@@l.rod.8558 "Expect the worst and the worst that life can do is meet your expectations" the pessimists motto. one person's pessimism is another person's realism.
Truth! The people of the "Dark Ages" were not, somehow, "dumb." The time period was "dark" because we know very little about them. The fall of Rome, "barbarian" invasions, the Plague (among others), etc., people were just trying to stay alive, they weren't interested in writing down their history. They had more important things to worry about.
It makes me wonder what caused the public consciousness to think the Dark/Middle Ages were full of dirty idiots but the periods before then were great artists and philosophers.
@@rainzerdesu Condescension. Stupid pride in what has since been accomplished, though not by they, themselves, but others. Schools no longer teaching what they should be teaching. idiocy. Many dumb reasons.
It is called the Dark Ages mainly due to the lack of historical records, so the ages were 'dark' in the sense that we have very little to enlighten us about the period through written records. Another factor is that the Roman Empire collapsed. It had brought about such things as clean drinking water for its citizens and a sewage system - a feat not replicated in England until the 19th century. With it went all of the upkeep on infrastructure, the knowledge of how to build it in the first place and the entire trading/cultural network that the Roman Empire brought. It is a little bit over-apologetic to say that calling it the Dark Ages is somehow discriminatory. Living through the collapse of the biggest empire Europe has ever seen was such a huge setback on so many fronts. The Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine) flourished in comparison to England in the same period. They were definitely dark days for the English, who were constantly raided by pirates. To solve this the English allegedly hired German mercenaries called... the Saxons. The Saxons, in turn, then came and conquered us. Modern DNA evidence has shown that, in fact, it was likely a slow settlement/migration rather than a conquest. Nonetheless, Roman Empire gone, England prostrate, pirate or raider heaven. The High and Late medieval periods are not considered the dark ages because they enjoyed a few centuries of separation from that collapse. We had been conquered by Normans and had feudalism, castles, bookkeeping (e.g. the lovely Domesday book) along with many technological innovations, as well as vaster trading networks. Not so dark then, and we have a lot more written information about the period. TL;DR: It's fine to call them the Dark Ages, they were pretty bad days for the English in comparison to before. We also have very little written evidence about the period. That's why it was dark.
So the people of Greece, Rome, and the later Renaissance didn't have to worry about staying alive? The Byzantines and the Persians of the same time period didn't have to worry about staying alive? Their food just magically appeared on their tables? Water ran up hill into their pots and kettles? Disease and injury just decided to take holidays from these places? The sheep sheared and wound their own wool while cotton picked and ginned itself? Their candles and hearths provided light and heat without fuel? I think not. It seems to me that every society has a similar struggle to stay alive -- especially for those of the non- privileged classes. That really hasn't changed. If you don't believe me, try spending some time in the third world. There are a lot of people around the world with lives not too different from Medieval peasants. The difference is that some societies have promoted development and progress while others have actively opposed it. Some have promoted universal literacy while others have attempted control society through the access of knowledge. Medieval people may not have been stupid; but, they were being actively repressed by the twin powers of nobility and the church who provided gates to knowledge or any other resource that the peasants could have used to improve their lives or potentially become less dependant on the wealthy and powerful. The end result is that Medieval Europe stagnated while past, contemporary, and future civilizations left behind histories of both scientific and artistic progress. It isn't so much that Medieval people had no time to write anything down because of their hardships. It is that they faced greater hardship because they didn't progress. They spent more time getting water because they didn't develop a water supply system as the Romans had done. They spent more time being sick because they didn't develop sewer systems as the Mesopotamians had done. They spent more time clothing themselves because they didn't have the division of labor that Plato spoke about in "The Republic." The lack of time to write anything down is therefore an effect of societal regression during the Medieval period rather than the cause of it.
I don't have a problem with the term "Dark Ages" because there was genuine intellectual atrophy that followed the Fall of Rome. A great deal of knowledge was lost and in many cases things that were known in Greek and Roman antiquity were not re-learned until as late as the 19th century. Yes many of the stereotypes about this era are not true or greatly exaggerated, but there was a major loss in collective knowledge.
Exaclty my thought, too! Medieval art was not figurative in the way it would be a few hundred years later but it would be far more accessible to most people than art today.
@@geronimo8159I think she’s referring to the fact that 99% of abstract art is hideous and the artist has such a high value of the,selves that most people just don’t get it😂😂 it sucks. They always look like a child threw bs together
@@geronimo8159 Imagine going out of your way to defend abstract art lmao. The majority of it is crap with fake meanings attached to it so that criminals will buy it to launder money.
Never mind medieval hospitals being dirty, the guy that suggested "maybe there are bad things on your hands that you should wash before doing a surgery" got laughed out of the room in the *19th* century
Hilariously, even though germ theory wasn't a thing, washing your hands before doing things (sometimes with a soap, weak lye solution, or ash, but usually just water) does appear repeatedly through history. Sometimes even associated with food, bathrooms, and caring for others. He was laughed at because germ theory was considered absurd. How could animals be so small they can't even be seen? If it was presented as the polite thing to do they might have listened better. Also the Victorians and Edwardians were rather full of themselves. They considered themselves better than the majority of history. They were better at some things but mostly we aren't very different from each other across history and their way of viewing historical periods through a self aggrandizing lens has created some of the myths today about periods like the medieval times.
Not to mention that the idea in washing hands between births came from poor people hospitals which suggest that the common people have always cleaned their hands. It was the male and wealth practitioners that would brush off the idea
Forgot the name but a Muslim scientist from the Islamic golden age had written about germ theory before and to wash your hands to get clean, after all the Quran is said to be a divine revelation and god being all knowing would command to wash your hands before prayer (Wudu), similar to the Jews. Which the medieval European Christians considered Jews to be bad since they didn’t get sick as often.
That is something I always try to impress on people when I talk about history with them. People back then had the same brains we do today with the same capacity for reason. All they were lacking at times was prior knowledge.
You may have the same brains physiologically but at the same time if you lack knowledge, your capacity for reason is simply not there. Your capacity for reason is defined by your upbringing and schooling.
@@sir_humpy The human capacity to reason means that people are able to recognize that certain things are necessary to bring about certain other things, that is the definition but put simply humans understand cause & effect. For an easy example: punching causes pain 😂 so while they didn’t have the exact same knowledge readily available at their fingertips like we do with google now, their brains was equally capable of reasoning & learning like us had it been. Similarly ours will seem like only basic understanding to future generations too but that doesn’t mean we completely lack the capacity to understand things does it.
Yes; also they could talk and have emotions and solve problems and show ingenuity and nuance. They just couldn't read or write, because nobody was interested in letting them and many preferred that they couldn't.
Medieval people took baths. There were communal bathing establishments. In fact, medieval people tended to bathe more often than Europeans in later centuries, especially from 1500 to 1750 or so. As for washing linens-the rich could afford linens since they had servants constantly washing things. The poor would wear the much hardier wool, which would be washed once a month or so.
It's weird, people seem to think that medieval people were literally stupid and suddenly grew a brain just 200 years ago! Human brain and the amount of "intelligence" we have hasn't changed in thousands of years. Evolution is not that quick! It's about medieval people not having education, not knowing how to write, not knowing what bacteria is, nobody ever told them that they could "invent this new thing", didn't have enough time to do much else but work to survive. Go back in time, get some orphan off of the streets and bring them back, teach them and clothe them and nobody would know the difference.
@@pdruiz2005 Exactly. That nice and refreshed feeling after good bath and/or sauna? Medieval people felt the same way! They knew that it felt good and made any smell go away so they would've have strived to get that same feeling when possible.
Regarding Medieval art, one thing to keep in mind is that whilst some artists were absolutely capable of realism (and it's a myth that da Vinci was the first to paint in perspective), art in general was seen as far more iconographic. It was meant to convey meaning that could be understood by anyone. So when you see Medieval icons of Saint George slaying the dragon, they will all have similar tropes even in artwork made centuries apart specifically so that someone doesn't have to read the book to understand what the artwork itself depicts. Symbols and meanings were far more important then than getting perceived "reality" across. Funerary effigies are an excellent example where I will fully agree Matt Lewis as well - the individual faces shown in funerary effigies are seldom very representative of a person, and more than not show a more generic face. But their clothes and armour tend to be very specified to that person, and indeed the best way for us to learn about things like plate armour is often through funerary effigies accurately depicting armour and us being able to compare that with the few extant pieces we have remaining. I also used to think Medieval art was a bit goofy, but learning more about it I think it's quite beautiful. It's capable of conveying meaning through simple means, does so much with so little, and even in places where the anatomy looks funny or the faces are less expressive, it can still show entire battlefields or wars in a single painting.
You are absolutely right. A representative example is the Christ Pantocrator in Byzantine art of the Middle Ages, in which he is depicted in a perfectly "flat" fashion with enormous staring eyes that seem to bore right through the viewer.
It makes sense that artists wouldn't aim for photographic accuracy in their subjects, really. If you want to see things that way, you can just look around at it. Prior to the printing press, people were telling full stories through their art, because there weren't many other media at the time, especially media that people who couldn't read text could derive the intended message from.
Giotto, Cimabue, Duccio di Buoninsegna, Ambrogio Lorenzetti etc..(and this is only italy). I don't know how some people can call medieval art "bad", aside from ignorance I guess. yes it was more primitive and stylized compared to reinassance but any human expression must be judged relative to its time and meaning.
5:42 just to add they also needed more calories, due to the fact they didn't have heating, more of the energy from your food had to be used to keep you warm. Also alcohol is high in calories, so a lot of those calories were accessed through that.
@@alexjutte229 they did it for both. The term weak and strong alcohol comes from the fact they thought, the higher the Alc% the stronger you would become. Interestingly the higher the alcohol content the more calories therefore, in terms of straight energy and weight gain. Stronger alcohol was making them stronger in a round about and highly inefficient way.
@@alexjutte229 What do you need to brew beer? The answer is clean water. Claiming that people were drinking alcohol because the water was dirty is a braindead take
@@alexjutte229 That's a myth, or at least a rather incomplete understanding. When drinking water, they'd certainly prefer "clean" water over "dirty" water because it tasted better, but germ theory and the importance of sanitation and the role of clean water in that regard wouldn't be understood until the late 19th century. What they would consider drinkable water is not the same as what we would consider potable water. Access to "clean" water was also not as rare as often thought. Public baths were fairly common in the medieval era even if not quite as prevalent as in the Roman era and people liked bathing. We would not consider their bathhouses sanitary but clearly, they wouldn't have bathed in what they considered "dirty" water. Things can rarely be simplified down to a simple reason as there are almost always multiple factors at play, but a big reason they drank alcohol is the same reason that people throughout history and even to this day drink it: they liked it.
It was a weird question, art is subjective. They definitely weren't as focused on realism or portraying things 1:1. It was also more focused on displaying scenes or events, not individuals. Personally, I think the artwork of Hildegard of Bingen are absolutely incredible. Surreal, almost psychedelic and mystical.
It wasn't realistic like Renaissance paintings, that's what i think people mean. Medieval Japanese art was also very far from being realistic, but for some reason you don't see nearly as many people trying to downplay how beautiful they were.
I imagine everyone is thinking of drawings and paintings when they say they say that. Check out some of the carvings, iconography and statues from a Gothic cathedral for example. Or the cathedral itself!
Beer: Hops were not widely used as the bittering agent until around the 18th century. It was usually local herbs and spices that would balance the cloying sweetness of the unfermented barley sugars. Try to find a gruit, that is a revival of a hopless beer style. Overall, beer was usually less alcoholic, less bitter, more spiced, drunk fairly fresh, and was slightly hazy and sour.
I was looking for this comment. Also would likely be a bit smokier/toastier and darker since the only way to dry the malted barley and arrest germination was to dry it over a fire. We can precisely control the malting and drying process today to achieve a huge range of malts, but back then that wasn’t the case.
Every brewer’s beer had its own flavor, a bit like sourdough bread today. The local natural yeasts were different and diverged the longer the base was used. I saw an awesome video about beer, but sadly I don’t remember what channel.
Hops were adopted earlier (12th c) in the continent. In the UK it was late to adopt it. For a while the English would referred to the hop flavored brew as “beer” and the traditional herb flavored brew as “ale”. (Both were top fermented as lager had not yet been developed)
They also had drinks with negligible alcohol like kvass, mentioned in Ukraine at least since 10th century, and it's still consumed by kids (impossible to get drunk from it), it has no more alcohol than sour milk products, i.e. kefir. Speaking of that, West and Central Asia has a long tradition of milk products as nomads wouldn't settle in once place long enough to grow grapes for wine, the famous legend of Scythian queen Tomyris beheading Cyrus the Great comes from that. Later, Islam solidified milk drunks like kumis among Muslim peoples i.e. Tatars or Kazakhs. Modern filtering was also not a thing, and since ancient times (literally prehistoric, like before writing was invented), we can see carvings of people drinking beer from jars with straws, that's to avoid all the hard stuff that would be in it, so many "beers" in ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia would be like porridge or smoothies. Of course people had liquid drinks too, I am just elaborating on what constituted "beer" back then, straight up stuff to get drunk was often called "mead" too, see various chronicles... Then Persians invented distilling (and didn't use if for much because of alcohol ban in Quran) in early Middle Ages, but vodka was invented by Polish way later. I looked up and it seems French were distilling brandy as early as 14th century so late Medieval period, and Irish and Scots were making whiskey in early 1000s, which is actually something I didn't expect, while cognac is a pretty late drink. Not sure about champagne, I guess monks could fart into wine or something, I am not a clergywoman to know.
I love the first part of this video - One of my favorite teachers would receive a good question from a student. He had NO problem with pausing, thinking for a bit, then simply saying “That’s a great question! I don’t have all the facts, but I’ll answer as much as I can. Give me a bit to refer to my notes/books and I’ll get an answer for you!” It was refreshing to have a person of authority simply say “I don’t know.” instead of making something up on the spot. And he’d absolutely make it a point to write the question down and have an answer either later that class period or the next day.
My neighbour has a medieval cottage with an original dirt floor in the back room. It sounds dirty doesn’t it? Once a year the room is cleared of furniture and a mixture of sour milk and chalk is poured over it. It takes about 3 -4 days to set, and works exactly like lineoleum.
@@marir.s3620perhaps the chalk acts as a sort of antiseptic? Also, I've seen milk stains on my counters drying to a sort of "plastic" texture, so maybe....
Another note about guilds: They would be used in order to regulate businesses. A guild could, for example, determine the price range that all its members were allowed to charge for certain goods or services, which in turn meant that no single member could just undercut all of their competitors to push them out of the market. Guilds often had the political influence to cause local laws to be enacted that prevented non-members from working in the same craft in a city, or merchants from selling imported goods at too low a price. Guilds also often offered a sort of insurance for their members, providing for members who had fallen ill until and were unable to work until they recovered, and paying the spouse of deceased members a pension. Guilds also enforced quality standards and regulated the training of aspiring craftsmen, which made them an important and well-accepted institution within medieval cities.
Correction: Making beer doesn't purify water. This is a popular myth. Beer was generally safe to drink, for the simple reason that you *couldn't* make beer from impure water. It takes clean, fresh water with no major bacterial contamination in order to create beer, meaning that if water from a specific source could be used to make beer, that water was also generally safe to drink, and any beer you did have was pretty likely to have been made from clean water and therefore also safe.
Casually tossing up a pic of Richard III when saying the king can't be told not to be cruel or inflict pain was a chef's kiss! Well done to the production crew. Fantastic video.
@hannytierlierblaauw192 Yes, I know, which is why I thought the placement was so funny. Despite being a Ricardian, I still like Mr. Lewis & find his discussions & books to be brilliant.
*THE VAST MAJORITY OF THE TIME* the vast majority of the people were pretty happy and pretty well fed, worked for pretty reasonable lords and had pretty reasonable neighbours. The medieval period is 1000 years - we pick out the battles, the famines, the Viking raids, the especially vile lords etc. But 365,000 days is a LOT of days - by far the majority of them were very ordinary, and probably 95% of these days were unremarkable and even the remarkable days didn't affect 95% of people with the exception of plagues.
From what I've seen and read ,medieval hospitals were more like hospices than hospitals. Quite often it was a place for those who were at the end of their life or close to it. Obviously some people did recover through the rest they got in a hospital but I would imagine the death rate was extremely high.
They didn't really have hospitals yet in medieval Europe, there were monasteries and nunneries where people could receive hospice care, as you said, otherwise people were mostly treated at home. So I imagine there was more concern about the state of the person's soul rather than their body. Apart from in places like Turkiye and the middle east during medieval times where they had started establishing proper hospitals as places of both physical and spiritual recuperation. They even had mental health wings. Look up information about the Maristan or Dar ul Shifa for more info on them, it's very interesting.
@@BiddyBiccy Yes to the Maristan! The middle east really were pioneers of creating a lot of what makes a modern hospital today. In Europe there were places where they tried to make the Maristan thing happen, but it was very hard for a multitude of reasons one of them being the way "healthcare" was funded. So we had monasteries and nunneries that would offer their services to the ill. These places were also used as hostals for travellers who needed a place to stay. Look up the "beguines", these were religious women who dedicated their lives to helping those in need specially the sick and even destitute or prostitute women. Look up also Saint John of God and his institution Brothers Hospitallers of Saint John of God, he was a monk who dedicated his life to taking care of the sick and funded that which ended up becoming a worldwide institute. All this to say, while a lot of non-specialized personnel ended up taking care of the sick, there were also people who specialized in that just like today we have nurses and doctors. Matrons existed back then too and had a super important sanitary role.
All you have to do stop and consider the Sunday scaries, blue Mondays, Hump day and TGIF to realize that people today are not happy in one sense but, at the same time, most of us aren't miserable. In the medieval period and really right up to the late 19th century most people were doing basic productive tangible work that contributed to survival and the quality of life in their community which might have given people a far greater sense of purpose than most people's jobs today, even if it was more arduous.
Ah yes, kripaki toiling 6 days a week for their pomeschik's field just to have their kids end up property of said pomeschik, sold, bought, whipped, or married at a whim of a noble TOTALLY had more sense of purpose than someone working 9 to 5... Listen, feudal times were horrible and most people were abused by 0.01% land-owners, way worse than current venture capitalists who have SOME checks and balances to their actions. Like yeah bosses suck but at least they're not like some local baron requesting first night with your new wife.
Yes of course, you're right 🙃. There was no sense of purpose. In the medieval times, in England at least, there wasn't a sense of nationality. People didn't feel a sense of belonging or pride from being English because they didn't feel represented by the king. The only thing they knew was their lord and they owed respect and basically their whole life to them. Children, men and women would work on their lent peace of lands for survival and then, they had to work on the lord's land. 16 hours a day, housing condition was dreadful, no clean water, only corn and bread for food. You were not free either, as you belonged to the lord's land. So yes, I'm sure they had a good sense of purpose back then.
@@camillerose8323 Most of what you say his mistaken but correcting it is more than there is space for in a comment section. I respectfully suggest that you go and read some good quality history books about the period. I also understand the pressing need that modern people have, particularly those trapped in the "corporate grind," to insist that we live in the Best of all Possible Worlds. We don't.
@@brucetidwell7715 I've read Trevelyan, Lipson, Stenton, Myers, etc. I have more than vast knowledge of English history, especially the medieval times and the modern times of the Tudors and Stuarts. Not everyone is stupid. I suggest you look up what I said, and check if I'm correct.
@@joostverra9130 You speak true. Every question can be complicated and require a nuanced answer. However, 'how you doing?' is not usually a question as it is a way of acknowledge someone's presence and pass some friendly words. That's why it is a funny post.
@@Hazuriel When they asked him “How heavy were medieval swords” his response was “the best sword is the one that feels good on the hands”, that was not the question. In other very specific questions he would just say things like “that’s tricky” or talk about the topic without providing an answer.
On the beer question: I’m no expert, but as I understand… It may have been infused with a variety of herbs, whereas, nowadays, that’s limited to just one: hops. Beer and ale should be regarded as a source of nutrition, not just a beverage. It’s liquid bread. In ancient and medieval times, it was considered a significant part of the diet.
Fun fact: The four humours are still the basis of many "personality tests" today. Whenever you see a quadratic matrice as basis (e.g. MBTI, Kersey Temparament Sorter, 16PF) it is based on the "Four Temparaments" which is a transfer of the four humors onto people's emotions. Only about a hundred years ago a new system, the lexical hypothesis, was proposed and has led to new personality tests like The Big Five or HEXACO.
Most personality tests you see online or in pop psychology journals are a scam, BTW, there are helpful clinical tests like Cattell's 16PF but they DO NOT tell what personality you have but are used by psychologists to measure client's change over time. Post-Jungian stuff like Myers-Briggs (or worse, Socionics) are actually do more harm than good as the result switch based on person's mood. The funniest thing is that almost everyone who believes in them says the same thing "I am INTJ did you know it's the rarest type only special super smart geniuses like Sherlock Holmes, Dr. House and MEEEEEEE have?" Finally, the biggest irony, is that while Four Humours theory in medicine is completely wrong and killed tons of people (doctors were "bleeding" them with dirty instruments because these morons didn't believe in infection), the four personality types DO have research that collaborates with them, specifically Eysenck put them on two scales, extroversion and neuroticism (emotional stability). I.e. a "sanguine" person isn't someone who has (Harker's voice in Dead and Loving it) _too much blood,_ but an extroverted emotionally non-stable person. Opposite for phlegmatics (and not having too much snot). Anything more that just that is usually fiction. Many people try to challenge Eysenck too, as for every two psychologists there's at least three theories, but at this point the critique mostly boils down to trying to deny introverts right to exist in an attempt to force them to become extroverts, seeing introversion as a disorder and not a personality type. But BOI the Socionic people are effectively a cult based on a _personality test._
The Briggs-Meyers (that's how I learned it) is based on Carl Jung's personality theory. It is a useful metric to determine learning styles and has applications in education. It should be interpreted by a trained psychologist, though, so avoid the popular nonsense on the internet.
This guy woked up, put on the first t-shirt that he saw and just walked into the studio. Absolute hero. Now I will be less stressed about my t-shirt's collar and how bad is it curled
I'm sure you could make a pretty artistic film about peace in peasant life. Same family dramas , marriage, births deaths etc. "Real housewives of plot of land near river "
Pillars of the Earth is kinda this. There is strife but it's not generally about war. I only read the first book, and loved it, but I know there is at least one sequel and an adaptation.
Ah yes, let's keep romaticizing serfdom and slavery, make the new Song of the South for future generation to cringe about and write disclaimers that "morons made it". Oh, BTW, the genre about happy go lucky peasants toiling the land exists. It's called "social realism" aka the only genre allowed in Soviet Union. You had kolkhoz slaves singing in opera voices while doing force labor on the land that was "collectivized" from their family and given to party bonzas in moscow. And China still does that shit with "singing and dancing Uyghurs" doing slave labour. I also loved learning that singing during working in the field was _forced by pomeschiks_ on kripaks so they _wouldn't dare eating,_ they had to occupy their mouths non-stop. Oh BTW, krepostnoye pravo also meant that you belong to a feudal, your wife and your kids too, and their kids. It was effectively chattel slavery for Eastern European people. PLEASE STOP NORMALIZING PAST ATROCITIES!
The question of "why was medieval torture so horrible" seems so strange to me... it's torture, doesn't really matter when it was its not really a nice thing
There’s orders of magnitude. Waterboarding or sleep deprivation is torture and is cruel, buts it’s a different sort of thing to being flayed alive or broken on the wheel.
less than 5% of the population lived in cities, so sewers being bad affected very few people; sewers also continued to be bad until the mid-19th century, with the ginourmous public works projects to implement sewers and pipes in cities
People didnt exactly bath in the sewers. He answered the question whether a basic peasant would be dirty, sewers were only in the city. Just because sewers are bad doesnt mean that the people themselves are dirty.
As Keto said, it's two separate topics. People weren't rolling around in open sewers. Bathhouses were incredibly common all around Europe during the Middle Ages. Part of the misconception around this is we have religious documents where priests were telling people to go to bathhouses less often, but that wasn't because they didn't want people to bathe. Bathhouses often doubled as brothels. They were also places disease could easily spread during epidemics, due to a lot of people being crowded into one place. But people back then understood the same thing people today do. That unpleasant smells are bad and pleasant smelling things are good. It's why people often bathed with rose petals or other flaural scents.
Regarding Medieval medicine I just watched a fascinating show about the surgery to remove an arrow from the face of Henry V of England. He was 16 years old and it (the arrow) went in 6 inches.
@@ericbrown1101I'm pretty sure I would just die of shock from an injury like that if I didn't get immediate medical attention, he fought a battle with an arrow through his skull and then waited for them to prise it out with pliers and alcohol. As far as I understand his doctor did a fantastic job for the time but how horrific.
Old timey surgeons were amazing! They were also treated as slaves and cosidered unskilled labor as they didn't know "humorism". It's doctors who were dipshits and bled people to death based on pseudoscience and part of the elite.
@@bluegum6438 there's actually a very harmful superstition of people "dying from shock" or "pain shock" in general. There IS a similar medical term "toxic shock", but that's not it, people do not die from having too much pain. Why does it matter? Soviet school of battlefield medicine believed in that, and to this day we have some medics in Ukraine taught to lessen pain at any cost and avoid tightening tourniquets too much, or give the injured morphine-based painkillers that can make the injury worse. Of course now there's awareness about it raised, but there's still red tape by outdated laws like ban on field blood transfusions that led to a lot of soldiers dying needlessly.
If you're ever studying history and find yourself thinking "Wow. People sure were stupid in the past", there's a good chance you're misunderstanding something or missing context. People in the Middle Ages had the same brains we do. The same problem solving abilities. They weren't a different species of human.
Does anyone else feel a little strange when seeing the podcaster after having listened for so long? It's like seeing the movie after reading the book! Love this video and the podcast
Hilarious that when asked what they eat, the video editor shows a pile of vegetables that includes a tomato, an artichoke, and corn... It also looks like an avocado is just barely in frame... Tomatoes, corn, and avocados come from the New World and would have been unknown to medieval Europe, Artichokes came from North Africa and are recorded to have arrived in Europe in the 1400s - they would have been unknown for most of medieval time, and then exceptionally expensive afterwards. The best answer to "What did people eat in Medieval times?" is "Local."
Art student here: there are many reasons why medieval paintings look “bad” compared to today’s standards of realism or compared to renaissance paintings, for example. One explanation being a change in ideology- this also connects to geography. The renaissance saw more and more “accurate” representations of figures because this high-accuracy skill that some painters had became extremely valuable with the introduction of The Academy. As an example, in ancient Egypt, art representing the gods was never “accurate” because they were offerings to the gods, and the accuracy of the piece was not valued at the time, rather the intention. There were also instances where the price you pay for a commission (during the renaissance) was equivalent to how detailed your portrait was. Another factor contributing to the development of higher-accuracy art was the introduction of the camera obscura, where rudimentary projections of a setting or figure are displayed on the canvas for the artist to trace.
About Egypt, there are only two points that I know of when they did realistic art: the short Amarna period, and later Roman era. Compare how Cleopatra was pictured in Egyptian busts of her and in art they did in Rome. Looks like completely different people.
I like how he goes on to stress the various differences between medieval and early modern times... And whoever edited the video picked so much imagery from the 16-18th centuries for a bunch of the medieval things he talks about.
0:58 I took a medieval history class at university about a year ago, and i distinctly remember the professor saying that she would mark the exam as an immediate failure if we even mentioned the year 476 AD as the beginning of the middle ages, she was joking of course but while in common culture it's still used as a conventional date the actual boundary is still fairly debated, generally speaking most historians agree that the end of the ancient world and the beginning of the middle ages was marked by the start of christian supremacy over pagan beliefs in Europe, around the 6th century AD, almost no book above high school level uses the conventional 476 now a days.
Thank you! Loved this video. In the end people are just like us regardless of the times in which they lived. We are in a constant state of change, that's all.
You would think the stench alone would have been enough to motivate them to develop an alternative method of waste disposal. I suppose when you've lived with something for years, you become indifferent to it. The answer about being "dirty" in medieval times was interesting, that they had an underlayer of linen clothing that they washed and changed regularly. This video makes me want to delve more into the history of medieval times from a factual perspective. I loved how he shut down the idea that medieval art was ugly. It clearly was not, and much of their architecture was truly stunning.
Latrines were located at the back of the house, to avoid said stench. They´d also be cleaned regulary for the same reason. Channels in the street were there for water, lye and stuff like that. The thing is, people thought bad smell transmits diseases (before we found out about bacteria etc). There was a huge market for aromatics, perfumes and volatile oils
@@Matze239 Exactly this. Humans have always been humans, and we've generally never liked bad smells, so medieval people also didn't like them and would therefore do everything they could to avoid smells.
your take on medieval art is the best take i've seen about anything anywhere about medieval times in a long time. great job explaining history as a story in a very short and approachable amount of time
21:15 fun facts about linen: it actually inhibits bacterial growth, and is stain and dirt resistant. I've also heard (no source, sorry) that its coarse texture works a bit like a scrubbing glove, so when wearing it you actually get rid of skin cells. the more you know :)
"medieval people weren't dirty" Immediately starts talking about sewers in the middle of the street lol. (I understand and agree with his point just found the juxtaposition funny)
5:46 from what I read that was only true in harvest season. But for example in winter there wasn't much work to do. Some historians actually estimated that the average work week for a peasant was just 10 or 20 hours, but with a lot of seasonal variation.
Medieval historian and economist, here. The narrator made some common errors and needed to elucidate on other points to clarify them for the modern audience. Overall, he did a good job. Never forget that bread today contains 19x the amount of gluten than wheat flour even in the early 1960s. (Thank you Big Ag…not!). So bread was healthful. Back then, even second class bread would today be called artisanal. “White bread” was not white, it was tan. Nobody bleached the nutrients out of flour, like is done today. Ale and beer: like drinking bread, with a little alcohol. Plus, from wild yeasts in the air, the drink had tetracycline in it! Ale was brewed without hops, beer was. When the narrator says the (“table ale”) was watered down, he doesn’t mean water was added. Ale brewing was an inexact exact science. One never knew if it was going to be sweet, sour or a sweet-sour taste. Also goes for the amount of alcohol in it. Every town had at least on ale-warden whose job it was to distinguish between the qualities. Small/weak/table ale could be drunk copiously when doing heavy labor without the unfortunate alcohol side effects. The reason ales and beers were “clean” and healthful was that the water had to be boiled. Yes, very young children drank ale, the weak stuff, with near zero alcohol percentage. Water: from time immemorial, locals knew which sources of water were clean and which were “sick”. They weren’t stupid. If they were, they died. The movie trope of a colorless lower and middle class is far from true, except in Scotland where dyes were taxed heavily. There, one used plant based dyes. The color range, even for the lower class in England was greater. Underclothes: linen was usually changed when it didn’t pass the “sniff test”. That was usually every two to three days, depending upon how much one sweated. This comes from several modern experiments with medieval reenactors. Cotton was around, but failed the sniff test at the end of the day. And cotton was half the price of silk, which meant that both were prohibitively expensive to the common and lower classes. The medieval literacy rate jumped considerably after the first occurrence of the Plague (the Black Death as it was later called). Fewer people meant higher wages (eventually) which led to a growing middle class, a literate class. Books became in demand. In church, the priest never told the congregation what the Bible said. The Church, Inc (arguably the first multinational organization) was quite afraid if the commons knew that in Jesus’ time there were no priests, bishops or even a pope they’d all be out of a job. (Illustrated well in the series “Wolf Hall”.)Violently. Quite right, as seen by the Reformation. The priest read a passage. Without going into church practices, which were markedly different from today’s, that was that. He read it in Latin, as well. Which was probably butchered, as many priests were barely literate and knew little Latin, if any. Pointed shoes: originally called “Cracows”, supposedly invented in Cracow, Poland. They became a fashion statement, as they were quite impractical, as many of our own fashions today. They caused bunions. (Definitely suffering for fashion!) Clergy were not supposed to wear them, but since when have a few silly dictates stopped fashion? They were also called “poulains”. In medieval times, there were no rights for the common people, human or otherwise. Nobles, of course, had rights. What do you think the Magna Carta was about? The commons? Ha! Don’t give them bad ideas. The Catholic Church dealt in slaves. Especially those captured by the Teutonic Order in what is now the Baltic States. The Normans never outlawed slavery in England after 1066. They made it illegal for English people to be slaves. However, the Irish were popular as slaves. There was a thriving trade between Dublin and Bristol. Scots? Other “races” as slaves? No problem. Brutality: the median age of the population was late teen to early twenties. A youthful population was violent (look at the Oxford crime rate), condoned fighting, animal baiting and painful means of execution (everyone like to see the “bad guys”/ criminals get it). It’s been like that for thousands of years, anthropologically speaking. I thought I’d clarify some ideas touched upon (and not) to give you a better idea of the medieval world. Thanks for getting this far. I hope it was helpful and interesting. Cheers!
Re: the amount of Gluten in modern bread-that goes a long way in explaining why so many people are gluten intolerant today! Thank you for the great info👍🏼
@@dannork1240 You nailed it for the gluten problems and intolerances. Big Ag has literally killed people and ruined lives for profit. I have had low gluten einkorn bread, and it was delicious. Not surprisingly, it tastes quite different than the bread of today. I instantly understood how bread was a staple of the medieval diet, regardless of class. I can only imagine how different ale and beer tasted. Cheers!
Cheers, I'm afraid I have actually been drinking, LoL. I'm an Early Modern English Historian, who loves the Tudor period as well and I've taken plunges into the mediaeval period. And I thank you for your comment. After much reading, I believe mediaeval people were even cleaner, especially peasants, than the people of later periods, because they were less concerned about public nakedness. A few fun facts from a slightly later period. Despite being assured by the local community that the water was safe, Samuel Pepys nearly died twice from drinking rural water. In his household the linens were washed by his wife and her maids, on average every three weeks. But ofcourse he did not engage in heavy labour. They were ofcourse soaked in urine before being boiled. Again to personal cleanliness, there is many people who say he was dirty and maybe only washed his face. But there is one day in his diary when he slept in and rather than completely washing his entire body, he only had time to wash his face. He described how dirty he felt all day. I am old enough to have known ladies who still washed with a jug and ceramic bowl. As for pottage, my information on the matter was that it was not vegetable based but grain or legume based. Elizabeth 1, always said it was her favourite food. Very clever politically, but apparently hers was full of sugar. Moving along historically about beer and ale. English doctors wrote many papers about this in the 1800s. Again not my period. But apparently Methodist and other farmers didn't like the working class agricultural workers being given alcohol whilst working. Instead they gave them tea. Many doctors noticed this resulted in malnutrition in agricultural workers. Back to the middle ages, Lawrance Stone, in the 70s gave an interesting theory based on Russian research where the practice continued into the twentieth century. Swaddling. When the practice ended, infant mortality fell. Goodnight from Australia.
@@grannyannie2948 Annie, Thanks of the exchange of most excellent information. Being in the SCA in the States from the seventies, I became a Medievalist. I researched recipes for my wife. I fought in plate armor, practiced archery, etc. And researched forms of address and rank. Did you know that calling a duke (for example) “your grace” did not enter the lexicon until the late Tudor or Stewart era? It was simply “my lord duke”. The fancy titles were probably a Renaissance affection. Hollywood and the film industry has been very wrong, but since when have they (and most authors) cared? Many pottages were indeed, as you noted, grain/legume based. Add onions and chunks of bacon and … voila! Bacon: was chunked, not in the strips we know today. Union General Butler, governor of captured New Orleans from 1862, had his bacon cut the way we know it. It caught on. Also, bacon was more like Canadian bacon, as there as little lard in medieval porkers. Only during WW2 were pigs grown for lots of lard by government instructions. I believe it started in the USA. The lard-fat pigs have stayed. (Bring back the lean pork!) And since the pigs were closer to their wild cousins, they were perforce lean and gamey tasting. They were maybe a third the size of the ones today. So were sheep. Again, nice to hear from you over in Oz. Goodnight from the Pacific Northwest. Hearty Cheers!
@@PSDuck216 We have groups like that here too. Though I've never seen them fight in plate armour, only chainmail. The difference between ale and beer is that ale only keeps for weeks, whereas hops are included in beer giving it a shelf life of months. It was was known in England in the Middle Ages, and drank in the Netherlands, but ussually only used in England for long sea voyages. Ale wives could join the guilds and have full voting rights, and widdows inherited their husbands vote if they continued to run their husbands business. Guilds could have considerable power. They could vote London to be a commune, considerably reducing the king's tax base. I agree that the Black Death changed the power dynamic for many peasants. I always thought that peasants were taught Bible stories, and that before the reformation many stories were illustrated on church walls. Phillipa Gregory does write some half decent novels about the Wars of the Roses, and the Tudors. But I have struck some dreadful, unreadable rubbish where they are eating potatoes in 1300, for example. I highly recommend the BBC farm series, (there are multiple) there are two mediaeval ones, one set in the reign of Henry vii, and another building a castle in the era of Eleanor of Aquitaine. My favourite is tales of the green valley in the 1600s. Archeologists, dress in the era, and run a farm, build and produce the food, for a year, in different historical periods. I recall my grandfather telling me that when he was a boy bacon was stored in the kitchen chimney, and people cut it various ways. You are too kind about my drunken ramblings. Cheers, I'm sober now but it is nearly beer time LoL.
I wouldn't necessarily say medieval knights were muscular in the sort of modern bodybuilder sense, strong certainly, but we can infer from art (and I do think at least for specific periods we have pretty good art on how they might have looked) and from what we know of the kinds of exercise they would have gotten. There's also armour and fashion, in the later medieval period there was definitely a sort of ideal of how a knight should look, think waist, broad shoulders and such. Armour from this period does back this up, as it'd be exceedingly hard for you to fit into a stereotypical suit of gothic plate if you were built like a modern bodybuilder. So they were muscular for sure, strong absolutely, they would have had to be, but not in the sense that we might imagine today.
The BBC series 'History Cold Case' took a look at a knight's skeleton and that person was most definitely well-built. Not in the puffy way of bodybuilders, but more in a natural strength kind of way. Especially the shoulders and arms were well developed by swinging a sword or carrying a heavy lance + shield. Knights would also be able to access better food and more protein than an average soldier, so I bet they would be a little bulkier too if they ate well. I think we also need to bring up survivorship bias for the armour from that era, as most still existing suits are most likely from nobility (who rarely actually fought) or were kept through the ages as novelties/status objects. I think the answer lies somewhere in between. Yes, they were well built but not like modern bodybuilders. I imagine they probably looked a bit like those old bodybuilders from the early 1900's. That physique is usually slimmer but still as strong, if not stronger.
I was genuinely shocked when Matt Lewis made that claim in the video. The person above who wrote that they’d look more like manual labourers is far closer to the truth.
Yes! A lot of people don't understand that LOOKING muscular (in a modern way) and actually being strong don't necessarily correlate a lot of times. I'm sure they were strong, but they wouldn't have a six pack for example or have super defined muscles. If anything, those who were less lean would probably look "fat" or midsize by today's standards only because we can't see a six pack.
Absolutely nobody was muscular in _modern_ bodybuilder sense until the 1950s as steroids weren't invented before that. Look at natty bodybuilders in old photos, in modern day, especially clothed, they would simply look lean and well-built, not bulging like those guys who are bald and old in ripe old age of 22 because of injecting a century's worth of testosterone into themselves. Of course muscular people existed going way back to see ancient Greek statues, they still looked more like Laocoön rather AND HIS NAME IS JOHN CENA!1111$%
The 9000 calorie stuff is wild. For some reason I had it in my mind they would eat tiny portions & struggle to eat much most of the time. I don't think I could manage that many calories!
Keep in mind because they drank alcohol a lot more than we do today, it was a little easier. A pint of ale is around 250 calories so if you had 8 a day that's 2,000 calories each and the higher the Alc% the higher the calories so we can be talking 3,500+ calories from alcohol alone. So it makes a little more sense when it is more like 5,000 calories from food, although still sounds a huge amount. Keep in mind also that due to not having heating they also had to use more of their energy on keeping themselves warm.
I live in the third world, and spent some time on a farm. During sowing season the landowner is expected to give all the workers their daily wage and a meal. I wasn't exactly working on the farm, as the owner was a friend of mine. However he'd often have trouble understanding what they're saying and i could help translate and I made a few friends. I've seen with my own eyes the average farm worker eat 2x to 3x the amount of food I'd eat. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fellow myself, at around 194 cm and weighing around 90 kgs, and the tallest of the men was around 170cm max. They're also very lean by comparison, and the labour would make them demand some alcohol at the end of the day. This is because their bodies would hurt after work and alcohol would help them sleep.
There was also little perspective until the renaissance with Giotto and Brunelleschi, etc. Medieval artists could sort of convey distance by moving things up and down on the image but there was little foreshortening or anything that gives a sense of 3D space.
@@curtispreston7928 Two mistakes: 1. Giotto isn’t a reneissance artist, he is a gothic 13th century italian painter and 2. He attepted to paint architecture but it was never in perspective
Well, kinda... That dramatic use of shadow is called chiarascuro or sometimes tenebrism. Other artists used this throughout the renaissance, too, although its considered a feature of baroque painting (ca 1600's). Actually, Caravaggio was a generation before Rembrandt and hes generally considered to be the guy that popularized the technique.
~3:46 This is false, Petrarch coined the term "dark age" to criticize the Latin literature of his time and harken back to a supposedly better period in classical antiquity, and this usage was popularized for the entire Middle Ages during the "Age of Enlightenment" by people who glorified classical antiquity and percieved themselves as returning to the intellectual heights of that period out of a supposedly more "barbaric" age. It was absolutely a pejorative, used in the same way it often is today. The usage of "dark age" to mean "period with fewer written sources" is a much more recent reinterpretation applied by some scholars to the Early Middle Ages, not the origin of the term.
Some of physicians and midwives were amazing healers during the medieval period. I remember it was John Bradmore who did an amazing surgery that was advanced when he removed a arrow from the prince of wales from the battle of shrewsbery and he allowed the wound to heal from the inside out instead of stitching it up. That was a majorly new concept in England but it worked and the prince healed really well.
How do you know that? Maybe they had a more holistic view. On the other hand, major illnesses may well have been untreatable, so taking care of the spiritual side of things would have seemed more important.
@@richardyates7280 This was before people got sick of the Church disallowing it and started dissecting corpses to figure out exactly what's going on inside our bodies. The body's workings were more mysterious than the workings of the soul, or so they believed at the time. Without anatomical knowledge or the scientific method most diseases are impossible to cure, only manage symptoms.
While Medieval medicine wasn't as archaic as some people may have you believe, there were still a lot of things that they couldn't cure so it makes perfect sense why people involved in healthcare back then were more interested in the soul rather than the body. If you can't cure their body, the least you can do is take care of their soul. And arguably, this introduced a now almost lost concept into healthcare which is the fact that treating ONLY the illness is not enough to provide good healthcare; your healthcare practice thrives when your care is humanized, when you look at the person and see a human being instead of just a leg that needs to be chopped or a set of symptoms that need to go away.
I think Medieval art is absolutely beautiful. I love ur program. I never knew this much about the Medieval times & people! Ur giving me quite an interesting education! Thanks
There are many types of corn ,not just MAIZECORN (American Corn)! Corn can be just a different word for Grain! I think this was just lost in translation.
@@killerkraut9179 Plenty of different colours. Purple carrots weren't uncommon, either. Though funnily enough, the orange we usually associate with carrots these days is actually a more recent development iirc.
Saw a video about medieval urinary stones the other day, and that can't be unseen. I'll keep my modern life with access to plentiful potable water, thanks.
Bladder stones were common in ancient and mediaeval times. They only began to become rare towards the end of the 19th century. I presume changes in food and drink had something to do with it.
I can't remember if we did this in 3rd year Chemistry, or back in 1st year, but we all enjoyed- and were fascinated by- our lab attempt to extract salicylic acid from _'acetylsalicylic acid,'_ more commonly known as _'Asprin.'_ While we were busying away, one of our lab tutors related some of the history of cures for headaches. You see, the salicylic acid we were working hard to extract from the Asprin was a naturally occurring substance in various plants and the ancient Greeks were smart enough (and untroubled by headaches) to have noted (almost 3,000 years ago) that chewing on this particular root/ twig was effective at relieving headaches. While the Greeks didn't know it at the time, that root/ twig they would chew contained therapeutic amounts of salicylic acid - the very same molecule that would one day grow up to be 'Asprin.' so, at 9:56, when our narrator derides the medical efficacy of a past millennium, saying that it can't compare to "getting paracetamol from the shops," he puts his foot firmly in his mouth! The ancestors in question had access to plentiful, free, effective and fast-acting 'Asprin,' so I rather think they got the better end of the deal in this example! Nb: As far as I'm aware, it was via the cultural knowledge, whereby chewing this root/ twig was found to relieve headaches, that led the Bayer corporation to research this plant, discovering the salicylic acid molecule it contained. Bayer also did a little tinkering before foisting their product (Asprin) on the public; Bayer acetylised the molecule, so that it's metabolised faster by the body. In fact, this was the same thing that they did to the Morphine molecule, leading to the discovery of Heroin, by Bayer (in the case of heroin, however, two acetyl groups attach to the morphine molecule, leading to diacetylmorphine - the industrial name for heroin, back in the 19th century). If you were alive sometime within the last 3,000 years (but not in the modern era, that is) then you ALSO would have preferred to chew a twig/ root from a Willow tree, rather than buying "Paracetamol" from the shops!
Great video, Matt! As for London: Most people in our times do not know that London was basically restricted to a rather small area (would be known as "The City of London" now), and all parts east of the Tower of London were really, really rural (and are now called "The East End"), and all parts west of Blackfriars were outlying lands as well (now known as "The West End" and then - even more west from the original City of London - Westminster). There's a reason why WESTminster is named such. In our modern minds it doesn't make much sense because we see Westminster, Mayfair, and St. James as the main hub (unless you're a banker). However, Westminster became the expansion to the west quite early (later medieval period).
Also - with regards to the art, conventional understanding of perspective only came with the renaissance period, so medieval art looks a bit surreal in that regard, i love it and definitely wouldn't call it ugly :)
I love the part where he talks about the evolution of the English language. I've often wondered how far back we could time travel speaking modern English and still be able to communicate with people.
I'm Scottish and I consider that I speak English and most of the English don't understand me so I don't think you would get far back before it was difficult, even if you watch a film based in London 60 years ago they sound Cockney, the kids down there now sound like black Jamaicans so it changes pretty quickly
You might enjoy reading about the Great Vowel Shift which took place during the Renaissance. It means that while we might recognise the consonants of medieval English speakers, nearly all the vowels would sound a bit wrong, which would be very disorientating.
I heard some Chaucer (14th century) at school - 60 years ago - and found I could 'get' about 80% with a lot of educated guessing. I don't know how much our knowledge of how English sounded has evolved since then. It helped that I spoke a bit of German. Thomas Malory (15th century) is interesting to have a crack at too, though in this case I think it was my schoolgirl French that was the more helpful.
I’ve seen videos on that topic and the general consensus is a modern English speaker could sort of understand most English spoken Back to the early 1500’s but before that the words and pronunciation would be so different it would sound like gibberish to us.
5:42 also because they drank alcohol a lot more than we do today, it was a little easier. A pint of ale is around 250 calories so if you had 8 a day that's 2,000 calories and the higher the Alc% the higher the calories so we can be talking 3,500+ calories from alcohol alone. So it makes a little more sense when it is more like 5,000 calories from food, although still sounds a huge amount. Keep in mind also that due to not having heating they also had to use more of their energy on keeping themselves warm.
Also, there was no automation/mechanization. You could have a few shortcuts (beasts of burden, cranes) but at the end of it, everything was made by hand. That explains why for most of mankind, food expenditure was the first priority.
That's some dumb maths though. You'd be able to drink more of a weaker beer and get more calories total, while still functioning, than you would with something stronger. Also, alcohol is not the only factor that impact calorie content. Even today you see massive variations in calories even with similar ABV, some even being higher at something like 4% compared to others at over 5,4%. Constantly drinking higher % alcohol would've come with it's own set of short and longterm problems. From what we know, weak beer was the everday drink workers consumed.
26:00 You're missing out the part about where the slaves came from. A lot, if not the majority, came from IRELAND. Dublin was the slave market of Western Europe and Irish pirates would constantly raid Wales and England to capture slaves. One, you might remember, is quite famous and he's called St. Patrick. The practice of capturing Welsh and English slaves was so bad the in the end England went to war with Ireland. But when it came to volunteers for the force to attack back, it was the WELSH barons who wanted to seek the most revenge against centuries of attacks. Which is why the large land owners to this day in Ireland have Welsh surnames. It should also be noted that the Irish Scoti tribe attacked, invaded and enslaved Caledonia. Taking it over. That's why it's called Scotland, land of the Scoti. The Scots then invaded northern England and tried to take control of it, until Edward I essentially had enough and they were beaten back. Just remember this when you hear an Irish or Scots person talk about how evil England is and how they never did anything.
Pointy shoes are not only a medieval fashion, but they are much easier to make than round-toed shoes. It has to do with how you shape the leather, a round toe requires that you work the leather into a bulge, but not so much that the edge of the leather gets stretched and wrincled, or you will have trouble sowing it to the sole. Shoes like we know them today, is a pretty recent development. For a long time, shoes were not even made asymmetrical to fit your left and right foot, instead both shoes were identical and you would have to wear them in to take on the shape of your feet. Shoes also didn't have heels, so medieval people walked tippy-toe like small children do. You can see this in medieval paintings where people are depicted with a (to us) strange, forward-leaning posture.
It’s all drawing imaginary lines but I like the symmetry of taking 1453 the fall of the eastern Roman Empire as marking the start of the early modern period of European history.
I think we tend to think that medieval art is "bad" because there are a variety of approaches to representing reality. To the modern eye, the variety of perspectives can look 'wrong', because we have come to expect a 2D representation of a 3D object or scene to obey certain rules, so that when you can see both sides of something (without the use of a mirror or similar device) your mind rebels. Medieval artists tried to show more than the eye could see. This deserves a whole lot more discussion than a quick comment. Sorry!
4:55 I heared that most medieval peasants ate porridge instead of bread. The reason for this was that if you wanted bread, the miller and the baker both would keep some flour for themselves, so you had less to eat if you ate bread instead of porridge.
This is almost certainly true. Bread has the advantage that it can be baked until it is very dry and then it will last for a long time, not to mention it's more portable, but medieval commoners ate lots of porridge and stew, as well as mashed and boiled beans and similar simple foods.
Ive heard that our working week today is much longer than the medieval working week. Personally I preferered working from dawn to dusk digging, growing food, mending fences etc in our family acre garden to 5 minutes in an office. But spring and autumn were the seasons of lots of work. Summer and winter less so.
And spring and autumn oddly enough are the most pleasant seasons to do outdoor manual labour in. Not freezing your fingers raw in the cold of winter or burning your skin to a crisp in the heat of summer.
The best job I've ever had was a summer job working on an organic veg farm. It was hard work but every day felt rewarding, even when it was tipping it down with rain, and the exhaustion was totally different from the exhaustion of a city job. It felt good for the soul and my body felt strong and healthy from the physical work involved. Mind you, I was very young. Now twenty years later I'm not sure I'd have the same energy for it!
Ah yes, YOUR family acre garden. You know, with modern human rights like land ownership. Instead of toiling away on some baron's property like 99% of Medieval people did. Feudalism was bad. Peasants weren't singing and dancing happy go lucky kolkhozniks like in Soviet movies, that's pure propaganda, actual labor in the field was hard and you had everything taken away by the nobles who, guess what, didn't work. Because ordinary people did the work for them. Things like "organic veg farm" are ultra-modern inventions, things like that are hispter fun for middle class people in first world aka 5% richest in the world. Yeah, 95% of world's population are poorer than an average Westerner. And the middle class wasn't a thing in old times, you either owned land, mansions and slaves or were exploited.
@@KasumiRINA you're right with a lot of your points, I was merely agreeing that outdoor work feels better than some of the modern jobs we have to do today, not that it compares with medieval life. But I want to make it clear that when I worked on that farm I was living in severe poverty in south west Wales - in a town which, at the time, was one of the poorest most deprived places in Europe (including eastern Europe). I was unemployed, malnourished and underweight, suffering from PTSD, living in a mouldy property. Most people in the UK don't know what it's like to open cupboards and find them empty, but that's how I was living. A friend was going to do the job and she offered to give me a lift each day to do it with her, so I did. This is why it was a good experience for me because it was the first time in a very long time I was able to be in the fresh air and sunshine, and to eat fresh fruit and veg. They were something I couldn't afford normally. So I just wanted to make the point that it's not always "middle-class hipster fun", misery and poverty do still exist and some people still have to live in a sort of slavery where they toil and struggle to not even have the basics of life. I think the point is medieval life wasn't always toil and misery, and modern life isn't always privilege and fun either.
@@KasumiRINA A few points: Middle class was a thing in medieval times. Citizens of cities and towns were middle class (it's only with cities growing to extreme sizes that most of the citizens became poor, but that's more of an industrial revolution era problem, medieval population of a city wasn't that). All the 'advanced' professions in the villages like blacksmiths were middle class. Same with hunters, tailors, etc. In short, any artisan profession was exactly, that, medieval equivalent of middle class. Also, nobles DID work (if we're talking specifically medieval period). Nobles had one of the most important jobs in the 'state' (although a kingdom really isn't a state) - they were the elite fighting force. Your kingdom is under attack or you want to go and attack someone? Well, take a wild guess who all of those knights and military commanders are...they're nobles and their families. As in, 90% of your military strength is precisely that...your nobles and their retinues. Because a bunch of peasants won't become an actual army even if you give them mail shirts and spears. A baron isn't a baron just because he sits in a castle and controls it in and a few villages around it. He is also the law (as in, he's the one expected to come and settle disputes/defend them/punish those who have wronged them). And when the king decides it's time to assemble the army, he gets his princes/dukes to tell their counts, who in turn tell their barons something along the lines of "Well boys, guess what time it is". And those barons and whatever other nobility is around them assemble whatever their fighting forces are and arrive at the destination, stat. Because those barons and counts and dukes know very well what happens if they don't.
![Seungmin "그렇게, 천천히, 우리(As we are)" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kAzmhLHePqU/mqdefault.jpg)
I won’t ever get tired of history and how people have lived. I often wonder how people 300 years from now will see us.
If there are any people and they even think of us it'll probably be as the idiots who left them with a Mad Max level hellscape.
@@killgoretrout9000ahh there’s nothing better than internet pessimism😊
@@l.rod.8558 "Expect the worst and the worst that life can do is meet your expectations" the pessimists motto.
one person's pessimism is another person's realism.
Probably laugh for those who still believe in these 2000-3000 year old mythologies and kept on killing eachother over it
They can see us. We're looking at you right now
Truth! The people of the "Dark Ages" were not, somehow, "dumb." The time period was "dark" because we know very little about them. The fall of Rome, "barbarian" invasions, the Plague (among others), etc., people were just trying to stay alive, they weren't interested in writing down their history. They had more important things to worry about.
It makes me wonder what caused the public consciousness to think the Dark/Middle Ages were full of dirty idiots but the periods before then were great artists and philosophers.
@@rainzerdesu Condescension. Stupid pride in what has since been accomplished, though not by they, themselves, but others.
Schools no longer teaching what they should be teaching. idiocy. Many dumb reasons.
It is called the Dark Ages mainly due to the lack of historical records, so the ages were 'dark' in the sense that we have very little to enlighten us about the period through written records.
Another factor is that the Roman Empire collapsed. It had brought about such things as clean drinking water for its citizens and a sewage system - a feat not replicated in England until the 19th century. With it went all of the upkeep on infrastructure, the knowledge of how to build it in the first place and the entire trading/cultural network that the Roman Empire brought.
It is a little bit over-apologetic to say that calling it the Dark Ages is somehow discriminatory. Living through the collapse of the biggest empire Europe has ever seen was such a huge setback on so many fronts. The Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine) flourished in comparison to England in the same period.
They were definitely dark days for the English, who were constantly raided by pirates. To solve this the English allegedly hired German mercenaries called... the Saxons. The Saxons, in turn, then came and conquered us. Modern DNA evidence has shown that, in fact, it was likely a slow settlement/migration rather than a conquest. Nonetheless, Roman Empire gone, England prostrate, pirate or raider heaven.
The High and Late medieval periods are not considered the dark ages because they enjoyed a few centuries of separation from that collapse. We had been conquered by Normans and had feudalism, castles, bookkeeping (e.g. the lovely Domesday book) along with many technological innovations, as well as vaster trading networks. Not so dark then, and we have a lot more written information about the period.
TL;DR: It's fine to call them the Dark Ages, they were pretty bad days for the English in comparison to before. We also have very little written evidence about the period. That's why it was dark.
So the people of Greece, Rome, and the later Renaissance didn't have to worry about staying alive? The Byzantines and the Persians of the same time period didn't have to worry about staying alive? Their food just magically appeared on their tables? Water ran up hill into their pots and kettles? Disease and injury just decided to take holidays from these places? The sheep sheared and wound their own wool while cotton picked and ginned itself? Their candles and hearths provided light and heat without fuel? I think not.
It seems to me that every society has a similar struggle to stay alive -- especially for those of the non- privileged classes. That really hasn't changed. If you don't believe me, try spending some time in the third world. There are a lot of people around the world with lives not too different from Medieval peasants.
The difference is that some societies have promoted development and progress while others have actively opposed it. Some have promoted universal literacy while others have attempted control society through the access of knowledge.
Medieval people may not have been stupid; but, they were being actively repressed by the twin powers of nobility and the church who provided gates to knowledge or any other resource that the peasants could have used to improve their lives or potentially become less dependant on the wealthy and powerful.
The end result is that Medieval Europe stagnated while past, contemporary, and future civilizations left behind histories of both scientific and artistic progress.
It isn't so much that Medieval people had no time to write anything down because of their hardships. It is that they faced greater hardship because they didn't progress. They spent more time getting water because they didn't develop a water supply system as the Romans had done. They spent more time being sick because they didn't develop sewer systems as the Mesopotamians had done. They spent more time clothing themselves because they didn't have the division of labor that Plato spoke about in "The Republic."
The lack of time to write anything down is therefore an effect of societal regression during the Medieval period rather than the cause of it.
I don't have a problem with the term "Dark Ages" because there was genuine intellectual atrophy that followed the Fall of Rome. A great deal of knowledge was lost and in many cases things that were known in Greek and Roman antiquity were not re-learned until as late as the 19th century. Yes many of the stereotypes about this era are not true or greatly exaggerated, but there was a major loss in collective knowledge.
imagine going back 1000 years & calling their art ugly whilst showing them an abstract painting
Abstract/Figurative has little to do with how 'beautiful' or 'ugly' a painting is...
Exaclty my thought, too! Medieval art was not figurative in the way it would be a few hundred years later but it would be far more accessible to most people than art today.
@@geronimo8159I think she’s referring to the fact that 99% of abstract art is hideous and the artist has such a high value of the,selves that most people just don’t get it😂😂 it sucks. They always look like a child threw bs together
@@austin8775 ah really? I guess I wasnt informed about that fact. what's the last exhibition you visited, if I may ask so?
@@geronimo8159 Imagine going out of your way to defend abstract art lmao. The majority of it is crap with fake meanings attached to it so that criminals will buy it to launder money.
Never mind medieval hospitals being dirty, the guy that suggested "maybe there are bad things on your hands that you should wash before doing a surgery" got laughed out of the room in the *19th* century
After dissecting cadavers, no less!
Hilariously, even though germ theory wasn't a thing, washing your hands before doing things (sometimes with a soap, weak lye solution, or ash, but usually just water) does appear repeatedly through history. Sometimes even associated with food, bathrooms, and caring for others. He was laughed at because germ theory was considered absurd. How could animals be so small they can't even be seen? If it was presented as the polite thing to do they might have listened better.
Also the Victorians and Edwardians were rather full of themselves. They considered themselves better than the majority of history. They were better at some things but mostly we aren't very different from each other across history and their way of viewing historical periods through a self aggrandizing lens has created some of the myths today about periods like the medieval times.
Not to mention that the idea in washing hands between births came from poor people hospitals which suggest that the common people have always cleaned their hands. It was the male and wealth practitioners that would brush off the idea
Forgot the name but a Muslim scientist from the Islamic golden age had written about germ theory before and to wash your hands to get clean, after all the Quran is said to be a divine revelation and god being all knowing would command to wash your hands before prayer (Wudu), similar to the Jews. Which the medieval European Christians considered Jews to be bad since they didn’t get sick as often.
Yeah it's crazy how Wyatt Earps brothers only got saved because lucky enough there was a doctor around that believed in cleaning his hands.
That is something I always try to impress on people when I talk about history with them. People back then had the same brains we do today with the same capacity for reason. All they were lacking at times was prior knowledge.
You may have the same brains physiologically but at the same time if you lack knowledge, your capacity for reason is simply not there. Your capacity for reason is defined by your upbringing and schooling.
@@sir_humpy The human capacity to reason means that people are able to recognize that certain things are necessary to bring about certain other things, that is the definition but put simply humans understand cause & effect. For an easy example: punching causes pain 😂 so while they didn’t have the exact same knowledge readily available at their fingertips like we do with google now, their brains was equally capable of reasoning & learning like us had it been. Similarly ours will seem like only basic understanding to future generations too but that doesn’t mean we completely lack the capacity to understand things does it.
Yes; also they could talk and have emotions and solve problems and show ingenuity and nuance.
They just couldn't read or write, because nobody was interested in letting them and many preferred that they couldn't.
Matt seems like such a sweet guy, i need more of him reacting to more offensive myths about people in the past
he doesn’t seem to know much about medieval times, how can he not even know their diet?
@@missestomlinson99but he did
He is! I've met him a few times and I email him questions I have as a student. He always replies quickly and is very lovely
I love this video.
Internet: Why did this basic thing happen in medieval times?
Matt: Basic answer.
yeah, like how exactly did they clean their bodies and the linen they wore?
this video was a lot of "I don't knows" and "who knows" almost like, why would you even wanna know?
Medieval people took baths. There were communal bathing establishments. In fact, medieval people tended to bathe more often than Europeans in later centuries, especially from 1500 to 1750 or so. As for washing linens-the rich could afford linens since they had servants constantly washing things. The poor would wear the much hardier wool, which would be washed once a month or so.
It's weird, people seem to think that medieval people were literally stupid and suddenly grew a brain just 200 years ago!
Human brain and the amount of "intelligence" we have hasn't changed in thousands of years. Evolution is not that quick! It's about medieval people not having education, not knowing how to write, not knowing what bacteria is, nobody ever told them that they could "invent this new thing", didn't have enough time to do much else but work to survive.
Go back in time, get some orphan off of the streets and bring them back, teach them and clothe them and nobody would know the difference.
@@pdruiz2005 Exactly. That nice and refreshed feeling after good bath and/or sauna? Medieval people felt the same way! They knew that it felt good and made any smell go away so they would've have strived to get that same feeling when possible.
Regarding Medieval art, one thing to keep in mind is that whilst some artists were absolutely capable of realism (and it's a myth that da Vinci was the first to paint in perspective), art in general was seen as far more iconographic. It was meant to convey meaning that could be understood by anyone. So when you see Medieval icons of Saint George slaying the dragon, they will all have similar tropes even in artwork made centuries apart specifically so that someone doesn't have to read the book to understand what the artwork itself depicts. Symbols and meanings were far more important then than getting perceived "reality" across. Funerary effigies are an excellent example where I will fully agree Matt Lewis as well - the individual faces shown in funerary effigies are seldom very representative of a person, and more than not show a more generic face. But their clothes and armour tend to be very specified to that person, and indeed the best way for us to learn about things like plate armour is often through funerary effigies accurately depicting armour and us being able to compare that with the few extant pieces we have remaining.
I also used to think Medieval art was a bit goofy, but learning more about it I think it's quite beautiful. It's capable of conveying meaning through simple means, does so much with so little, and even in places where the anatomy looks funny or the faces are less expressive, it can still show entire battlefields or wars in a single painting.
You are absolutely right. A representative example is the Christ Pantocrator in Byzantine art of the Middle Ages, in which he is depicted in a perfectly "flat" fashion with enormous staring eyes that seem to bore right through the viewer.
It makes sense that artists wouldn't aim for photographic accuracy in their subjects, really. If you want to see things that way, you can just look around at it. Prior to the printing press, people were telling full stories through their art, because there weren't many other media at the time, especially media that people who couldn't read text could derive the intended message from.
Giotto, Cimabue, Duccio di Buoninsegna, Ambrogio Lorenzetti etc..(and this is only italy). I don't know how some people can call medieval art "bad", aside from ignorance I guess. yes it was more primitive and stylized compared to reinassance but any human expression must be judged relative to its time and meaning.
@@MarcusLangbart I think Jan van Eyck was very important!
There is also the factor that Artistry as a profession was probably not recognized until the renaissance era.
It is hard to imagine food without New World items such as potatoes and tomatoes.
@@HuskyTheDog2202 chestnuts were an important source of calories. Sort of the potato of the day.
I don’t think they even had salt. No other spices - spices were costly.
I dont think so !
I think Max miller does a good Job about this!
@@margo3367 This isnt true!
@@margo3367they did have salt and a lot of other spices.
5:42 just to add they also needed more calories, due to the fact they didn't have heating, more of the energy from your food had to be used to keep you warm. Also alcohol is high in calories, so a lot of those calories were accessed through that.
Mostly they drank alcohol due to a lack of clean drinking water.
@@alexjutte229 they did it for both. The term weak and strong alcohol comes from the fact they thought, the higher the Alc% the stronger you would become. Interestingly the higher the alcohol content the more calories therefore, in terms of straight energy and weight gain. Stronger alcohol was making them stronger in a round about and highly inefficient way.
@@alexjutte229 What do you need to brew beer? The answer is clean water. Claiming that people were drinking alcohol because the water was dirty is a braindead take
I wonder when we learned that boiling water cleans it.
@@alexjutte229 That's a myth, or at least a rather incomplete understanding. When drinking water, they'd certainly prefer "clean" water over "dirty" water because it tasted better, but germ theory and the importance of sanitation and the role of clean water in that regard wouldn't be understood until the late 19th century. What they would consider drinkable water is not the same as what we would consider potable water.
Access to "clean" water was also not as rare as often thought. Public baths were fairly common in the medieval era even if not quite as prevalent as in the Roman era and people liked bathing. We would not consider their bathhouses sanitary but clearly, they wouldn't have bathed in what they considered "dirty" water.
Things can rarely be simplified down to a simple reason as there are almost always multiple factors at play, but a big reason they drank alcohol is the same reason that people throughout history and even to this day drink it: they liked it.
Medieval art wasnt bad, it was just stylised. A lot of it is actually amazing and highly technical.
It was a weird question, art is subjective. They definitely weren't as focused on realism or portraying things 1:1. It was also more focused on displaying scenes or events, not individuals. Personally, I think the artwork of Hildegard of Bingen are absolutely incredible. Surreal, almost psychedelic and mystical.
It wasn't realistic like Renaissance paintings, that's what i think people mean.
Medieval Japanese art was also very far from being realistic, but for some reason you don't see nearly as many people trying to downplay how beautiful they were.
I imagine everyone is thinking of drawings and paintings when they say they say that. Check out some of the carvings, iconography and statues from a Gothic cathedral for example. Or the cathedral itself!
100%
Ok but some of it is bad lol
Beer:
Hops were not widely used as the bittering agent until around the 18th century. It was usually local herbs and spices that would balance the cloying sweetness of the unfermented barley sugars. Try to find a gruit, that is a revival of a hopless beer style.
Overall, beer was usually less alcoholic, less bitter, more spiced, drunk fairly fresh, and was slightly hazy and sour.
I've tried Gruit, it was quite tasty. Different but I wouldn't mind to have it again.
I was looking for this comment. Also would likely be a bit smokier/toastier and darker since the only way to dry the malted barley and arrest germination was to dry it over a fire. We can precisely control the malting and drying process today to achieve a huge range of malts, but back then that wasn’t the case.
Every brewer’s beer had its own flavor, a bit like sourdough bread today. The local natural yeasts were different and diverged the longer the base was used. I saw an awesome video about beer, but sadly I don’t remember what channel.
Hops were adopted earlier (12th c) in the continent. In the UK it was late to adopt it. For a while the English would referred to the hop flavored brew as “beer” and the traditional herb flavored brew as “ale”. (Both were top fermented as lager had not yet been developed)
They also had drinks with negligible alcohol like kvass, mentioned in Ukraine at least since 10th century, and it's still consumed by kids (impossible to get drunk from it), it has no more alcohol than sour milk products, i.e. kefir. Speaking of that, West and Central Asia has a long tradition of milk products as nomads wouldn't settle in once place long enough to grow grapes for wine, the famous legend of Scythian queen Tomyris beheading Cyrus the Great comes from that. Later, Islam solidified milk drunks like kumis among Muslim peoples i.e. Tatars or Kazakhs.
Modern filtering was also not a thing, and since ancient times (literally prehistoric, like before writing was invented), we can see carvings of people drinking beer from jars with straws, that's to avoid all the hard stuff that would be in it, so many "beers" in ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia would be like porridge or smoothies. Of course people had liquid drinks too, I am just elaborating on what constituted "beer" back then, straight up stuff to get drunk was often called "mead" too, see various chronicles...
Then Persians invented distilling (and didn't use if for much because of alcohol ban in Quran) in early Middle Ages, but vodka was invented by Polish way later. I looked up and it seems French were distilling brandy as early as 14th century so late Medieval period, and Irish and Scots were making whiskey in early 1000s, which is actually something I didn't expect, while cognac is a pretty late drink. Not sure about champagne, I guess monks could fart into wine or something, I am not a clergywoman to know.
I love the first part of this video - One of my favorite teachers would receive a good question from a student. He had NO problem with pausing, thinking for a bit, then simply saying “That’s a great question! I don’t have all the facts, but I’ll answer as much as I can. Give me a bit to refer to my notes/books and I’ll get an answer for you!”
It was refreshing to have a person of authority simply say “I don’t know.” instead of making something up on the spot. And he’d absolutely make it a point to write the question down and have an answer either later that class period or the next day.
Q: Why were the Middle ages also called the Dark Ages?
A: Because they had so many knights...
[I'll get my coat.]
[slow clap]
😄
Dark Ages was Early Medieval Period, or Pre-Medieval. Definitely not purely Medieval.
It took a second but I did chuckle a bit
@@Calucifer13 Dark age is a term we no longer use, we call it late antquity and early middle ages
Don't let the door hit you on the way out
My neighbour has a medieval cottage with an original dirt floor in the back room. It sounds dirty doesn’t it? Once a year the room is cleared of furniture and a mixture of sour milk and chalk is poured over it. It takes about 3 -4 days to set, and works exactly like lineoleum.
I would love a video on this, both from an historian but also a chemist or similar to explain how it works.
Thats awesome
Does milk have a strong scent? Because if you drop milk in your clothes, it smells strong once it dries out.
Does the same happen with said flooring?
@@marir.s3620perhaps the chalk acts as a sort of antiseptic? Also, I've seen milk stains on my counters drying to a sort of "plastic" texture, so maybe....
Never heard about this in all the many history videos I've watched over the years. Thanks! I'm going to find more on that.
Another note about guilds: They would be used in order to regulate businesses. A guild could, for example, determine the price range that all its members were allowed to charge for certain goods or services, which in turn meant that no single member could just undercut all of their competitors to push them out of the market. Guilds often had the political influence to cause local laws to be enacted that prevented non-members from working in the same craft in a city, or merchants from selling imported goods at too low a price.
Guilds also often offered a sort of insurance for their members, providing for members who had fallen ill until and were unable to work until they recovered, and paying the spouse of deceased members a pension.
Guilds also enforced quality standards and regulated the training of aspiring craftsmen, which made them an important and well-accepted institution within medieval cities.
Correction: Making beer doesn't purify water. This is a popular myth.
Beer was generally safe to drink, for the simple reason that you *couldn't* make beer from impure water. It takes clean, fresh water with no major bacterial contamination in order to create beer, meaning that if water from a specific source could be used to make beer, that water was also generally safe to drink, and any beer you did have was pretty likely to have been made from clean water and therefore also safe.
Thought guilds were just where reincarnated people signed up so they could hunt 👻 👾 for 🪙 💰 😂 and level 🆙️
Casually tossing up a pic of Richard III when saying the king can't be told not to be cruel or inflict pain was a chef's kiss! Well done to the production crew.
Fantastic video.
? The English people got rid of him and gave him a reputation no subsequent monarch would want.
@@fion1flatout He wasn't deposed.
Richard III wasn’t a cruel king. Henry VIII was a cruel king. He murdered everyone who disagreed with him.
Matt Lewis is a Ricardian..
@hannytierlierblaauw192 Yes, I know, which is why I thought the placement was so funny.
Despite being a Ricardian, I still like Mr. Lewis & find his discussions & books to be brilliant.
*THE VAST MAJORITY OF THE TIME* the vast majority of the people were pretty happy and pretty well fed, worked for pretty reasonable lords and had pretty reasonable neighbours.
The medieval period is 1000 years - we pick out the battles, the famines, the Viking raids, the especially vile lords etc. But 365,000 days is a LOT of days - by far the majority of them were very ordinary, and probably 95% of these days were unremarkable and even the remarkable days didn't affect 95% of people with the exception of plagues.
Strange women, lying in ponds, distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Best comment 👌
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Well I didn't vote for You.
@@BobSaint You don't vote for kings!
Come and see the violence inherent in the system!! Help! Help! I’m being repressed!!
😂
From what I've seen and read ,medieval hospitals were more like hospices than hospitals. Quite often it was a place for those who were at the end of their life or close to it. Obviously some people did recover through the rest they got in a hospital but I would imagine the death rate was extremely high.
They didn't really have hospitals yet in medieval Europe, there were monasteries and nunneries where people could receive hospice care, as you said, otherwise people were mostly treated at home. So I imagine there was more concern about the state of the person's soul rather than their body. Apart from in places like Turkiye and the middle east during medieval times where they had started establishing proper hospitals as places of both physical and spiritual recuperation. They even had mental health wings. Look up information about the Maristan or Dar ul Shifa for more info on them, it's very interesting.
@@BiddyBiccy Yes to the Maristan! The middle east really were pioneers of creating a lot of what makes a modern hospital today. In Europe there were places where they tried to make the Maristan thing happen, but it was very hard for a multitude of reasons one of them being the way "healthcare" was funded. So we had monasteries and nunneries that would offer their services to the ill. These places were also used as hostals for travellers who needed a place to stay. Look up the "beguines", these were religious women who dedicated their lives to helping those in need specially the sick and even destitute or prostitute women. Look up also Saint John of God and his institution Brothers Hospitallers of Saint John of God, he was a monk who dedicated his life to taking care of the sick and funded that which ended up becoming a worldwide institute. All this to say, while a lot of non-specialized personnel ended up taking care of the sick, there were also people who specialized in that just like today we have nurses and doctors. Matrons existed back then too and had a super important sanitary role.
All you have to do stop and consider the Sunday scaries, blue Mondays, Hump day and TGIF to realize that people today are not happy in one sense but, at the same time, most of us aren't miserable. In the medieval period and really right up to the late 19th century most people were doing basic productive tangible work that contributed to survival and the quality of life in their community which might have given people a far greater sense of purpose than most people's jobs today, even if it was more arduous.
Ah yes, kripaki toiling 6 days a week for their pomeschik's field just to have their kids end up property of said pomeschik, sold, bought, whipped, or married at a whim of a noble TOTALLY had more sense of purpose than someone working 9 to 5... Listen, feudal times were horrible and most people were abused by 0.01% land-owners, way worse than current venture capitalists who have SOME checks and balances to their actions. Like yeah bosses suck but at least they're not like some local baron requesting first night with your new wife.
Yes of course, you're right 🙃. There was no sense of purpose. In the medieval times, in England at least, there wasn't a sense of nationality. People didn't feel a sense of belonging or pride from being English because they didn't feel represented by the king. The only thing they knew was their lord and they owed respect and basically their whole life to them. Children, men and women would work on their lent peace of lands for survival and then, they had to work on the lord's land. 16 hours a day, housing condition was dreadful, no clean water, only corn and bread for food. You were not free either, as you belonged to the lord's land. So yes, I'm sure they had a good sense of purpose back then.
@@camillerose8323 Most of what you say his mistaken but correcting it is more than there is space for in a comment section. I respectfully suggest that you go and read some good quality history books about the period. I also understand the pressing need that modern people have, particularly those trapped in the "corporate grind," to insist that we live in the Best of all Possible Worlds. We don't.
@@brucetidwell7715 I've read Trevelyan, Lipson, Stenton, Myers, etc. I have more than vast knowledge of English history, especially the medieval times and the modern times of the Tudors and Stuarts. Not everyone is stupid. I suggest you look up what I said, and check if I'm correct.
This
"Hey Matt, how are you doin'?"
"Well that's a tricky question..."
😂💀☠️
Never trust people that claim to know the full truth about everything! Even this question is hard to answer sometimes isn''t it?
@@joostverra9130 You speak true. Every question can be complicated and require a nuanced answer.
However, 'how you doing?' is not usually a question as it is a way of acknowledge someone's presence and pass some friendly words. That's why it is a funny post.
Yeah he rarely answers the question, more so gives info around it.
@@Hazuriel When they asked him “How heavy were medieval swords” his response was “the best sword is the one that feels good on the hands”, that was not the question. In other very specific questions he would just say things like “that’s tricky” or talk about the topic without providing an answer.
On the beer question: I’m no expert, but as I understand…
It may have been infused with a variety of herbs, whereas, nowadays, that’s limited to just one: hops.
Beer and ale should be regarded as a source of nutrition, not just a beverage. It’s liquid bread. In ancient and medieval times, it was considered a significant part of the diet.
Thanks to all who liked my reply.
I’ll add that hops serves to preserve the beer. I also understand that it is fairly closely related to cannabis.
Funnily enough here in Germany we still sometimes call beer liquid bread.
So then it might not have tasted as bitter? 🤨
@@amazinggrapes3045 That depends on the choice of herbs.
@@DaydreamingSophie Yea, but it doesn't toast well.
This was very well done!!!! I really enjoyed learning more about the Middle Ages!!! Hats off to you Matt and the history hit team!!!!
Fun fact: The four humours are still the basis of many "personality tests" today. Whenever you see a quadratic matrice as basis (e.g. MBTI, Kersey Temparament Sorter, 16PF) it is based on the "Four Temparaments" which is a transfer of the four humors onto people's emotions. Only about a hundred years ago a new system, the lexical hypothesis, was proposed and has led to new personality tests like The Big Five or HEXACO.
Yep. Which makes people who harp on about MBTI laughable.
Oh a INFJ are you? Phlegmatic more like. And that's me being nice
Sounds like something a sanguine person would say…
@@TomJakobW How did you know? Well, actually I am sanguine-choleric.
Most personality tests you see online or in pop psychology journals are a scam, BTW, there are helpful clinical tests like Cattell's 16PF but they DO NOT tell what personality you have but are used by psychologists to measure client's change over time. Post-Jungian stuff like Myers-Briggs (or worse, Socionics) are actually do more harm than good as the result switch based on person's mood. The funniest thing is that almost everyone who believes in them says the same thing "I am INTJ did you know it's the rarest type only special super smart geniuses like Sherlock Holmes, Dr. House and MEEEEEEE have?"
Finally, the biggest irony, is that while Four Humours theory in medicine is completely wrong and killed tons of people (doctors were "bleeding" them with dirty instruments because these morons didn't believe in infection), the four personality types DO have research that collaborates with them, specifically Eysenck put them on two scales, extroversion and neuroticism (emotional stability). I.e. a "sanguine" person isn't someone who has (Harker's voice in Dead and Loving it) _too much blood,_ but an extroverted emotionally non-stable person. Opposite for phlegmatics (and not having too much snot).
Anything more that just that is usually fiction. Many people try to challenge Eysenck too, as for every two psychologists there's at least three theories, but at this point the critique mostly boils down to trying to deny introverts right to exist in an attempt to force them to become extroverts, seeing introversion as a disorder and not a personality type.
But BOI the Socionic people are effectively a cult based on a _personality test._
The Briggs-Meyers (that's how I learned it) is based on Carl Jung's personality theory. It is a useful metric to determine learning styles and has applications in education. It should be interpreted by a trained psychologist, though, so avoid the popular nonsense on the internet.
This guy woked up, put on the first t-shirt that he saw and just walked into the studio. Absolute hero. Now I will be less stressed about my t-shirt's collar and how bad is it curled
Proper enthusiasts who are happy with their knowledge are quite oblivious to clothing habits, and even the proliferation of body hair.
I'm sure you could make a pretty artistic film about peace in peasant life. Same family dramas , marriage, births deaths etc. "Real housewives of plot of land near river "
Downton Abbey, but in the middle ages
Pillars of the Earth is kinda this. There is strife but it's not generally about war. I only read the first book, and loved it, but I know there is at least one sequel and an adaptation.
“The Kings hounds” by Martin Jensen, a medieval novell in the time of King Cnut and also a detective story.
Ah yes, let's keep romaticizing serfdom and slavery, make the new Song of the South for future generation to cringe about and write disclaimers that "morons made it". Oh, BTW, the genre about happy go lucky peasants toiling the land exists. It's called "social realism" aka the only genre allowed in Soviet Union. You had kolkhoz slaves singing in opera voices while doing force labor on the land that was "collectivized" from their family and given to party bonzas in moscow.
And China still does that shit with "singing and dancing Uyghurs" doing slave labour. I also loved learning that singing during working in the field was _forced by pomeschiks_ on kripaks so they _wouldn't dare eating,_ they had to occupy their mouths non-stop. Oh BTW, krepostnoye pravo also meant that you belong to a feudal, your wife and your kids too, and their kids. It was effectively chattel slavery for Eastern European people. PLEASE STOP NORMALIZING PAST ATROCITIES!
😅
The question of "why was medieval torture so horrible" seems so strange to me... it's torture, doesn't really matter when it was its not really a nice thing
Plus unfortunately it's still a thing in our times.
Perhaps "gruesome" would have been a better word. Torture's effects nowadays is often hidden.
There’s orders of magnitude. Waterboarding or sleep deprivation is torture and is cruel, buts it’s a different sort of thing to being flayed alive or broken on the wheel.
my sentiment exactly.
It was orrible
Him: Medieval people weren’t dirty
“How did their sewers work”
Him: Badly
😂😂😂
My thoughts exactly 😂
less than 5% of the population lived in cities, so sewers being bad affected very few people; sewers also continued to be bad until the mid-19th century, with the ginourmous public works projects to implement sewers and pipes in cities
People didnt exactly bath in the sewers. He answered the question whether a basic peasant would be dirty, sewers were only in the city. Just because sewers are bad doesnt mean that the people themselves are dirty.
As Keto said, it's two separate topics. People weren't rolling around in open sewers.
Bathhouses were incredibly common all around Europe during the Middle Ages. Part of the misconception around this is we have religious documents where priests were telling people to go to bathhouses less often, but that wasn't because they didn't want people to bathe. Bathhouses often doubled as brothels. They were also places disease could easily spread during epidemics, due to a lot of people being crowded into one place. But people back then understood the same thing people today do. That unpleasant smells are bad and pleasant smelling things are good. It's why people often bathed with rose petals or other flaural scents.
Regarding Medieval medicine I just watched a fascinating show about the surgery to remove an arrow from the face of Henry V of England. He was 16 years old and it (the arrow) went in 6 inches.
Yeah and he kept fighting with it stuck in his face. These people had next level pain tolerance.
That ain’t nothing, check out a painting of a hungarian hussar with a lance in his face
@@ericbrown1101I'm pretty sure I would just die of shock from an injury like that if I didn't get immediate medical attention, he fought a battle with an arrow through his skull and then waited for them to prise it out with pliers and alcohol. As far as I understand his doctor did a fantastic job for the time but how horrific.
Old timey surgeons were amazing! They were also treated as slaves and cosidered unskilled labor as they didn't know "humorism". It's doctors who were dipshits and bled people to death based on pseudoscience and part of the elite.
@@bluegum6438 there's actually a very harmful superstition of people "dying from shock" or "pain shock" in general. There IS a similar medical term "toxic shock", but that's not it, people do not die from having too much pain. Why does it matter? Soviet school of battlefield medicine believed in that, and to this day we have some medics in Ukraine taught to lessen pain at any cost and avoid tightening tourniquets too much, or give the injured morphine-based painkillers that can make the injury worse. Of course now there's awareness about it raised, but there's still red tape by outdated laws like ban on field blood transfusions that led to a lot of soldiers dying needlessly.
Delightful to watch and listen to
What did medieval women look like?" "Women???" 😂
Well, they didn't have fillers and botox
@@PeleskiBy and large, they didn't live long enough to need it!
@@reggae-rock-roots Maybe the opposite! People were quite pocked back then.
Hairy women.
Not being mean, if I’m not mistaken they didn’t shave in the Middle Ages.
As a person who spends all his time watching history videos and reading about history I can concur, I was also confused by the word woman.
The story about the children being blinded and having their noses cut off is horrific.
I have a feeling I won't forget that one but wish I could
I relate to your comment !! I was looking for the comment about it
If you're ever studying history and find yourself thinking "Wow. People sure were stupid in the past", there's a good chance you're misunderstanding something or missing context.
People in the Middle Ages had the same brains we do. The same problem solving abilities. They weren't a different species of human.
Excellent discourse on normalizing Medieval people and culture. Thumbs up
Does anyone else feel a little strange when seeing the podcaster after having listened for so long? It's like seeing the movie after reading the book! Love this video and the podcast
😊
Gone Medieval is such a gem of a podcast!
Hilarious that when asked what they eat, the video editor shows a pile of vegetables that includes a tomato, an artichoke, and corn... It also looks like an avocado is just barely in frame...
Tomatoes, corn, and avocados come from the New World and would have been unknown to medieval Europe, Artichokes came from North Africa and are recorded to have arrived in Europe in the 1400s - they would have been unknown for most of medieval time, and then exceptionally expensive afterwards.
The best answer to "What did people eat in Medieval times?" is "Local."
I love Matt! He's well informed and a good sport. He even thought there were more questions and was absolute ready to answer!😂
Art student here: there are many reasons why medieval paintings look “bad” compared to today’s standards of realism or compared to renaissance paintings, for example. One explanation being a change in ideology- this also connects to geography. The renaissance saw more and more “accurate” representations of figures because this high-accuracy skill that some painters had became extremely valuable with the introduction of The Academy. As an example, in ancient Egypt, art representing the gods was never “accurate” because they were offerings to the gods, and the accuracy of the piece was not valued at the time, rather the intention. There were also instances where the price you pay for a commission (during the renaissance) was equivalent to how detailed your portrait was. Another factor contributing to the development of higher-accuracy art was the introduction of the camera obscura, where rudimentary projections of a setting or figure are displayed on the canvas for the artist to trace.
About Egypt, there are only two points that I know of when they did realistic art: the short Amarna period, and later Roman era. Compare how Cleopatra was pictured in Egyptian busts of her and in art they did in Rome. Looks like completely different people.
I really enjoyed this session, it was well laid out, and an easy watch, interesting as well,
I like how he goes on to stress the various differences between medieval and early modern times... And whoever edited the video picked so much imagery from the 16-18th centuries for a bunch of the medieval things he talks about.
Loved his passion in defending good name od medieval people :) totally agree with him. And I am looking forward to next show
Let’s not forget medieval music, it was beautiful 💞
Love love love! Would love to see more vids like this.
0:58
I took a medieval history class at university about a year ago, and i distinctly remember the professor saying that she would mark the exam as an immediate failure if we even mentioned the year 476 AD as the beginning of the middle ages, she was joking of course but while in common culture it's still used as a conventional date the actual boundary is still fairly debated, generally speaking most historians agree that the end of the ancient world and the beginning of the middle ages was marked by the start of christian supremacy over pagan beliefs in Europe, around the 6th century AD, almost no book above high school level uses the conventional 476 now a days.
that was so interesting! please bring him back, i want to learn more about medieval things!
“So be prepared to hear an awful lot of…idk” 😂😂 I already love this guy lol
Thanks for the history lessons.
Ah!! There you are! On my RUclips list!! Wonderful.
Thanks very much, that was really interesting, informative and entertaining 👍
Thank you! Loved this video. In the end people are just like us regardless of the times in which they lived. We are in a constant state of change, that's all.
You would think the stench alone would have been enough to motivate them to develop an alternative method of waste disposal. I suppose when you've lived with something for years, you become indifferent to it.
The answer about being "dirty" in medieval times was interesting, that they had an underlayer of linen clothing that they washed and changed regularly. This video makes me want to delve more into the history of medieval times from a factual perspective. I loved how he shut down the idea that medieval art was ugly. It clearly was not, and much of their architecture was truly stunning.
Latrines were located at the back of the house, to avoid said stench. They´d also be cleaned regulary for the same reason. Channels in the street were there for water, lye and stuff like that.
The thing is, people thought bad smell transmits diseases (before we found out about bacteria etc). There was a huge market for aromatics, perfumes and volatile oils
@@Matze239 Exactly this. Humans have always been humans, and we've generally never liked bad smells, so medieval people also didn't like them and would therefore do everything they could to avoid smells.
your take on medieval art is the best take i've seen about anything anywhere about medieval times in a long time.
great job explaining history as a story in a very short and approachable amount of time
Bravo, maestro, more please.
21:15 fun facts about linen: it actually inhibits bacterial growth, and is stain and dirt resistant. I've also heard (no source, sorry) that its coarse texture works a bit like a scrubbing glove, so when wearing it you actually get rid of skin cells. the more you know :)
This was great!
I love this guy. This was very informative. Thanks! 👍
"medieval people weren't dirty" Immediately starts talking about sewers in the middle of the street lol. (I understand and agree with his point just found the juxtaposition funny)
5:46 from what I read that was only true in harvest season. But for example in winter there wasn't much work to do. Some historians actually estimated that the average work week for a peasant was just 10 or 20 hours, but with a lot of seasonal variation.
Probably true, but regular work all year would be easier on the body. Not easy doing everything to strict seasons.
Thanks
Medieval historian and economist, here. The narrator made some common errors and needed to elucidate on other points to clarify them for the modern audience. Overall, he did a good job.
Never forget that bread today contains 19x the amount of gluten than wheat flour even in the early 1960s. (Thank you Big Ag…not!). So bread was healthful. Back then, even second class bread would today be called artisanal. “White bread” was not white, it was tan. Nobody bleached the nutrients out of flour, like is done today.
Ale and beer: like drinking bread, with a little alcohol. Plus, from wild yeasts in the air, the drink had tetracycline in it! Ale was brewed without hops, beer was.
When the narrator says the (“table ale”) was watered down, he doesn’t mean water was added. Ale brewing was an inexact exact science. One never knew if it was going to be sweet, sour or a sweet-sour taste. Also goes for the amount of alcohol in it. Every town had at least on ale-warden whose job it was to distinguish between the qualities. Small/weak/table ale could be drunk copiously when doing heavy labor without the unfortunate alcohol side effects. The reason ales and beers were “clean” and healthful was that the water had to be boiled.
Yes, very young children drank ale, the weak stuff, with near zero alcohol percentage.
Water: from time immemorial, locals knew which sources of water were clean and which were “sick”. They weren’t stupid. If they were, they died.
The movie trope of a colorless lower and middle class is far from true, except in Scotland where dyes were taxed heavily. There, one used plant based dyes. The color range, even for the lower class in England was greater.
Underclothes: linen was usually changed when it didn’t pass the “sniff test”. That was usually every two to three days, depending upon how much one sweated. This comes from several modern experiments with medieval reenactors. Cotton was around, but failed the sniff test at the end of the day. And cotton was half the price of silk, which meant that both were prohibitively expensive to the common and lower classes.
The medieval literacy rate jumped considerably after the first occurrence of the Plague (the Black Death as it was later called). Fewer people meant higher wages (eventually) which led to a growing middle class, a literate class. Books became in demand.
In church, the priest never told the congregation what the Bible said. The Church, Inc (arguably the first multinational organization) was quite afraid if the commons knew that in Jesus’ time there were no priests, bishops or even a pope they’d all be out of a job. (Illustrated well in the series “Wolf Hall”.)Violently. Quite right, as seen by the Reformation.
The priest read a passage. Without going into church practices, which were markedly different from today’s, that was that. He read it in Latin, as well. Which was probably butchered, as many priests were barely literate and knew little Latin, if any.
Pointed shoes: originally called “Cracows”, supposedly invented in Cracow, Poland. They became a fashion statement, as they were quite impractical, as many of our own fashions today. They caused bunions. (Definitely suffering for fashion!) Clergy were not supposed to wear them, but since when have a few silly dictates stopped fashion? They were also called “poulains”.
In medieval times, there were no rights for the common people, human or otherwise. Nobles, of course, had rights. What do you think the Magna Carta was about? The commons? Ha! Don’t give them bad ideas.
The Catholic Church dealt in slaves. Especially those captured by the Teutonic Order in what is now the Baltic States.
The Normans never outlawed slavery in England after 1066. They made it illegal for English people to be slaves. However, the Irish were popular as slaves. There was a thriving trade between Dublin and Bristol. Scots? Other “races” as slaves? No problem.
Brutality: the median age of the population was late teen to early twenties. A youthful population was violent (look at the Oxford crime rate), condoned fighting, animal baiting and painful means of execution (everyone like to see the “bad guys”/ criminals get it). It’s been like that for thousands of years, anthropologically speaking.
I thought I’d clarify some ideas touched upon (and not) to give you a better idea of the medieval world. Thanks for getting this far. I hope it was helpful and interesting.
Cheers!
Re: the amount of Gluten in modern bread-that goes a long way in explaining why so many people are gluten intolerant today! Thank you for the great info👍🏼
@@dannork1240 You nailed it for the gluten problems and intolerances. Big Ag has literally killed people and ruined lives for profit.
I have had low gluten einkorn bread, and it was delicious. Not surprisingly, it tastes quite different than the bread of today. I instantly understood how bread was a staple of the medieval diet, regardless of class.
I can only imagine how different ale and beer tasted.
Cheers!
Cheers, I'm afraid I have actually been drinking, LoL. I'm an Early Modern English Historian, who loves the Tudor period as well and I've taken plunges into the mediaeval period. And I thank you for your comment.
After much reading, I believe mediaeval people were even cleaner, especially peasants, than the people of later periods, because they were less concerned about public nakedness.
A few fun facts from a slightly later period. Despite being assured by the local community that the water was safe, Samuel Pepys nearly died twice from drinking rural water. In his household the linens were washed by his wife and her maids, on average every three weeks. But ofcourse he did not engage in heavy labour. They were ofcourse soaked in urine before being boiled. Again to personal cleanliness, there is many people who say he was dirty and maybe only washed his face. But there is one day in his diary when he slept in and rather than completely washing his entire body, he only had time to wash his face. He described how dirty he felt all day. I am old enough to have known ladies who still washed with a jug and ceramic bowl.
As for pottage, my information on the matter was that it was not vegetable based but grain or legume based. Elizabeth 1, always said it was her favourite food. Very clever politically, but apparently hers was full of sugar.
Moving along historically about beer and ale. English doctors wrote many papers about this in the 1800s. Again not my period. But apparently Methodist and other farmers didn't like the working class agricultural workers being given alcohol whilst working. Instead they gave them tea. Many doctors noticed this resulted in malnutrition in agricultural workers.
Back to the middle ages, Lawrance Stone, in the 70s gave an interesting theory based on Russian research where the practice continued into the twentieth century. Swaddling. When the practice ended, infant mortality fell.
Goodnight from Australia.
@@grannyannie2948 Annie,
Thanks of the exchange of most excellent information.
Being in the SCA in the States from the seventies, I became a Medievalist. I researched recipes for my wife. I fought in plate armor, practiced archery, etc. And researched forms of address and rank.
Did you know that calling a duke (for example) “your grace” did not enter the lexicon until the late Tudor or Stewart era? It was simply “my lord duke”. The fancy titles were probably a Renaissance affection. Hollywood and the film industry has been very wrong, but since when have they (and most authors) cared?
Many pottages were indeed, as you noted, grain/legume based. Add onions and chunks of bacon and … voila!
Bacon: was chunked, not in the strips we know today. Union General Butler, governor of captured New Orleans from 1862, had his bacon cut the way we know it. It caught on. Also, bacon was more like Canadian bacon, as there as little lard in medieval porkers. Only during WW2 were pigs grown for lots of lard by government instructions. I believe it started in the USA. The lard-fat pigs have stayed. (Bring back the lean pork!) And since the pigs were closer to their wild cousins, they were perforce lean and gamey tasting. They were maybe a third the size of the ones today. So were sheep.
Again, nice to hear from you over in Oz. Goodnight from the Pacific Northwest.
Hearty Cheers!
@@PSDuck216 We have groups like that here too. Though I've never seen them fight in plate armour, only chainmail. The difference between ale and beer is that ale only keeps for weeks, whereas hops are included in beer giving it a shelf life of months. It was was known in England in the Middle Ages, and drank in the Netherlands, but ussually only used in England for long sea voyages.
Ale wives could join the guilds and have full voting rights, and widdows inherited their husbands vote if they continued to run their husbands business. Guilds could have considerable power. They could vote London to be a commune, considerably reducing the king's tax base.
I agree that the Black Death changed the power dynamic for many peasants. I always thought that peasants were taught Bible stories, and that before the reformation many stories were illustrated on church walls.
Phillipa Gregory does write some half decent novels about the Wars of the Roses, and the Tudors. But I have struck some dreadful, unreadable rubbish where they are eating potatoes in 1300, for example. I highly recommend the BBC farm series, (there are multiple) there are two mediaeval ones, one set in the reign of Henry vii, and another building a castle in the era of Eleanor of Aquitaine. My favourite is tales of the green valley in the 1600s. Archeologists, dress in the era, and run a farm, build and produce the food, for a year, in different historical periods.
I recall my grandfather telling me that when he was a boy bacon was stored in the kitchen chimney, and people cut it various ways. You are too kind about my drunken ramblings.
Cheers, I'm sober now but it is nearly beer time LoL.
I wouldn't necessarily say medieval knights were muscular in the sort of modern bodybuilder sense, strong certainly, but we can infer from art (and I do think at least for specific periods we have pretty good art on how they might have looked) and from what we know of the kinds of exercise they would have gotten. There's also armour and fashion, in the later medieval period there was definitely a sort of ideal of how a knight should look, think waist, broad shoulders and such. Armour from this period does back this up, as it'd be exceedingly hard for you to fit into a stereotypical suit of gothic plate if you were built like a modern bodybuilder. So they were muscular for sure, strong absolutely, they would have had to be, but not in the sense that we might imagine today.
I imagine they would be muscular like bricklayers or other types of manual labourer are today?
The BBC series 'History Cold Case' took a look at a knight's skeleton and that person was most definitely well-built. Not in the puffy way of bodybuilders, but more in a natural strength kind of way. Especially the shoulders and arms were well developed by swinging a sword or carrying a heavy lance + shield. Knights would also be able to access better food and more protein than an average soldier, so I bet they would be a little bulkier too if they ate well. I think we also need to bring up survivorship bias for the armour from that era, as most still existing suits are most likely from nobility (who rarely actually fought) or were kept through the ages as novelties/status objects. I think the answer lies somewhere in between. Yes, they were well built but not like modern bodybuilders. I imagine they probably looked a bit like those old bodybuilders from the early 1900's. That physique is usually slimmer but still as strong, if not stronger.
I was genuinely shocked when Matt Lewis made that claim in the video. The person above who wrote that they’d look more like manual labourers is far closer to the truth.
Yes! A lot of people don't understand that LOOKING muscular (in a modern way) and actually being strong don't necessarily correlate a lot of times. I'm sure they were strong, but they wouldn't have a six pack for example or have super defined muscles. If anything, those who were less lean would probably look "fat" or midsize by today's standards only because we can't see a six pack.
Absolutely nobody was muscular in _modern_ bodybuilder sense until the 1950s as steroids weren't invented before that. Look at natty bodybuilders in old photos, in modern day, especially clothed, they would simply look lean and well-built, not bulging like those guys who are bald and old in ripe old age of 22 because of injecting a century's worth of testosterone into themselves. Of course muscular people existed going way back to see ancient Greek statues, they still looked more like Laocoön rather AND HIS NAME IS JOHN CENA!1111$%
You can see him reconsider his life every time a new question was asked. He is confused, but also happy that people are curious about this topic.
I just took a medieval literature class at my uni and hearing my professor speak Middle English was so interesting
Matt, thanks, I really enjoyed your knowledge and compassion to those times
The 9000 calorie stuff is wild. For some reason I had it in my mind they would eat tiny portions & struggle to eat much most of the time. I don't think I could manage that many calories!
Keep in mind because they drank alcohol a lot more than we do today, it was a little easier. A pint of ale is around 250 calories so if you had 8 a day that's 2,000 calories each and the higher the Alc% the higher the calories so we can be talking 3,500+ calories from alcohol alone. So it makes a little more sense when it is more like 5,000 calories from food, although still sounds a huge amount. Keep in mind also that due to not having heating they also had to use more of their energy on keeping themselves warm.
I live in the third world, and spent some time on a farm. During sowing season the landowner is expected to give all the workers their daily wage and a meal.
I wasn't exactly working on the farm, as the owner was a friend of mine. However he'd often have trouble understanding what they're saying and i could help translate and I made a few friends.
I've seen with my own eyes the average farm worker eat 2x to 3x the amount of food I'd eat. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fellow myself, at around 194 cm and weighing around 90 kgs, and the tallest of the men was around 170cm max. They're also very lean by comparison, and the labour would make them demand some alcohol at the end of the day. This is because their bodies would hurt after work and alcohol would help them sleep.
@@Alex-cw3rz True, good point
Besides famine when it happened. Peasents ate well. They grew what tbey eatz and would catch fish
@@rustomkanishkaincredible but also sad
Thank you for a great video, it was funny, enlightening and I enjoyed it very much
Medieval art lacked shadow and light. Which is what most people are used to. Rembrandt made this popular in the 17th century.
There was also little perspective until the renaissance with Giotto and Brunelleschi, etc. Medieval artists could sort of convey distance by moving things up and down on the image but there was little foreshortening or anything that gives a sense of 3D space.
@@curtispreston7928 Two mistakes: 1. Giotto isn’t a reneissance artist, he is a gothic 13th century italian painter and 2. He attepted to paint architecture but it was never in perspective
Well, kinda... That dramatic use of shadow is called chiarascuro or sometimes tenebrism. Other artists used this throughout the renaissance, too, although its considered a feature of baroque painting (ca 1600's). Actually, Caravaggio was a generation before Rembrandt and hes generally considered to be the guy that popularized the technique.
I thought the Four Humours were "Wry", "Sarcastic", "Crude", and "Punny". They always made the best medicine.
~3:46 This is false, Petrarch coined the term "dark age" to criticize the Latin literature of his time and harken back to a supposedly better period in classical antiquity, and this usage was popularized for the entire Middle Ages during the "Age of Enlightenment" by people who glorified classical antiquity and percieved themselves as returning to the intellectual heights of that period out of a supposedly more "barbaric" age. It was absolutely a pejorative, used in the same way it often is today. The usage of "dark age" to mean "period with fewer written sources" is a much more recent reinterpretation applied by some scholars to the Early Middle Ages, not the origin of the term.
Some of physicians and midwives were amazing healers during the medieval period. I remember it was John Bradmore who did an amazing surgery that was advanced when he removed a arrow from the prince of wales from the battle of shrewsbery and he allowed the wound to heal from the inside out instead of stitching it up. That was a majorly new concept in England but it worked and the prince healed really well.
Medieval monks and nuns in hospitals were often more concerned with the state of the soul than the body.
How do you know that?
Maybe they had a more holistic view.
On the other hand, major illnesses may well have been untreatable, so taking care of the spiritual side of things would have seemed more important.
People in Europe cared alot about their soul, so of course having a nun or a priest by your side was important
@@richardyates7280 This was before people got sick of the Church disallowing it and started dissecting corpses to figure out exactly what's going on inside our bodies. The body's workings were more mysterious than the workings of the soul, or so they believed at the time. Without anatomical knowledge or the scientific method most diseases are impossible to cure, only manage symptoms.
While Medieval medicine wasn't as archaic as some people may have you believe, there were still a lot of things that they couldn't cure so it makes perfect sense why people involved in healthcare back then were more interested in the soul rather than the body. If you can't cure their body, the least you can do is take care of their soul. And arguably, this introduced a now almost lost concept into healthcare which is the fact that treating ONLY the illness is not enough to provide good healthcare; your healthcare practice thrives when your care is humanized, when you look at the person and see a human being instead of just a leg that needs to be chopped or a set of symptoms that need to go away.
I mean that's how religion operated until more recent times as well
I think Medieval art is absolutely beautiful. I love ur program. I never knew this much about the Medieval times & people! Ur giving me quite an interesting education! Thanks
The picture of vegetables at 4:38 is misleading. Corn, Carrots and Tomatoes didn't come to Europe until much later during colonization of America.
Carrots were absolutely available; they probably originated in Central Asia and have been recorded in Europe between 3000 and 2000 BCE.
@@mattjones5813 I have heard in the medieval times there where often yellow!
There are many types of corn ,not just MAIZECORN (American Corn)!
Corn can be just a different word for Grain!
I think this was just lost in translation.
I think the Picture wasnt choosen by the historian!
@@killerkraut9179 Plenty of different colours. Purple carrots weren't uncommon, either. Though funnily enough, the orange we usually associate with carrots these days is actually a more recent development iirc.
Great video, as always, Matt!
So interesting. I learned a lot.
4:12 Not to mention that some of the first universities in the world were established during the Middle Ages!
Saw a video about medieval urinary stones the other day, and that can't be unseen. I'll keep my modern life with access to plentiful potable water, thanks.
And antibiotics and effective painkillers /anaesthetics!
Bladder stones were common in ancient and mediaeval times. They only began to become rare towards the end of the 19th century. I presume changes in food and drink had something to do with it.
But they lived in eternity, unlike you and your toilet paradise
I can't remember if we did this in 3rd year Chemistry, or back in 1st year, but we all enjoyed- and were fascinated by- our lab attempt to extract salicylic acid from _'acetylsalicylic acid,'_ more commonly known as _'Asprin.'_ While we were busying away, one of our lab tutors related some of the history of cures for headaches. You see, the salicylic acid we were working hard to extract from the Asprin was a naturally occurring substance in various plants and the ancient Greeks were smart enough (and untroubled by headaches) to have noted (almost 3,000 years ago) that chewing on this particular root/ twig was effective at relieving headaches. While the Greeks didn't know it at the time, that root/ twig they would chew contained therapeutic amounts of salicylic acid - the very same molecule that would one day grow up to be 'Asprin.'
so, at 9:56, when our narrator derides the medical efficacy of a past millennium, saying that it can't compare to "getting paracetamol from the shops," he puts his foot firmly in his mouth! The ancestors in question had access to plentiful, free, effective and fast-acting 'Asprin,' so I rather think they got the better end of the deal in this example!
Nb: As far as I'm aware, it was via the cultural knowledge, whereby chewing this root/ twig was found to relieve headaches, that led the Bayer corporation to research this plant, discovering the salicylic acid molecule it contained. Bayer also did a little tinkering before foisting their product (Asprin) on the public; Bayer acetylised the molecule, so that it's metabolised faster by the body. In fact, this was the same thing that they did to the Morphine molecule, leading to the discovery of Heroin, by Bayer (in the case of heroin, however, two acetyl groups attach to the morphine molecule, leading to diacetylmorphine - the industrial name for heroin, back in the 19th century).
If you were alive sometime within the last 3,000 years (but not in the modern era, that is) then you ALSO would have preferred to chew a twig/ root from a Willow tree, rather than buying "Paracetamol" from the shops!
he's very watchable, does anyone reccomend any other channels or shows he talks on? I'd watch more of him
He has a podcast that is mentioned at the beginning of the video.
I’m surprised by some of the questions.you have answered them so well.thanks very interesting.
Thanks, very interesting vid.
Great video, Matt! As for London: Most people in our times do not know that London was basically restricted to a rather small area (would be known as "The City of London" now), and all parts east of the Tower of London were really, really rural (and are now called "The East End"), and all parts west of Blackfriars were outlying lands as well (now known as "The West End" and then - even more west from the original City of London - Westminster). There's a reason why WESTminster is named such. In our modern minds it doesn't make much sense because we see Westminster, Mayfair, and St. James as the main hub (unless you're a banker). However, Westminster became the expansion to the west quite early (later medieval period).
He should have mentioned in the diet section that they lacked all new world foods including tomatoes, potatoes, corn, and all manner of peppers.
I’m so glad I found this channel!!! Hi Matt!!! 👋🏼🤩 lol
Can we have Matt cover the renaissance as well ?
Props to him for debunking the so called "dark ages" way some people use to describe that time period ❤❤❤
"Stop calling medieval people dirty! ... OK, the sewers were horrible."
And sometimes there was sewage running down the street....
I'm sorry, what? 😂
Also - with regards to the art, conventional understanding of perspective only came with the renaissance period, so medieval art looks a bit surreal in that regard, i love it and definitely wouldn't call it ugly :)
I love the part where he talks about the evolution of the English language. I've often wondered how far back we could time travel speaking modern English and still be able to communicate with people.
I'm Scottish and I consider that I speak English and most of the English don't understand me so I don't think you would get far back before it was difficult, even if you watch a film based in London 60 years ago they sound Cockney, the kids down there now sound like black Jamaicans so it changes pretty quickly
You might enjoy reading about the Great Vowel Shift which took place during the Renaissance. It means that while we might recognise the consonants of medieval English speakers, nearly all the vowels would sound a bit wrong, which would be very disorientating.
Not far back
I heard some Chaucer (14th century) at school - 60 years ago - and found I could 'get' about 80% with a lot of educated guessing. I don't know how much our knowledge of how English sounded has evolved since then. It helped that I spoke a bit of German. Thomas Malory (15th century) is interesting to have a crack at too, though in this case I think it was my schoolgirl French that was the more helpful.
I’ve seen videos on that topic and the general consensus is a modern English speaker could sort of understand most English spoken Back to the early 1500’s but before that the words and pronunciation would be so different it would sound like gibberish to us.
5:42 also because they drank alcohol a lot more than we do today, it was a little easier. A pint of ale is around 250 calories so if you had 8 a day that's 2,000 calories and the higher the Alc% the higher the calories so we can be talking 3,500+ calories from alcohol alone. So it makes a little more sense when it is more like 5,000 calories from food, although still sounds a huge amount. Keep in mind also that due to not having heating they also had to use more of their energy on keeping themselves warm.
This explains a lot
Also, there was no automation/mechanization.
You could have a few shortcuts (beasts of burden, cranes) but at the end of it, everything was made by hand.
That explains why for most of mankind, food expenditure was the first priority.
That's some dumb maths though. You'd be able to drink more of a weaker beer and get more calories total, while still functioning, than you would with something stronger. Also, alcohol is not the only factor that impact calorie content. Even today you see massive variations in calories even with similar ABV, some even being higher at something like 4% compared to others at over 5,4%.
Constantly drinking higher % alcohol would've come with it's own set of short and longterm problems. From what we know, weak beer was the everday drink workers consumed.
This guy is defending the medieval era/people like his life depends upon it lmao. I appreciate his passion for that period in history.
26:00 You're missing out the part about where the slaves came from. A lot, if not the majority, came from IRELAND. Dublin was the slave market of Western Europe and Irish pirates would constantly raid Wales and England to capture slaves. One, you might remember, is quite famous and he's called St. Patrick. The practice of capturing Welsh and English slaves was so bad the in the end England went to war with Ireland. But when it came to volunteers for the force to attack back, it was the WELSH barons who wanted to seek the most revenge against centuries of attacks. Which is why the large land owners to this day in Ireland have Welsh surnames. It should also be noted that the Irish Scoti tribe attacked, invaded and enslaved Caledonia. Taking it over. That's why it's called Scotland, land of the Scoti. The Scots then invaded northern England and tried to take control of it, until Edward I essentially had enough and they were beaten back. Just remember this when you hear an Irish or Scots person talk about how evil England is and how they never did anything.
Pointy shoes are not only a medieval fashion, but they are much easier to make than round-toed shoes. It has to do with how you shape the leather, a round toe requires that you work the leather into a bulge, but not so much that the edge of the leather gets stretched and wrincled, or you will have trouble sowing it to the sole.
Shoes like we know them today, is a pretty recent development. For a long time, shoes were not even made asymmetrical to fit your left and right foot, instead both shoes were identical and you would have to wear them in to take on the shape of your feet.
Shoes also didn't have heels, so medieval people walked tippy-toe like small children do. You can see this in medieval paintings where people are depicted with a (to us) strange, forward-leaning posture.
It’s all drawing imaginary lines but I like the symmetry of taking 1453 the fall of the eastern Roman Empire as marking the start of the early modern period of European history.
I 100% support your comments about the basic intelligence and cleanliness of Medieval people!
I think we tend to think that medieval art is "bad" because there are a variety of approaches to representing reality. To the modern eye, the variety of perspectives can look 'wrong', because we have come to expect a 2D representation of a 3D object or scene to obey certain rules, so that when you can see both sides of something (without the use of a mirror or similar device) your mind rebels. Medieval artists tried to show more than the eye could see. This deserves a whole lot more discussion than a quick comment. Sorry!
Also look at their architecture. Thats art. Maybe they thought 2d should look 2d and 3d was for architecture.
4:55 I heared that most medieval peasants ate porridge instead of bread. The reason for this was that if you wanted bread, the miller and the baker both would keep some flour for themselves, so you had less to eat if you ate bread instead of porridge.
This is almost certainly true. Bread has the advantage that it can be baked until it is very dry and then it will last for a long time, not to mention it's more portable, but medieval commoners ate lots of porridge and stew, as well as mashed and boiled beans and similar simple foods.
Ive heard that our working week today is much longer than the medieval working week. Personally I preferered working from dawn to dusk digging, growing food, mending fences etc in our family acre garden to 5 minutes in an office. But spring and autumn were the seasons of lots of work. Summer and winter less so.
And spring and autumn oddly enough are the most pleasant seasons to do outdoor manual labour in. Not freezing your fingers raw in the cold of winter or burning your skin to a crisp in the heat of summer.
The best job I've ever had was a summer job working on an organic veg farm. It was hard work but every day felt rewarding, even when it was tipping it down with rain, and the exhaustion was totally different from the exhaustion of a city job. It felt good for the soul and my body felt strong and healthy from the physical work involved. Mind you, I was very young. Now twenty years later I'm not sure I'd have the same energy for it!
Ah yes, YOUR family acre garden. You know, with modern human rights like land ownership. Instead of toiling away on some baron's property like 99% of Medieval people did. Feudalism was bad. Peasants weren't singing and dancing happy go lucky kolkhozniks like in Soviet movies, that's pure propaganda, actual labor in the field was hard and you had everything taken away by the nobles who, guess what, didn't work. Because ordinary people did the work for them. Things like "organic veg farm" are ultra-modern inventions, things like that are hispter fun for middle class people in first world aka 5% richest in the world. Yeah, 95% of world's population are poorer than an average Westerner. And the middle class wasn't a thing in old times, you either owned land, mansions and slaves or were exploited.
@@KasumiRINA you're right with a lot of your points, I was merely agreeing that outdoor work feels better than some of the modern jobs we have to do today, not that it compares with medieval life. But I want to make it clear that when I worked on that farm I was living in severe poverty in south west Wales - in a town which, at the time, was one of the poorest most deprived places in Europe (including eastern Europe). I was unemployed, malnourished and underweight, suffering from PTSD, living in a mouldy property. Most people in the UK don't know what it's like to open cupboards and find them empty, but that's how I was living. A friend was going to do the job and she offered to give me a lift each day to do it with her, so I did. This is why it was a good experience for me because it was the first time in a very long time I was able to be in the fresh air and sunshine, and to eat fresh fruit and veg. They were something I couldn't afford normally. So I just wanted to make the point that it's not always "middle-class hipster fun", misery and poverty do still exist and some people still have to live in a sort of slavery where they toil and struggle to not even have the basics of life. I think the point is medieval life wasn't always toil and misery, and modern life isn't always privilege and fun either.
@@KasumiRINA A few points:
Middle class was a thing in medieval times. Citizens of cities and towns were middle class (it's only with cities growing to extreme sizes that most of the citizens became poor, but that's more of an industrial revolution era problem, medieval population of a city wasn't that).
All the 'advanced' professions in the villages like blacksmiths were middle class. Same with hunters, tailors, etc.
In short, any artisan profession was exactly, that, medieval equivalent of middle class.
Also, nobles DID work (if we're talking specifically medieval period). Nobles had one of the most important jobs in the 'state' (although a kingdom really isn't a state) - they were the elite fighting force. Your kingdom is under attack or you want to go and attack someone? Well, take a wild guess who all of those knights and military commanders are...they're nobles and their families. As in, 90% of your military strength is precisely that...your nobles and their retinues. Because a bunch of peasants won't become an actual army even if you give them mail shirts and spears.
A baron isn't a baron just because he sits in a castle and controls it in and a few villages around it. He is also the law (as in, he's the one expected to come and settle disputes/defend them/punish those who have wronged them). And when the king decides it's time to assemble the army, he gets his princes/dukes to tell their counts, who in turn tell their barons something along the lines of "Well boys, guess what time it is". And those barons and whatever other nobility is around them assemble whatever their fighting forces are and arrive at the destination, stat. Because those barons and counts and dukes know very well what happens if they don't.