Medievalist Professor Answers Medieval Questions From Twitter

I'm medievalist professor Dorsey Armstrong.

Let's take some questions from the internet.

This is Medieval Support.

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@JohnnyV45385760 asks,

What did medieval English sound like?

A good shorthand way

to figure out what medieval English sounds like

is to take all vowels

and pronounce them as you would in French,

and pronounce every letter.

The word for wife would be pronounced weef.

The word for house would be pronounced hus.

The word knight, k'nigt.

Here is what the Lord's Prayer would've sounded like

in Middle English, probably sometime in the 14th century.

Oor father that art in have-nuss,

hallow-ed bay thee nam-eh.

Thee ray-um oor kingdom come to bay

and led us not into temp-tass-ee-one,

but deliver us from ay-vil.

@caffeinateddayes asks, why was it called the Middle Ages?

How did they know when the end was?

The name Middle Ages was given to that period

by people who came much later

and the middle that they were thinking of

was the period roughly from about 500 to 1500,

after the fall of the Roman Empire

and before the Renaissance.

Around 1000, there is an increase in population,

and so we call this period in between

say, about 1000 and 1300, the High Middle Ages.

This is when the university system comes into existence.

This is when those beautiful cathedrals are all being built.

It really is a golden age in the medieval period.

@B4wekiss asks, wait?!

The Game of Thrones Red Wedding really happened?

It's well known that George R.R. Martin borrowed liberally

from medieval history.

The Red Wedding itself is based on Scottish history.

In 1440, the young King of Scotland

invited the young leaders of the Douglas clan

to dine with him.

When you're invited into the feast hall,

you dine with the king.

The code of hospitality should maintain

that no Ill can come to you,

and instead they were betrayed and beheaded.

Like in Game of Thrones,

much of the contest over the throne

has to do with rival factions

that maybe to some degree or another

are related to one another.

George R.R. Martin took as his template for this

the late medieval conflict known as the Wars of the Roses.

You have the Lancaster cousins against the York cousins.

And in the show, the Lannisters have a name

that sounds very much like Lancaster,

and the Starks, with their one syllable name,

that name chimes nicely with York.

As far as characters go, the mad Targaryen king

would seem to be a pretty clear analog

to King Henry VI, who suffered bouts of madness.

Cercei Lannister very much resembles Margaret of Anjou,

Henry VI's queen.

Her son was probably not the son of Henry VI.

Henry VI himself commented that he could not remember

when the conception had happened

and that it must have been a miracle.

This, of course, seems to be very much

like the situation with Cercei,

whose children are not that of Robert Baratheon,

but are indeed the children of herself

and her twin brother, Jaime Lannister.

@sulliscomrade asks, do I have narcolepsy

or do I just have the natural sleep cycle

of a medieval peasant?

Sleep? in the Middle Ages was very different

from sleep today.

People in the Middle Ages generally slept biphasically,

which means in two stages.

So there was what was called the first sleep.

If you're in a natural sleep rhythm

that does not have any exposure to unnatural light,

you'll fall asleep when the sun goes down,

you will sleep for a few hours,

and then you might get up and maybe around 11, midnight,

might do some chores, might have sex,

you might visit your neighbors.

In early castles,

the lord and lady usually slept in the Great Hall

behind where they would sit at table for great feasts.

All of the king's retainers and loyal warriors

would also sleep in that same room.

There might be a screen separating their sleeping quarters

from the rest of the hall,

but there was not a ton of privacy.

Then usually around 2:00 a.m. or so,

you might enter what's called the second sleep,

and this sleep would go until the sun came up

and you would arise

and get ready to do your chores or your work for the day.

It's not until the advent of electricity

and people are able to work longer hours

and they need to compress their sleep into one single block

that we see people sleeping, say,

from 10:00 pm. to 6:00 a.m.,

and that is not a natural cycle.

@rahsoose asks, honestly,

why do medieval people have so many torture devices?

What the [beep] was wrong with those people?

First of all, they did not have all those torture devices.

Yes, they had some,

but most torture devices you see came into use

or were invented after the Middle Ages

or they're completely fabricated,

especially by people in the 19th century

who for some reason wanted to imagine the Middle Ages

as a time of savagery and barbarism

so by contrast they seemed much more civilized.

So, for example, you might have the Rack.

That might be legit.

There is no Iron Maiden.

There is no Spanish Tickler.

There were no chastity belts.

Any chastity belt you have seen in a museum is a fake!

@MedievalScholar asks,

what is your favorite medieval castle?

This is a tough question to answer because I have about 20.

The top of my list is Windsor Castle.

It is a great example of a motte-and-bailey castle.

Basically, a motte-and-bailey castle has two parts.

First, there would be an earthen mound.

On top of that, you would build a keep.

Below and in front of the keep would be the bailey section,

and this is where all the activity

of the household would happen.

A motte-and-bailey castle

would also have another layer outside that enclosure,

which would be a moat.

If you are a knight in armor,

the last thing you probably want to do

is swim across the moat.

The moat also prevents the enemy

from tunneling under the castle walls to get to the keep.

If the enemy forces push through the bailey,

then everyone retreats into the keep.

For the most part, a castle was defensive.

It was not luxurious.

There are, for example, no hallways in castles.

Hallways come about with the advent of the palace,

which is post-medieval.

And because of this there's really no privacy.

@Shark3143 asks,

did medieval kings ever just piss in the moat or what?

Absolutely, and it's not just kings!

Toilets tended to be a very, very small sort of closet

that jutted out over the edge of the walls,

sometimes over the moat,

sometimes just down into a courtyard

and some poor guy had to clean it up.

These were also called garderobes.

Garderobe means in French, a place to keep your robe,

and if you hung your clothes in the garderobe

next to all the ammonia scent from the urine,

you were less likely to get mites

and other creepy crawlies in your clothes.

@Wheezy_814 says,

could y'all imagine the [beep] swampass people had

during the medieval times?

Yes, in the Middle Ages,

you absolutely were smelling your neighbors

much more than you are today,

but it is a myth that they were completely unsanitary.

Plenty of medieval cities had bathhouses,

where a caller would go through the streets

announcing when the water was hot.

In certain medieval communities like Strasbourg,

if you were a civil servant,

part of your salary went towards

being able to use the bathhouse once a week

so you could get clean.

It did smell bad, there were open sewers,

but it was not as bad as some people might believe.

@cavemanpaints asks,

how did humanity survive the Black Death

without vaccines?

They did not.

Most of them died.

If we look at the mortality rate for the Black Death,

we see that it's something like 80%,

and that means if you contracted plague,

you had maybe an 18-20% chance of surviving.

Otherwise, you were dead.

The first big wave, which was about 1346 to 1353,

wipes out half of the population, we now estimate.

The population didn't have any chance to rebound

because plague kept coming back

over and over again up, until 1721.

And by the way, if you have seen images

that supposedly represent what plague doctors looked like,

in sort of a primitive hazmat suit,

no one wore those plague masks in the Middle Ages.

You should know that that is anachronistic.

It is wrong.

That probably came into being

sometime around the 17th century.

@i_love_ur_mom3 says, Hansel and Gretel is brutal.

Did parents even love their children?

Infant mortality was so high in the Middle Ages

that you might think there's no way

medieval parents could attach any affection

to children who are very likely to die.

Evidence now shows

that medieval people seem to have loved their children

just as much as modern people do,

that they mourned when they died,

that they worried over them when they were sick.

Infant mortality rates before the first year of life

are somewhere around 80%,

but if you made it past age five,

there's no reason why you couldn't live into your sixties,

even seventies, and, in some cases, eighties.

The rate of infant mortality skews lifespan averages

in the Middle Ages

so that it looks like totally healthy people

are walking around and at age 35, they keel over and die.

That's not the case.

Since you mentioned Hansel and Gretel,

this story and other stories like Red Riding Hood

have one purpose,

to teach your children not to go into the woods.

Dangers in the woods include, for example, wolves.

That was a very large danger.

On the Continent and in England,

you also have all kinds of outlaws living in the woods.

They made their living by thievery, looting,

and all kinds of other unsavory practices

@StrongbowBeleg asks, I must ask,

did medieval artists actually know what animals look like?

This image is from the Aberdeen Bestiary.

These are cats.

Yes, indeed, they did know what cats looked like.

We know that they had cats

and that cats were acting then like cats do now

because we have evidence of paw prints,

walking across medieval manuscripts.

We do have a medieval manuscript

in which a cat apparently peed on the page

and the monk circled it

and noted which cat had done this to the manuscript.

The way things were drawn or rendered

was not meant to be a realistic representation.

It was meant to be symbolic, flat, 2-D,

and often would have lots of signals or clues

that had hidden meanings,

especially in manuscript illuminations.

And if you're going for a three-dimensional,

realistic portrayal, that's not quite as easy to do.

@agneponx asks, how [beep] boring would it have been

to be born in medieval times?

What the hell did they do for fun?

They played all kinds of ball games

that would involve kicking

or hitting something like an inflated pig's bladder

with a stick.

Lawn bowling, where they would roll smooth stones

to knock someone else's ball out of the way.

They also played board games.

There's a game called Fox and Geese

that's sort of a strategy game.

And they played chess.

Here we have an example of a chess piece

from the famous Isle of Lewis chess set,

which was fashioned out of walrus ivory

sometime in the 12th century.

@atothe_d asks, did medieval court jesters actually exist?

Seems fake.

Does seem fake, but it's not.

Court jesters absolutely existed.

They provided some much needed entertainment,

both for the king and for nobles assembled at court,

especially on feast days.

One famous court jester

who was at the court of King Henry II

was asked every year during the Christmas holidays

to put on his signature performance,

which was a leap, a whistle, and a fart.

But jesters, or fools as they were sometimes called,

might be there just for entertainment, juggling, antics.

Others might be the individual who was the only individual

who could speak truth to the king

without fear of getting beheaded.

Because this position of fool or jester was meant

on one level not to be taken seriously,

these individuals could get away

with giving the king advice or information

or saying things that other people at court just could not.

@kenziexlittle asks,

how the [beep] did jousting become a thing?

Jousting started out as a very necessary, pragmatic activity

that was to train young knights for warfare.

Over time, however, jousting became something of a spectacle

and this eventually developed

into the full-fledged tournament,

one of which we see in the beginning

of House of the Dragon.

The basics are there,

two knights riding at each other on horseback

with a very small barrier in between

to keep them to either side of what are known as the lists.

House of the Dragon has some of the lower classes there.

This wouldn't have been the case in the Middle Ages.

This was really something that the upper classes attended

and the lower classes might be present

as food vendors or sellers of other goods

outside the tournament arena, but not inside.

Boydell & Brewer asks,

did you know that in Medieval England,

animals could be tried and convicted of crimes?

There are records of animals being taken to court.

And yes, indeed, there are.

If an animal had caused damage to crops

or to other livestock or had injured a person,

very often the animal could be put on trial.

And in this case,

they were often thought to be possessed by Satan

when they did these terrible things.

Even more interesting than animals on trial, though,

is the case of animals who became saints.

In 13th century France,

there is the story of the Sainted Greyhound,

and this is a story in which the lord of a castle

leaves his young son in a cradle while he goes out hunting

and when he comes back,

he finds the son's room is a disaster.

There's blood everywhere.

The cradle's been overturned.

The dog has blood on its muzzle,

and so the Lord thinks that the dog has killed his son,

so he kills the greyhound, flips over the cradle,

and finds that, in fact, what the dog had done

was protect the child from a snake.

And the lord feels so bad

that he creates a shrine to this greyhound,

and her name is Saint Guinefort, and pretty soon,

she becomes a local patron saint to children.

And a little bit later the Catholic church said,

no, you are not allowed to have animal saints.

What is wrong with you people?!

@NeffliesStuff asks, Was there a real King Arthur?

Maybe?

In about 1191, the monks at Glastonbury Abbey claim

that they have found the grave of King Arthur.

And the monks report that in the coffin they discovered,

there was a very large man

who had died from an ax blow to the head

and they know it's Arthur's grave

because on it is this leaden cross,

and engraved on the cross in sort of very early script,

here lies buried the renowned King Arthur

in the Isle of Avalon.

Now, in the 20th century,

archeologists excavated where the monks said they had dug

and they found out that, indeed, they had excavated someone.

Whether or not it was actually King Arthur, we don't know.

The cross itself has been lost.

One clue that works in favor of this

is the spelling of Arthur's name, Artorius,

which is a really early spelling.

If you were gonna dummy up a cross

to say you found the grave of Arthur in the 12th century,

you'd probably spell it Artus.

Also, the shape of the letters

seem to be earlier than 12th century,

although, again, that could be part of the forgery.

@XavierTorch asks, did medieval knights name their swords?

Because that's big in fiction.

In the medieval tradition,

the most famous sword is Excalibur,

which belongs to King Arthur.

Other medieval individuals who had actual named swords

include Charlemagne, who had Joyeuse,

his nephew, Roland, Durandal.

Some of these would be passed from generation to generation,

and that's one reason why they would have names.

Physical objects such as the sword

would help to identify that person

as the new head of the household.

@IreneC_Bgv says, why did the Vikings attack?

Why these farmers and fishermen suddenly decided

to go looting and pillaging has to do with the possibility

that maybe the farmland they were working

was no longer quite as fertile,

and perhaps population had increased to the point

that you had what's called this youth bulge,

where there's too many young men

and not enough for them to do.

Whatever the reason, at the end of the eighth century,

the Vikings start to move out

from what we think of as their home territory

here in Scandinavia.

All of these blue pins on the map indicate places

where they either set up settlements

or they raided frequently.

They made most of their money

looting Christian churches and monasteries.

The Vikings were not Christian,

so they didn't know what these big structures were,

full of men who couldn't or wouldn't fight,

except for they seemed to be full

of lots of nice, shiny things.

They sailed up the Seine and attacked Paris.

Made it all the way to the Middle East.

And if we go back to France, this area is Normandy.

Why is it called Normandy?

Because that is where the north men settled.

There was almost nowhere that the Vikings did not go

in the Middle Ages.

Oh, here's a good one.

Who is your favorite influential woman in history?

I have several favorite medieval women.

Right at the top though has got to be Eleanor of Aquitaine,

who famously was married

to both the French king and the English king

and was mother to two more kings.

Eleanor was the heiress of the huge Duchy of Aquitaine,

which is in what today is southern France.

She was married off to the French king.

Overnight, that almost doubled the size of France.

But the French king wasn't a great king.

He would've made a great priest.

Eleanor, coming from the south,

which was the land of troubadours

and chivalry and courtly love

and where women had much more power and influence,

really was not having a great time up north in Paris,

where people were much more serious.

She and the French king had two children,

but after a certain point,

it was clear that this was not working

and they got the Pope to annul their marriage.

Once she was free,

Eleanor wrote to the young Prince Henry,

letting him know that she was available

should he be interested, and he was.

She marries Henry

and had an additional eight to ten pregnancies.

She is the mother of the famous Richard the Lionheart

and the infamous King John.

She was busy up until the very end of her life.

She died when she was about 80 years old.

@coveredinliz asks, what did the Holy Grail even do?

Just a pretty cup?

It is such an important religious object.

Either the cup that Christ drank from at the Last Supper

and/or the cup that Joseph of Arimathea used

to catch Christ's blood when he was on the cross.

What's fascinating about the grail legend

in the Arthurian stories

is that no one ever really succeeds.

In fact, the only knight

who really has a true measure of success is Sir Galahad.

He gets to see the grail and when he does see it,

we are told in Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur

that Galahad had sees something

and we don't get to know what it is.

His flesh begins to tremble

when he beholds these spiritual things

and then he dies and gets taken up to heaven,

with the grail!

For everyone else,

the quest is pretty much a dismal failure.

So those are all the questions for today.

Thanks very much for watching Medieval Support.

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