Medieval Historian Answers Google’s Most Popular Questions About Life In The Middle Ages

I mean people are down on medieval people what is all this they can't do art they can't do medicine there was fleem there was oh craigy what the four humors why did Medieval people wear pointy shoes fashion what did Medieval English sound like see in The Siege and the assault what ceased at Troy hello I'm Matt Lewis I'm co-host of History hits gone medieval podcast and I've been bought before you today to try to answer the most Googled questions about the Medieval World so prepare to hear an awful lot of I don't [Music] know here it goes when did Medieval Times start and end it's a really good question and a really tricky one we normally date the beginning of the medieval period from the fall of Rome so around 47 that even that's debated you know Rome is sacked several times but the end of the Roman Empire is considered to be the start of the early medieval period then it's divided into early medieval High medieval and late medieval for a long time particularly in Britain we've been guilty of ending the medieval period with the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 as if one defeat in one battle is a hard cut to the end of a whole period with the beginning of the chudah in truth it all bleeds a little bit further across that there's not really a hard end to it but probably by the beginning of the 16th century we're starting to move into more like the Renaissance period I think uh what did Medieval women look like women I'm not sure they would have looked too much different to to what women look like today for the most part having your head uncovered was a sign of a young unmarried woman most women once they're married and they've started a family they would cover their heads from that point onwards if you you're looking to swipe left or swipe right you're looking for the ones without a head covering on were they all uh Wy pockmarked witches absolutely not did they all look like some ma Maran in a Robin Hood film probably not but I'm sure women took a degree of interest in their appearance we get fashions in things like women's hairline so the nobility would pluck their hairline to move it further and further back but hi hairlines become like a a real fashion statement for women but I think Medieval women would have just looked like women today in medieval clothes were medieval swords heavy medieval swords come in a variety of types and shapes and sizes mass-produced swords might be a bit clumsy but most swords if you've invested money in having an expensive sword made for you this was a work of art they were designed for the user to be able to wield the them reasonably easily in their hand the whole point of having the the pommel and the handle and the blade in the lengths and styles and weights that they were was that it should be able to be fairly easily held in your hand and comfortably used for a long period of time if you get onto a humongous two-handed sword then yes potentially you're getting heavy simply because of the amount of metal that's involved in putting that together but then they become quite clumsy and unwieldy so I would argue that the best medieval swords they should feel comfortable in your hand all right what's next why was medieval times called the Dark Ages o this is a tricky and painful painful one we tend to to shy away from using the phrase the Dark Ages these days it was originally coined to talk about the early medieval period as a time when there weren't many recorded sources we didn't have lots of written Source material so we don't know a lot of what's happening in various places and so it was dark to us but it's kind of been used as a a pejorative term since then almost to suggest that people in this period lacked education and yet we know that there is incredible jewelry and artworks coming out of this period we tend to shy away from it now I guess because it's being used instead to paint these people in a way that we shouldn't really seek to portray them and next what did Medieval people eat I mean probably not all that different a diet from us much less processed food obviously maybe a not very varied diet a lot more vegetables if you weren't particularly well off meat was an expensive commodity so reserved for the tables of the nobility you displayed your wealth by putting on huge feasts with masses of roast meat and if you could afford to waste it then all the better that just goes to show how rich you really are so food waste was almost an active display poorer people would have lived on bread bread would have been a communal effort so you could grow your own wheat but you would need the Miller to ground that for you You' need the baker to bake it into bread for you and they would eat an awful lot of vegetabl so pottage something literally just throw everything into a pot like a big stew uh and you keep that on the go you would eat meat whenever you possibly could but there are lots and lots of feast days and Saints days and holy days when you wouldn't be allowed to eat meat so the church discouraged you from EA eating meat sometimes eat fish but normally you would be expected to replace that with vegetables having said that medieval people's calorie intake was also huge it's been estimated at around 7 to 9,000 calories for a man working out in the field during the day you might be doing a 12 14 hour shift of hard labor out in the fields every day you needed the calories to sustain you so they may have eaten much pler food we might not think of it as very tasty but they would have eaten a lot of it and were medieval knights muscular I mean it's really hard to tell what we have left of people from this period are just skeletons and we don't have particularly good art of what they would have physically looked like I would suggest that they probably were incredibly muscular they would have spent periods of every day practicing fighting learning to hunt learning to wear armor to wield various different kinds of weapons to ride horses their days would have been full of physical activity I would suggest that they would have been quite lean people probably quite muscular and so yeah a bunch of medieval knights would probably look something like the Avengers to us today next up how did medieval soldiers know who to fight it's a really good question you watch lots of films and it looks like chaos on a medieval battlefield but it very rarely looked like that in terms of knowing who to fight you would normally have worn the Livery of the Lord that you were fighting for so you would wear his colors you would wear his badge and you would fight near To His Banner and that's the way that people identified who was who on a battlefield it's the equivalent I think of being in a crowd and being able to spot opposing football fans from the football shirt that they're wearing you would understand what colors their allegiance referred to and so you would know whether that Lord was an enemy of your lord and therefore someone that you should be fighting medieval battlefields weren't chaotic they were normally well organized with large ranks of men moving in blocks so until you get to the point of a route at the end of a battle you could normally identify the enemy because they were a big bunch of men standing together on the other side of the field from you waving their swords at you and shouting and next up we have how did Medieval guilds work Guild bus were groupings of merchants who operated in a specific trade and they would come together to pull their wealth and their resources to try and increase the influence of their own activities so they might be able to buy more Goods if they work together they might be able to influence politics in the city and get tax breaks for their particular trade if that was what they were after at the time they would also pull their resources is to make religious donations or gestures pay for chapels in churches and things like that you quite often see guilds operating in that kind of way so it's a way for people to pull their resources and come together I guess similar to a trade Union but for merchants in the modern world why was medieval medicine so bad I guess we would view medieval medicine as bad because they didn't have any idea of germ Theory they didn't particularly use pharmaceutical drugs in the way that we do they believed in this ancient Greek understanding of the body as being a balance of the four humors there was Flem there was oh craigy what the four humors so there is blood Flem black bile and yellow bile and these things were variously hot or cold or dry or wet substances if you were ill it was because one of those four was out of balance you had too much black bile or not enough fleem in your system you might be bled to reduce the amount of blood in your system so that you could even out all of those four things and they they understood Wellness as a balance of things in the body and they did have Medical Treatments and drugs they would use uh herbs and things from the garden to treat certain ailments they may not have been as hugely effective as going down the the supermarket and buying some Paras them all today but they did know how to deal with odd ailments that could be treated with with herbs and Medicine in that way that's what leeches and all that kind of but they cut a vein and then the physician would judge the amount of bloody thinks she need to lose were Medieval peasants happy I mean this is a really really tricky one to answer I guess I'm probably going to have to go for a general I don't know I would imagine most people are usually fairly happy as long as they have full bellies and they're reasonably comfortable peasant life was hard it required an awful lot of work but most peasants wouldn't have known anything different either this was what they expected from life this was what their grandparents life had been like it's what they expected their grandchildren's life to be like you can find ways to be happy within that surely medieval people didn't have weekends so you would work every day that being said there's much less work to do in the winter when the days are shorter and the crops aren't growing in the field you potentially get a bit more time off work around then the 12 Days of Christmas would have been 12 days of Holiday from work when you're expected to just celebrate happy is a really subjective thing it's hard to measure how many people in the world are happy today I don't know I think it would have been fairly similar in the Medieval World you have happy days and you have sad days were medieval soldiers paid this kind of depends what kind of soldier you were if you lived on a a bit of land from which your lord required you to give him military service in return for having that land and you may well not get paid during that military service it may be restricted to a certain number of days a year that you were required to go and serve him in the Army but your payment was having a home to live in instead throughout the medieval period we do get a growth in Mercenary forces so armies for higher and yes you absolutely would get paid if you were a mercenary there in the 100 Years War we see roles of arch is being hired to go over to France and we see their daily rates of pay so absolutely you are getting paid you would normally serve in those conditions under an indenture so you would indent to a Lord to give him military service for a fixed period of time for a fixed daily rate normally and at the end of that period you get paid and you go home or you could choose to extend your indenture and fight on was the pay for is pretty good yeah do we know the pay I'm trying to think what it was I mean it is good pay yeah um at a time when a labor in a field might earn one or two p a day an Archer might be earning more like 8 or 10 p a day you get the chance for for a bit of loop while you're over there as well so you can supplement your wages a little bit next up we have what did Medieval English sound like and this this is quite tricky English as a language has been evolving over centuries so it would have sounded like different things at different parts of the medieval period there's a strong argument that the American accent an American pronunciation is actually quite close to late medieval English our best guide is probably that medieval written literature in the vernacular tends to be written phonetically so it's written down as you'd say it so if you want to know what it sounds like I would suggest go and find a paragraph of high medieval English vernacular writing and just read it as it appears on the screen try and pronounce it exactly as it said see in The Siege and the assault what ceased at Troy the bore Britain and Brent to brondes and asz the tlk that the trames of traon their root what's tried for his treachery the truest on Earth Old English so Anglo-Saxon early medieval we probably wouldn't be able to understand at all today as we move through the medieval period and English gets more similar to the English that we speak today I guess there'll be points when it's equivalent of having some GCSE French and going to France and trying to understand conversations you pick up bits and pieces and you might be able to get the gist of what's going on but there would still be odd words that we don't use anymore and there would be pronunciations that sound really really odd to our I think so English sounds different at different times and in different places as the medieval period goes on we would have understood more of it than we would have at the beginning why was medieval art so bad wow I mean we're hard on medieval people here the medieval doctors are awful and the medieval artists are terrible I think if you look at some of the illuminated manuscripts that are produced in monasteries even in the early medieval period I would argue they are absolutely stunning pieces of art that have lasted 1500 years and still look absolutely beautiful I think perhaps this question is thinking about why isn't it portrait imagery like we would expect to see today as we see emerging in the early modern period so quite often they are manuscript images of generic people in the field doing generic jobs and some of that can look really really good some of it is marginal Doodles and that's as good as the artist is I'm a terrible artist I can't draw for love no money if I draw you a stick man you'd ask me what it was I think the medieval period kind of lacks this obsession with self we don't really have concern about authorship of books or ownership of manuscripts and people were less concerned with their names and their faces being remembered for all time so there was much less of a concern with painting someone sat in front of you exactly as they appeared and more concerned with getting across images so you would produce an image that looked like a Countryside scene and it wasn't meant to represent a single person because there wasn't that obsession with individuality that exists today so I don't know that it's bad I think maybe that's unfair some of it is absolutely stunning and next we have what did Medieval beer taste like I mean I guess it would taste like beer there are lots of places that claim the recipe hasn't changed all that much in centuries I guess beer would have been much more prevalent during the medieval period in land we probably had more ale rather than beer beer is a continental way of producing that alcohol and you would have kind of your small ale small beer which would be much more watered down much more for for everyday drinking and then you would have the stronger stuff that was maybe reserved for the evening after a hard day or for a party making beer was a way of cleaning water they did drink water during the medieval period it's another myth that people didn't drink water during the medieval period but you couldn't always be certain about what was a a clean source of water you couldn't turn a tap on and know that some water company has been responsible for making sure that that's safe for you to drink and the process of making beer has the effect of killing germs that are within the water so the medieval mind wouldn't have understood why that happened but nevertheless you could drink beer that was made with unpure water that you couldn't drink itself it's entirely possible that fairly young children were drinking beer during this period and were Medieval hospitals clean H medieval hospitals were were quite complex places they're often attached to monasteries staffed by monks and nuns who would have a rudimentary idea of how to look after you they're still interested in these four humors in balancing all of those things out they may care for lepers in a community perhaps they wouldn't necessarily know how to treat those people but they would feel the responsibility to look after them in the community so we know that medieval armies were aware that where they camped they tried to make sure that they weren't close to stagnant water and that their waste was away from the people because it was so easy to introduce disease so there was an understanding that noxious smells and Vapors could lead to disease and so there would be a degree of cleanliness in hospitals but I doubt they were scrubbing everything to the extent that we would expect people to do today so maybe if you break your arm don't go to a medieval Hospital why was medieval torture so cruel again we might be being a bit mean here we're calling it cruel they'd probably argue they were just good at it I don't know that medieval times was as as full of torture as we sometimes think it was the use of things like the rack and methods of extracting confessions from people is actually more of an early modern thing comes after the medieval period undoubtedly there were cruel and harsh punishments there was this idea of kind of restorative justice so a thief might have a hand cut off if you committed certain crimes you could be branded with a letter so that everybody would know that you had committed that crime Justice was much more of a community issue so it was actually quite rare for the state to get involved in torturing someone in order to extract a confession or anything like that if we're talking about why were they able to be so cruel I mean who cares about human rights in the medieval period no one is telling the king that he can't inflict some pain on somebody because it's against their human rights there was simply no mechanism for people to protest against that kind of thing so we know for example blinding is a big political form of torture in the medieval period and we know Henry the first allowed a hostage exchange between some people that were in dispute and the one side blinded the son of the other family who they had as a hostage and Henry the first allowed that first family to take two daughters from the second family and not only blind them but also cut their noses off and those two girls were actually Henry the first own granddaughters so he allowed this to be done to his own grandchildren because it had that element of restorative justice to it but I actually think torture as a form of extracting some kind of confession is far rarer in the medieval world than we probably think it was were Medieval people dirty I mean people are down on medieval people what is all this they can't do art they can't do medicine they're all rubbish and they're all filthy and they stink absolutely not they would have worked out in the field all day so obviously they're going to get sweaty and they're going to get dirty but their entire way of life and of dressing even is geared up to deal with this medieval people wore an underlayer of linen garments and linen was there to absorb the sweat and the smell and that was the layer that you would change every day or as regularly as you needed to your outer clothes then would never touch the sweat they would never become smelly medieval people were almost certainly dirty while they're out working in the field because they had hard manual jobs to do but they knew how to keep themselves clean they knew how to wash that dirt off and they knew how to make sure they didn't stink of sweat at the end of a busy day too people need to not be down on medieval people like this how did Medieval sewers work badly you could often get sewers down the middle of streets there would be a channel down the middle that would take away all of the waste that could be in an area where there are trades going on like butchers that could be animal blood and all sorts of stuff being washed down the street in the middle of a town medieval toilets would be open holes and they might be over a river or a waterway that will take all of that away for you so they never actually went into a recognizable underground sewer and to some extent this is a problem that lingers into the the 19th Century you know you think of the great stink in Parliament was essentially because the temps were so full of sewage and rubbish that there was no effective way of getting it out of the city as it grew huge underground sewers didn't exist in the medieval period the other way you get round this is that you have some kind of of outside toilet and then you get people who are known as gong Farmers maybe one of the worst jobs in history in the world ever is surely being the gong farmer going around digging up all your neighbors poop piles and taking it away for them were Medieval peasants illiterate yes for the most part they had very little need to read and write they had very little time to learn it and nobody to teach it to them really you do see literacy growing throughout the medieval period particularly with the emergence of a merchant class who need to be able to count and reconcile paperwork uh and do their books and provide receipts but if you're a medieval peasant working in the field being able to read and write is of no interest to you you go to your church services on the Sunday and the priest tells you what the Bible says so you don't need to be able to read the Bible and indeed there was a huge argument that medieval peasants shouldn't be allowed to read the Bible it shouldn't be in English it should be in Latin and so you hear from the priest what it is Medieval churches would have been painted with Incredible wall art telling biblical stories so again you have that visually represented to you and you would read those paintings rather than having to go away and read the word so I would say for the most part yes medieval peasants were overwhelmingly illiterate what did Medieval London look like for example that the wall city of London what is still called the square mile the city of London today was contained within those walls with seven Gates around it that allowed people in and that it ordered onto the river temps and places like Westminster up River and the Tower of London the other way were considered outside of the city of London uh there was one Bridge across the temps London bridge on the other side of that was suuk which was then almost like a little independent town of its own and suduk was kind of marshy land over there it's where you went if you were looking for a medieval brothel for a good time sodic was the place to go and so I think medieval London would feel very different to today but you might have that same sense still of being crammed into a small space it's really busy it's really hectic it's quite noisy and maybe a bit disorientating especially if you you normally lived in the countryside medieval London would have seemed like a completely different world why did Medieval people wear pointy shoes fashion why do most people wear trainers today Fashions change so you go through periods in the in the Medieval World when long shoes are fashionable pointy shoes are fashionable curled up shoes become fashionable and these things just move in and out so we can't say that they use pointy shoes all the way through the medieval period but shoes will also become a key indicator like everything else that you wear it's the outward face that you present to the world so they're a good way of displaying your wealth and you can reach the point where the longer and pointier or curlier your shoes are the more expensive they are so you can look like a clown and it would be a great way of announcing how rich you are we're medieval peasants slaves but chunk to the medieval period yes so in Anglo-Saxon England probably the majority of peasants were in a form of slavery or at least something close to indentured service you had a piece of land the lord gave it to you and he would expect you to work that land you you grew your own food on that land but you would also have to go and work on his land in his fields to bring in his crops as part of that deal and you wouldn't get paid for doing that the Anglo-Saxons did keep slaves the Viking economy ran on slavery so the Vikings traded in the the near East in uh Constantinople and places like that what they took East to trade for for money for beads for goods what they took East was slaves because that was the most valuable commodity in that part of the world and so lots of their raids in Britain during this period are about collecting slaves and transporting them down into the near East Christianity tends to frown on slavery so with the Norman invasion of England we see an almost immediate end to slavery as such in England with the christianization of the Vikings we see the slave trade dying out amongst them but you still have a long period in which there are many ways to be a medieval peasant you can be a fairly wealthy peasant and distinction really is between free men and unfree men if you're free you can buy a piece of land wherever you want and you can move around around you can better yourself if you're unfree you're still tied to that piece of land that the Lord has given you and you are considered a possession of the lord of the land in effect you are still in real terms probably in a form of slavery deep into the medieval period next question uh why were Medieval Times so brutal I mean I guess because it's populated by human beings and we're a pretty terrible species I guess we can think about things like punishments corporal punishment still existed during this period capital punishment still existed during this period it's a time when things like branding and mutilation were used as forms of punishment and today we consider that brutal but it's it's a fairly new phenomenon to consider that to be brutal they were concerned about maintaining Law and Order and if you could punish one criminal and protect the entire community that was the kind of balance I think that they were playing with in the medieval mind so although we think it's a brutal period there are a long periods of Peace there are many people who would have done absolutely no fighting in their lifetime they would have worked in the fields worked the land for their entire lives and might have lived a life that we would have thought was pluming hard work but could have been quite idyllic we always think the time that we're living in now is so much better than previous times everyone that came before was brutal and I don't doubt in 500 years time people will think that we were brutal and unnecessary and did incredibly weird things that they don't understand and perhaps it's partly as well to do with the parts of of the medieval world that we study and that we see in film we see battles we see the bad guy Sheriff of Nottingham with his acts of Cruelty and brutality we see Edward the first in Braveheart being a vicious man who wants to conquer all these people and has pretty brutal and and evil ways to go about it we don't see many three-hour cinematic epics of people going out in the field doing a bit of digging and plowing and then going home and having a beer and their tea and next oh that's the last question so that's all of the most Googled questions about the Medieval World hopefully I found some reasonable answers to that I didn't go for too many I don't knows if you've enjoyed it please like And subscribe to catch more of this incredible content and you can also catch me on the god medieval podcast on Tuesdays and Fridays from history hit

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Id: mzMRYt-5PQc

Length: 29min 30sec (1770 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 31 2024