What fantasy tropes of medieval history are not historicall accurate?

Everybody, everywhere speaking the same language. Definetly the most common offender

the magic part

>>52906497
Chainmail Bikinis were actually unisex.

>>52906497
Jumping around in plate armour?

Halfplate. In real life, it's just fullplate without the leg armor so you can poop more easily in Switzerland, not chainmail with plate carrier attachments like in 3.x

>>52906497
Generic Golden Coin.

Trying to make a fantasy setting "realistic" is an exercise in insanity.

>>52906920
https://youtu.be/qzTwBQniLSc
my plate carrier, rifle and backpack weighs way more and is isolated to one point, and i can vault highwalls and do jumping jacks with ease

>>52907140
>Quest for the holy grail test reels

>>52906497
Peasant levies
Mono cultural kingdoms

>>52906926
There barely were any plate armour that hindered pooping to begin with. Mail's more of a hassle.

>>52906497
Vikings had no horns on their helmets.

>>52906497
Dirty unwashed peasantry. Outside of some specific periods or cultures, people've bathed regularly for ages when they could. Cultures without bathing habits were more of a rarity than ones with.

This one's not as bad but sex and race inequality wasn't really as rampant as a lot of settings make it out to be. Granted, you'd totally be in the right still if you chose to make it a big deal because that was a thing, but another default people take a lot building "realistic" settings is to make women cattle and make regions mono-cultural or mono-racial. A lot of the time the generic euro-setting's real world counterparts were actually totally game for women to own and run properties, and for foreigners to come into town and set up a life unimpeded. A lot of people just gave less of a shit back then.

>>52907220
>This one's not as bad but sex and race inequality wasn't really as rampant as a lot of settings make it out to be.

And here comes the Tumblr.
Fuck off, you worthless autogynephilia shill.

>>52906497
Magic and wizards in general did not, in fact, exist

>>52907253
>>52907220
Race wasn't half as important before the modern age as it is now. language and religion were a lot more imporant to medieval and pre-modern people. A warrior from Mali and a Berber warrior both fighting in spain would be treated the same by the local populace because they were both muslims.

>>52906895
>>52907307
Magic and supernatural forces were pretty real to the people at that times. Granted there weren't any fireballs but still

>>52907329
Early medieval women still weren't whipped but as time went on and the power of the church grew women got shat on harder and harder. You didn't even need a priest to marry, just a witness for vows, until the church clamped down on it.

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>>52907220
>>52907329
the jews in england were almost completely kicked out fothe country. there were laws that prevented them from owning land, working land, opening shops, or owning any property at all. race was extremely important in england, and different laws applied to you depending on your race. laws that had extreme consequences for your life, unlike today.

you dont know anything about what you are talking about.

>>52907329
>>52907220
This is going against literally everything I've ever heard on medieval society so I'd like to see some sources

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>>52906920

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>>52907220
>>52907253

Crazy generalisations and bait aside, for anyone who gives a shit about actual history, the role of women in medieval society is something hugely dependent on context - impossible to make a blanket statement about the period.

For example, different high medieval states in Italy had totally different approaches. In Venice, women were often confined to households and held to extreme standards of modesty and lacked all kind of self determinism and property rights. In other coexisting maritime republics there are records of women being guild masters, owning and managing extensive properties, etc. You also have very hierarchical (nobility) dominated states at the same time where the power of women was totally dependent on how important they were, and the wives of dukes would often manage estates and be responsible for defense during sieges.

The closest you can come to a blanket statement is that GENERALLY the more commercially inclined a society, the more scope there was for low and mercantile class women to have some power and autonomy, with Venice as the extremely important caveat to this.

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>>52907422
he has no sources because everything he said is a fucking lie. he is probably an enlightenment hating postmodernist retard that wishes for the good old days before science, and democracy, and freedom

>>52906497
Plate armor being heavy.
Common people eating meat on any other occassion than some big holiday.

Also, what this >>52906887 anon said. The language variability was so massive before early modern period, you could have people living 100 km apart, technically still in the same duchy, still from the same culture (nominally, at least) and speaking local variables of the same language so different from each other they might be even unable to understand each other. Also, absolutely nothing wrong with having settles from different country/culture/region in the middle of your kingdom/duchy, especially east from Elbe river.

>>52906887
I always remember back when I was studying English my lecturer told us one of the biggest drives for spreading the written language was so that people across different regions of the country could understand what each other meant because of how distinct dialects were back in the day

>>52906497
There is so much wrong with ye olde standard medieval fantasy that it is difficult to know where to begin. Almost every issue can lead to a field of rabbit holes filled with exception and explanations so a lot of it depends on just how much detail you want.

It's probably easier to just list all the things you want checked.

*All answers come with the caveat that medieval europe is a big place that sprawls across time and space so there is no "one size fits all" answer most of the time.

>>52907478
>Also, absolutely nothing wrong with having settles from different country/culture/region in the middle of your kingdom/duchy, especially east from Elbe river.

Yeah German merchants and craftsmen were fucking everywhere alongside the Hansa.

>>52907405
I wasn't the anon talking about women and race, I just commented on the racial thing.

Widow's inherited their husbands property if they had no children or very young children, making them the head of the household.

They also could rise to great hights in the church, a couple of famous women are known as great philosphers and writers (Hildegard Vond Bingen for example) but it was still quite rare.

>>52907416
As were the jews in other countries yes, but don't you think this has more to do with their jewish religion than race?

>>52907422
>>52907456
I didn't say racism wasn't a thing, I said it was less important then today. Just take a look at the mongols, Europeans were racist as fuck against them, a lot of them thinking the mongols were a group of humans straight out of hell.

I'll look up some sources shortly.

>>52907499
You think about this being an issue in tiny-ass England? Check China then, where the various dynasties and the country as a whole survived solely because they had a vast bureaucracy made of literate people, who could read the orders send from capital and reply on them, while speaking completely different languages, DESPITE it still being a Chinese and still technically being able to communicate perfectly in written form.

>>52907416
But could it not be that it was because the Jews followed their Jewish religion, rather than converting to catholicism?

>>52907253
>>52907448
The dude's kind of right. The middle ages were about class first, gender second. Rights were granted to individual persons and classes, so a woman of a higher class did indeed have more rights than one of a lower class AND could hold on to additional rights that were exclusively hers as well.

Doesn't mean that there was gender equality within any class, mind you. All the same, the reconfiguration of our societies around sex only really began during the 17th century or so.

>>52907522
>They also could rise to great hights in the church
Get your head out of your ass.

>>52907526
I'm talking more about settler actions, where various Polish and Czech rulers, both on king, duke or even baron level were eager to just get more people to their land, so they were commissioning settlement actions, using surplus Germans. And then, due to this being medieval, they had German subjects, who were speaking German, were culturally German and yet were n-th GENERATION of people living in the middle of Poland/Bohemia.

>>52907405
That is demonstrably bullshit.
The catholic church was if anything a pro-women's rights organisation for the early medieval age.
>Stopped local pre-christian customs of child-wedding
>Solidified rights of inheritance and registered who was born from who, etc.

I'm not trying to whitewash the catholic church here. Their approach to sin and a womans role in society was shit, but it did go a long way to establish cultural norms of murder/violence being a sin, rule of law, and weddings being a thing for adults.
And all of that benefitted women greatly.

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>>52907456
But I thought postmodernists were supposed to be all for enlightenment and muh science and democracy, while le ebil nazis were supposed to be the reactionary ones that want good ol' medieval-tier christian theocracies

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>>52907478
On the meat thing, it depends where you are in Europe and when. Post the black plague in northern Europe, common people actually had more meat in their diets, mostly in the form of game, due to the massive depopulation, decreasing agricultural workforce, and the regeneration of forests.

Also, in some places in Scandinavia, coast of the Iberian peninsula etc, people ate a fair amount of salt fish, even when poor.

>>52907541
Fuck, wrong link, should go here >>52907516

>>52907538
I gave you an example in the next sentence of a woman who did just that.

>>52907522
>They also could rise to great hights in the church
>in the church
>women
Yeah, such great hights in men-only club

>>52907571
>>52907558

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>>52907548
no, postmodernism is a counter enlightenment philosophy.
postmodernism is a philosophy directly derived from the NAZIs. communists took the counter enlightenment philosophies of the nazis after wwii and started using them for the purposes of the far left.

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7705.html

>>52907558
>i posted marxist revisionist fake history

>>52907549
Silly anon, don't you know fish don't count as meat?

And not counting few rare occurances like the one you've noted, meat was rare. Especially as game meat, since most of forests were privately/crown owned, so hunting in one was a sure way to get yourself hanged for poaching. It was lessened a bit by Late Medieval period, mostly due to "wide" domestication and husbandry of rabbits.
They are delicious, you should try one

>>52906497
>What fantasy tropes of medieval history are not historicall accurate?
It's generally ignored that the middle ages were an age of colonization, population growth and city building.

>>52907416
>being allowed to shoot at any Welshman approaching the city walls with your longbow
>justenglishthings

>being conquered by the French
>justenglishthings

>>52907416
>jews are a race

Can you not? I mean I guess you could argue they're a genetic group with certain similarities (even then, there are actually several groups of jews with varying numbers of genetic disease etc.)

But to say it was anything BUT religion at that time is retarded.

>>52906497
Door knobs weren't invented until 1878.

>>52907593
>I am a faggot that does not know anything about history.

>>52907522
I recommend
>Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient times to the end of the Eighteenth Century. Which aims to look at the diffrence between people different by birth (antipodes, mongols etc) and people diffrent by culture. (Muslims, the Pagans of north-eastern Europe, sometimes Jews althought they sometimes fit in the different by birth camp because they were seen as spawn of witches/satan during some periods).

>>52907593
>conflicts with my ahistorical medieval fantasy ideas
F-f-fake news! SJWs! REEEEEEEEEEEEE

>>52907593
Hildegard Von Bingen is fake?

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>>52907612
>I post wild claims
>I seriously think organisation entirely run by male clergy allows any rank or position to female, who are banned from entering said clergy by the sole fact of not having penis
>I don't see how this contradicts itself

>>52907608
By a black guy in America.

>>52907626
Here let me namedrop some other famous Abbesses
>Héloïse
>Herrad of Landsberg

>>52907542
It's like people who have never read the Qu'ran crying about how horrible it is to women. Yeah, maybe in the 21st century's point of view, but looking at the west's treatment of women anywhere before the fucking second world war, it's no different if not better, and it for sure is a hell of a lot better than women were getting before Islam.

>>52907626
No, but claiming she gained high rank in Church is.
She was a fucking nun. That was also the highest where females could go in Church hierarchy. And still is the upper limit. A nun, just like monk, is literally NOBODY in the hierarchy. Even rank and file priest is higher.

It's like you are obtuse on purpose

Well, at least the thread started out alright.

>>52907542
>child-wedding
How young?

>Everything is dyed shades of brown
>Nobility didn't fight in battle

Those are my biggest issues.

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>>52906497

Bolts and arrows dropping people like if they were bullets.

People holding bows at full draw to threaten others.

Everyone stabbing through armor like it wasn't there.

>>52907653
Let me correct you there, there are a lot higher ranks above a nun, Hildegard became both a Prioress and an Abbess. And while nun's aren't much to write home about, an Abbess is.

Hildegard corresponded with multiple Emperors, Popes and Kings, they all wanted her advice. She wrote highly influential books on Music, Medicine and Theology.

She was allowed on preaching tours, not just preaching to other nuns but also to mail clergy and to laypeople.


Also why the fuck do you think monk's are nobody, there are some pretty famous monks who had a huge influence on the world around them.

Martin Luther for example, Benedict of Nursia as another.

>>52907635
Hey retard more than one anon thinks you are stupid.

>>52907651
Yes, because, say, the suffragettes were stoned to death after they were put into a pit dug out specifically for them so that their heads would be the only thing to stick out of the ground.

>>52907689
Bullets of each and every kind instantly dropping people dead

>>52907715
>lol it's just 9mm

>>52907703
>>52907635
>>52907653
Oh btw, according to canonical law, an Abbess is of the same rank to a bishop

>>52907542
>The catholic church was if anything a pro-women's rights organisation

Before Catholicism dominated Europe women held much more rights in most cultures. But it's true that it wasn't Christianity that started this, Greeks and Romans did.

Go read about how many cities were ruled by women in the times of Roman conquests.

Hell Persepolis archives confirmed that women back then had maternal leaves and right of equal pay and plenty of them were on top of guilds.

>>52907729
>lol hollywood is always right

Same with knife wounds.

>>52907774
Considering Greek philosophers views on women, that's surprising.

>>52907416

Jews were hated because they followed a different religion. On top of that Jews were the only people allowed to legally lend money in most places. So just imagine how many people would want them gone.

>>52907651
Islams treatment of women was not better than other parts of the world and it only got worse the longer it existed. Early examples of liberal treatment of women was simply a remnant of pre-existing Roman and Persian laws that were gradually replaced by Islamic Law.

Regardless of the powers mothers and wives of rulers often had, women in Islamic society had a lot less personal freedom and less opportunity than those in the West.

Reminder that Islamic law is not limited to the Qu'ran.

>>52907715

We are talking about medieval here. A 13m musket bullet does indeed drop you dead instantly just because hydrostatic shock.

>>52906497
Who... cares...

>>52907774
If a city is ruled by a women during a Roman conquest doesn't that just imply the men all just died fighting the Romans?

>>52907842

No. It was common before the roman conquest wars.

>>52907835
I know, that's why I put that under a spoiler.

>>52907823

This guy gets it. Women had a lot of rights and power in pre-Islam middle east. Since Islam took over it was only getting worse and worse.

>>52907602
>the middle ages were an age of colonization, population growth and city building.
This sounds really confy for some reason.

>>52907867
In the netherlands, where I live a lot of people walked into wilderness or uninhabited forests/swamps and started a life there. This got them outside of feudal rule and made them freeman. Because this happened so much the peasantry here was almost non existent in the 15th century.

>>52907867
People also died of the dreaded japanese cold and the runs left and right and Swedes and Arabs raided most of the subcontinent.

>>52907891
But they had to settle in a marshy and cold saltwater-swamp.

>>52907891
What do you mean that the peasantry became non-existant? Did people grow out of that profession as the Netherlands became a big trading nation and that manufacturing became more prominant?

>>52907921
Correct, life was hard the first couple of years,
the water is brakkish most of the time, half salty, half normal you could make a fine western like experience in such an environment

>>52907928
Peasant isn't a profession, it's a station in life. You're born a peasant. You aren't born a farmer, or a craftsman.

>>52907921
>>52907934
But weren't/aren't the Dutch very good with dams and drainage systems? Did that not make more land available for use?

>>52907867
Comfy is not quite the word I'd use to describe things. However the broad trend was growth and development. For an era unfairly characterised as stagnant it is staggering to think just how far things had come from the Migration Period in almost every way.

Just stay away from the 14thC, that is not a comfy time and the plague was merely the largest in a conga line of calamities.

>>52907947
Alright. But incidently, weren't peasants as a class also not predominantly involved with farming or herding of animals?

>>52907928
Oh boy I did it again. I meant Serfdom. In dutch there is a word for Peasantry and Serfdom, so I keep forgetting that in English the two meanings have separate words.

Excuse me.

Also the Peasantry also shrunk quite a bit yeah. Because there was so much water everywhere (some villages were only reachable by boat, and most villages/towns were easier to reach by boat then on foot) a shipping industry developed that made it very easy to just import food from other places. This led to growing towns, trading contacts all over Europe and a big prominence of the guilds in daily life all over the country. It's one of the reasons the Netherlands became filthy rich in the 1500-1700's and it thebig reason why the Netherlands were the second biggest urban concentrated region in Europe during the 1200-1700's

>>52907952
>But weren't/aren't the Dutch very good with dams and drainage systems?
Practices makes perfect, yes.
>Did that not make more land available for use?
Yes, eventually. Just a couple of generations of shoveling dirt and pumping water, hoping that no flood or inattentive neighbour is going to cause the dam to bust between then and actual arable land.

>>52907974
Yes, but so were freemen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_(class)

>>52906497
The idea that everything existed alongside everything and had a specific purpose.

The most common example of this is weaponry and armour. Any number of rpgs or fantasy themed videogames will have weapons and armour used simultaneously, that in reality were separated by a LOT of time and technological development.

An example would be knights in full plate using 14th century style weaponry fighting vikings wearing armour and weaponry from the 10th century.

The stereotypical fantasy warrior in plate armour wearing a shield and sword is a mishmash of different time periods. Shields and swords were mainly a thing of the chainmail and shieldwall era of the norman conquests, viking incursions and "dark age" medieval years, and fighters who meant business in the era of full plate armour used shields less for foot combat since they were not the main form of physical protection any more, in order to use two-handed weapons of various kinds that were capable of hurting other people in plate armour.

>>52908027
Darn, I was just writing a bit on free vs. serf.

But yeah, the big social and legal divide was not between noble and commoner (that was a much fuzzier line) but between freemen and serfs. As the wiki page says, those lines in Magna Carta about "no freeman shall be imprisoned...without trial" etc that have become cornerstones of anglophone conceptions of liberty excluded the majority of the population.

One of the reasons towns attracted so much immigration from the countryside was that after a certain period dwelling there, status as a freeman was earned.

>>52908090
Well in the Netherlands you could start living in some unclaimed swamp (or in the forested wilderness if you lived in the inland parts) with some bro's and after a couple of years have a comfy-freeborn life.

>>52908090
It also seems to be a mark of germanic influence to me. This divide was predominately seen in Scandinavian countries, former empire of Charlemagne, and lands conquered by the Normans.

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>>52907635
>banned from entering said clergy by the sole fact of not having penis
You make it sound as if a woman WITH a penis would be able to enter this clergy.
Maybe it was possible, the priests would like it, I guess.

I've heard that one of the reasons behind the popularity of Christianity among Roman women was because it binded woman and husband together for life instead of the husband being able to cast her aside, if he want it. Is that truth?

>>52908257
Christianity was popular with slaves and women because it gave them more freedom and prospects for a better life.

Except when all of them got fed to the lions offcourse.

>>52907253
ur a faget

>>52908257
I couldn't say if that is specifically true or not but it would make sense.

Christianity placed a great deal of emphasis on entering into marriage of ones own free will but once married divorce was tricky to say the least (anullments were easier but require specific circumstances and still don't come cheap).

Pre-Christian Rome was not a very female-friendly society and marriage was no exception. Wives could be divorced with ease, and especially among the patrician class you can see marriages being made to cement alliances then broken the moment those links became inconvienient or a better offer appeared.

It was actually considered a major scandal when Pompey fell in love with Caesar's daughter Julia rather than simply treating her as a totem of the alliance.

It might not be the number one attraction of conversion, but the offer of stability and security in marriages for life cannot have hurt the appeal to women.

>>52907817
Also jews were even forbidden to lend money to other jews, but it was allowed by their religion to lend to non-jews, because jews consider(ed) non-jews to be no better than common beasts.

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>>52906497
/his/ needs to learn history. Studded leather armor existed. What didn't exist was the idea that the studs reinforced the armor, as D&D puts it.

http://greatmingmilitary.blogspot.com.br/2014/11/leather-armour-of-ming-dynasty.html
> Armour used by the militia-sailors from Yue region (粤, modern day Guangdong and Guangxi province, especially Guangxi). This armour is made of cowhide, cut into multiple bands and treated with tung oil, then joined together with studs (turning it into a studded leather armour). Its spaudlers can be further reinforced with cow horn plates.

>Yue Bing Kui Jia was considered the best among leather armours.

Those are rants on fantasy armies:
http://l-clausewitz.livejournal.com/161857.html
http://l-clausewitz.livejournal.com/195018.html

>>52908719
No one cares for chings and chongs
When people talk about typical medieval fantasy settings they're talking about european cultures

>>52907528
>But could it not be that it was because the Jews followed their Jewish religion, rather than converting to catholicism?
No, it was because jews were shaving gold from the edges of coinage and melting it down. It's why many coins had/have ridges on the edge to this day, though it's cerimonial now since coins aren't made from gold or silver.

>>52908774
Brigandines often employ studs to keep the plates locked together, so there exists a western equivalent,

Also chinks are fucking mental and have some of the coolest and weirdest history I have ever read.

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>>52908955

>>52907253
>And here comes the Tumblr.
>Fuck off, you worthless autogynephilia shill.
How does pointing out that "things weren't as bad as pop culture makes them think it was" make someone "tumblr"?

I think you're jumping at shadows, friend.

>>52908955
>>52908978
>>52908719

The entire fucking point is that people looked at pictures of metal armour where the metal plates were riveted to leather to keep it all together, and thought "huh, a leather vest with tons of rivets in it, well I guess leather armour with metal studs was a thing, so now it's in D&D"

That's what people mean with the "myth" of studded leather armour, not that there were never any armour that incorporated leather and rivets.

>>52908955
>>52908978
Yeah I know of brigandines, but the stud are there because of the metal plates not because the studs are supposed to stop blows

>>52907703
>She was allowed on preaching tours

Are... are those a thing? Because I am visualizing roadies and groupies and crowds of teenagers who cannot wait to see their star live.

>>52908955
>Also chinks are fucking mental and have some of the coolest and weirdest history I have ever read.
Fuck off chinks are a fucking disease shit country shithistoryFUCK OFF YOU BITCH KEK FUCKER ASSHOLE CUT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHOT SHITSHRISHIRHSITHSURSHITSHITSHIRHSITHSITHDIRHS

>>52908719
>>52908955
Leather (although textiles were more ppopular for brigandines) and studs may be involved, but both are pretty far from "studded leather" as is popularly understood. It's a crappy term that does not accurately describe how either armor functioned and it is only good for confusing people or pedantry.

You don't call lamellar "string armor" because the rope is just the attachment method, it's the lames that actually protect you. All the leather (or fabric) and rivets in a brigandine do is keep the metal plates inside supported.

I'll admit I have no clue about this Chinese stuff, but again the rivets just hold the hardened leather sections together. Call it segmented leather or something.

Studded leather is too far gone as a term to save, and frankly it is not worth saving anyway.

>>52909116
Essentially, yes. Just think about how people still flock to listen to the pope give sermons and the like, now imagine every single member of your society gives a deep damn shit about what the pope has to say.

>>52908257
>>52908312
>>52908386

Christianity, once it took off, was spread by rulers who saw a way of curbing the influence of previous religious leaders or to unify their people, or as a convenient way to create an us vs them situation. "I'm christian now and it's my duty to christen the fuck out of all these pagans that I was looking for a reason to conquer"

>>52906887
God damn you.

>>52907129
This is my most hated one. How do you get around that without complex currency conversion charts? hell, even the idea of average people ever getting their hands on a 'gold coin' seems like a stretch.

>>52909156
That may be, but we were specifically talking about Rome as it was still taking off, rather than the top-down style of conversion that characterised the Dark Ages.

The conversion of the Roman Empire took centuries, went through many phases and only at the very end of that process did you see rulers enforcing Christianity (although soft social pressure had been growing for a time).

>>52909156
Yeah but all those comments were aimed at christianity before it became state-religion tier.

>>52909197
The tricky part is adjusting for availability and demand, since medieval type settings don't have the logistics and communications of modern ones.

Figuring out what a horse is worth in a few currencies is easy, you just figure out what currency is the most common one, then just make a conversion chart for all the others.

The tricky part is to remember to adjust prices massively based on when in the season it is, how far you are from a town and whether or not the person you are trading with has any use for coin.

A trader who goes from port to port will gladly take your coin, a farmer will just look at it and go "yeah, fantastic, I'll have tons of use for hard cash in my bumfuck village where I buy everything from my neighbors and where a total of 3 of us have been further from home than the next village."

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>>52907416
>the jews in england were almost completely kicked out fothe country

Gee, I wonder why...

>>52909197
It depends on what flavour of medieval you want but there are a few things that can make it easier.

1. Most coins are silver. Even silver coinage is too large for some day-to-day uses, but much more manageable than gold which is only used by the very wealthy. Most kingdoms may not even mint gold coins, except for the largest and most economically powerful.

2. Value is determined by weight/purity. Coins from all over the world may be accepted as long as there is trust in their purity. The English penny was the de facto currency across much of Europe in the Early Middle Ages as it was trusted unlike debased local coins.

3. There are usually only a handful of denominations, perhaps even only one per Kingdom. Further most kingdoms will use one of a few "standard" weights with minor variations. Coins can be cut to make change.

To make a nifty fantasy currency:

Decide roughly how much silver is worth, make some coins at various weights- usually 1-3 per kingdom with many sharing denominations. Then decide if any kingdom is either very good or very bad when it comes to purity and adjust value when you compare the weight of the coin to the value of silver. Sprinkle a gold coin or two per continent.

>>52909197
>This is my most hated one. How do you get around that without complex currency conversion charts?

You don't even get around with them, because the exchange rates are in constant flux. Losing money is to be expected.

>Figuring out what a horse is worth in a few currencies is easy, you just figure out what currency is the most common one, then just make a conversion chart for all the others.

It didn't work IRL. They tried, god did they try, but it was straigth up impossible to calculate anything other than the approximate value of one currency vs the other in many cases.
Plus horses got more valuable the further you transported them. Everything did.

>>52909333
>A trader who goes from port to port will gladly take your coin, a farmer will just look at it and go "yeah, fantastic, I'll have tons of use for hard cash in my bumfuck village where I buy everything from my neighbors and where a total of 3 of us have been further from home than the next village."

The peasant can use the coins to get himself over a bad year, either by paying taxes in cash or by aquiring stuff even after anything he could exchange in kind has rotted in the fields.

>>52908774
>No one cares for chings and chongs

t. murk-kin lout

>>52907760
They could attend ecumenical councils but didn't have the authority to deliver the divine liturgy/mass and needed a priest for that and a few other spiritual functions. They could be powerful if the nunnery was wealthy, and influential if they were regarded as saintly or aware in a special way. They're in an odd spot but I wouldn't call them high by Catholic church standards since regular bishops are rather low on their totem pole when you have a crap ton of names for higher Bishops and they're equivalent Rank but have very different kind of authority, with their "diocese" being an abbey and their congregation consisting of solely of nuns. There was often more social mobility for women than the period is given credit for, but I'd hardly say that was always the case, and women were generally not powerful in the church since they couldn't be appointed as regular clergy.

>>52909122
Indonesian detected.

>>52909333
>3 of us have been further from home than the next village.
Going on pilgrimages and traveling a bit was more common than people tend to think, even for the lower classes.

>>52909459
When there's a shortage of food, money usually becomes worthless really fast even in modern societies. It won't be better in a pre-modern infrastructure society, it'll be worse.

People who live in isolated places or during a crisis prioritize things that have value because they're useful and necessary, not because of it's theoretical value in an ideal situation.

Assuming that he'll be able to easily buy food with cash during a famine year is very optimistic.

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>>52909415
The Eternal Anglo suffers no rivalry.

>>52909543
Which is why I specifically mentioned paying taxes and hazily hinted at buying seed stocks. Cash isn't too useful as long as everything's peachy, but it can keep you a free man if you got it handy during times of crisis.

>>52907571
>What are nuns

>>52909583
Still, it is of limited value. Seeds need time to grow, and you want to eat three times a day, and you may not to live to see a tax collector again. Collectors also may have orders to take produce only if the kingdom suffers a famine.

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>>52908955
>Also chinks are fucking mental and have some of the coolest and weirdest history I have ever read.

>>52906497

Honestly there's so much historically inaccurate fuckery when you start messing around with fantasy that it gives me a migraine just trying to consider the sheer amount of work that would be required to fix it all.

You would have to have some serious double-barreled autism to go about fixing it all that it just doesn't seem worth it to me.

It however is an interesting subject simply to discuss, just because its amusing how much history can become warped and diluted by pop culture and the sheer passage of time.

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>>52909749
>Also chinks are fucking mental and have some of the coolest and weirdest history I have ever read.

>>52906497
>muh peasant armies

Peasant armies were uncommon in the Medieval era as were large battles in general. Most battles were small-scale as they were fought as personally feuds between various nobles. And you wouldn't want to bring a bunch of untrained farmers with pitchforks into the fray, especially since that means they aren't tended the fields for you. You'd want to bring any allied and vassal nobles, your knights, their men-at-arms, and whatever local strong-men could be rounded up who had some basic experience and could afford weapons/armor. Large armies simply couldn't be afforded or mobilized for much of the Medieval era due to the lack of centralization, so you'd have to rely on a handful of well-trained elites to win skirmishes.

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>>52907835
what the hell is the velocity on a musket bullet? you dont get hydrostatic shock at low velocities tard. thats why it comes up in argument between 9mm and 45s since 9mm has a higher velocity

>>52906497
>What fantasy tropes of medieval history are not historicall accurate?

For D&D and D&D-inspired tropes: Guns were a lot more common a lot earlier, vikings never fought enemies in full plate armor, longswords are designed for two-handed use and are much longer than portrayed.

>>52909774
I attempted an ultimate autism combo:
a weird nonsense fantastical setting with as much historical accuracy as possible, with tech equivalent of 11th century Europe (and a bit of Byzanthine Empire's stuff)
I was [b]really[/b] not up to the task.
It hurts.

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>>52909793
>Also chinks are fucking mental and have some of the coolest and weirdest history I have ever read.

>>52909861
Well the .45 is fucking magic and can even take down negros who have been enraged by the devil herb marihuana as it has been clearly demonstrated during the police actions on the Philippines.

>>52909880

Well that's another thing. Historical accuracy is all well and good for that feel-good brain tickle it gives you, but there's going to be a certain point where its either no longer entertaining or starts to restrict what you can do with what you're working on.

>>52909904
Truly a weapon to surpass Metal Gear.

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>>52909129
>textiles were more ppopular for brigandines
A portuguese prince used one with an outer layer of green velvet, and it seems the troops went homo for him because of how fucking gorgeous it was.

>>52907329
>>52907405
>>52907220

The only job you'll ever get with your worthless degree is posting lies in 4Chan and tumblr

>>52909930
Yeah. I had to change my attitude and now it's more of a rule of cool setting. I still tried to read as much as I could on possible underground ecosystems, for one

>>52909930
>What is money worth
>What counts as currency
>we just don't know and we got no way to find out because nobody in the party has the required skills&connections

History is fun like that.

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>>52909996

>>52909996
Nah bro I teach history in highschool dont worry I can pay my bill.

People using shields while wearing plate armour.
Everyone using swords as a main weapon
Elves

>>52909930
Perhaps, but there is a decent amount of historical fiction that combines reasonable historical accuracy and fun.

The main thing though is that most movies, games or whatever are so divorced from reality that research and realism is quite refreshing. In some cases the dumbed down shit we get is less entertaining than the colorful and wacky reality.

There may be a point where it stops being fun for non-autists and history grads but I don't think we are anywhere near it.

>>52909793
Please explain what on Earth that thing is supposed to be. It literally looks like someone just took a dead fir tree and started swinging it around.

>>52910175
I think it's a ladder.

>>52909999
>>52910017

Yeah that's what I'm talking about. Figure out when to drop some of that historical realism into your setting, and realize when its time to dial it back a bit as well. Or hell, even have things that directly go against it and figure out why your setting ended up developing that way instead. Shits fun and adds an interesting angle to it.

>>52910085

Oh don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating to just drop realism or historical accuracy, in fact I think using it well is a fantastic thing. I just think that it shouldn't be such a huge focus for someone trying to create something that it prevents them from enjoying doing it (unless of course this striving for realism is the point of it).

I've come across this myself a couple times, where I start pondering how feasible it as for a given character to have a certain color of clothing based on the availability of that dye in the region and time period they were in.

And that's when I decided I needed to dial that shit back a few notches.

>>52909996
kill yourself

>>52910175
A piece of bamboo with branches and a metal point. They held it into the faces of Wako pirates as all the branches made cutting your way through to the wielder a pain to them and gave the rest of the unit additional time to shoot and stab the pirates.

>>52906497
Thinking that the earth was flat. Anyone with an education during the Medieval era knew that the earth was round, because they had translated Greek texts on the subject.

>>52909230
It's actually interesting, about the time that Christianity became the official religion of the Empire, artists started depicting Christ as an "imperial" figure. Yanno, sitting on thrones, looking regal and all that.
Beforehand he was more of a firebrand revolutionary type I think.
It wasn't until the turn of the millennium that the image of Christ dying on the cross became prominent in church iconography.
Also compare and contrast the Apocalypse of Peter with the Apocalypse of Paul

>>52906920
Plate armor existing at all in the middle ages actually. It was invented in the early modern period, around the same time as firearms, and only got associated with medieval knights because of jousting. Actual medieval knights wore Chain armor (Chainmail is also a redundant phrase, it means chain chain)

>>52910217
Been there, with the dye thing. I even started reading on the whole process of making wool clothing, from shear to loom.

>>52910347
>Chainmail is also a redundant phrase, it means chain chain)
Unless you're using say, a victorian era dictionary, in which case "mail" means "metal armor".

What makes one definition intrinsically superior to another one?

>>52907220
>Outside of some specific periods or cultures
Like anything north of the mediterranean until the renaissance ? :^)

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>>52907590
>Le postmodernism boogieman.

>>52910395
Rule of thumb, if it's a Victorian definition, it's a shit one. Esp when it comes to something historical, because they projected and made shit up all the time. Most of our misconceptions about the middle ages come from the Victorian equivalent of fan-fiction.

>>52907422
He's correct, but conversely it also wasn't particularly common for large migrations of human beings of other ethnicities to settle in places because living at a subsistence or near-subsistence lifestyle doesn't allow for much personal mobility.

Matters of religion mattered much more then matters of race and ethnicity, and actually many foreign visitors were seen largely as curious and pleasantly exotic since they were so uncommon.

>>52910347
No it started being used in the late middle ages.

>>52910347
1250 was the first time plate chest pieces started arriving so you are wrong.

>>52908858
Matters of religion actually WERE important back then, you'll find.
When you lived until the ripe old age of 60 and died ONLY if you were lucky and didn't get seriously sick at any point before then, people were pretty concerned for the afterlife and their immortal souls because like it as not they were getting there a shitload faster then we were.

Chances are that everyone on this thread right now caught something at least once that would've killed them back in the day.

>>52910454
>Rule of thumb, if it's a Victorian definition, it's a shit one.
So now you're making a value judgment, on the basis of your opinion.
>Rule of thumb, if it's a Victorian definition, it's a shit one. Esp when it comes to something historical, because they projected and made shit up all the time. Most of our misconceptions about the middle ages come from the Victorian equivalent of fan-fiction.
Irrelevant. A definition is simply a convention as to what a given word means to a given audience. Using "mail" to mean "metal armor" is internally consistent, and if you work with an audience which is expecting that, is a very clear term. That they were crap historians doesn't make their diction incomprehensible, or necessarily wrong, if you can even apply "right" and "wrong" to a convention as to what a given set of sounds mean.

There is absolutely zero difference between a divergence of mail's meaning over "metal armor" vs "chain linking" and a divergence over the definition of "sucker" meaning "dicksucker" as opposed to "gullible person". Are you willing to say that when P.T. Barnum is alleged to have said "A sucker is born every minute" he was objectively WRONG for using a Victorian era definition of a word when alternate definitions existed with very divergent meanings?

>>52907635
....Hildegard Von Bingen is famous?
Like, I had to read about her in one of my classes before even the internet had invented silly terms like "SJWs" and shit like that in the extremely early 00's when it was totally publicly acceptable to be paranoid at Muslims because of 9/11 in most places.

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>>52910454

>>52910482
Late middle ages, as in it didn't exist for the vast majority of the time period that people think of as the Middle ages.

Also, they were invented around the same time as firearms, and nobody associates those with the middle ages.

>>52910530
>Chest pieces
>Articulated plate armor

These things are not the same. The "fancy plate armor that isn't heavy at all and you can do backflips in" is what I'm talking about. Armor in the middle ages was heavier, and consisted mostly of chain. Which incidentally is another thing DnD gets wrong, portraying chain armor as lighter and cheaper than plate armor. When mass produced, plate armor was actually cheaper and less labor intensive.

>>52910547
If you want to go there, feel free, but the Victorians are responsible for most of our misconceptions about the middle ages, and using their terminology makes you look like an idiot.

>>52907329
Race wasn't an issue because there wasn't enough multicultural intermingling for a problem to ever rise. Aside from notable cosmopolitan areas, the vast majority of ethncities were still in their isolated little bubbles.

>>52910621
>Armor in the middle ages was heavier, and consisted mostly of chain
Wrong.
It was A SHITTON heavier.
Like holy shit have ever held a mail shirt in your hands and then compared with a breastplate ? This shit is crazy

>>52910621
>If you want to go there, feel free, but the Victorians are responsible for most of our misconceptions about the middle ages, and using their terminology makes you look like an idiot.
I was bringing it up as an example. Making a blanket statement as to what the word "mail" really means and that saying chainmail is a redundant phrase makes you look like an idiot, especially since to a normal modern listener of the term "chainmail" is itself a noun and definitionally complete, and not the conjoining of two sub-words. That you're clinging to some sort of linguistic purity of a single time-frame's definition while at the same time ignoring how definitions in general work is fairly stupid.

>>52907220
Bathing was considered at best too much of a hassle and at worst outright satanic throughout the dark ages and into the high middle ages

>>52910676
I'm fairly sure i'm just buthurt about the Victorians, and trying to discourage the use of their terminology.

It's not /WRONG/ it just sounds really stupid when you understand the historical context.

>>52910661
>what is weight distribution
It's not as cumbersome when it's stretched out over your body.

>>52910631
Pretty much this. A British sailor meeting a Congolese trader wouldn't feel animosity so much as fascination, seeing as how they've never met someone of such strange complexion with an even stranger culture before. A British sailor would feel animosity though towards those FUCKING GINGER CUNTS from Ireland whose pirates keep harassing his ships. In the Middle Ages, you'll hate whatever culture of people is closest to your own without being a part of it.

>>52910720
You are indeed a but more agile than in plate armor but I woul'dnt try going for a run or lying on the ground with this fucking thing on me

>>52910717
Ah well. I'm something of an autist when it comes to linguistic constructionism, and the idea that a definition is "wrong" (Absent some sort of official dictionary like you get with the French language) triggers me. Sorry if I shot off stupidly.

>>52910661
The weight actually isn't usually the problem in many cases, it's more that it's distributed differently.
Compare holding a heavy bucket of water sloshing around in a bucket as you try to haul it around to holding a block of ice of equivalent mass; same actual weight, but one will be easier to carry because it's weight is more stable.

>>52910734
Pretty much.
There's tons of stories of foreigners from WAAAAY off visiting distant countries (usually traders, sometimes aristocrats), and they seemed to be usually treated as curiosities rather then as aliens to be hated.

It's probably the "exotic animal effect"; when you first see an elephant or whatever non-American, non-European animal as a child or even a adult your instinctive reaction isn't revulsion and hatred, but is something more like "super cool, I've never seen this before in person!"

That was probably a lot more commonly applied to human beings when the only things most people were actively familiar with much of their lives are things within walking distance of their homes.

>>52910846
precisely what I mean. When lying on the ground the weight is distributed solely on your torso.
While not impossible to get back up it is more cumbersome and *feels* heavier than plate (and usually is).
t. wore a mail shirt then immediately after that a breastplate with tassets

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>>52906497
Clerics not using bladed weapons.

Knights/samurai being nice and/or honorable.

Ninjas being anything more than assassins in camo.

>>52910694
>Bathing was considered at best too much of a hassle and at worst outright satanic throughout the dark ages and into the high middle ages.
Bathing was associated with sin because public bathhouses were also whorehouses and very few people could afford a private one.

>>52910934
>Knights/samurai being nice and/or honorable
They weren't amoral assholes either. Just because reality isn't noblebright doesn't mean it's grimdark.

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>>52910694
>outright satanic throughout the dark ages and into the high middle ages
While we're at it, can we please dispel MUH DARKAGES?

>>52911220
Some fucking judges forgot how to read and valubale skills were forgotten. Feodalism meant centralized justice could not happen and lords could get away with pretty much anything
Only thing that saved this is roman laws and shit that were being preserved in the east and then used to fulfill if not replace the stupid germanic laws.
So no, we don't dispel the dark ages, fuckface.

>>52911220
>While we're at it, can we please dispel MUH DARKAGES?
B-b-but if not for EVUL CHRISTIUNS Rome would have survived (Third Century Crisis? Pfft.) and we would have colonized Mars by 1066.

>>52907184
I thought you just shit and pissed in you armor.

>>52911288
>Only thing that saved this is roman laws and shit that were being preserved in the east and then used to fulfill if not replace the stupid germanic laws.
>Byzantium never existed.
>Rome just wanished before reappearing somewhere during Renaissance.

>>52911288
That's not what people mean when they think of the dark ages. For fuck's sake, some one just claimed the Church withheld bathing from society.

>>52911359
Try doing that in winter.

>>52911299
>SUPERPLANET BY 1120

>>52907416
You are partially right, but race didn't have as broad a meaning as it does now. A man from Liverpool was a different race than a man from London.

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>>52910347
You were so close. Just call it mail. That is the actual period term, actually describes what the armor looks like (OF:net [of iron]) and costs nothing since pople already know the word mail even if they misuse it.

Seriously there is no reason not to call it mail, and being correct was never this easy.

>>52910694
[incoherent screaming]
Have you ever read anything about middle ages at fucking all?
Public baths were the thing, in XIII century there were 32 public bathhouses in Paris, for example

>>52911288
>implying the clusterfuck called late Roman Empire could give you any form of justice from the richest.
The only modern justification of term "dark ages" is that we have relatively little written material about it so it's a kinda obscured.

>>52911401
>The only modern justification of term "dark ages" is that we have relatively little written material about it so it's a kinda obscured.
And even this is no longer true, since a lot of evidence has been uncovered since the term was coined, some even lying in plain sight like Islamic sources.

>>52906497
Casual sex was commonplace, especially among the lower classes.

>>52911372
>For fuck's sake, some one just claimed the Church withheld bathing from society.
No clearly that's retarded. Without the church members remembering how to fucking write and read and also keeping the roman laws and texts everything would have gone to shit permanently

>>52911452
That's why relatively. There are still places where we know very little about the early medieval period like Slavic lands.

>>52911288
>judges

>>52911477
Source?

>>52911571
Yeah believe it or not a judicial system is actually necessary for a society to fucking exist.

>>52906497

Elves weren't actually hot

>>52909926
well of course .45 would stop that

this is basic knowledge
9mm kills the body
.45 kills the body AND the soul

if you don't want your target to reincarnate you use .45

>>52911596
All the shit church talked about public bathhouses.

>>52910082
adventurers using swords as main weapons makes sense, their purpose is perfect for what your typical d&d party does. You're basically a constant traveller that has no home (nearby) and isn't directly in a lord's army, you don't know whether or not you'll be fighting that day so you strap a sword on your hip and call it that because fuck carrying a massive spear everywhere

>>52906497
Catholic clergy was allowed to marry almost until High Medieval period and in other denominations like Eastern Orthodoxy priests are required to marry to get a parish.

>>52911759
>adventurers using swords as main weapons makes sense, their purpose is perfect for what your typical d&d party does
Swords are expensive, require more training than a spear, and illegal to carry for commoners in some countries.
Also,
>adventurers
of murderhobo variety in general.

>>52911795
Even then, clerical concubines living openly as wives (or mistresses) in all but name were very common. Actually enforcing the idea of clerical celibacy was a huge running battle for the Church.

>>52911477
In Western Slavic lands during solstice feast it was a common practice to have random sex.
On the other hand sex would be terribly awkward to our standards - most people lived with their whole family in really small houses with a single room.

>>52911795
>Catholic clergy was allowed to marry almost until High Medieval period
wasn't forbidding it a reaction to the protestant reforms ?

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How common were adventures during the middle ages and there was a period in particular that they were more common?
I think that errant knights come close to it.
Also, if you weren't a noble, how could you just wander around armed and doing shit?

>>52911842
when your d&d party takes place in the normal not!late medieval Europe that so many do, literally every single fighter in an army would be carrying a sword, and a day's wage from even the lowest paid members of said army could afford to buy a sword, it wouldn't be super fancy but it would be a sword

your standard d&d party makes way more money in a couple trips into a dungeon than a typical soldier would during a whole military campaign

>>52911899
>how could you just wander around armed and doing shit?
Either you did not because crossing borders was actually not the most simple of things or you were a bandit

>>52908317

>Pre-Christian Rome was not a very female-friendly society
>Muh blanket statements

You say that like it was a Utopia for men of all classes, who weren't toiling it fields, languishing in debtors prisons or going to war

>>52911949
>languishing in debtors prisons
slavery actually

>>52911795
>>52911843
Well, christianity and its shenanigans doesn't really matter for fantasy settings because people just make up whatever religion with whatever morality

The "polytheism" you see in DND is pretty much NOT how paganism went on.

As mentioned, people were plenty xenofobic, but on religious and to a lesser extent ethinc lines, not "racial" (racism per se implies a specific worldview, even an academic posture of sort).

In general older societies were HEAVILY more stratified. Not segregated, or at least not necessarily, but still.

Taverns and even more inns are a surprisngly modern thing in Europe, of the low middle ages and actually more like renaissance. Before, people DID travel a lot, but it was by necessity a more organized thing: you were noble, you went to the castle of the baron your uncle knew. You were a merchant, better check your contacts. Peasants? Well, that happened, in pilgrimages, but still, yeah, monasteries and shit.
(to an extent in islamic countries caravanserai were more ancient, but caravans were organized as fuck)

In general the most precious things a man or woman could buy in medieval times was privacy. And actually they didn't care that much even if they could have it, at least for a time: a duke probably slept with his servant in his room or outside the door, and didn't give a fuck.
I think even an affluent (not filthy rich) men of classical Rome would be puzzled by that; imagine one of us moderns.

It's hard for us to think how much older societies used rituals and had a notion of a sacred time. And they liked that, it was certainly not something imposed on them. I think this one thing we really never see in fantasy.
(personally I think to an extent it's something we will return to, but that's my idea)

>>52911899

Errant knights are a fantasy trope. By which I mean a Malory time trope.

That being said it's not like a noble didn't go outside his castle with weapons, far from that. I think a freeman was pretty sure to carry a knife or something; up from that, honestly, I dunno. I can surely see a merchant in peaceful times going not only in groups for security but carrying a real sword.

>>52906497
>Someone on /his/ mentioned that studded leather wasn't really a thing
People here bitch about that too
probably because there's a massive amount of crossposting between /his/ and /tg/ since they are basically the same shit except /his/ is about things people claim actually happened

Also studded armour (brigandine, which is cloth with studs in) existed, just not as leather. That would be kind of redundant, but a lot of people don't realise how tough leather can actually be if you have multiple layers of it.

>>52906887
>what is Latin
usually when you see that in fantasy it's within a large empire, and that actually happened. It's called a lingua franca, the second language most people (at least who aren't lowly peasants, but merchants and upward) learn so they can speak with anyone in the empire they belong to. With peasants it would probably be the way things still are in China, where every town has its own version of the same language, sure, but the people you'd actually care to talk to in the first place would likely speak a language you spoke even if you had completely different native languages.

>>52906920
Actually "plate armour heavily inhibits mobility and flexibility" is the bigger misconception that arises from fantasy and especially game settings. Here's a video with more of >>52907432
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hlIUrd7d1Q
The mass of the armour is close to your body and evenly distributed, so unless you're knocked on your back you don't have a real problem with mobility (which is how one would defeat someone in plate armour most easily, because then it's relatively easy to get on top of them with a dagger and slide it into their helmet or armpit, and a lot of weapons, like shotels, were designed specifically to drag armoured and mounted opponents to the ground so this could happen).

>>52911524
>Slavic lands.

As if this describes any kind of unified culture whatsoever during the Medieval period.

Also, there is plenty of info on the kingdoms of Poland and Bohemia, as well as Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria (if that counts as Slavic, "since depending on the time, the aristocracy may still have been speaking Bulgar- a Turkic language). We have a pretty good understanding of the Rus states as well- including that they contained large cities, and that Kievan Russia was possibly the strongest state in Christendom during the Medieval period. (though the term "state" is not the same as what it would mean in a later context).

>>52911899
There are two ways to read adventurer; one is "mercenary", the other is "bandit". Mercenaries were common throughout the period, but become more common later on as warfare gets more organised and there is the demand for mstly professional standing troops with loyalty to the bottom line rather than messy feudal obligations. That is mostly bands and armies than lone wanderers though.

Errant knights are primarily a (period) literary thing rather than a reality. The closest activities were tournament fighting and mercenary work rather than dragon slaying.

As for wandering around, that depends. It's hard to make generalisations but arms for self defense were usually fine if you don't make trouble. Wandering around in full battle kit on your own is either going to get you a job offer so you are now longer wandering or in deep water as potential trouble. "doing shit" while armed is vague and what trouble will depend on what shit you are doing.

When you read about heroic men doing heroic deeds like Hardrada, Beowulf or whatever the bit that is less dwelt upon are the lines which go "and he brought 50 mates in his ship but let us now return to praising the heroic leader".

>>52911938
>a day's wage from even the lowest paid members of said army could afford to buy a sword
It would barely afford a meal for a day, and definitely not a fucking sword.

>>52911982
>Well, christianity and its shenanigans doesn't really matter for fantasy settings because people just make up whatever religion with whatever morality
Usually it would be not!Christianity with all the trappings, but with some modern politically correct values thrown in.

>>52912051
We still don't know a lot of shit about the eastern slavs. For example, whether or not they had their own alphabet before certain missionaries paid them a visit, the whole Norman theory, how much BS there was in the Primary Chronicle, etc.

>>52906497
No synthetic fabrics. Almost all modern fantasy art depicts clothes which are impossible to make with anything available before 1960-70s.

>>52912004
>a Malory time trope
So, a medieval trope? well is better than a victorian trope, I guess. If late medieval people were fantasizing about errant knights than I can use them in my settings, still don't see how commoners would get away with this

>>52912045
>brigandine, which is cloth with studs in
Yes, but is not the studs that protect you from blows, which is what the "studded leather" thing proposes

>>what is Latin
>usually when you see that in fantasy...
Yeah, I guess if you really want to have a continental lingua franca in your setting you can work around it, while still being realistic, but most settings have it in a way that is just dumb, with peasants from buttfuckvile in the farthest reaches of the land speaking the same exact language from the most cosmopolitan comercial mega city

>>52911632
judges as a separate, stand-alone, function is not though

>>52912319
Cry all you want but judges in one form or another always existed

>>52912004

To add:

Cities often, if not very often, had a negative natural growth.
Basically for the lower classes not having a "free" source of food was pretty much bad news. But of course, if you could have a stable job, well, that's way they went there in the first place.
(it's interesting to see that in roman times cities had a free distribution of bread)

Fire was common as shit. Check your candles, dude, you don't want half the city in flames.

Waterways were (up to the fucking railroad actually) cheaper, safer and often faster. I think oddly enough most people realize that but don't really use it fantasy novels/games. Severe lack of aventurers using rivers, and if you ask me it's actually something that could spice up travel in stories.

Winter didn't mean to be cold in the first place. It meant less food.

>>52912236

Indeed. I don't think actually it was really something prohibited, it was more that armored guys meant mercenaries/nobles and war/a shitton of money. Something your local baron would REALLY check out. That being said, I think a studded leather merchant with a sword wasn't something unusual even for your average peasant to see.
On this subject, it's mostly bullshit that the church was "peaceful". I mean, monks didn't usually have weapons traveling, but wise monks didn't go into bandits' territory just believing in the bandits' faith: they had a stout friend or two.

>>52912197
Their is so many theories to Slavic writing system, whether it was similar to runic alphabet or glagolitic alphabet. Ancient Slavic history is so obscure, we can only read about it through some texts.

>>52912375
if your lord speak justice that does not make him a judge in the modern sense..
Rachimburgs were closer, but still.

In fact, the opposite of what the original judge post described was happening all over. Law that was just oral tradition became a written code of law.

>>52912377
>(it's interesting to see that in roman times cities had a free distribution of bread)
>Fire was common as shit. Check your candles, dude, you don't want half the city in flames.
Which leads to an interesting situation in Rome where grain was distributed freely, but cooking was forbidden in most places, resulting in baker mafia offering some great deals for plebs like "I would make some bread out of your grain for 95% of it.".

>>52912004
>Errant knights are a fantasy trope
They more or less existed in the form of crusaders, though the crusades were partly a means to get knights out of europe and weaken the stranglehold of fieflords with bands of hired thugs on law and order.

>>52911759
I have a PC right now who wields a winged longspear as his primary weapon. Carrying it isn't really an issue. Especially when it can be used as a walking stick, or just carried in the same fashion as a greatsword, but even lighter. I'm not discounting the uses of a sword, but spears particularly aren't an issue to travel with.

>>52912551
>They more or less existed in the form of crusaders, though the crusades were partly a means to get knights out of europe and weaken the stranglehold of fieflords with bands of hired thugs on law and order.
I think anon means single knights wandering around doing murderhobo's jobs, not just landless and lordless knights. Lone knight having a personal crusade will be a very short story.

>>52912476
>In fact, the opposite of what the original judge post described was happening all over. Law that was just oral tradition became a written code of law.
Not in the dark ages it wasn't, no.
You have to wait until stable kingdoms start to appear to even see any kind of written oral law (coutume). And in the end it still got slowly replaced by principles straight from roman law because it was just much more developed than the rules of a king that most of the kingdom didn't apply until it was fully reunited.
Meanwhile as soon as 1100 students going to Italy to learn religion and law (forming the first universities) became councillors for all the decision makers in europa

>>52912575
You have never tried to take a 9ft spear on the tube.

>>52912607
>Tube
>Middle Ages
Good one. Now try to open carry a sword on the tube.

>>52912607
You know how you can point a spear forward to get it through doors, right? And when they're the most common weapon in the land, nobody would bat an eye or take it as a threat.

>>52912591
>Not in the dark ages it wasn't, no.
Did the dark ages end before the middle of the 7th century, when visigothic and anglo-saxon laws were codified?
Hell, Salic law was written in fucking 500 A.D. (approximately), the start of the dark ages.

>>52912644
Not a problem provided it's all tied up and your documents are in an accessible pouch. Train staff and Transport Police don't care and will seek you out for an idle chat on the platform amid the dead-eyed commuters.

>>52906887
CARLOS!

>>52911363
>>Byzantium never existed
What do you think he meant by East? Fucking China?

>>52911759
Axe would be more practical in a dungeon, you can not only fight, but cut trough an occasional obstacle as well.

>>52906497

All princesses are beautiful

>>52912583
Oh, I misunderstood.

>>52912706
Sadly TFL are killjoys and bar any item no matter how vital for the defense of the kingdom which longer than 7ft. So only short spears when travelling through London.

>>52912575
>it isn't an issue for my abstract fictional character so it isn't an issue
???

>>52912707
Oh right, forgot about these.
Though they were also lost during the Dark ages :^)
Fuck last time Sallic law was actually researched in the French Kingdom was to stop a woman from getting on the throne

>>52911193
True enough.

I've read before that our concept of 8 hours of sleep is an invention of the industrial revolution and before that people went to sleep at dusk, woke up around midnight to mingle or do whatever for a few hours, then went back to sleep until dawn.

>>52912794
Well, it also wasn't much of an issue for almost all fighters since the invention of pointy stick and until after WWI.

>>52912721
Is that actually true? I've also heard that in some places in canada you don't even need any kind of permit to carry a clearly visible non-firearm weapon so you can carry broadswords and claymores.

>>52912850
Then why do medieval manuals from all around the world suggest that the size of a spear is one of its major drawbacks, and that sidearms should be carried indoors?

>>52912877
>Then why do medieval manuals from all around the world suggest that the size of a spear is one of its major drawbacks, and that sidearms should be carried indoors?
If you are walking the Earth do you plan on fighting indoors a lot? And even then, most medieval indoors would be too tight for a sword too.

>>52907416
That's because they didn't follow the Church of England, fuckhead

>>52906497
Ruins and remnants of Acnient Civilizations. Unless they were somehow made inaccessible like Sphynx, Great Pyramids and Pompeii, or were still in use in some way or other like in Rome, they would be quickly dismantled and used as building materials.

>>52907835
>13m

Yeah I wouldn't want to get hit by a 1,300mm projectile either

>>52912877
There is no such thing as a sword permit in Blighty. They are entirely legal to own, but having one out in public is very much a grey area.

Generally the rule is that you need a good reason to have it on you. Waving it around is a great way to get arrested. Travelling to and from an event with your society membership forms SHOULD be entirely fine.

This does depend a great deal on the judgement of the policeman ruminating on nicking you. This is also the reason behind some of the more alarmist headlines. Walking around a park with a chainsaw or billhook is fine, but a simple screw driver is not if a copper catches you hanging in an alley ready to shiv someone with it.

I've never had trouble, and don't know anyone else who has. You just don't do anything stupid and don't allow morons to grab your stuff and wave it around. Taking my spear out shopping is not going to end well though.

>>52912817
Circadian rhythms in general are very fluid, and though nocturnal patterns have definitely increased in frequency with the advent of cheap artificial lighting humans are not even naturally diurnal, most circadian rhythms are also longer than 24 hours, meaning, sleeping when you get tired instead of based on an arbitrary indicator like the time on a clock or when the sun goes down, most people will slowly oscillate between nocturnal and diurnal habits as each day they go to sleep and wake up a little later.
Most people also have naturally polyphasic sleep schedules, which is why those with the luxury to do so usually take naps and sleep less at night.

Over time, as people have been treated more as a resource than as individuals (ironically as the attitude of individuals has shifted from one of duty to the tribe/village/nation to exaltation of the individual self), things like diet and sleep schedule have been subjected to rigorous conformity to make it easier to manage work. I'm not sure if what you said about the middle ages specifically is accurate, but the "8 hours a(t) night" thing is definitely a relatively modern fabrication, yeah.

>>52912964
>most medieval indoors would be too tight for a sword too.
The fuck are you on? You know big anime swords were not a real thing, right? If the space is too tight for a typical straightsword or broadsword either you are extremely obese or it's too tight to be wearing clothing either.

>>52911288
Are you fucking retarded? Everyone and their grandma was trying to be the new Rome. Fucking Theodoric had Roman advisors and started putting Roman laws in his own rule. Every fucking asshole had a hardon for Rome and looked to emulate their laws.

>>52911854
>>52911524
>Long time ago
>In uni, in NYC.
>Get invited to history professor's place for dinner
>accept
>Meet his family, they're nice
>They're all from Poland.
>Telling me about some medieval slavic hospitality customs.
>And it was customary to offer distinguished visiting male guests a woman if they weren't traveling with female companionship.
>By the way, my daughter's room is over there, why don't you say hi?
>Wait, is he really trying to pimp out his daughter to me? And possibly making up some custom to justify it?
It was really, really weird, and a part of me always wondered if there was in fact some kind of custom that he really was referring to, but another part of me never wanted to even mentally go near that.

>>52913097
>If the space is too tight for a typical straightsword or broadsword either you are extremely obese or it's too tight to be wearing clothing either.
Most medieval houses were pretty small to preserve heat and would have tons stuff hanging around from the ceiling because there is very little place for storage.
Castles wouldn't be much better. I've seen throne rooms for a king that are smaller than my bedroom.

>>52912817

Benedictine lithurgy, which was pretty strict regarding the circle of the hours of prayer (and indirectly about all the monks' activities), usually had monks going to sleep at say 8 pm and wake up at 3-4 am.

>>52913097
>straightsword or broadsword

>>52913197
>>52913197

It's bullshit anyway.

>>52913205
>straightsword
What about queerswords and nonbinaraxes?

>>52913197
Good job, anon, she was actually a daemon. You've saved your soul.

>>52907797

Most of what we call Greek is actually Athens. Comparatively little survived from other city-states. Hell, most of what survived about Sparta was from an Athens perspective. (ESL here, sorry if I get the name wrong)

>>52913236

And what about transitioning polearms, say from falchion to pike?

Check your cisblade privilege.

So, something that always annoys me are Amethyst being the cheapest of the cardinal gems, where for most of history they were as valuable or more valuable than diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and emeralds.
Why does every fantasyland have a Brazil analog pumping out amethyst on the cheap?

>>52913197
>Polish hospitality
I had a relative who once stayed overnight in a Polish house with some of his friends. He went to the outhouse in the middle of the night and when he came back he found all his friends with their throats slit. It was during WWII and he was in the military at the time. Not Polish one. But anyway, never trust fucking Poles.

>>52908312

>Except when all of them got fed to the lions offcourse.
That was early church propaganda, anon.

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>>52907636

>>52912751
They were beautiful in comparison to commoners because of much better diet and body care.

>>52913429
>better diet and body care
Not really.

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>>52913467

>>52906497
Fucking modern dirt roads with a nice patch of grass in the middle.
Shit-tier carpentry done by interns at the film studio.
Riders outracing a carriage with multiple horses.

>>52907522
Probably because the Mongols were a murderous rapist horde

>>52913578
>Horde
Mongol armies had better logistics and organization than anyone at the time.

>>52913615
>Mongol armies had better logistics and organization than anyone at the time
Sure

>>52913578
>>52913615
Considering that the term horde is ultimately derived from the Mongolian word for army both can be true.

>>52913624

They kinda did.

Something to keep in mind about the MONGOL HORDES is that they would mostly have been comprised of non-Mongols, since there have never been all that many Mongolians on earth anyways. It was more like a confederation of many different peoples operating under the banner of Mongol Khans.

>>52913467
>Not really.
>wealthier people wouldn't have had a better diet and means to care for their appearance.

>>52907995

Thank god for all the little Dutch boys saving the day.

>>52911220
Between 300 and 500 in many regions there most definitely was a dark age.

>>52911863
Nope, that predates Protestantism by few centuries and the lax attitude to this ban was one of the core issues behind Protestantism - that the priests, especially the high ranking ones, didn't kept their vows.

Which is pretty ironic, as the ban wasn't around for more than 300 years and yet it stirred a massive shitstorm for not following it, by people deluded that it's "standard" mode of clergy to uphold celibate and not something introduced quite recently.

>>52913197
>>And it was customary to offer distinguished visiting male guests a woman if they weren't traveling with female companionship.
I will never understand from where Americans got this one.

I mean it literally only exists in American publications about medieval Slavs. Wtf?!

>>52913737
>wealthier people wouldn't have had a better diet and means to care for their appearance
They would usually have worse diet with too much meat, fats and carbs. Wealthy women would usually stay indoors for most of the time, which would lead to health problems like gout, made worse by aforementioned bad diet. And medieval cosmetics would give you cancer.

>>52913819
>confusing slavs and mongols
Common mistake. Even genetic tests do it.

>>52911299
Rome's ascend coincidences with the decline of western sciences.

Their anti-science stance is well known and their inability to understand mathematical theories is so well documented that a couple of examples even survived. Took us a fucking thousand years to crawl back to where we had been two thousand years ago in many a field of science.

Chrstianity is a liberal, spineless shitshow that's totally okay with changing their theology in reaction to scientific discoveries and trends in philosophy while the Romans couldn't even be arsed to updated the language of their own rites, so language drift eventually led to them having no fucking actual idea what anything in their own cults was about originally.

>>52913801
Well like, 300 years is a pretty long time when you start counting from yesterday.

>>52911363
>roman laws

Reminder that the western church stopped teaching and copying most of it because they were buttmad about Byzanz.
Reminder that a significant part of Roman law were completely unedited and untranslated greek laws.

They literally don't teach roman law, but a fanfic-tier white marble-statue version of it.

>>52912707
>Did the dark ages end before the middle of the 7th century
Yes? I'm familiar with a much earlier dark age, which basically starts some time in the 300's (St. Augustine writes on them) and is over by the beginning of the 500's in most places.

>>52913201
I've seen throne rooms for a duke that could house a bowling alley.
I live within walking distance of an 11th century abbey I'd feel comfortable swinging around another dude my own size

>>52913931
Yeah, but it's kind of ridiculous when your entire postulate is about "going back to the roots". What fucking roots? And it wasn't exactly performed by idiots, as they were all well-educated theologians, so by default they had access to all the knowledge and law skills to realise the "roots" and celibacy don't mix (which in fact few decades later was fixed, but makes the initial "hurrr the bishop has a wife" outcry even more retarded and almost hypocritical)

>>52913963
You can swing a halberd or a spear without any problems in places where you can swing a dude of your own size.

>>52911397
not even any of those anons, but fuck are you ever a pedantic cunt

>>52913962
Where the fuck did you learn that?
Generally what people call the dark ages start with the fall of the roman empire and end sometime between Charlemagne and William the bastard/conqueror

>>52914030
you certainly can, but not every room or hall is like that

>>52913330
Too bad your relative managed to get away, god smiles to every nazi death.

>>52913987
>What fucking roots?
Adam and Eve before Original Sin?

>>52906497
There's surprisingly little evidence to suggest that princesses were ever actually kidnapped by dragons.

>>52914049
The reason I remember that being the time period is because when I took a class on the Dark Ages we read about two things I really remember: One was the writings of Augustine, which talk about the collapse of society that he was living through. The heartland of Rome hadn't entered a dark age, but the outlaying colonies in Africa and Britain had.
The other thing we did was compare the Sutton Hoo burial site to Pompeii. Some of the stuff in their was of excellent quality, but some of it was a lot worse than what a middle class Pompeian would have had. So the professor said that was a pretty good era to say "The Dark Ages are starting to end, infrastructure is starting to rebuild and manufactured goods are getting back to where they were before."

>>52909715
> want to eat three times a day

Another ahistorical thing. It was common for many medieval and dark age people to eat only twice a day. Once around 10am, and again at around 4pm.

>Collectors also may have orders to take produce only if the kingdom suffers a famine

Also not true. Lords would almost certainly have their own granaries and larders in preparation of famines.

>>52914107
>nazi
Do you realize that not every German is nazi and not every Wehrmaht soldier is German? Hell, even SS troops, which were supposed to be hardline nazi pure-blood german-exclusive, consisted mostly of Eastern European kids forced at gunpoint into service by the late war.

>>52914160
I'd agree that that is actually the period of very noticeable decline; but generally dark ages is synonymous with early-medieval period (and of course a very out-of-favor term)

>>52913828

Still better than starving now and then (statistically speaking)

>>52914188

Actually I head that breakfast was a thing, but referred to 1800s peasants. So I dunno.

>>52914274
I read a history of Roger Mortimer during the early 1300s, which specifically discussed meal times in london during that time, because it was relevant to understanding the timeline of events for some trials and arguments in parliament.

>>52914357
Time travellers guide to medieval England? I liked that book a lot

>>52914263
Yeah, one of the first things the lecturer talked about was "The Dark Ages and the Medieval Period aren't the same era." He basically said we should think of the DA as the end of antiquity instead of the beginning of the early Medieval. (I know I asked him if this meant the early Renaissance was really the end of the Medieval, but I can't remember what his answer was).

>>52914436
His answer was probably: Whatever you want and are able to reason is the ending of the medieval period is the ending of the period.

>>52914357
>)
>>52914357

Interesting. Higher classes/urbanites?

>>52914411
>>52914520

Actually, The Greatest Traitor - The Life of Roger Mortimer, by Roger Mortimer (unrelated). Very interesting book about a very interesting person. A bit dry in places but worth a look.

>>52914563
Oh sorry, Time traveller was written by Ian Mortimer

>>52914563
>>52914584
As was the greatest traitor now that I looked it up

>>52910082
ELVES AREN'T HISTORICALLY INACCURATE

>>52914619
It's true, Iceland is crawling with them.

>>52906497
Typical village blacksmiths don't sell full-plate armor or any kind of weapons, except the ones that double as farming tools.

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>>52910934
Actually Ninjas most often disguised themselves as regular civilians or soldiers.

The common pitch-black face-concealing suit is actually a cloth used in theater to sgnify that character is an assassin

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>>52910347
Well, technically the Dendra or musculata armors are plate armor, so they are pretty ancient. Dark age Greeks even had a kind of armor than was verty articulate made all of bronze.

>>52912522
usually not cooking, but baking specifically

>>52914870
My understanding is that the cloth was supposed to represent stagehands, or non-characters to move set pieces. It was a clue to the audience that that person should be ignored, but when ninjas became involved, some clever bastard had them disguise themselves as the stagehand.

>>52907416
They were talking about human races, so jews doesn't count.

>>52912045
>usually when you see that in fantasy it's within a large empire, and that actually happened. It's called a lingua franca, the second language most people (at least who aren't lowly peasants, but merchants and upward) learn so they can speak with anyone in the empire they belong to.
> lingua franca


So it is time to throw out a fact that a lot of people do not know about France. Most people inside France did not speak French inside France till around 1850. I am not talking about speaking it as a first language but rather speaking it at level that military orders mean for enlisted men could be understood.

Inside France at the time there was areas that are Spanish, Catalan, German, Italian, two living Celtic languages, or Basque speaking. Also there was not one French language by that point but a few. These not dialects. They have different words for the same thing,different rules of grammar, and many of the common shared words are not pronounced the same way. Norman was viewed as the worst of the lot. To add to this the most common second language for native Norman speakers to pick up was Dutch not stranded French.

Or hell lets talk about late medieval German. It was really four different but some what related languages.

>>52915476

Are you implying that lingua franca refers to French, because it emphatically does not.

>>52915615
No he describes why one of the biggest and powerfull kingdoms of the medieval period had no lingua franca.

>>52914563
This book is great, very thorough if that's what you're into.

>>52915644

Speaking a half dozen languages doesn't preclude a lingua franca. Did those people not trade with each other? I think you might be conflating lingua franca with vernacular.

>>52915702
As i said, it wasn't me you were reacting to, I was merely clarifying what I thought that anon was saying, whether I agree with him or not.

I think there were definitly classes of people in medieval France who went to great lengths to learn latin or the kings' french, namely the Nobility and the higher clergy.

>>52915789

Sure, definitely, but the term lingua franca encompasses a variety of pidgins and trade languages distinct from any "official" languages, not just Latin or French.

>>52914989
Again, that's not the kind of plate armor you can do cool backflips in, nor was it worn by medieval knights, or resemble the armor in RPG illustrations.

>>52915702
>Speaking a half dozen languages

The issue was they still had 11 different spoken languages inside their Kingdom by the Napoleonic era. That is a very high bar to try to get past.

>Did those people not trade with each other?

At the start of the 12th century they in fact needed local religious leaders ( commonly a abbot because the area priest would only know the local tongue and Latin) to act as translators in business deals. Abbots then got a idea of how much money was to be had in trans-regional trade and ended up started business on their abbeys behalf. They trained purchasing agents in the needed languages for a given trade route. By around 1230 secular merchants and southern noble houses got in on the idea. They would put together a ox train, funds, teamsters, and a trusted agent to go into areas producing a valuable good but had a language barrier. They would buy in bulk and then hand the goods off to regional partners back home.

So there was a high volume of trans-regional trade but it was done in a small number of transactions with only a small number of specialized merchants having to know extra languages.

TL:DR the French created a structural work around of the issue to avoid having to learn other peoples languages during trade.

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>>52915905
You can do it with this kinds of bronze plate armor. Your post was full of inacuracies also, guns were medieval , as well as plate armor both were used in the hundred years wars for example, even those than resemble RPG ilustrations.

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>>52916655
You can see cannons, handguns with the crossbowmen in the right part and full harness plate armor here and there.

>>52916655
And yet, when people ask for generic medieval fantasy, it typically includes late medieval/early modern style articulated plate armor, and excludes the guns that existed at the same time. Except when pirate ships get involved, and then suddenly it's the 1700s.

The picture you included is bronze age style armor, which is comparatively niche.

>>52911193
>They weren't amoral assholes either

Not quite true. There was certainly some that were amoral assholes as much as there was some that was nice.

>>52906497
>Poisoned daggers
>Double bitted axes
>Dual wielding swords
>Hacking through plate armor with the blade of a long sword
>hide ""armor""

>>52907636
There were rings though. Just not knobs.

>>52908432
Only in the way that both beasts and christians arent jewish, so wouldnt get into jewish heaven anyway.

>>52909904
The fucking tiny double headed axe bayonet on the leg.

Amzaing.