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The weight of armor in combat isn't nearly as much of an issue as the fact that armour is damned hot to wear. That's one thing that hasn't changed from the 11th century, bulletproof vests are still damned uncomfortable to wear in the long run.
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Feb 7, 2013 12:11
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Makrond posted:I've met people who were under the impression that if you used a pole weapon against someone with a sword or an axe they'd just cut clean through it and kill you, but I feel like it would be a struggle even with just a pine shaft, let alone the hardwood shafts everyone was using. A sword doesn't do much against a wood shaft, you're right. About medieval superstition, I minored in folklore so I got some tidbits. What it all boils down to is that before circa 1850, there was absolutely zero effort put towards collecting folklore. The national romanticist period is what made rural people fashionable in Europe. We can safely assume that massive amounts of knowledge have just plain disappeared due to never having been written down. One thing that's fun to note is that there's a type of creature appearing in folk stories and myth that's called a "fict", pretty much a made up creature to frighten children, and we assume that grownups of the day and age didn't really believe in it. Did superstition have an impact on everyday life? Most def. For instance, it's hard for the modern person to grasp how hostile the environment was to the medieval man. Outside your yard, at night it was pitch dark and you never ever left the farm at night. Most people didn't go to the woods alone ever if they could avoid it, because people believed in stories about robbers, forest spirits and the like. You even get strange phenomena like "bergstagen" (taken by the mountain) where people who disappear into the woods for one reason or another return messed up, and this was explained by being captured by trolls. However, we don't really know what people believed in and what they didn't. While it's renaissance age stuff, it's rather clear that many people in the Swedish Royal Commission of Sorcery (set up to investigate the witch craze) just plain didn't believe in witches at all.
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Feb 16, 2013 07:30
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sullat posted:Speaking of medieval superstition, I once read a book that talked a lot about peasantry in France and how they lived. One weird tidbit in the book was that apparently there was a sub-caste of peasants that were treated like Jim-Crow era blacks; they couldn't drink from public wells, they couldn't use the main doors of churches and other public establishments, and were basically treated extremely badly by their fellow-peasants. The author wasn't sure why this sub-caste developed, or precisely who it was comprised of, just that he had compiled examples of the laws discriminating against them and anecdotes of them being lynched for breaking those laws. I guess my question is, is that author pulling that completely out of thin air? Has anyone else heard about such a thing? For the life of me, I can't remember the name or author of that book, and google has not availed me. I think you're talking about Les Cagots. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cagot
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Feb 16, 2013 19:36
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Railtus posted:However, the Inquisition also did some good things. They stopped witch hunts, they acted as a control against corruption in the church, they made sure the trials of heresy were based on theology rather than mob rule or lynching. Essentially the point I want to make is the Inquisition seemed to be more of a symptom of cultural trauma rather than a cause. I think the best way to summarize the Inquisition is that they were very fair in carrying out unjust laws, which is kind of a running theme in early modern jurisprudence. For instance, Sweden implemented Mosaic as the criminal code in the 17th century, but the courts never punished the guilty to the full extent of the law.
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Feb 20, 2013 15:11
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Firstborn posted:When were the last battles that took place with the medieval notion of the knight? Any conflicts in the 1500s or 1600s still fought with armor, melee, and the like? The War of the Roses was pretty much the end of knights on the battlefield. Last time an English king died on the battlefield, too. You could make an argument about 16th century noble cavalry which existed in some countries but they weren't really knights in the traditional meaning of the word. Gustav Vasa has a cavalry unit called Adelsfanan, or the Noble's Banner, and even later you had noblemen cavalry in Poland.
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May 10, 2013 18:29
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:It became widespread in the West around the 10th and 11th centuries, in the time of the Gregorian Reform movement. The Western Church at this time was serious about uniformity, and thus you have the serious repression and reform of the English Church immediately following the Norman Conquest. One of the things worth mentioning though is that the church always had issues enforcing uniformity in peripheral regions. Some of the oldest text sources about Northern Europe are papal letters complaining about how lovely the priests are in the North and how pagan beliefs are getting integrated into the local catholic belief. The church was always just as strong as the state apparatus it could talk into supporting it and there's probably the reason protestantism got it's true start in Northern Europe and Britain.
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Sep 5, 2013 09:32
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HEGEL CURES THESES posted:
It only became a significant political force later on, what with support from the northern German lords, the Danish and Swedish crowns and King Henry gettin mad about not getting a divorce. Switzerland is kind of a weird case but say Jan Hus was sort of a false start since he got owned by the HR emperor. Edit: This thing was more of a later symptom of the fact that the church couldn't really keep tabs on stuff far away from Rome. You could have the occasional monarch supporting the churches endeavors and the occasional bishop with a decent power base getting stuff done according to what Rome wanted, but in general, until the Modern period, administration and government were more or less haphazard everywhere. This of course led to the peripheral areas running themselves the best they could, since there was really no way for Rome to assert itself somewhere in Scotland or coastal Norway. Kemper Boyd fucked around with this message at 10:36 on Sep 5, 2013 |
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Sep 5, 2013 10:26
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Alekanderu posted:Shields were in common use up until the adoption of plate armor, at which point they began to see less use since the armor itself offered enough protection. Bucklers stuck around for quite a long time since if you're going to be waving a sword around without armor, a shield comes in handy. Edit: The Scots were kind of an exception since they used shields as their main form of protection up until Culloden or so. Kemper Boyd fucked around with this message at 11:54 on Nov 6, 2013 |
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Nov 6, 2013 11:51
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Grand Prize Winner posted:e: Are there any sources on marginal areas during the middle ages? Places like Scotland or Estonia or Finland, areas that had hostile environments with relatively few resources where the major (and more literate) powers didn't have much influence? The history prof I've studied under always made a point to note that if you're lazy and want to be an expert, get into North European medieval history, because you can read all primary sources within a week. So, there's very little stuff from medieval Finland.
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Nov 15, 2013 10:24
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:Yes and no. While this is theortetically true, I have never heard of a dead horse breaking the ranks of formed infantry outside of one instance in the Napoleonic period. Moreover, I do not think that even if a horse did kill one man that it would cause the remaining foot-soldiers too much consternation, unless they were formed only one-rank deep. As I understand it, infantry lines weren't nearly as dense as people commonly think anyway, so it's not like a dead horse will hit that many people at once. If it was easy, why not just shoot at the enemy with dead horses I guess.
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Dec 30, 2013 17:03
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:Well, William of Poitiers describes English at Hastings being so tightly packed that their dead could not drop to the ground. Not sure how much tighter you can get without getting all Human Centipede. I think formations only started regularly opening up with the increasing use of firearms, in order to accommodate countermarching, but that's just a guess. We know shields would be overlapped in a shield wall, so at the very least there were some very tight infantry formations out there. From my reading I get the impression that tight formations on foot were the norm, unless we are dealing with skirmishers or bowmen or special circumstances, like the mixed spear-and-crossbow formation that Richard used at Jaffa. I might be wrong, but I have an idea that formations loosed up a bit as time progressed, in the 11th century you would see a lot more tight formations than later when the medieval age was coming to an end. By the time you start seeing pikes becoming the norm for the infantryman, formations got a lot more loose because you needed the space to effectively use it. So we might have been talking about two kind of different things which isn't that weird considering the approximate time frame is something like 800 years or so.
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Dec 31, 2013 10:56
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IShallRiseAgain posted:Does anyone have some recommendations for good books/documentaries about the black death? I got John Kelly's "The Great Mortality" in my own bookcase and it's pretty good. It goes a bit in depth in how it probably began, cultural phenomena during the Black Death and other assorted weirdness that took place.
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Jan 12, 2014 06:26
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a travelling HEGEL posted:(Ironically, outside a number of highly publicized events, the Thirty Years' War is a story of the anti-Imperials getting it handed to them repeatedly.) Gallas did more damage to the Imperial side than the anti-Imperials ever could do.
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Jan 21, 2014 11:10
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CoolCab posted:Is this really surprising? I understand some of the european martial tradition has been lost, but someone trying to build a fencing style is going to have a pretty significant advantage over an ancient master. Means tested techniques get a lot easier when you don't risk death or maiming from infection every time you are accidentally injured, and we can for example record sparring and examine what works. As far as I know, even back in the day they used practice swords and protective gear, which doesn't really differ that much from today's stuff in their utility. The types of injuries you get from sword practice aren't that lethal on the average: you might break a finger or get bruises.
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Aug 13, 2014 13:13
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Phobophilia posted:Everything I've read and watched about feudal Japan makes them out as some of the least honorable motherfuckers ever. Yeah, the later idea of bushido and so on are basically made up.
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Sep 2, 2014 06:16
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Nektu posted:Yes? More like the ACW, actually.
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Sep 11, 2014 19:40
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JaucheCharly posted:I have only little woodworking or bowyer experience and picked most of it up on the go. A person growing up on a farm who has to fix stuff around the house or make tools himself would have no problem with the skillset needed. Glueing is another story, but I've seen people working way more crudely than me and still make a working bow. These are all standard skills, safe for the geometry that you need. It's also probably worth noting that the average person today who decides to make a bow probably makes a few for their own amusement. The dudes and dudettes who did that back in the day did that for a living, so they had a lot of experience whenever King Henry's agent showed up to ask "hey can you do like 500 bows for next week?"
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Jan 18, 2015 11:47
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GyverMac posted:Was slings ever a commonplace thing in armies during ancient times? If so, whats the main reason it went out of fashion? I recon its easier to supply a mass of people with slings and rocks for ammo, but I guess it got less range and power than bows. Slings are even harder to use properly than bows, and slings usually used metal bullets as ammo instead of rocks. They got hella range and serious hitting power. though.
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Jan 31, 2015 19:23
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Frostwerks posted:The joke is everyone's dentistry sucked back then. In the Middle Ages, most people had decent teeth because sugar wasn't available to most people. Teeth really started to rot in the 18th century when regular people could afford sugar.
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Feb 7, 2015 06:20
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Siivola posted:Hey I need to win an ~internet argument~ with some of my tabletop gamer buddies on IRC. Untrained peasant levies keep coming up, what's a good page to read up on how fighting people tended to be mostly professionals? For one, feudalism (in European countries with feudalism) doesn't work like that. The lord of the domain can't call up the peasants for war, because fighting that war is his job. Especially in feudal countries with serfdom.
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Feb 24, 2015 18:47
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Disinterested posted:This really very much depends on time and place. Well, as does everything in history, but I feel that it's good enough for government work to say so. The Anglo-Saxons had the fyrd, but they weren't untrained. The Swedes had "gå man ur huse", which was basically "welp we are getting invaded so every bloke grab weapons and form up" but I can't actually remember a single case where it was carried out on a larger scale.
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Feb 24, 2015 18:58
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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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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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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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Kanine posted:A lot of films and other media portray medieval and ancient combat rather, unrealistically. Game of Thrones has some really lovely swordfighting. But some good too. The first season has two fights that come to mind: that Bronn dude up in that whatever tower against an armored knight is bad, but the fight between Jorbo Marmite or whatever is his name and that horsefolk dude is pretty good.
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Apr 18, 2015 11:28
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Shoot pistols out the window, hit the guy who left the gap by accident.
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Aug 31, 2015 15:33
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Phoneposting, but if I remember correctly, someone posted about the Venetian Doge elections sometime ago and the system was ridiculously convoluted to ensure an impartial result. Modern elections have an element of choosing the nominally best candidate, but Venice was more about ensuring that the result is as neutral as possible.
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Sep 15, 2015 13:20
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Not paying soldiers was common as hell. Some of the Swedish regiments in the 1630's had six years worth of pay in arrears.
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Feb 6, 2016 07:05
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:From the way you've described things, it sounds like nobody ever got paid back then. Is that accurate? Sweden had their army in the field mutiny a bunch of times during the 30YW, usually the state scrounged up a bunch of coin to pay the soldiers something whenever they wanted to be sure the army just didn't disband whenever they left winter quarters.
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Feb 6, 2016 07:49
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HEY GAL posted:i have no idea, although as you can see in that quote people did use checks. One thing was that the Swedes had fuckall for actual money, so they borrowed money from Amsterdam, using future iron and copper exports as collateral, and these loans were frequently done as sort of proto-money orders. So funding wars deffo made people invent new finance instruments.
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Feb 6, 2016 08:03
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My hometown has a medieval fair thing every year and I got drunk there once and bought a spatha for a hideous amount of money off the best swordsmith in Finland. That is my medieval fair story.
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Feb 19, 2016 10:25
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JaucheCharly posted:What is a hideous amount of money? Are people actually going there with the prospect of spending 1-2k €? A grand in euros.
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Feb 20, 2016 14:50
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HEY GAL posted:wait a minute. when a european says "elk," what specifically do they mean? do they mean moose? is GA on the battlefield with armor made out of moosehide? Yeah, moose.
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Mar 4, 2016 11:26
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HEY GAL posted:am i allowed to hunt them in your country? we could try out rodrigo diaz's question Technically you could but it is complicated. This also inspired me to talk with my traditional artisan friend about how much they'd want to get paid for making a buff coat. Answer so far: these loving suck to make, it will cost a lot.
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Mar 4, 2016 11:41
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This is probably the thread to ask a thing which was brought up elsewhere: stripping nobles of their titles in the feudal era due to treason or lesser crimes. It seems to be something that happens in fiction a lot more than in actual history. The English used their bills of attainder (most of which were not carried out anyway in exchange for fresh loyalty oaths), sure, but did that happen anywhere else on a regular basis?
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Mar 16, 2016 13:10
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:I mean if you want to start analyzing arms and armor, the helmets on the show are, in the examples I can recall, very loving dumb. Great helms stopped being used during the 14th c, morions don't show up until the 16th. So not "many centuries" but more than 100 years for sure. I always groan when someone fights a duel with their visor down. That is a really good choice if you don't want to see poo poo while fighting, and getting winded as fast as you can. Also, the swordplay on the show is subpar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN30YMzja6Y
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Jun 20, 2016 21:36
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Xiahou Dun posted:(Again : not defending the show's fights, I actually think they totally suck, I just think you picked one of the worst (or better??) examples and undermined your point.) I picked it because while it's a good scene overall, the actual sword swinging is still bad. I'd argue too that the whole thing with "unarmored opponent exhausting armored opponent" thing you often see in pop culture is a crock of poo poo, because the unarmored guy can't get hit while the armored one can actually take hits and take it easier. Funny enough, there's a scene in GOT that gets this right, the dishonored knight fighting one of those Dothraki dudes with his armor on. But yes, Rob Roy owns, and it's understandable that a TV show doesn't have the time to train every actor in swordfighting, and so on and so on.
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Jun 21, 2016 08:33
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One of my fav stories from 17th century Sweden is a former soldier drinking with a goldsmith, and the soldier then wants to fight because he thinks the goldsmith is a coward. He also calls the goldsmith a hundsfot. Goldsmith ends up beating the soldier to death with a bench. That's some WWE poo poo.
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Jun 22, 2016 13:23
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Loomer posted:Which is surprising, as you'd think the English ancestry of most of the town's people would mean that a bunch of armed vikings drunkenly roaming the streets with flaming torches would trigger instinctive fear. The technical definition for an Anglo-Saxon is a Viking who forgot how to raid and then got their poo poo pushed in by their country cousins.
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Jun 23, 2016 07:34
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Most of the demonstrations I've seen tend to lean towards "as long as you hold on really loving tight, it won't cut you" as an explanation.
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Jun 23, 2016 12:29
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