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Grand Prize Winner posted:Wasn't it a little thicker, though? You know, because the guy wasn't covered head to foot so they could make the remaining armor heavier - and thus more effective. If I remember high quality armor actually got some heat treating and other fun things.
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May 21, 2015 22:36
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Wasn't it a little thicker, though? You know, because the guy wasn't covered head to foot so they could make the remaining armor heavier - and thus more effective. They left out some parts, like foot and shin protection.
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May 22, 2015 06:35
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Wasn't it a little thicker, though? You know, because the guy wasn't covered head to foot so they could make the remaining armor heavier - and thus more effective. More or less. Elizabethian era armours, at least from browsing the Wallace Collection, tend to be a little heavier than the more medieval armours. The impression I got is armour from around 1450-1500 (from that museum at least) tended to average around the 20-25 kg range, while the full suits from the late-1500s and early 1600s seem to be around 30 kg, so it looks like heavier armour was used in response to firearms. There's another neat thing called duplex armour: https://www.royalarmouries.org/what-we-do/research/analytical-projects/duplex-bulletproof-armour The idea is by dividing the breastplate into layers, a crack in the outer layer would not weaken the structure for the full depth of the armour. So there were other ways used to reinforce the armour against firearms. Met museum also supports what you are saying: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/aams/hd_aams.htm#firearms_b xthetenth posted:As far as I remember munitions plate isn't the same level of quality as the armor that guys who would have been wearing full harnesses decades ago wore. You're right, although I would add that munitions armour and full harnesses coexisted for a long time, and quite a few of the cuirassier or demi-lancer sets of 3/4 or 1/2 armours would also be higher quality than munitions plate.
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May 22, 2015 10:15
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So tell new about mediaeval torture. My understanding is that, while some pretty horrifying stuff definitely existed (especially the wheel), a lot of the mutilation and torturous execution stuff was kinda made up later by unscrupulous historians. Are there figures for the prevalence of torture and mutilation? I'm curious as to how common it actually was.
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May 24, 2015 04:00
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Breaking on the wheel is far lamer than I thought it was. You were either beaten with a wagon wheel or they tied you to a wheel and then beat you.
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May 24, 2015 22:46
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Testikles posted:Breaking on the wheel is far lamer than I thought it was. You were either beaten with a wagon wheel or they tied you to a wheel and then beat you.
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May 24, 2015 22:48
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Are metal detectors used very much in archaeology? Sorry if it's a dumb question but I just never notice them much in the backgrounds of photos of dig sites. I suppose that leads to another thing I've been curious about with digging up old stuff, how do you find it in the first place? Say you find one artifact by chance somewhere how far are you willing to spread out from that one point to look for other stuff?
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May 24, 2015 23:10
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Kanine posted:Are metal detectors used very much in archaeology? Sorry if it's a dumb question but I just never notice them much in the backgrounds of photos of dig sites. I suppose that leads to another thing I've been curious about with digging up old stuff, how do you find it in the first place? Say you find one artifact by chance somewhere how far are you willing to spread out from that one point to look for other stuff? I'm not an archeologist any more, but I believe it depends very much on the type of site you're working on. I worked on a rural archeological site in Ireland and there was no call for them since pretty much every artifact at the site was bits of ceramic or stone. If you were doing work on a gunpowder era battlefield or a shipwreck of any era I'd expect there'd be a great use for it. Also lots of buried coin hoards are found by amateurs with metal detectors. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 00:44 on May 25, 2015 |
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May 25, 2015 00:41
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Ye olde quote is not ye olde edite.
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May 25, 2015 00:44
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Testikles posted:Breaking on the wheel is far lamer than I thought it was. You were either beaten with a wagon wheel or they tied you to a wheel and then beat you. How is spending hours in pure agony with your limbs totally smashed before dying of shock not horrible enough for you? If they were feeling merciful they might bash in your skull and/or chop tyour head off before breaking the bones but that isn't exactly pleasant either.
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May 25, 2015 05:14
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Yep. Though interestingly, in my brief bit of internet reading over the past day, the only accounts of breaking on the wheel I've seen have been from post-1500 or so. And I'm finding it pretty hard to find any kind of reliable sources actually dealing with how frequent torture, mutilation and executions really were. There seem to be plenty of sources that take it for granted as being commonplace (without backing that up), though.
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May 25, 2015 05:54
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Yeah the breaking wheel was a very early modern thing. As were witch burnings, something a lot of people associate with medieval times.
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May 25, 2015 06:20
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FreudianSlippers posted:How is spending hours in pure agony with your limbs totally smashed before dying of shock not horrible enough for you? If they were feeling merciful they might bash in your skull and/or chop tyour head off before breaking the bones but that isn't exactly pleasant either. Lame. Needs to be way more mechanical and metaphorical about the wheels of progress trampling human dignity. Graded C+ - Please See the Teacher After Class.
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May 25, 2015 16:24
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So, question about the medieval to early modern era: Taxes. How were they assessed, and how were they paid? If you were a peasant, how would you go about figuring out how much tax you have to pay, and what's the procedure for paying them? Would much the same system apply for people living in cities? And if conversely you were a lord or a city mayor, how do you go about figuring out how much people owe you, and how do you collect?
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May 25, 2015 16:38
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Tomn posted:So, question about the medieval to early modern era: Taxes. How were they assessed, and how were they paid? If you were a peasant, how would you go about figuring out how much tax you have to pay, and what's the procedure for paying them? Would much the same system apply for people living in cities? And if conversely you were a lord or a city mayor, how do you go about figuring out how much people owe you, and how do you collect? This is a super complex question 
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May 25, 2015 16:40
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Disinterested posted:This is a super complex question Well, that's not a good sign. Any way I can break it down to something easier to answer? I'm mostly interested in how exactly people went about sending money to the government and how the government even figured out how much money you were supposed to send in the first place in an age before modern bureaucracies and oversight.
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May 25, 2015 16:46
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FreudianSlippers posted:Yeah the breaking wheel was a very early modern thing. As were witch burnings, something a lot of people associate with medieval times. I thought the Catherine Wheel was named after Saint Catherine, the early Christian saint who was broken on the wheel by Romans in the 4th century. Although much of Catherine's life is legend, it would at least indicate that breaking on the wheel predates the 16th century.
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May 25, 2015 16:51
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Tomn posted:Well, that's not a good sign. Any way I can break it down to something easier to answer? I'm mostly interested in how exactly people went about sending money to the government and how the government even figured out how much money you were supposed to send in the first place in an age before modern bureaucracies and oversight. Well to make one simple point - taxes were not always calculated in a very precise manner and not always monetary. Take a basic manorialist economic model - you can have a villein who is obliged to farm someone's land for x number of days in y period. You can also have a tithe, levied on different basis depending on the nature of employment - for farmers, it might be a 10th of the gross production of a field, paid in bushels of wheat, whereas for a craftsman it might be a 10th of the profits, paid in money. How taxes were collected could also differ. For example, you might collect taxes as a farm. So you, the liege lord (say, the king of England) might have granted a fief to a lord in return for his returning a fixed amount of gold/currency to you a year e.g. (from wiki) quote:"William, king of the English, to all the sheriffs and barons of Huntingdonshire, greeting. Know that I have granted the hundred of Normancross to the abbot and monks of Thorney to be held in fee-farm for an annual rent of 100 shillings which I order them to pay to my sheriff at Huntingdon. And I forbid any of my officers to do them injury or insult in respect of this." You simply leave it to them to raise the money however they want, and in return you get a fixed and predictable income. I believe the Ottomans commonly did this. Sorry, that's hopelessly general, but it's what comes to mind as a way of trying to put out a few basic models for how you can approach taxation in this time.
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May 25, 2015 16:55
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Tomn posted:Well, that's not a good sign. Any way I can break it down to something easier to answer? I'm mostly interested in how exactly people went about sending money to the government and how the government even figured out how much money you were supposed to send in the first place in an age before modern bureaucracies and oversight. At least as far back as the Romans, and pretty much every ancient civilization, have had a grip on this. Not always, mind you, but for fairly extended periods of time.
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May 25, 2015 16:58
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Bagheera posted:I thought the Catherine Wheel was named after Saint Catherine, the early Christian saint who was broken on the wheel by Romans in the 4th century. Although much of Catherine's life is legend, it would at least indicate that breaking on the wheel predates the 16th century. I thought the legend was that they tried to break her, but she was too holy, so when she touched the wheel it broke instead. Then they gave up and decapitated her. Which also sounds hella made up way post-hoc.
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May 25, 2015 16:59
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Tomn posted:Well, that's not a good sign. Any way I can break it down to something easier to answer? I'm mostly interested in how exactly people went about sending money to the government and how the government even figured out how much money you were supposed to send in the first place in an age before modern bureaucracies and oversight. The short answer is: they didn't, at least until very late in the period. The rest of my answer is going to pertain mostly to England, I'm honestly not sure if that extends to elsewhere in Europe. Taxation was almost always done by socioeconomic tiers. Freemen would pay taxes, usually in kind, to their manor house or sheriff, the manor/sheriff to the county, the county to the earldom, and the earldom to the king. The higher you went, the more cash replaced goods as the method of payment. These duties were usually established based on the amount of land that the individual owned or presided over. Usually a lord or community could break up his tax burden however he/they saw fit, which helped to account for differences in land quality and whatnot, but also made it very easy to take advantage of people. These tax levels didn't tend to change much over generations and were often legally bound to the land. Land taxes stayed around in various forms for a long time and I suppose still exist in the form of property taxes. Eventually the nobles got sick of the king being able to arbitrarily change tax systems and that was a big driver for the establishment of Parliament; around the same time most taxes started being taken from assessments of cash and other non-land property. Communities of various sizes were given tax burdens and it was still generally up to them how they filled them; they tried individual taxes, including income tax, at some points but as you've guessed they didn't really have the oversight to make this work efficiently until long after the medieval period. Other forms of taxation, like customs (ie, paying a portion of goods to get into a town for market), tolls, and "justice profits" (fines, ransoms, etc) were a pretty big chunk of the income for larger nobles as well. One of the largest privileges of the king was the income from crown justice matters.
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May 25, 2015 17:04
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bewbies posted:One of the largest privileges of the king was the income from crown justice matters. Also the reversion of property to the crown as bona vacantia or escheat.
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May 25, 2015 17:17
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Also similar to the feudal system is the concept of the tax farmer. You basially say, well, province Bumfuckland can probably give us X in taxes, so we sell the right to tax that province to Biggus Dickus for X/2 cash on the spot. How he gets the taxes is his business. But in a lot of places, taxes=labor. Not necessarily free labor, since you draw rations while doing it, but building infrastructure type stuff like canals, tombs, walls, that sort of thing. Also keeps the peasants busy during the off season, too. Finally, at the lowest level, taxes are paid in kind, rather than in coin. Whenever they switch to making the peasants pay in silver, it's always to screw the peasants for the benefit of effective tax administration and the government.
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May 25, 2015 17:27
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quote:interesting responses Thanks! I suppose I should have guessed that the easiest way to tax someone is to tax the land they use to grow food - it's impossible to hide land, after all. Though I imagine that land assessors or whoever went around predicting how much yield the territory of so-and-so should probably produce in a year and thus how much they could be taxed must have been corrupt as all get-out. But that seems to break down somewhat when you get to cities and land is no longer a reliable way of assessing and taxing people's income. It seems from what you're all saying that for lords and kings, the best way to get the money is to tell the cities "Raise me X amount of cash, don't care how you get it, just do it," and then the cities can figure things out for themselves. But how DID they figure things out? Were the customs and tolls bewbies mentioned sufficient to pay a city's taxes, or did they turn to selling citizenship rights, or operate civic monopolies on necessary goods, or what? Come to that, in cities like, say, Venice or the like, was there ever an idea that the wealthiest men of the city were obligated to pay into the state treasury, whether through taxes or donations?
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May 25, 2015 17:48
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Lead out in cuffs posted:So tell new about mediaeval torture. What you are looking for is "Peinliche Befragung". If you stand accused of an offense that's punishable by death or maiming and you don't confess or the interrogation isn't conclusive, you'll get tortured. From what I recall, this process was first codified in 1532. They'll first show you the tools, if you don't confess there's a range of things that they will do to you, but it depends on the offense. Thumbscrews, spanish boots, hot irons and pliers, cutting out straps of your skin, hanging on your hands in different positions, dipping into water with a cage, etc., etc. In the city's museum there's a paper from the 1500s where the hangman bills the city for services. Pretty interesting to see how much this and that costs. Disinterested posted:Well to make one simple point - taxes were not always calculated in a very precise manner and not always monetary. You are thinking of the Timar system on the countryside, which managed taxation under a system called Çift-Hane. The system was coupled with a smart inheritance law for the farmers that prohibited splitting up of the granted land, so that there was no tendency to end up with more and more farmers that had too small plots of land to survive upon. The system was pretty effective and comparably mild. If you had to be a peasant in the 1500s, your best pick would be in the Ottoman Empire.
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May 25, 2015 19:35
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China also has a pretty interesting and well documented tax system. Most famously the transition from paymen in kind (produce from the men, woven silk from the women) to payment in silver had drastic effects on the world economy. Land surveys were a big deal so that taxes could be assessed well. There's some tablets also that the transition from paymen in kind to payment in coins in the Persian empire, as well as describing how that cash got spent.
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May 25, 2015 20:38
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Taxes are also ad hoc, raised according to need; if the Emperor or his agent wants to have a war, he'll also ask the general assembly or one of the Kreise for the sums he thinks are necessary. This is, of course, extremely difficult to get out of them.JaucheCharly posted:In the city's museum there's a paper from the 1500s where the hangman bills the city for services. Pretty interesting to see how much this and that costs. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 20:46 on May 25, 2015 |
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May 25, 2015 20:43
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The emperors always had severe money issues though, because they are playing politics on a very big stage while often having very little land or revenue stream of their own, and a very complex system of governance over what are notionally their vassals. If you can't use the imperial title to squeeze cash and land in the middle ages, or successfully wage wars to acquire tribute like the Ottonians do, you're going to need a good banker or a big silver mine.
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May 25, 2015 21:01
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Disinterested posted:The emperors always had severe money issues though, because they are playing politics on a very big stage while often having very little land or revenue stream of their own, and a very complex system of governance over what are notionally their vassals.
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May 25, 2015 21:14
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It's also what makes colonisation / acquiring territory external to the empire so important. The conquest of Pommerania enabled enormously intensive new economic exploitation outside of imperial authority. Likewise the Scandinavian area being part of the Bishopric of Hamburg-Bremen for a while was an enormous moneyspinner.
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May 25, 2015 21:24
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Tomn posted:Thanks! I suppose I should have guessed that the easiest way to tax someone is to tax the land they use to grow food - it's impossible to hide land, after all. Though I imagine that land assessors or whoever went around predicting how much yield the territory of so-and-so should probably produce in a year and thus how much they could be taxed must have been corrupt as all get-out. Cities had a lot of options for raising funds. For most cities the largest source was customs taxes on merchants and other sellers who wanted to sell in the city's market. The simplest way to do this was to tax by the cartload: carts were close to standard size and it was pretty much impossible to get one into the city some other way so they'd just collect the cash from the carter as it came through the gates. They could also tax market stalls, or in the case of widely traded commodities, tax by volume (ie, wool, alcohol, wheat, etc). Later in the period guilds and licenses became a major source of income: a guild would buy a license from the town for a pretty huge sum, which would then grant the guild most of the power to regulate their specific trade within the town. There were dozens of other ways to raise money: fairs, bridge tolls, rents, sales taxes, and so on. You sometimes saw wealthy citizens donating directly to the city as you've described, though this was much more common in free cities/burghs/boroughs than in demense cities (as these citizens were basically lords who "owned" the city). More commonly they'd raise money through establishing guilds: church guilds to build/maintain a church, guilds to establish/maintain a watch or a constabulary, things like this.
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May 26, 2015 17:20
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Killing/banishing a wealthy person (or unpopular class of people) and taking their stuff works in just about any era.
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May 26, 2015 17:40
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sullat posted:Killing/banishing a wealthy person (or unpopular class of people) and taking their stuff works in just about any era. Extremely prevalent in medieval Italy.
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May 26, 2015 17:42
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bewbies posted:Cities had a lot of options for raising funds. For most cities the largest source was customs taxes on merchants and other sellers who wanted to sell in the city's market. The simplest way to do this was to tax by the cartload: carts were close to standard size and it was pretty much impossible to get one into the city some other way so they'd just collect the cash from the carter as it came through the gates. They could also tax market stalls, or in the case of widely traded commodities, tax by volume (ie, wool, alcohol, wheat, etc). Later in the period guilds and licenses became a major source of income: a guild would buy a license from the town for a pretty huge sum, which would then grant the guild most of the power to regulate their specific trade within the town. There were dozens of other ways to raise money: fairs, bridge tolls, rents, sales taxes, and so on. If it's a bigger city is next to a river, there's a good chance that it will have the Stapelrecht. It means that the merchants travelling downstream and upstream have to offer their wares for a certain number of days before continuing. Alternatively they could pay a fee to be freed from this. Ofc this is a huge source of income, as these cities often couldn't be circumvented. Umschlagrecht is another way of raising income. If you transport goods through the vicinity of the city, you're forced to use the means of transport provided by the city. Power Khan fucked around with this message at 18:46 on May 26, 2015 |
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May 26, 2015 18:43
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JaucheCharly posted:Umschlagrecht is another way of raising income. If you transport goods through the vicinity of the city, you're forced to use the means of transport provided by the city. So if I travel with my horse + carriage through the vicinity, I have to offload all my stuff and put it on a city-owned carriage?
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May 26, 2015 18:55
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Yep. e: Come to think of it, it's so long that I learned about it. I don't think it makes sense to do that to every person that transports a bag of nuts or a wheel of cheese. Power Khan fucked around with this message at 19:03 on May 26, 2015 |
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May 26, 2015 18:59
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HEY GAL posted:Dude, they break every single joint in your body starting with the hands and feet and moving up. Last to go is hips and spine. Then they hoist the wheel onto a stake, wrap your (now flexible) limbs around it backwards, and leave you there. The punishment also makes you ritually impure so you don't get a Christian burial. The hell were you expecting? Something more contrived. In some cases they were just bludgeoning you to death with a wheel which in that case use a club? It just wasn't what I thought it was. I expected something far more elaborate than a wheel beating or just being tossed on a wheel after being savaged. Kaal posted:Lame. Needs to be way more mechanical and metaphorical about the wheels of progress trampling human dignity. Graded C+ - Please See the Teacher After Class. This guy gets it.
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May 28, 2015 09:04
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Testikles posted:Something more contrived. In some cases they were just bludgeoning you to death with a wheel which in that case use a club? It just wasn't what I thought it was. I expected something far more elaborate than a wheel beating or just being tossed on a wheel after being savaged.
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May 28, 2015 09:08
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HEY GAL posted:Your body parts will probably be used in magical rituals after you die, does that help? Acceptable. Please bill my family for my wheel beating.
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May 29, 2015 21:29
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A breaking wheel pole is a pretty striking image:   
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May 30, 2015 06:29
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