General news, articles and discussions regarding the Middle Ages.
During this turbulent period of history, the fall of the Roman Empire led to invasions, mass migrations and the formation of new kingdoms. A prolonged period of cultural and economic stagnation was followed by the consolidation of monarchies, and progress in the arts and literature including the first universities, in turn followed by famine, plague, and increased religious conflicts.
I heard this from a podcast so I don't have a source.
Apparently the English wouldn't use the crossbow even though it required barely any training, they viewed it as unchristian basically seeing it as cheating and stuck to the long bow.
Maybe they thought God would favor them more than crossbow users in battle.
Hoard of silver coins may have been part of historic ransom to save Paris
24 minutes ago
A hoard of silver coins minted in the Carolingian Empire about 1,200 years ago has been unearthed in northeastern Poland and may have been part of a historic ransom to save Paris from a Viking invasion.
It's the first time anyone has found so many Carolingian coins in Poland. Only three such coins — of a distinctive style with Latin inscriptions and a central crucifix — have been found in the country before now.
The Carolingian Empire was founded by the Frankish king Charlemagne — Charles the Great — and spanned much of modern France, Germany, Switzerland and northern Italy in the eighth and ninth centuries.
Archaeologists think the newfound coins may have come from the Viking trading town of Truso, which was then located near the Baltic coast about 60 miles (100 kilometers) west of the farmer's field where they were found.
And if the coins did come from Truso, it's possible that they were part of an immense ransom of gold and silver paid by a Carolingian king to prevent invading Vikings from sacking the city of Paris.
This story actually straddles the Middle Ages and the era preceding the Middle Ages. I will put it here because that seems to be the more relevant orientation.
Human Skulls Reveal New Clues About Early Anglo-Saxon Ancestry
by Dustin Manduffie
June 23, 2021
Introduction:
(Courthouse News) — The early ancestry of the peoples inhabiting Britain never has been quite settled. It’s known that large groups of Germanic tribes from continental Europe came over at some point between the fall of Rome and the rise of the English crown — but who, how many and how they got on with the locals has been a source of debate for as long as anyone can remember.
Germanic settlers first flooded into Britain between the 5th and 7th centuries A.D., described in historical texts as an invasion from the continent. That “invasion” led to the formation of the Anglo-Saxon ethnic group that would rule much of the island for the next roughly 500 years, until the Normans showed up. That’s also when the English language formed, which is itself based on an early form of German. Was it actually an invasion, though?
As it turns out, early Medieval Britain following the influx was much like modern-day Britain in that it was full of people from a diverse range of backgrounds, eventually united by a common language, culture and values, according to the authors of a study published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One.
“The most significant finding is that Anglo-Saxon identify was based on cultural practices and language, not genetics, since we found that the area that came to be called England was occupied by people of different ancestries who shared a common language and culture,” said Kimberly Plomp, a postdoctoral researcher at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, in an email. “England is a country with an unusually high level of diversity in relation to ancestry, as anybody watching the current Euros soccer competition will readily appreciate. But of course, the vast majority of people living in the country speak the same language and share a large number of cultural values and practices.”
Derbyshire cave house identified as ninth-century home to exiled king
Thu 15 Jul 2021
A cave house previously thought to be an 18th-century folly has been identified as one of the oldest intact domestic interiors ever found in the UK and was once, archaeologists tantalisingly believe, the home of an exiled Anglo-Saxon king.
In the 18th century, Anchor Church cave in south Derbyshire was used by local gentry as a place for parties, and until now it was officially understood that that was as far back as its history went.
But archaeologists now believe the cave house can be dated to 1,200 years ago, probably lived in by Eardwulf who was deposed as king of Northumbria in AD806 and died in AD830.
Edmund Simons, the principal investigator on the project, grew up in an area surrounded by cave houses. “They are very difficult things to understand and date and I’ve been fascinated by them all my life,” he said. “I remember falling off one when I was three.”
He normally works abroad but with travel impossible over the last year he decided to “indulge myself and get together a project to work out what the hell what these things are”. The project is looking at 170 sites, but it is Anchor Church cave where “everything just fitted together in a way that it normally doesn’t happen with these things”, Simons said.
New Discovery Indicates Machu Picchu Could Be Decades Older Than We Realized
5 AUGUST 2021
The history of the Incas was written by their conquerors, and as we're coming to find out, the story we know is not necessarily accurate.
Modern radiocarbon dating now suggests Machu Picchu is at least two decades older than historical records have indicated.
According to interpretations of 16th century documents by the American archaeologist and anthropologist John Rowe, this high-altitude citadel was built for the Inca Emperor Pachacuti, shortly after he rose to power in AD 1438.
This date has served as a baseline for the construction of Machu Picchu since Rowe's work was published in the 1940s, and repeated in textbook after textbook. Yet it seems he may have read a little too much into those historical texts.
Now, the dating of human bones and teeth buried at the sacred site indicates Machu Picchu was already occupied by AD 1420, which means it was probably built earlier than that.
Vikings settled in North America in 1021AD, study says
31 minutes ago
Vikings had a settlement in North America exactly one thousand years ago, centuries before Christopher Columbus arrived on the continent, a study says.
Scientists say a new dating technique analysing tree rings has provided evidence that Vikings occupied a site in Newfoundland, Canada, in 1021AD.
It has long been known that Europeans reached the Americas before Columbus's arrival in the New World in 1492.
But this is the first time researchers have suggested an exact date.
Writing in the journal Nature, scientists said they had analysed the tree rings of three pieces of wood cut for the Norse settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows.
^^^Speaking of early settlement and exploration of North America, there is also a very controversial belief that the Chinese may have explored the North American continent circa 1421. Here is a website devoted to furthering this argument as well as the broader argument that Chinese sailing vessels basically circumnavigated the globe in that same time frame:
As I say, the idea is very controversial, so I would carefully explore both sides of the argument before spreading the ideas further around via the internet.
(Archaeology.org) About 1,600 blocks of metal movable type from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have been discovered inside an earthenware pot underneath Jongno, one of Seoul’s busiest tourist districts. This is the largest collection of movable type blocks from the period ever discovered in Korea. Six hundred of the pieces use hangul, the Korean alphabet, which was created in 1433 and gradually replaced Chinese characters.
The earliest known examples of hangul metal movable type are 30 pieces held by the National Museum of Korea, dating to 1455, that were used by Korean royalty. Researchers believe the new finds date from around the same time. The blocks were found with other metal objects that commoners would normally not have had access to, including artillery and parts of an astronomical clock and a water clock—both of which are described in royal documents.
During the Joseon period (1392–1910), the Jongno area of Seoul was one of the city’s most prosperous financial and commercial districts, as well as home to government officials and wealthy merchants. Archaeologists believe the site where the type blocks were found was likely a house’s storage room, and that the blocks were buried with the intention of reusing them later. This may have been a response to an unexpected event, such as the Japanese invasion known as the Imjin War (1592–1598).
(Archaeology.org) A cave carved by human hands out of a sandstone cliff above a tributary of the River Trent in Derbyshire, England, may have been occupied as early as the seventh century A.D. Edmund Simons, an archaeologist at the Royal Agricultural University, recently led a team that found that the Romanesque doors of the three-room cave are very similar to those found in other medieval buildings. Moreover, a rock-cut pillar in the cave is of a style found in many Anglo-Saxon structures, including a seventh-century A.D. crypt in nearby Repton. This raises the possibility that the cave may have been built to imitate the crypt, or possibly even by the same architect.
Legend holds the cave was once inhabited by a ninth-century A.D. saint named Hardulph, who has been identified with Eardwulf, a deposed king of Northumbria who lived out his final years exiled in the early medieval Kingdom of Mercia, where the cave is located. Likewise, its name, Anchor Church, which dates to at least the thirteenth century, suggests the cave was home to anchorites, or religious hermits. “Saint Hardulph has a cell in a cliff a little from the Trent,” reports a fragment of a medieval book preserved in a 1545 volume. “Anchor Church is the only real contender because there aren’t any other caves by the Trent that are like it in that area,” says Simons. The cave went on to be used in the eighteenth century by inhabitants of the nearby manor house, Foremarke Hall, as an entertainment venue. Archaeologists have found evidence that the gentlefolk knocked out some of the cave’s walls to provide an airier space with better views of the valley below.
(EurekAlert) A research group at the Politecnico di Milano analysed the orientation of ancient Japanese tombs – the so-called Kofun. This study has never been carried out before, due to the very large number of monuments and the fact that access to these areas is usually forbidden. For these reasons, high-res satellite imagery was used. The results show that these tombs are oriented towards the arc of the rising sun, the Goddess Amaterasu that the Japanese emperors linked to the mythical origin of their dynasty.
The Japanese islands are dotted with hundreds of ancient burial mounds, the largest of which are in the typical shape of a keyhole and are called Kofun. Built between the third and the seventh centuries AD, the most imposing are attributed to the semi-legendary first emperors, while the smaller ones probably belong to court officers and to members of the royal family. Among these, the so-called Daisen Kofun is one of the largest monuments ever built on Earth: it measures 486 meters in length and about 36 in height. It is traditionally attributed to Emperor Nintoku, the sixteenth emperor of Japan. The Daisen Kofun belongs to a group of tombs recently inscribed in the UNESCO World Heritage List.
There are no written sources on these tombs, and excavations are rare and limited to the smaller ones, since the largest are considered the tombs of the first semi-legendary emperors and, as such, are strictly protected by law. Protection also extends to the outside: many monuments are fenced, and it is not allowed to enter the perimeter. For these reasons, it is impossible to obtain accurate measurements of size, height and orientation. Furthermore, their number discourages any on field investigation. It is therefore natural to study them using high-resolution satellite images, which furnish simple but very powerful tools for remote sensing investigations.
This is what Norma Baratta, Arianna Picotti and Giulio Magli of the Politecnico di Milano did, with the aim of deepening the knowledge of the relationships between these fascinating monuments with the landscape and, in particular, with the sky. The team measured the orientation of more than 100 Kofuns and came to interesting conclusions.
The results - just published in the scientific journal "Remote Sensing"
New research released today finds that while the Knights of the Round Table have won global fame, most medieval English heroic or chivalric stories have been lost. Meanwhile, more than three quarters of medieval stories in Icelandic and Irish survive to the present, in an unusual pattern suggesting island "ecosystems" helped preserve culture.
The findings come from an international research team, including Oxford experts, which has applied statistical models used in ecology to estimate the loss and survival of precious artifacts and narratives from different parts of Europe. This ecological approach offers a new perspective on the loss of cultural heritage, complementing past research. Their findings are published in the journal Science, with Mike Kestemont (University of Antwerp) and Folgert Karsdorp (KNAW Meertens Institute) as the main authors.
Dr. Katarzyna Anna Kapitan, an Old Norse philologist and Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College, Oxford, says, "By using statistical methods borrowed from ecology, we were able to add to previous scholarship.
"We estimate that more than 90 percent of medieval manuscripts preserving chivalric and heroic narratives have been lost. This corresponds roughly to the scale of loss that book historians had estimated using different approaches. Moreover, we were able to estimate that some 32 percent of chivalric and heroic works from the Middle Ages have been lost over the centuries."
Tadasuke wrote: ↑Fri Feb 25, 2022 12:57 pm
I can only imagine that it would be awfully bland, boring and unstimulating for the likes of me.
I'm not so sure about that (in my case), but it would be awfully dangerous
If I were to accidentally stop in the middle ages when my time machine breaks, I'll be putting a lot of effort to acquiring the tools and wares just to be able to boil water.
To know is essentially the same as not knowing. The only thing that occurs is the rearrangement of atoms in your brain.
This video shows clearly how backbreaking, unpleasant, boring and undesirable medieval peasant's life was. Truly nothing worth experiencing. Usually they didn't even have things like metal tools, glass or horses. And they had to obey their lords. Most of people in the Middle Ages Europe lived like that and life later before the XIX century wasn't much different either. Time travelers wouldn't be entertained. It's enough to watch a 30 minute documentary to know what is worth knowing.
^^^It is true that there was very limited wealth for most people in the Middle Ages. However, some have argued that it was also an era in which there was a comparatively great amount of leisure time. The calendar for the year was filled with all manner of festive holidays. Presumably, people had to rely upon their own devices for entertainment during these festivities.
