Ask me about Medieval History & Combat.

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Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; 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

SlothfulCobra posted:

Back in medieval times, I think people would've mostly cared about being native to their own village rather than to their country. I'm really not sure if they really bothered much about who was ruling them unless they were part of the aristocracy.

So there seems to have been a stronger collective identity than just one's village (such as Wace above) but I certainly agree the particular overlord mattered less then than now.

Rabhadh posted:

Being Anglo-Irish in early modern Ireland meant you spoke English (or Hiberno-English I guess) to the English, telling them that you were the Kings most loyal subject. At the same time you spoke Irish to your Gaelic allies, telling them to raid and burn the pale so you could swoop in and restore order to gain favor with parliament.

By the time protestantism arrives, a lot of the Anglo-Irish have gone native in speech, dress and customs, audience dependent of course.

See this is very interesting and is both somewhat "predictable" (by a certain rationale) and also "surprising" (by another rationale)

But all good posts!

My personal theory is that three generations of death beyond the original invaders (i.e. so you don't remember talking to your settler great grandparents) is one of the key *internal* cultural markers. I think history through family is seriously understated in the anglophone sphere as a mode of transmission.

But these are just my musings on an area I haven't studied heavily.

# ¿ Oct 15, 2016 23:06

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 13:17

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; 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

Mr Enderby posted:

I'd say that a key factor for colonial people is the extent to which they retain relations with their country of origin. It's striking that many ANC firebrands will concede that Afrikaners are native Africans, while white English speakers aren't, given that the latter were always much more supportive of black enfranchisement. But at the same time, it makes sense, if you consider the way Afrikaners completely adopted an African identity, with no links to Europe.

Likewise, the English in India never really became native, apart from a few eccentrics, because children were universally sent back to Britain for their schooling, and the vast majority of people expected to retire to Britain. So despite many people being born in India, living most their lives there, marrying and having children there, and if they were unlucky dying there, it remained a place of work, with identity still tied back to a Britain they barely knew.

This certainly plays a factor but I don't think it is the main factor, or at least is not adequate in isolation. The Italo-Normans took a very long time to "blend in" even after they had lost serious contact with northern France. The same goes for the Moors in Spain.

I think it to a degree has to do with formation of a caste system (or something like it) along ethno-cultural lines, but if your Afrikaners example holds water then that clearly is also inadequate.

# ¿ Oct 18, 2016 01:07

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; 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

sullat posted:

Speaking of unusual crusades...

Yeah, the crusades were after Manzikert, and had to fight through Turkish-ruled lands to get to the holy land.

The Wikipedia page on the Children's Crusade is interesting, because it is clearly written by a fan of one historian's work. While I don't advocate relying on one historian at the expense of all others, this guy's methodology seems fine and he bags hard on Runciman which I'm already down with.

# ¿ Oct 20, 2016 10:31

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; 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

Rodrigo Diaz posted:

Lmao. So his point that the Normans are not French is an extremely silly one. They spoke a lang d'oil and were more or less mutually intelligible with men from the Ile de France. Moreover, they owed fealty to the king of France and had culturally become essentially Frankish (I actually prefer this term to French tbh).

Even if you reject all of this, there were loads of French among William's soldiers and allies (like the mercenary mentioned above). I imagine he'd get similarly sniffy if we called D-Day the American invasion of Europe.

Oh yeah I remembered regarding this whole thing: it's clear that, by the late 1130s at the latest, the Normans were considered French, for Geoffrey Gaimar writes of William Rufus in his Estoire des Engleis

quote:

Par tute France les barons, / Le dutouent cum uns leons. / Treska Peiters ne remist ber / Kil ne feist vers sei cliner.

Rodrigo Diaz fucked around with this message at 19:05 on Oct 23, 2016

# ¿ Oct 22, 2016 23:31

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; 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

Cyrano4747 posted:

Mind translating for those of us who have t used their awful grad school French in years?

That's 12th century Norman French, so I'm not sure how useful it would be.

Anyway the important part is the first sentence, which is something like "throughout all France the barons feared him as a lion", referring both to his war for the Duchy of Normandy as well as his partial conquest of Maine and wars in the Vexin. The second part refers to his plans to purchase Poitou iirc. Peiters is Poitiers. Sorry but I only kept the Norman French version because I didn't use that passage in my dissertation.

# ¿ Oct 23, 2016 23:01

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; 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

punk rebel ecks posted:

How exactly are the Crusades seen differently by scholars as opposed to popular opinion?

This interview goes some way to answering your question, as does the book it's about! I think it's important to note there's no singular received history of the Crusades. The most popular has probably been Stephen Runciman's very bad books, which present an overwhelmingly negative portrait of the Crusades and their participants, so most scholarship will be seeking to correct that. However there is also a strong current of Crusade apologia, either from the Catholic perspective of trying to justify the Crusades within the Church's history or from the less-religious perspective that usually sees the crusaders as defenders of Western culture and Virtue against the dangerous and encroaching Orient. Both are dumb though the latter is way more dangerous and prone to stoking Islamophobia etc.

# ¿ Oct 31, 2016 02:50

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; 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

Bendigeidfran posted:

What is Alfred Andrea's take on the Fourth Crusade, if you don't mind me asking? He suggests that he has one but doesn't really substantiate too much on the page.

No idea dude. I only really know about the 1st and 3rd crusades (and even then my knowledge is limited), though I've also checked out Joinville.

quote:

My personal view on it is pretty influenced by the sort of "dramatic irony" narrative that the interview calls out, and perhaps early exposure to the ideas of Dread Runciman. Would appreciate some solid analysis on the matter.

So I actually agree with the position that the Venetians were interested in diverting the crusade. At the very least the attack on Zara is telling. As to whether they intended to sack Constantinople from the get-go, however, I don't know enough to say for sure. I certainly think the offer by Alexios IV made the concept a lot easier for the Crusaders to swallow.

# ¿ Nov 1, 2016 03:24

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; 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

P-Mack posted:

I'd lean much more to a case of one thing leading to another than that ever being the original plan. But being in hock to Venice from the get go made it very unlikely that they'd actually have a straightforward trip to the holy land. Nobody rides for free.

Yeah I essentially agree.

also when did people start saying "in hock"? I'd never heard the phrase before and today I heard it twice.

# ¿ Nov 5, 2016 04:33

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; 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

xthetenth posted:

Occasionally? The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon is a fun thing (more fun when it's with something truly weird like Tom of Finland's art).

I reckon some media figure used it and everybody is following their lead because it sounds good (tho imo it sounds bad)

Pontius Pilate posted:

Usual caveat of long time period and large place, but questions of honor is the big one that springs to mind. Suppose that carries into the early modern and (early) modern as well.

Idk man, calling someone a cheat or a hick or a cuck all seem like honor-based insults to me, we just react less violently.

# ¿ Nov 5, 2016 14:32

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; 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

Kemper Boyd posted:

Niklas Ericsson says it's because the modern man believes in internal honor and not external honor. Internal honor is far harder to damage with insults and slander.

Hmmm this actually sounds very interesting!

# ¿ Nov 7, 2016 00:06

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; 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

DuckConference posted:

Okay there's something I don't get about armor because I don't know that much about smithing.

Let's say I'm an armorer and someone gives me a chunk of bloom iron

this doesn't happen

quote:

that's anywhere form the size of a small fist to like the size of my head or something. Me and my assistants try to knock off all the slag from the outside with hammers, then heat it up and try to knock even more slag off. Then I guess we fold it or and beat it or some loving thing to get more slag off or something I'm a little unclear.

This is all done at the furnace, and the exterior slag is usually knocked off within the first minute of extracting the bloom. The bloom is then typically divided and forged into billets or plates which can then be forged into plates. Even relatively early bloomery furnaces could make a bloom of two dozen pounds or so.

quote:

Then we use heat and charcoal to turn the bloom iron into lovely, lumpy steel, and then I guess we could fold it and smack it more to make it less lovely and lumpy? Or does it already have enough carbon in it to be steel when we got the bloom initially?

The first process you describe is hearth refining, and the steel it makes is not lovely. it has to be forge welded back into bar or plate form but that's not a huge challenge.

quote:

Anyway my main question is about what kind of armor we make with the somewhat lovely and lumpy steel. It's seems like we could:

A) Bang on the lump of steel until it turns in to a flat plate and then bang on it more until we can make a nice shape with proper edges and poo poo. If we started with a small bloom we could make a small plate for a brigandine or coat of plates or something, or if it was a big bloom and not so lovely we could make a breastplate or something. Forge welding multiple small plates together to make something like a breastplate isn't an options because of ??? Anyway depending on how many assistants I have and whether I have a sweet water-powered hammer or something this is a few days to weeks of work depending on the size?

Nobody is going to give you a bloom, see above. Forge welding thin material together is very challenging because it loses heat very fast. You could weld together a few bars [or weld one bar over on itself] if you want to concentrate material, but more often you just buy the correct type of raw billet in the first place.

quote:

B) Get the steel hot enough to be nice a flowy and somehow drag it through a draw plate with a series of smaller and smaller holes until I can pull a continuous steel wire. Somehow do this even though there are bits of slag and other discontinuities in the steel bigger than the diameter of the wire. Or maybe we spend way longer folding and removing slag compared to option A? Anyway after we get the wire made we have to spiral it into a bunch of rings, and take some of those rings and forge weld the ends together to make solid rings, and take the other rings and make flat bits on the end with holes in them to make space for little rivets. Also we have to make a fuckton of little rivets too I guess gently caress. Then we spend goddamn ages riveting these links together until we reach the heat death of the universe or we finish the mail shirt or something. But the extra effort was all worth it in the end because we made armor that isn't even as good as what we could have made in option A.

No. Welded rings are rare, but when they are made it was by iirc welding a pipe together and sawing the rings off. this is relying on me remembering a thread I saw some months ago. The far more common way to make solid rings was punching them out of a plate. Wedge rivets are not hard to make, and wire rivets must have been fairly easy as well given how many thousands would be in a hauberk. Also mail vs. plate isn't a clear-cut one is better than the other. we know, for example, that mail wire has to be of quite pure iron, and tailored to the wearer. Smaller plates, like those of Lorica Segmentata or Lamellar, can be made out of comparatively slaggy iron, and thus the overall product requires less labor to produce. however, both segmentata and lamellar are subject to weaknesses that make them in many ways less preferable than mail, like difficulty of cleaning, limited coverage for joints, vulnerability of brass hinges or string to blows, etc. plate's biggest advantage is of course rigidity, which is why you never really see someone going with just a mail coif if they could afford a helmet, since your brain box is particularly weak to percussive force. Once you get to globose steel breastplates in the mid 15th c. you still need mail for your joints but it becomes less important as the foundational armour because the necessary knowledge & equipment to make lots of good, high-quality plate has been achieved & it is outright cheaper to make in terms of labor than mail, though some people still preferred mail for reasons that are not entirely scrutable.

quote:

Like the standard story on this is the mail was succeeded by plate for most areas of the body because plate was better armor, but mail was more common in earlier periods because it was easier to make. I feel like I'm missing something major with the history of these armors or the way they were made because the explanations I've seen (a detailed historical understanding formed from youtube videos and skip-reading this thread) aren't making sense to me.

So read what I wrote above, and also read this http://myarmoury.com/feature_mail.php

P-Mack posted:

There's a blacksmithing thread in DIY. I haven't read it but maybe they could help with the technical explanations? (If so please report back here!)

Almost all of these guys are machinists, and the few blacksmiths don't have a lot of experience with historical ironwork. In addition to milhist I've been a hobbyist blacksmith for 13 years & keep an eye on developments in the bloom smelting world (of which there are many right now. Lee Sauder is really carrying the torch, in that regard). Though I've never forged bloom iron I've had a lot of time with 19th century wrought iron, which has a similar slag content. It's fun stuff.

Edit: see this vid. Mark Green and Daniel Cauble are two other big names in smelting.

https://youtube.com/9S30KoIzvmA

Rodrigo Diaz fucked around with this message at 15:38 on Nov 11, 2016

# ¿ Nov 11, 2016 15:24

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; 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

DuckConference posted:

Thanks, this makes more sense now. I think I was under-estimating the quality of steel that they would have while also ignoring some of the downsides of multiple-small-plates type armors.

EDIT: That youtube link is dead

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9S30KoIzvmA

# ¿ Nov 11, 2016 21:24

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; 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

Ghost of Babyhead posted:

Have people seen this story about 40ish shipwrecks (9th-19th century, including a medieval round ship) discovered reasonably intact on the bottom of the Black Sea?

Id been told about this but never looked it up. Fuckin sick

# ¿ Nov 18, 2016 01:06

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; 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

OK so I want easily-browsed collections of arms and armor to check out. I've already found some good ones but want more (MORE)
Here's what I've got so far:

Philadelphia Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Walters Museum
The Royal Armouries
Hermann Historica auction house

Any other recommendations?

Rodrigo Diaz fucked around with this message at 01:54 on Nov 27, 2016

# ¿ Nov 27, 2016 01:27

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; 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

xthetenth posted:

Link to Hermann Historica is broken.

no it's not :ninja:

# ¿ Nov 27, 2016 01:55

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; 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

Ghost of Babyhead posted:

If Flickr accounts are OK, Roel Renmans has a bunch of stuff, sorted by period.

Ah lol I can't believe I forgot him. I even linked to him in this thread (reposting because it's an awesome piece that I look at a lot)

Rodrigo Diaz posted:

This carving in particular blows me away because a) its early/mid 12th century and b) the paint is still there, which one of the Vatican councils is supposed to have done away with:

quote:

On Pinterest (ordered by object):

Robert MacPherson (more material culture than armour)
Ian LaSpina

n0ice

edit: Really I'm looking for more weapons stuff too, and more actual objects than historical images featuring weapons. Still soliciting suggestions.

Rodrigo Diaz fucked around with this message at 22:54 on Nov 27, 2016

# ¿ Nov 27, 2016 22:32

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; 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

icantfindaname posted:

Pretty much the core territory of the Carolingian empire, northern France, western Germany, the low countries, and England(not part of the empire but a graft from it after 1066

That's... Not a particularly reasonable linkage, especially nearly 700 years later. Also English feudal practice was never particularly closely related to the French. Even in the Anglo-Norman period there were some pertinent differences, so calling it a "graft" but not, say, contemporary Tuscany doesn't really make sense.

I don't know enough about the larger politics of 16th century Germany or France to give you a good answer, though, since all I care about are fluffy ostrich feathers and outrageous amounts of slashing and particolor (aka the military side)

Rodrigo Diaz fucked around with this message at 13:22 on Feb 27, 2017

# ¿ Feb 27, 2017 13:20

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; 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

icantfindaname posted:

why did feudalism develop representative bodies/parliaments in europe and not in japan? is this another bad question?

There are only three parliaments in medieval Western Europe: Leon, England and Scotland. The French parlement is the etymological origin of the word but is not a legislative body, and is therefore very different. But all forms of representative government in Europe grow out of either earlier communal practices like the Nordic thing or from the reciprocal relationship between a king and his nobility as in the Polish sejm.

I don't think, however, that the consent of the governed is a conclusion that particularly needs explaining. There is literally no governmental system that does not, to some degree, operate on some consensual level, even if it is only the consent of the nobility and their soldiers. Rebellion is political opposition, and it would be a challenge to find a governmental system that has never seen it.

# ¿ Mar 11, 2017 15:06

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; 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

Cyrano4747 posted:

the divine right of kings backed by Papal sanction that you see in post-Charlemagne Europe. At a guess forming some kind of body to try and negotiate with the monarch seems like something that might be an attractive point short of rebellion if your cultural assumption is that the King was appointed irrevocably by God.

That's not how it worked tho. Anywhere. Hell, in England (the oldest surviving example) it was literally forced on the monarch by rebellious barons.

# ¿ Mar 11, 2017 22:06

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; 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

deadking posted:

You're hot as hell right now

# ¿ Mar 24, 2017 00:31

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; 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

Meanwhile in the late 11th c... (Eat poo poo idiots who study illegible writing)

Also notice the "et"s that're more or less in the shape of a modern ampersand.

Only registered members can see post attachments!

# ¿ Mar 29, 2017 23:13

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; 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

Splode posted:

Is that a result of writing being done exclusively by trained professional writers?

That certainly helps compared to post-medieval writing, but even in the middle ages there was some goofy crap going on eg https://twitter.com/DJMHarland/status/833267673748369412

Shits as bad as Russian cursive

Edit: I'll point out it's not *exclusive*. We have my namesake's signature for example, which is in the standard style of the time

Rodrigo Diaz fucked around with this message at 04:55 on Mar 30, 2017

# ¿ Mar 30, 2017 04:50

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; 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

Majorian posted:

It's funny, my Russian has atrophied, but I can write in Russian cursive easier than I can write in English, and CERTAINLY better than Russian block letters. My hands are Dr. Strange-level unsteady though.

Ok but can other people read it?

# ¿ Mar 30, 2017 12:12

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; 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

JcDent posted:

I'm a game reviewer, it has certain perks. I now know that there's an ootion to play in English, but with norse names, so you have Vjolholl or smth everywhere.

Now pls address my question.

So the time period you're talking about (500-800) is very murky historically, and I'm working from vaguely remembered commentary from someone else. while female warriors would have existed within that culture and time period, the number of them probably numbered in the dozens, not the hundreds.

Rodrigo Diaz fucked around with this message at 23:08 on Apr 16, 2017

# ¿ Apr 16, 2017 23:04

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; 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

JcDent posted:

Well, half of my hird is now female. I gave one of them the cheap, cheap "Sexist" trait which somehow translates into 10% more damage against the opposite sex!

E:V is set in 750s or something.

So this was nagging at me and I did some more reading and came across this: https://books.google.com/books?id=X...epage&q&f=false which generally seems to line up with what I half-remembered.

this is also interesting and semi-related https://academic.oup.com/ehr/article/doi/10.1093/ehr/cex066/3738045/The-Earliest-Viking-Activity-in-England

Rodrigo Diaz fucked around with this message at 03:13 on May 1, 2017

# ¿ May 1, 2017 03:09

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; 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

Pistol_Pete posted:

Slightly obscure question for this thread: are there any surviving 1st hand accounts of what it actually felt like to be a soldier in the middle ages? There's a million accounts of fighting but it's all stuff like:

Not really though? Even someone like Orderic Vitalis who has a very wide scope gives a lot more tactical information than that, but battle is a relatively infrequent feature of medieval warfare.

quote:

Basically, if anyone knows of a Diary of an Ordinary Grunt in King Edward III's Army, I'd love to hear about it.

Because writing was not normal education for commoners, and hiring a scribe isn't cheap, there are more knightly accounts of warfare. However, we do have at least two, maybe 3 examples from commoners that I can think of off the top of my head: Ramon Muntaner's Cr�nica, the Luzerner Schilling, and (arguably) Gutierrez Diaz de Gamez's El Victorial (Gamez is a man-at-arms so not poor but also non-noble). For noble accounts the Scalacronica and Jean de Joinville's account of St. Louis's crusade come to mind.

Edit: the letter from Alfonso VIII of Castile to the pope after the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa is also of interest. http://deremilitari.org/2014/11/three-sources-on-the-battle-of-las-novas-de-tolosa-in-1212/

He refers to himself as Emperor here which is a title occasionally used in the middle ages by Castilian and Leonese monarchs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperator_totius_Hispaniae

Rodrigo Diaz fucked around with this message at 11:58 on May 4, 2017

# ¿ May 4, 2017 03:15

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 13:17

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; 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

Flesnolk posted:

Was it unheard of for knights to take on more than one page, squire, what-have-you at a time?

No, but that would be commensurate with their own personal largesse. I've only ever heard of nobility on the scale of counts, dukes, or powerful barons having multiple pages.

# ¿ Jun 7, 2017 11:52

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Ask me about Medieval History & Combat.

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