TOP Medieval MYTHS

there are many misconceptions about the medieval period here are just a few of my favorites [Music] [Music] no one lived past 30 years old it's completely untrue but it's a little more complicated and relies upon statistics so the reason that the average age in the medieval period is relatively low is because of the tragedy of infant mortality effectively in the medieval period if you were born you had a roughly 50 chance of dying before you reached adulthood in fact something like 30 percent of babies died in their first year of Life absolute tragedy but of course those statistics meant that if you did live to adulthood there's a fair chance you would live to roughly the same age that we do today perhaps slightly less but roughly the same age that we lived to today everyone was short and malnourished completely untrue one of the reasons why people think that mobile people were short is that the doors are often quite small they're quite low you have to almost dip to get underneath them and ceilings are quite low too if you think about it though if you don't have Central Heating and most of your life is actually spent Outdoors unless the weather's terrible it doesn't really matter how tall your ceilings are you just sit down in front of the fire and stay warm with a cloak around you and big doors mean big amounts of air coming in every time the doors opened so a small door uses less material allows you to get in and out of your house but doesn't let too much of the cold out the records we have of archeology show that they were roughly the same height as us in fact some of them were very very well muscled remains of The Archers that we have the longbowmen show incredible muscle growth and very asymmetrical so one of the things you might notice is that medieval archers were a bit lopsided there was no scientific progress or cultural progress during the medieval period it was just all grim and horrible completely wrong there was tons of scientific progress in fact a lot of the ancient Works were being translated into ordinary people's language Latin was typically the language of discourse across cultures Muslims and Christians were interacting with each other obviously there were lots of battles as well but there was an awful lot of scientific discussion going on in certain places there were also business developments for example did you know that the principle of share ownership separating the ownership of something and the operating of it was actually invented in Italy in the late medieval period as a result of people owning the mill and paying the Miller to operate the mill so shares in our modern society arguably were first formed in the medieval period nobody drank water because the water in the medieval period was absolutely disgusting and they just drank ale all the time well the answer's a bit nuanced so if you lived in a big city or a town some of the Water Systems would not be particularly drinkable you really wouldn't want to drink them but in a lot of places there were perfectly good safe clean sources of natural water so people did drink water and they were very aware of clean water as well as dirty water obviously they didn't have the germ Theory they didn't know that there were waterborne diseases as such but they knew that you got the flux and you got diarrhea if you drank the wrong kind of water now ale ale was extensively drunk as well extensively made and it was an important part of the calorie diet for the medieval worker in particular you'd often drink quite a lot of Ale at lunchtime and in the mornings and in the evenings as well because it was safe the water had been boiled but also it tasted good and had a lot of calories and anybody that drinks too much beer knows that you can put on weight by drinking beer well the many people wouldn't have put on weights drinking beer they would have used up that energy physically working in the fields because the vast majority of the population were really subsistence Farmers or little more than subsistence Farmers everybody in the medieval period was covered in muck it was filthy and everything was dull and brown complete rubbish complete rubbish there were of course times when people would have been covered in mud I mean if you're working outside and it's rainy there's going to be a lot of mud around a lot of the streets were quite muddy as well so there's some argument that in inclement weather things would have got muddy at certain times but also towns and Villages were quite keen on keeping things neat and tidy and people were meant to clean the road in front of their houses they often didn't and were taken to court about it but they were meant to sweep the road in front of the house but broadly speaking people try to not be muddy and dirty and of course civilian clothes are often very brightly colored in fact heraldry and all the bright colors around that showed your wealth so I think it's likely that medieval battlefields were bright but Grim places especially to begin with I'm sure after blood staining on the heraldry it would have looked pretty gruesome and awful but at the beginning I think medieval Battlefield would have been a magnificent and terrible sight

Channel: Modern History TV

Views: 276,264

Keywords: documentary, history, history documentary, kingsley, jason kingsley, medieval, middle ages, knight, mediaeval, myth, busted

Id: ViV6VmI9g0U

Length: 5min 49sec (349 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 03 2023