises and conclusions, but he's referring to the argument that people in the Middle Ages experienced and participated in a lot more violence in daily life than in the modern era. When I say daily life, by the way, I don't mean to imply that every single day people saw or participated in violence. It's hard to say if this is the case, especially since the types of homicide statistics favored by historians of crime (who are the major proponents of this idea) simply don't exist for large swathes of the medieval period. That said, the idea of a state monopoly on violence does not exist or is very limited for many times and places in the Middle Ages, so I think there's something to be said for a wider personal recourse to violence (violence represented as legitimate and not criminal at that) in the medieval period. Rodrigo Diaz posted:2. Keegan's account of Agincourt is not good. I haven't read it in a long time, but he makes some very bad assumptions. Yeah, I agree. I simply bring Keegan up because he's the only scholar who came to mind (in my limited familiarity with the later Middle Ages and with military history) who thinks about the psychological impact of a battle like Agincourt. His reconstructions are flawed and his answer is incredibly simplistic, but he at least asks an interesting, if probably unanswerable, question. quote:5. in my study of primary sources I've never come across something like ptsd. I'm sure it or something like it was around, and I think I saw it mentioned in a secondary source, but the point is that it's very hard to assess. I've never seen anything like PTSD for the early or central Middle Ages (although, again, not a military historian, blah blah blah). I have come across a reference to a suicidal knight in the Miracles of Saint Foy, though. The guy gets stabbed through the face by a lance and survives but with a permanent disfigurement and disability. He thinks about killing himself, but is eventually miraculously cured by Saint Foy.
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Mar 17, 2015 16:10
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:Uh where are you getting this number from? Niklas Ericsson who's studied swedish medieval history, presented this figure in the context of various types of homicide in medieval Sweden. It is an amazing figure, but we got the surviving court documents to prove it.
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Mar 17, 2015 16:15
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Kemper Boyd posted:Niklas Ericsson who's studied swedish medieval history, presented this figure in the context of various types of homicide in medieval Sweden. It is an amazing figure, but we got the surviving court documents to prove it. is there a book for this? Sounds very interesting. Edit: I found this http://www.adlibris.com/se/bok/mord-i-stockholm-9789185377107 the summary references the 100 times figure, but this only applies to Stockholm. Cities, in general, have much higher murder rates than the countryside in the Middle Ages (and today). Interestingly, the Wikipedia page on the subject has this nifty graph:  starts at 1400 (which is around when I'd expect record keeping) and is more in line with a number I'd expect. (looks like about 20-25 times more common, at least compared to 2000) Of course, maybe Eisner's statistical methods were flawed, maybe Ericsson is also counting executions, or maybe he found a trove of new documents. If I could read more than two words in swedish I'd definitely pick this up. Rodrigo Diaz fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Mar 17, 2015 |
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Mar 17, 2015 16:30
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I don't know the Ericsson reference, but for a very similar idea, I recommend checking out Pieter Spierenberg's A History of Murder. Again, a lot of this work is based on statistical evidence which simply isn't available for a lot of the Middle Ages, but what evidence there is has been interpreted as testifying to a decrease in homicide between the late Middle Ages and the 20th century.
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Mar 17, 2015 16:35
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deadking posted:I don't know the Ericsson reference, but for a very similar idea, I recommend checking out Pieter Spierenberg's A History of Murder. Again, a lot of this work is based on statistical evidence which simply isn't available for a lot of the Middle Ages, but what evidence there is has been interpreted as testifying to a decrease in homicide between the late Middle Ages and the 20th century. I wasn't trying to dispute that murder was higher, just that it was not quite THAT high. I don't really know about sweden in the 1400s, but I'd be really interested to know why the murder rate dropped precipitously around 1500, then again around 1700
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Mar 17, 2015 16:57
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:is there a book for this? Sounds very interesting. Ericsson wrote "Mord i Stockholm" (Murders in Stockholm) about it but as far as I know, he has only been published in Swedish. If I remember correctly, his stats include all cases of homicide, which naturally includes executions and justifiable ones.
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Mar 17, 2015 17:04
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:I wasn't trying to dispute that murder was higher, just that it was not quite THAT high. I don't really know about sweden in the 1400s, but I'd be really interested to know why the murder rate dropped precipitously around 1500, then again around 1700 Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that was the crux of your objection. Spierenberg has an explanation for the decrease. It's been a while since I've looked at his book, but IIRC it's related to both the expansion and consolidation of state power and shifts in the culture of honor (basically, a transition from honor as a public quality which needs to be defended to honor thought of in terms of self-restraint, which contributes to a reduction in small-scale violence). Spierenberg was a student of Norbert Elias, so a lot of his ideas strike me as elaborations on things Elias argued in The Civilizing Process.
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Mar 17, 2015 18:15
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deadking posted:Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that was the crux of your objection. Spierenberg has an explanation for the decrease. It's been a while since I've looked at his book, but IIRC it's related to both the expansion and consolidation of state power and shifts in the culture of honor (basically, a transition from honor as a public quality which needs to be defended to honor thought of in terms of self-restraint, which contributes to a reduction in small-scale violence). Spierenberg was a student of Norbert Elias, so a lot of his ideas strike me as elaborations on things Elias argued in The Civilizing Process. No worries. It sounds like, from what you've said, you look more at the cultural side of the period. Do you have a specialty?
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Mar 17, 2015 18:20
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I do! I work broadly on early medieval religious and cultural history (focusing mostly on the Carolingian period), and my project is on the intersections between healing and punishment in early medieval miracles. Hence all the hedging of my bets in my responses to people's questions about later medieval and military history. I am more generally interested in the history of violence, though.
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Mar 17, 2015 20:55
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deadking posted:I do! I work broadly on early medieval religious and cultural history (focusing mostly on the Carolingian period), and my project is on the intersections between healing and punishment in early medieval miracles. Hence all the hedging of my bets in my responses to people's questions about later medieval and military history. I am more generally interested in the history of violence, though. Nice. Got any entertaining or particularly illustrative examples of miracles? Also, how does the treatment of saints evolve over the period?
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Mar 17, 2015 23:06
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This is a really specific language thing and I apologize if it's really obscure and/or dumb, but where did the initial 'E' come from in the Iberian (Castillan, Galician, Portuguese, etc.) and French forms of Stephanus? A lot of Latin names, both personal and toponymic, sort sound like they got simplified or streamlined into whatever forms they have today- 'Grenoble' is shorter and smoother to say than 'Grationopolis', 'Soissons' is shorter and derived from (Augusta) Suessionum, English and French both chopped off the '-us' from a lot of personal names (Marcus->Marc/Mark, Lucas->Luc/Luke), but then there's this extra vowel at the beginning of some language's renderings of Stephen and I don't actually understand how languages change over time so it's driving me nuts why there's Esteban and Étienne rather than just Steban and Stienne or something like that.
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Mar 25, 2015 16:46
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I think it's because people in those areas used to be unable to pronounce words that begin with two consonants, so they'd say something like "Es-tephanus" instead. The spellings you mention came from that.
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Mar 25, 2015 17:12
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It's called epenthesis and is a normal thing in sound change. Short version is it's a quirk of how your brain/mouth works. Longer version is that vowels are really loud so adding them makes neighboring consonants more salient. (French then lost the 's' later on.) The real answer involves taking a linguistics class.
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Mar 25, 2015 17:35
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:2. Keegan's account of Agincourt is not good. You can pretty much replace Agincourt with any battle and this point will be equally valid.
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Mar 26, 2015 05:31
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In the realm of dumb weapon myths, I was browsing reddit earlier today.  how could someone type this with a straight face how could 18 people think a 40 pound sword is believable
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Apr 6, 2015 21:13
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Post a link to the giant sword?
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Apr 6, 2015 21:22
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It was just a link to this page about the dude in question, which says nothing whatsoever about a 40-lb sword. Dumb post is here.
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Apr 6, 2015 21:28
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IronicDongz posted:how could 18 people think a 40 pound sword is believable Because I can swing around a 50 pound "great sword" in Dark Souls with ONE HAND. I can't remember the context, but someone made a giant foam boffer sword that weighed something like 20 or 30 pounds and they claimed it was perfectly reasonable and they could TOTALLY use it just as swiftly and effectively as a regular sword. Meanwhile I swung around a 9 pound workout bar the other day and you need to be really careful with those because you can literally snap your wrists with that much weight down towards the end.
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Apr 6, 2015 21:39
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Verisimilidude posted:Because I can swing around a 50 pound "great sword" in Dark Souls with ONE HAND. Do hema guys use wrist wraps like we do in boxing? I asked my new hema instructor about shoulder injuries but if I have to worry about wrists I'll just use my wraps edit: Sorry I thought this was the martial arts thread for a second
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Apr 6, 2015 21:52
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Rabhadh posted:Do hema guys use wrist wraps like we do in boxing?
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Apr 6, 2015 21:56
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There are some absurdly heavy 80 pound Chinese polearms, but they were used for training tests and feats of strength, not any actual use.
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Apr 6, 2015 22:00
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Rabhadh posted:Do hema guys use wrist wraps like we do in boxing? I asked my new hema instructor about shoulder injuries but if I have to worry about wrists I'll just use my wraps Oh, and please come hang out with us in the fencing thread! 
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Apr 6, 2015 22:16
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Siivola posted:Unless you've got a medical problem or you'll be training with huge-rear end pikes like HEY GAL
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Apr 6, 2015 22:21
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Wasn't there an article a while back that mathematically concluded that a sword would have to be something like 60' long to weigh 15 kg? Another armor question; did layered cloth armors like the Greek linothorax exist in the middle ages? Or were padded jacks/gambesons/etc the extent of it?
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Apr 6, 2015 22:32
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Jabarto posted:Wasn't there an article a while back that mathematically concluded that a sword would have to be something like 60' long to weigh 15 kg?  Pictured: a 20-pound sword. That guy was talking about a 40-pound sword. 
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Apr 6, 2015 23:24
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:I wasn't trying to dispute that murder was higher, just that it was not quite THAT high. I don't really know about sweden in the 1400s, but I'd be really interested to know why the murder rate dropped precipitously around 1500, then again around 1700 In the early 16th century during Gustav Vasa's reign Sweden started to change from a feudal country with an adversarial judicial system to a centralized country with an inquisitorial judicial system. Powerful local men couldn't break the law as easily anymore. In the early 17th century Gustav II Adolf and his Lord High Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna started even bigger state reforms that eventually modernized Sweden. Looks like there's also some correlation with longer periods of peace and lower murder rates. Hogge Wild fucked around with this message at 00:22 on Apr 7, 2015 |
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Apr 7, 2015 00:20
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Jabarto posted:Another armor question; did layered cloth armors like the Greek linothorax exist in the middle ages? Or were padded jacks/gambesons/etc the extent of it? Cloth armor were widespread and really common. Everyone wore them, from infantry to knights and kings.
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Apr 7, 2015 00:26
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Were medieval mercenaries mostly noblemen? You know since the nobles were the "bellatores" and you wouldn't really except many commoners to have enough training or opportunity to become professional soldiers. Am I wrong to assume that mercenary companies would have been largely made up of landless nobles and the 8th(or whatever) sons of noblemen who weren't going to inherit anything? FreudianSlippers fucked around with this message at 03:35 on Apr 7, 2015 |
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Apr 7, 2015 03:32
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P-Mack posted:There are some absurdly heavy 80 pound Chinese polearms, but they were used for training tests and feats of strength, not any actual use. Right, these were used in military exams, where you had to lift one with one arm and hold it over your head
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Apr 7, 2015 07:36
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HEY GAL posted:Every now and then I wonder why my ankles hurt and then I'm like oh yeah. That.
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Apr 7, 2015 07:58
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