There are a lot of misguided beliefs about the Medieval period arising from a popular Gothic/Romantic revival in the 19th century. The period became known by another name - "the Dark Ages" - and was seen as dark, mysterious, and primitive. That completely got wrong what the Medieval period really was - the transition from Roman imperial rule to early-modern European states, and a small industrial revolution in technology including agriculture and navigation.
The popular view of all-powerful, romantic nobility and dumb peasants also comes from this mischaracterization. In reality, the period's instability after the Roman empire fell really made kings and nobles more akin to local warlords playing at Roman customs, and there were exceptions to the rule like prosperous city-republics. Peasant life was also sophisticated, rational, and complex, completely attuned to local weather and crop cycles. A good blog series goes into detail about this here:
The important thing to realize is that no matter how difficult it was, how long ago it occurred, and how foreign the customs were for a certain period, people are still people. They have emotions, worries, good days, and struggles. If you take things in perspective and empathize with the people that preceded you on this world, history will lose a lot of its mystery.
is a good post about that, and the Dark Ages myth. There's a lot of propaganda from this time period that people still believe today because it was used to justify a lot of the European nationalism of the 19th and 20th centuries.
I broadly agree with you, but think there’s a danger there of going too far in reducing culture and belief systems to simple “customs”.
Bret Devereaux, for one, constantly reiterates on his (awesome) blog you linked that people in the past really did often act, relate, and believe very differently than we do.
Anachronism is a trap just as much as romanticism, only from the opposite extreme.
The later Medieval period was one of great economic and population expansion. However, the rise of famine due to too many people to feed without any increase in agricultural production was a big problem in Northern Europe (1315-1317. Of course the arrival of the bubonic plague would then push the population levels further down. Parts of Europe did indeed enter a "Dark Ages" after the fall of the Roman Empire. England was hit particularly hard after the Roman withdrawal , as was the Italian Peninsula after the Gothic Wars, the arrival of the first bubonic plague, and the worsening of the general climate during this time period (560s CE)
>That completely got wrong what the Medieval period really was - the transition from Roman imperial rule to early-modern European states, and a small industrial revolution in technology including agriculture and navigation.
The Dark Ages are from ~500AD to ~900AD and as a term were first used in the 14th century. I don't know how else you would describe a period in which population was reduced to less than a quarter of what it had been at the peak of the Pax Romana.
It’s important to emphasize that feudalism is fundamentally a transactional system. What the nobility had to offer peasants was safety. In the absence of the Roman imperial system, binding yourself to a local lord who could raise men at arms and a small castle to protect you and your family is a rational decision. I wouldn’t go so far as saying that feudalism is good, but it’s at least understandable when viewed that way.
Of course late feudalism became extra intolerable once kings stopped protecting peasants and started pulling them into new wars instead.
The dark ages is not a synonym for the medieval era. It's a sub-division of the medieval era - one of three.
The dark ages is a period after the fall of Rome. It's named for the fact that very little written output was produced during this time. It ran about 500-1000AD.
The high middle ages came after, and there was a lot more writing going on during this period. This was about 1000-1250AD. When people think 'medieval', this is usually what they think, if not the late medieval period (the third sub-division).
Then came the Renaissance, then the modern period.
The dark ages actually were pretty dark, mysterious, and primitive, as evidenced by the very low intellectual and cultural output during these years, low populations, low levels of social organization, and so on. Generally, the good parts and achievements of the medieval period that you're gesturing at were during the high and late parts.
>That completely got wrong what the Medieval period really was - the transition from Roman imperial rule to early-modern European states, and a small industrial revolution in technology including agriculture and navigation.
Well, not that wrong, as the "transition from Roman imperial rule" (in the Western part of the empire) was followed by huge decline in government, standards of living, safety, and so on, that lasted many centuries.
(There's a recent trend to downplay this, as there was a trend to overplay how dark the dark ages where in the past. But if one can see through the temporal trends in the historical discipline, they can also see that those times were bad, and the numbers and facts support this).
"The Dark Ages" is not a synonym for The Middle Ages. It refers to the period of 5th-10th century, when Europe experienced its biggest cultural stagnation.
It's not to say that the rest of The Middle Ages was particularly innovative, but The Dark Ages were the The Middle Ages of The Middle Ages.
>there were exceptions to the rule like prosperous city-republics.
This seemed to start because of the "compromise" status of Venice and Rome after Charlemagne's conquest of Italy; after that the floodgates opened and other cities tried to get away with it. A thousand years later, the kings have finally been kicked out (mostly).
So I appreciate what you're saying but the "people are people" argument... has limits.
One of the most interesting things I find about ancient history is just how _alien_ the culture must've been. The problem with a lot of historical texts is no one thinks to write down what to them is mundane or ordinary and it doesn't take long until the mundane becomes almost incomprehensible.
Thing is, you don't need to go back thousands of years to see this. Even 100 years ago you find totally different attitudes (eg the willingness to be conscripted and to volunteer to go to war).
Go back a little further and you find the culture shock to Victorian England with Pacific cultures.
My point is it can be a bit of a trap to take too much for granted in terms of a human baseline.
I had the sense in my education that dubbing it the Dark Ages was a way of diverting attention away from it. This large block of time was the period of the Crusades, Reformation, antipopes, etc. No shortage of interesting happenings during this period, but the education system does not want to touch that with a 10-foot pole, nor the leadership. It's too close to the topic of religious strife and atrocities. This might become less true as Christianity gets less ubiquitous. Nationalism might be another reason that it's cast aside.
The #1 misguided belief among the general population is how the Reinassance came to be. And that misguided belief has been driven by revisionism.
We are happy to talk about Ancient Greece, but when it comes to talking about the influence of the Umayyad Caliphate in Europe, then people quickly become aggressive and start saying "no, no, no, we don't talk about this here".
Why? because the Islamic civilization were our rivals and acknowledging that we owe them our modern lifestyle is highly taboo, especially among people with Conservative views.
A sobering thought: when you consider that this is true for people we have come to demonize as well. Hitler, Vlad the Impaler, Genghis Khan ect ect they were all human with emotions, worries, good days and struggles. The only thing that separates us from them is what we think about what they did. A lot of people can’t process the idea of the worst criminals being people just like them or consider that deep down they are not moral, good or anything special and they themselves are capable of the same evil if placed in the correct circumstances.
Please, please, good people. I am in haste. Who lives in that castle?
No one lives there.
Then who is your lord?
We don't have a lord.
What?!
I told you. We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as sort-of-executive officer for the week ... But all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting...by a simple majority, in the case of purely internal affairs...but by a two thirds majority, in the case of more major...
Be quiet! I order you to be quiet!
Order, eh? Who does he think he is?
I am your king!
Well I didn't vote for you.
You don't vote for kings!
How'd you become king, then?
The Lady of the Lake,... her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water signifying by Divine Providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. THAT is why I am your king!
Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Be quiet!
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!
Shut up!
I mean, if I went 'round saying I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!
Shut up! Will you shut up?!
Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system!
Shut up!
Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! HELP, HELP, I'M BEING REPRESSED!
> Clues about how privileged people in the Middle Ages regarded peasants can be found in their courtly songs, sarcastic proverbs, nasty jokes, and pious sermons. Knights and ladies were fond of songs known as pastourelles that told, among other things, about how easy it was for knights to have sex with peasant women or, failing that, to rape them; monks and students enjoyed jokes that portrayed peasants as ludicrously dumb and foolish; and priests, friars, and bishops preached sermons that depicted “those who work” as objects of pity, charity, and disgust. Even Piers Plowman, a sympathetic portrayal of rural life, portrayed the peasant’s lot as hard and pitiable. These literary texts are useful for understanding the often astoundingly negative attitudes of elites toward peasants, but they tell little about the peasants themselves.
They also seem useful to contrast the American / protestant view of work as the path to salvation with the European / catholic view of work as something pitiful
The "Protestant" work ethic existed before Protestentism. See for example:
> Andersen et al found that the location monasteries of the Catholic Order of Cistercians, and specifically their density, highly correlated to this work ethic in later centuries;[18] ninety percent of these monasteries were founded before the year 1300 AD. Joseph Henrich found that this correlation extends right up to the twenty-first century.[19]
That... doesn't make a lot of sense, at least on face value. In the Protestant view, your work (human effort) has no effect on your salvation. In the Catholic view, it has a lot to do with it.
My ancestors were all farmers. I knew my great-grand dad when I was still a boy, he was born in 1900. I'm not a historian, so take my point of view with what I understand of how the "younger generations of farmers" thought.
I actually don't think they had it bad. Sure, they worked very hard, but that was their life. The good part is that they were fully self-reliant. They had food, were able to protect themselves, were able to fix anything that was broken, they had a strong community with the other farmers in the neighborhood. In rough times, I think this is very valuable.
I'm sure they didn't want to become knights and die in some war. Just because the scholars looked down on them, didn't mean they looked down on themselves, or were all stupid. Because back then you didn't have as much chances to study, I'm sure the intelligence of farmers was very diverse. About 50% of my cousins have a university degree, and most of the rest bachelor. So our genes can't be that stupid ;).
History told only from the winner's point of view is what makes a lot of people not know that the US lost Vietnam war.
Our generation is a bit worse than the previous ones in terms of how we preserve our culture and media. Digital media is way hard to preserve for posterity. That is why I think preserving geocities is so important. Long live the work made by archive.org and project gutenberg; they really deserve our respect.
>”... told only from the winner's point of view is what makes a lot of people not know that the US lost Vietnam war.”
This is confusing. VN winning means people don’t understand the US losing? Or VN wining meant they wanted others to believe the US won the war? Or the US actually lost but never the less your assertion doesn’t apply?
In many ways, digital is actually easier to preserve. Consider how many digital artifacts are surviving each year that give us detailed glimpses of daily lives as compared to physical goods that don’t tell much beyond the odd letter or two that survives. There’s more media soon than ever before and it survives in an accessible way longer than ever
The medieval period was a fairly long ordeal with large differences over both time and place.
Life post-black death in Europe, for example, included a heightened QoL for many as population density was lowered.
Many peasants in Europe had their own plot of land but also had to spend some time working his lords' fields. Often the lords had to supplement this with paid work - peasants did not particularly like giving away their labour for free and as such did not work very hard.
My source is Patrick Wyman's podcast "Tides of History". He has a PhD in history. He has a Substack also: https://patrickwyman.substack.com/ and another great podcast, "The Fall of Rome".
I cannot ensure that my assertions hold for all of Europe :-).
Bump Up Vote for "Tides of History" - it is an excellent podcast full of rich detail while also covering a lot of ground and explaining the macro picture.
When searching about for decent resources to help build a working hypothesis for worldbuilding in D&D, I came across bits on medieval demographics, sort of a "how many peasants do you need for the village to have its own blacksmith" deal.
Overall, a very grim view of the situation is a bit like trophic levels in a food web, with the farming peasants being the humble vegetation on which all others grazed, directly or indirectly. And certainly all of those tax records helped delineate just how much land was required. Fascinating stuff.
Little over hundred years ago, the dashing Dutch Historian Johan Huizinga wrote a book called: "The Autumn of the Middle Ages", with the subtitle: "A study of the forms of life, thought and art in France and the Netherlands in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries".
In it, Huizinga attempts to debunk some myths about the Middle Ages:
"[...] Huizinga presents the idea that the exaggerated formality and romanticism of late medieval court society was a defense mechanism against the constantly increasing violence and brutality of general society. He saw the period as one of pessimism, cultural exhaustion, and nostalgia, rather than of rebirth and optimism."
The original English translation is hard to read as he refers to many paintings in it, but no pictures. Luckily, on the book's hundred-year anniversary in 2020, a new, English translation (a tad expensive, though) with 300 full-colour illustrations was released.
In Italy we are lucky to have a very good medieval historian, professor Alessandro Barbero, who has done a great deal of work to popularize "peasant history" among the general public.
Most of his talks, are available on YouTube and are being collected in an increasingly popular podcast [1].
Once-obscure topics like the Ciompi revolt in Florence, the French Jacquerie, or the English peasants' revolt, are basically achieving memetic status.
The podcast is only in Italian, but it could be a useful tool to learn the language :)
There is also Ferdinand Braudel, who published 3 works about peasant live in the 15th to 18th century: "The Structures of Everyday Life", "The Wheels of Commerce" and "The Perspective of the World". I found them very interesting, they depict normal days for different trades and classes and the changes that occured to them over the centuries.
>monks and students enjoyed jokes that portrayed peasants as ludicrously dumb and foolish; and priests, friars, and bishops preached sermons that depicted “those who work” as objects of pity, charity, and disgust. Even Piers Plowman, a sympathetic portrayal of rural life, portrayed the peasant’s lot as hard and pitiable.
The more things change. The more things stay the same.
"Those who fight", in this case, means the military aristocracy.
Compare to the three estates of the French Ancien Régime (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estates_of_the_realm#Kingdom_o...). The first estate was clergy (aka, "those who prey"). The second estate was nobility, original the "nobility of the sword" (aka "those who fight"), but later including administrators and judges as the "nobility of the robe". Note that the second estate was exempt from most taxes and forced labour, which underscores their power and prestige. And then the third estate was "everyone else", basically peasants, serfs, wage labourers, etc.
Brahmins, a scholarly class, have traditionally been atop the Hindu caste system in wide usage in South Asia for millenia, with Ksatriyas, the warrior class, below them. Not all societies view might as right. (And in fact, much of Asia has a history of assimilating, not coming under, invaders pre-British imperialism.)
What they're referring to here is that medieval European aristocrats were typically military aristocrats, with the power to personally command troops and fight wars in addition to administering their lands. Random farmers who got levied into an army wouldn't have gained high social status from it.
This came from the fact that in the early Middle Ages it seemed more feasible to pay your warriors with land than with money. Money was scarce and harder to use in a collapsed economy.
In the beginning, you had just the fighting men of your barbarian post-Roman kingdom. The barbarians had their military egalitarianism, but what remained from the Antiquity's culture perceived soldiers more like we do (as a specialized force and not as the societal elite).
The warriors (which became knights) were supposed to hold the land on the condition of military service. But it gradually became hereditary. Over the centuries, holding the main form of capital in the society gave knights high position and tremendous clout. (Note that the other big landowner was the Church.)
The article identifies 'those who fight' as knights. Knights often raised, resourced and commanded their own armies.
"As “those who work” (in Latin, laboratores), peasants supported people more privileged—“those who pray” (oratores) and “those who fight” (pugnatores). Each of these three orders ideally helped the other, with clergy contributing prayers and knights providing protection, but the mutuality of the system was more ideal than real. Also, the three groups were not equal. A peasant might have benefited from the prayers of a nun or from the protection offered by a knight, but a peasant was deemed to do work of lesser value and to be a less worthy person. Born into this unexalted state, a peasant’s lot was to labor for the benefit of others."
With the context given as High Middle Ages, "those who fight" primarily as in knights, with ideas around chivalry etc having strongly developed by then, and at least the "proper" knights being landed etc.
I am not a historian, but IIRC, warrior-nobilities were really not that uncommon before gunpowder was invented. Sparta had a (very cruel) one, Greece had one, etc.
Pretty shameless (though I don't think against the guidelines afaict), but my mother has written a series of novels that have a similar focus in terms of time period and section of society, for anyone who might be interested: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fortunes-Wheel-Meonbridge-Chronicle...
If you're interested in the topic of peasants of Europe a great book comes to mind: 'The Peasants' by nobel laureate Władysław Reymont.
It describes the life and customs of peasants during the four seasons. We're talking 19th century but the life and customs of peasants in that era haven't changed much except for extra rights they acquired in that century.
The article draws a distinction between the more modern Marxist definition of feudalism as a stage between slavery and capitalism and the medievalist one that describes "the customs and relationships of an elite who governed ordinary people by virtue of their military, political, and social power."
I feel our current model would merit a third definition. The demographic partition is similar to what is described in the article: a very large group of workers, a smaller group of more comfortable workers, and the capital holding elite. The main difference is that workers have a few more rights and a different relationship to the world, the clergy-analog workers have a physical role in the economy (in the sense that unlike with the social function of prayer, machines and systems of production and control have to be actually designed and implemented), and the elites are, due to the increased virtuality of the economy and the skills of the clergy-analog class that assists them, no longer subject to the same type of pressures and responsibilities as their blue-blooded forebears. Perhaps our generation's Thorstein Veblen will tackle the question of identifying what the customs and mechanisms of the current elite are in more detail.
A major factor is that in many/most area and periods a low-ranking member of the society (even a serf or sometimes a slave) was able to move, for example in order to escape from to much hardship by crossing the domain boundary (in stealth mode). This established a limit to the hardship enforced by a local power: too much of it, and too many will defect, either to the wilderness or to join another lord's domain (for example in some march).
This is less and less an option, as technical progress helps enforcing a rule.
We sure can read, however for many/most of us it is mainly "Manufacturing Consent" all day long, and thus a way for the establishment to manipulate us.
[+] [-] nexthash|5 years ago|reply
The popular view of all-powerful, romantic nobility and dumb peasants also comes from this mischaracterization. In reality, the period's instability after the Roman empire fell really made kings and nobles more akin to local warlords playing at Roman customs, and there were exceptions to the rule like prosperous city-republics. Peasant life was also sophisticated, rational, and complex, completely attuned to local weather and crop cycles. A good blog series goes into detail about this here:
https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...
The important thing to realize is that no matter how difficult it was, how long ago it occurred, and how foreign the customs were for a certain period, people are still people. They have emotions, worries, good days, and struggles. If you take things in perspective and empathize with the people that preceded you on this world, history will lose a lot of its mystery.
[+] [-] Karrot_Kream|5 years ago|reply
https://www.exurbe.com/black-death-covid-and-why-we-keep-tel...
is a good post about that, and the Dark Ages myth. There's a lot of propaganda from this time period that people still believe today because it was used to justify a lot of the European nationalism of the 19th and 20th centuries.
[+] [-] smogcutter|5 years ago|reply
Bret Devereaux, for one, constantly reiterates on his (awesome) blog you linked that people in the past really did often act, relate, and believe very differently than we do.
Anachronism is a trap just as much as romanticism, only from the opposite extreme.
[+] [-] vondur|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] konjin|5 years ago|reply
The Dark Ages are from ~500AD to ~900AD and as a term were first used in the 14th century. I don't know how else you would describe a period in which population was reduced to less than a quarter of what it had been at the peak of the Pax Romana.
[+] [-] ashtonkem|5 years ago|reply
Of course late feudalism became extra intolerable once kings stopped protecting peasants and started pulling them into new wars instead.
[+] [-] jlawson|5 years ago|reply
The dark ages is not a synonym for the medieval era. It's a sub-division of the medieval era - one of three.
The dark ages is a period after the fall of Rome. It's named for the fact that very little written output was produced during this time. It ran about 500-1000AD.
The high middle ages came after, and there was a lot more writing going on during this period. This was about 1000-1250AD. When people think 'medieval', this is usually what they think, if not the late medieval period (the third sub-division).
Then came the Renaissance, then the modern period.
The dark ages actually were pretty dark, mysterious, and primitive, as evidenced by the very low intellectual and cultural output during these years, low populations, low levels of social organization, and so on. Generally, the good parts and achievements of the medieval period that you're gesturing at were during the high and late parts.
[+] [-] coldtea|5 years ago|reply
Well, not that wrong, as the "transition from Roman imperial rule" (in the Western part of the empire) was followed by huge decline in government, standards of living, safety, and so on, that lasted many centuries.
(There's a recent trend to downplay this, as there was a trend to overplay how dark the dark ages where in the past. But if one can see through the temporal trends in the historical discipline, they can also see that those times were bad, and the numbers and facts support this).
[+] [-] yakubin|5 years ago|reply
It's not to say that the rest of The Middle Ages was particularly innovative, but The Dark Ages were the The Middle Ages of The Middle Ages.
[+] [-] scythe|5 years ago|reply
This seemed to start because of the "compromise" status of Venice and Rome after Charlemagne's conquest of Italy; after that the floodgates opened and other cities tried to get away with it. A thousand years later, the kings have finally been kicked out (mostly).
[+] [-] cletus|5 years ago|reply
One of the most interesting things I find about ancient history is just how _alien_ the culture must've been. The problem with a lot of historical texts is no one thinks to write down what to them is mundane or ordinary and it doesn't take long until the mundane becomes almost incomprehensible.
Thing is, you don't need to go back thousands of years to see this. Even 100 years ago you find totally different attitudes (eg the willingness to be conscripted and to volunteer to go to war).
Go back a little further and you find the culture shock to Victorian England with Pacific cultures.
My point is it can be a bit of a trap to take too much for granted in terms of a human baseline.
[+] [-] slothtrop|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 29athrowaway|5 years ago|reply
We are happy to talk about Ancient Greece, but when it comes to talking about the influence of the Umayyad Caliphate in Europe, then people quickly become aggressive and start saying "no, no, no, we don't talk about this here".
Why? because the Islamic civilization were our rivals and acknowledging that we owe them our modern lifestyle is highly taboo, especially among people with Conservative views.
[+] [-] zentropia|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] suifbwish|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TechnoTimeStop|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asix66|5 years ago|reply
No one lives there.
Then who is your lord?
We don't have a lord.
What?!
I told you. We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as sort-of-executive officer for the week ... But all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting...by a simple majority, in the case of purely internal affairs...but by a two thirds majority, in the case of more major...
Be quiet! I order you to be quiet!
Order, eh? Who does he think he is?
I am your king!
Well I didn't vote for you.
You don't vote for kings!
How'd you become king, then?
The Lady of the Lake,... her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water signifying by Divine Providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. THAT is why I am your king!
Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Be quiet!
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!
Shut up!
I mean, if I went 'round saying I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!
Shut up! Will you shut up?!
Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system!
Shut up!
Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! HELP, HELP, I'M BEING REPRESSED!
BLOODY PEASANT!!
[+] [-] Kelamir|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] second--shift|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] airstrike|5 years ago|reply
They also seem useful to contrast the American / protestant view of work as the path to salvation with the European / catholic view of work as something pitiful
EDIT: See e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the...
[+] [-] throw0101a|5 years ago|reply
> Andersen et al found that the location monasteries of the Catholic Order of Cistercians, and specifically their density, highly correlated to this work ethic in later centuries;[18] ninety percent of these monasteries were founded before the year 1300 AD. Joseph Henrich found that this correlation extends right up to the twenty-first century.[19]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic#Criticis...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cistercians
[+] [-] michaelsbradley|5 years ago|reply
For a modern review see Laborem Exercens: http://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/do....
[+] [-] koonsolo|5 years ago|reply
I actually don't think they had it bad. Sure, they worked very hard, but that was their life. The good part is that they were fully self-reliant. They had food, were able to protect themselves, were able to fix anything that was broken, they had a strong community with the other farmers in the neighborhood. In rough times, I think this is very valuable.
I'm sure they didn't want to become knights and die in some war. Just because the scholars looked down on them, didn't mean they looked down on themselves, or were all stupid. Because back then you didn't have as much chances to study, I'm sure the intelligence of farmers was very diverse. About 50% of my cousins have a university degree, and most of the rest bachelor. So our genes can't be that stupid ;).
[+] [-] greypowerOz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcodiego|5 years ago|reply
History told only from the winner's point of view is what makes a lot of people not know that the US lost Vietnam war.
Our generation is a bit worse than the previous ones in terms of how we preserve our culture and media. Digital media is way hard to preserve for posterity. That is why I think preserving geocities is so important. Long live the work made by archive.org and project gutenberg; they really deserve our respect.
[+] [-] mc32|5 years ago|reply
>”... told only from the winner's point of view is what makes a lot of people not know that the US lost Vietnam war.”
This is confusing. VN winning means people don’t understand the US losing? Or VN wining meant they wanted others to believe the US won the war? Or the US actually lost but never the less your assertion doesn’t apply?
[+] [-] vlovich123|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 88840-8855|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the-smug-one|5 years ago|reply
Life post-black death in Europe, for example, included a heightened QoL for many as population density was lowered.
Many peasants in Europe had their own plot of land but also had to spend some time working his lords' fields. Often the lords had to supplement this with paid work - peasants did not particularly like giving away their labour for free and as such did not work very hard.
My source is Patrick Wyman's podcast "Tides of History". He has a PhD in history. He has a Substack also: https://patrickwyman.substack.com/ and another great podcast, "The Fall of Rome".
I cannot ensure that my assertions hold for all of Europe :-).
[+] [-] jimmySixDOF|5 years ago|reply
https://wondery.com/shows/tides-of-history/
[+] [-] at_a_remove|5 years ago|reply
Overall, a very grim view of the situation is a bit like trophic levels in a food web, with the farming peasants being the humble vegetation on which all others grazed, directly or indirectly. And certainly all of those tax records helped delineate just how much land was required. Fascinating stuff.
[+] [-] azepoi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kashyapc|5 years ago|reply
In it, Huizinga attempts to debunk some myths about the Middle Ages:
"[...] Huizinga presents the idea that the exaggerated formality and romanticism of late medieval court society was a defense mechanism against the constantly increasing violence and brutality of general society. He saw the period as one of pessimism, cultural exhaustion, and nostalgia, rather than of rebirth and optimism."
The original English translation is hard to read as he refers to many paintings in it, but no pictures. Luckily, on the book's hundred-year anniversary in 2020, a new, English translation (a tad expensive, though) with 300 full-colour illustrations was released.
[+] [-] aduitsis|5 years ago|reply
https://www.smithjournal.com.au/blogs/history/3011-this-medi...
[+] [-] lou1306|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/podcast-di-alessandro-bar...
[+] [-] bildung|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway0a5e|5 years ago|reply
The more things change. The more things stay the same.
[+] [-] chmod600|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lazare|5 years ago|reply
Compare to the three estates of the French Ancien Régime (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estates_of_the_realm#Kingdom_o...). The first estate was clergy (aka, "those who prey"). The second estate was nobility, original the "nobility of the sword" (aka "those who fight"), but later including administrators and judges as the "nobility of the robe". Note that the second estate was exempt from most taxes and forced labour, which underscores their power and prestige. And then the third estate was "everyone else", basically peasants, serfs, wage labourers, etc.
[+] [-] Karrot_Kream|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SpicyLemonZest|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stereolambda|5 years ago|reply
In the beginning, you had just the fighting men of your barbarian post-Roman kingdom. The barbarians had their military egalitarianism, but what remained from the Antiquity's culture perceived soldiers more like we do (as a specialized force and not as the societal elite).
The warriors (which became knights) were supposed to hold the land on the condition of military service. But it gradually became hereditary. Over the centuries, holding the main form of capital in the society gave knights high position and tremendous clout. (Note that the other big landowner was the Church.)
[+] [-] robotresearcher|5 years ago|reply
"As “those who work” (in Latin, laboratores), peasants supported people more privileged—“those who pray” (oratores) and “those who fight” (pugnatores). Each of these three orders ideally helped the other, with clergy contributing prayers and knights providing protection, but the mutuality of the system was more ideal than real. Also, the three groups were not equal. A peasant might have benefited from the prayers of a nun or from the protection offered by a knight, but a peasant was deemed to do work of lesser value and to be a less worthy person. Born into this unexalted state, a peasant’s lot was to labor for the benefit of others."
[+] [-] detaro|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] watwut|5 years ago|reply
And social status flows from power.
[+] [-] IdiocyInAction|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrow84|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michalu|5 years ago|reply
It describes the life and customs of peasants during the four seasons. We're talking 19th century but the life and customs of peasants in that era haven't changed much except for extra rights they acquired in that century.
About the book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peasants
[+] [-] Bakary|5 years ago|reply
I feel our current model would merit a third definition. The demographic partition is similar to what is described in the article: a very large group of workers, a smaller group of more comfortable workers, and the capital holding elite. The main difference is that workers have a few more rights and a different relationship to the world, the clergy-analog workers have a physical role in the economy (in the sense that unlike with the social function of prayer, machines and systems of production and control have to be actually designed and implemented), and the elites are, due to the increased virtuality of the economy and the skills of the clergy-analog class that assists them, no longer subject to the same type of pressures and responsibilities as their blue-blooded forebears. Perhaps our generation's Thorstein Veblen will tackle the question of identifying what the customs and mechanisms of the current elite are in more detail.
[+] [-] natmaka|5 years ago|reply
This is less and less an option, as technical progress helps enforcing a rule.
We sure can read, however for many/most of us it is mainly "Manufacturing Consent" all day long, and thus a way for the establishment to manipulate us.