Medievalist Professor Answers Medieval Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED

I'm medievalist Professor dorsy Armstrong let's take some questions from the internet this is Medieval [Music] support Johnny V45 38576 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 we would be pronounced we the word for house would be pronounced H the word night K here is what the Lord's Prayer would have sounded like in Middle English probably sometime in the 14th century father that in Haven us the the or Kingdom to and let us not into temp but Deliver Us from Evil at caffeinated days 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 1,000 there is an increase in population and so we call this period in between say about 1,00 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 at before we kiss asks wait the Game of Thrones red wedding really happened it's well known that George RR 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 Martin took as his template for this the late medieval conflict known as the wars of the Roses you have 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 targarian King would seem to be a pretty clear analog to King Henry V 6 who suffered bouts of Madness Cersei Lannister very much resembles Margaret aanu Henry VI 6th Queen her son was probably not the son of Henry v 6 Henry VI 6 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 Cersei whose children are not that of Robert Baratheon but are indeed the children of herself and her twin brother Jamie Lannister at suiss comrade 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 B phasically 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 will fall asleep when the Sun goes down you will sleep for a few hours and then you might get up maybe around 11: midnight might do some chores you 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 War 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 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. and that is not a natural cycle at Rus asks honestly why do medieval people have so many torture devices what the 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 barbar M 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 at Medieval scholar 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 Mot and Bailey Castle basically a Mot and Bailey Castle has two parts first there would be an earn 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 motten Bailey Castle 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 at shark 3143 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 juted 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 garderobes 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 at Wheezy 814 says could y'all imagine the swamp ass 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 bath houses where a caller would go through the streets announcing when the water was hot in certain medieval communities like strawberg if you were a civil servant part of your salary went towards being able to use the bath house 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 at caveman paints 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 to 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 your mom 3 says Hansel and grle 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 were 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 60s even 70s and in some cases 80s the rate of infant mortality skews lifespan averages in the Middle Ages so that it looks like totally healthy people are walking around in an age 35 they heel over and die that's not the case since you mentioned Hansel and gredle this story and Other Stories like red ridinghood 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 at Strongbow bellig asks I must ask did Medieval artists actually know what animals look like this image is from the aine beastiary 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 2D 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 at agap asks how 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 the 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 at a toid asks the medieval Court gestures actually exist seems fake does seem fake but it's not Court gestures 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 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 at Kenzie X little asks how how the 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 list 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 boell and 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 has 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 St Jenifer 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 at nle stuff asks was there a real King Arthur maybe in about 1191 the monks at glenburry Abbey claim that they have found the grave of King Arthur the monks report that in the coffin they discovered there was a very large man who had died from an axe 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 archaeologists 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 arturus which is a really early spelling if you were going to dummy up 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 seemed to be earlier than 12th century although again that could be part of the forgery at Xavier torch 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 name swords include Charlamagne who had joyus his nephew Roland Duran do 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 at Irene cbv 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 8 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 seem to be full of lots of nice shiny things they sailed up the sen 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 in infuential woman in history I have several favorite Medieval women right at the top though is got to be Elanor of aquan who famously was married to both the French King and the English king and was Mother to two more Kings Eleanor was the ays of the huge duy of aquan 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 have made a great priest Elanor coming from the south which was the land of troubadors 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 anull 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 8 to 10 pregnancies she is the mother of the famous Richard the lionart 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 at covered in Liz 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 arthea used to catch Christ blood when he was on the cross what's fascinating about the gra 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 mallerie's mortar tour that Galahad sees something and we don't get to know what it is his flesh begins to tremble when he beholds the spiritual things and then he dies and gets taken up to heaven with the G 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 [Music]

Channel: WIRED

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Keywords: game of thrones, got, house of the dragon, innovation, medieval, medieval history, medieval interview, medieval support, medieval times, medieval wired, middle ages, ott tech support, science & technology, tech support, the middle ages, wired, wired tech support

Id: 7x8IW3XnYfo

Length: 19min 10sec (1150 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 18 2024