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Railtus posted:I have never really experienced hot debates in medieval history, at least not within scholarly circles. Instead there is just straightforward cases of either outdated information (such as with medieval sword use, the concept of the Dark Ages) or a disconnect between scholarly research and popular culture (attitudes towards the Crusades, views of medieval science, and so on). The closest answer I could give would be to give a list of common misconceptions about the medieval period. I thought there was significant debate about what clothes were actually worn, at least in the Viking age. I think the line of reasoning was "We know what they were buried in, so we know what they wore" vs "We know what they were buried in, it doesn't follow that the clothing they used while alive was similar" and that the debate was quite heated. I think part of it came from the way that Viking burial ships have ornamental shields (and so on) on them that wouldn't be practical to actually use, due to size, weight, construction, and so on. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
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Jan 23, 2013 07:57
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Railtus posted:Alphadog: Hey, cool! I remember reading about the stirruped pants. That was a common design feature of later-period hose, right? I'm not a historian, but I was a viking age re-enactor for 8 years, and a lot of the guys were either history students or actual historians. I just listened to them talking a lot and tried to absorb things, and read a few books. So I don't think I could source or quote anything for you, sorry. I think it had a lot to do with other depictions "...biased towards the upper classes", and the idea that people may have been buried in their best clothes, so grave-finds aren't necessarily a good indicator of everyday wear. But I heard about it in probably 2004, and I haven't been very interested in the whole scene for 3 years or so now. So there's a good chance I'm just wrong. I have a question about Viking and Celtic swords and knives. I know they were pattern-welded, probably due to the poor quality of iron ore available. Is it true that they could work designs into the patterns created by the process? I've seen modern smiths pull it off (sort of), but I've always wondered if they could do it back then. Edit: Do you have any idea how accurate the Heimskringla is? I know it was written well after the events described, but do we know how embellished it was? Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 14:57 on Jan 23, 2013 |
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Jan 23, 2013 14:49
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Railtus posted:Heimskringla seems to be more accurate the further forward in time it goes. The first few sagas are believed to have been essentially made up, but more credible the nearer to the 13th century the sagas get. For me, it is still valuable as a resource of the time, because even exaggerations tell you what people felt a need to exaggerate, which is an important aspect of my dissertation. However, I am just parroting the established consensus rather than conducting an analysis of my own. Thanks again! I love that set of sagas, the language is at times quite naive, which gives the whole thing a bit of a surreal tone. That might be the translation though. Could you give some examples of exaggeration in medieval accounts of things? It'd be cool to hear what was considered important enough to start fibbing about. Earwicker posted:I have read in a few places that clean water for drinking was relatively rare for most people in medieval Europe and so everyone constantly drank beer or other alcoholic beverages instead. Is this true or a misconception and if it's true how anyone get anything done and why didn't people constantly die from dehydration and alcohol poisoning? As far as I know, what they were talking about was "small beer" - beer with very very low amounts of alcohol. You can make small beer at home pretty easily, and it comes out to around 0.5% alcohol (you can do this by accident when you gently caress up your homebrew process). You'd have to drink 10 pints to get as much alcohol as a single pint of normal beer. The safeness probably had much more to do with the fact that the brewing process involves boiling the malt and water than with "alcohol kills germs". Again, I could be completely wrong, since I'm in no way a historian. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 07:14 on Jan 24, 2013 |
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Jan 24, 2013 07:06
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I knew that Prima Nocta was probably not practiced at all, or at least that it was very rare or isolated to a small group of people during a small window of time. I never thought of it in terms of being a propaganda tool, but it really, really makes sense as one.
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Jan 24, 2013 13:37
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Chamale posted:How did health affect the effectiveness of troops in medieval times? I imagine most soldiers were much weaker than they could have been due to malnutrition, sleep deprivation, dysentery, and various other conditions. Medieval games? Hnefatafl! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tafl_games
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Jan 25, 2013 01:33
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Railtus posted:Others, like cartwheels in armour, are easy. Overall I suspect those exact feats were not uniformly expected (I doubt the training knights received was regulated enough for that), just that these feats were examples of how a knight or squire should train. They are. I can barely do a cartwheel normally, but a cartwheel in a properly fitted and strapped mail shirt presented no extra problems beyond "it's heavy, so it's harder". I did smash the hell out of my chin trying to somersault in a coat-of-plates, but that had far more to do with the armour being poorly made (since I made it out of mild steel and canvas) and riding up than it did with "you can't do this in armour". It's pretty easy to dispel myths about the heaviness and clumsiness of armour by simply putting some on and trying to do stuff. I have a mail shirt from my reenactment days. It's made out of thicker than historical rings because those were what I had. It weighs just under 19kg, or about 42lbs. It turns out I can swim in it. Not very far, and probably not with the padding, but I won 50 bucks off a friend who said there's no way whatsoever it could ever be done by anyone. And I'm an unfit fat gently caress. If you trained in this stuff every day, I don't imagine marching, running, climbing, etc, would present you any problems at all.
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Jan 25, 2013 06:12
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Railtus posted:Is your mail butted or riveted? I notice modern mail tends to be heavier, probably because with butted mail it needs thicker wire to hold its shape and structure. Butted. But made out of thicker rings than even normal modern butted mail. My friend has a shirt that's the normal modern thickness and weighs 16kg. Another guy I knew had a rivetted shirt that only weighed 14kg. Mine's 19kg. Butted mail is surprisingly easy to make. Rivetted isn't much harder once you learn how to peen the rivets properly. The only hard parts are the armpits.
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Jan 25, 2013 22:44
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Railtus, you said you got to slash at a gambeson without a person inside it - did you place it over something? Trying to cut at things when they're just hanging there is significantly harder than if they have something solid behind them. We did a test with an old mail shirt, and couldn't break it when it was hanging up. As soon as we laid it over a watermelon, the first blow split rings and left a hole (and wrecked the melon). With padding between it and a melon, it still wrecked the melon, but the padding had enough give that the rings didn't split. Far from scientific, but it was to prove a point to a guy who didn't want to wear the gambeson (which is admittedly not very comfortable in the Australian summer). EvanSchenck posted:I had a practical question about armor. Did soldiers and knights wear it throughout the day while they were on campaign, or did they carry it as baggage and put it on before the fight? If they were in a situation where their enemy was known to be in the vicinity, would they sleep in their armor if they suspected a surprise attack at dawn or something like that? At the battle of Stamford Bridge (right before Hastings), Harald Hardrada (Norwegian) had ordered his men to leave their armour behind at the ships (because they were not expecting strong resistance, and also because it was a hot day and/or he wanted to move faster). His army was wrecked by the English, in part because they were caught on two sides of a river at once, and in part because they weren't wearing armour. A lot of people at the time were basically of the opinion that Hardrada had been a loving dumbass to do it the way he did. This all implies that, at least around 1066, it was usual practice to march in armour. As for sleeping in armour... I've slept in mail over gambeson, but that was because I passed out drunk. It wasn't super comfortable.
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Jan 27, 2013 05:16
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Geek USSR posted:Will my Level 7 Ice Armor hold up against a Level 4 flame sword for eleven consecutive attacks? Yes, unless your opponent has good halfswording technique.
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Jan 30, 2013 14:11
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As far as George Silver goes, I was under the impression (from having read Paradoxes of Defense and the Notes on those), that what the books mostly were was an advertisement for George Silver. Also, he makes absolute statements a lot, saying X is always better than Y forever. I find it hard to trust people who do that when it comes to fighting.
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Feb 15, 2013 14:44
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I'm not disagreeing that a short (5-7 foot) pole weapon is incredibly versatile. I'm just questioning Silver's statements because most people who publicly make "x is better than y" statements about fighting have some sort of agenda. Kemper Boyd posted:A sword doesn't do much against a wood shaft, you're right. It certainly can. Probably not the swords Silver was talking about, but earlier, heavier swords will quite effectively cut a pine shaft, and might well ruin a hardwood shaft to the point where it was unusable. That said, you'd never block a sword with a wood shaft in a way that would enable it to be chopped through - you'd have to hold it completely rigid, since any "give" will absorb most of the blow. Also, a lot of wooden weapons shafts were wrapped in hardened rawhide (the ones I know about are the viking short axes, the top half of the handle was often rawhide-wrapped) and later had metal re-enforcing on the sides. Edit: Wasn't one of the functions of the Zweihander to chop through pike shafts? I swear I read that somewhere but I can't find a reference now.
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Feb 16, 2013 08:42
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Perestroika posted:I think that came up in the general military history thread some time ago, with the conclusion that that particular tidbit is most likely conjecture. I think I have read somewhere that it was fairly common to have a few guys with Zweihändern in a pike formation, but their main purpose was to protect the ensign and/or to quickly exploit any holes in the enemy formation. Maybe this misconception comes from a bad translation somewhere, something like "and the Zweihänder cut their way through the pikes" was taken to literally mean the weapons instead of just the people wielding them or something? That seems very likely. Mistranslations or misunderstandings are apparently a huge problem for historians. I am not a historian, but I enjoy listening to them talk. I can't remember the specifics of where my favorite one comes from, but the translation said something like "he ran forward, throwing two spears at once from each hand", and the meaning of the original was "two guys ran forward at once (as in, right away) and each of them threw a spear from their hands". Possibly it was a Roman thing, I really don't remember.
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Feb 17, 2013 02:06
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