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    Default Misconceptions of Medieval Times in Media

    Spurred by the thread on Eragon, what common screwups do you see about actually living in medieval times?

    Think of this also as a FAQ about what the medieval times were really like. I guess this could also be a primer for anyone who wants to write good fantasy fiction.

    1) People with full-sets of teeth: Lack of dental care means that very few people in medieval times had a full-set of teeth.

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    Default Re: Misconceptions of Medieval Times in Media

    Quote Originally Posted by Joran View Post
    Think of this also as a FAQ about what the medieval times were really like. I guess this could also be a primer for anyone who wants to write good fantasy fiction.
    I suggested something like this a while back, and it didn't get such a great response.

    To this list I would add really old old people. Life expectancy was a lot shorter than it is now.
    Last edited by Hairb; 2008-06-17 at 10:05 AM.

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    Default Re: Misconceptions of Medieval Times in Media

    Many people thought vegetables were poisonous upto the 17th C or so, so no turnip munching.
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    Default Re: Misconceptions of Medieval Times in Media

    Quote Originally Posted by Joran View Post
    Spurred by the thread on Eragon, what common screwups do you see about actually living in medieval times?


    1) People with full-sets of teeth: Lack of dental care means that very few people in medieval times had a full-set of teeth.
    Although this can be taken too far. I read an interesting piece once that argued that due to the lack of sugar in past diets, people's teeth would not be as bad as generally thought.

    The thing that really gets me is the protagonist with modern ideas. "The class system is unfair, all religions deserve equal respect" etc.
    The Historian: This DM has the history of his world written out millenniums back. It is intricate, complex, and most importantly, incredibly long. Moreover, everything your characters are doing is based on the previous history. It also tends to lead to loudmouth NPCS who will explain hundreds of years of history at a time while the players try to gouge their eardrums out with mechanical pencils.


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    Default Re: Misconceptions of Medieval Times in Media

    Quote Originally Posted by Hairb View Post
    I suggested something like this a while back, and it didn't get such a great response.

    To this list I would add really old old people. Life expectancy was a lot shorter than it is now.
    This is another thing that can be taken too far, since when we say life expectancy was shorter, we mean average life expectancy was shorter due to massive infant mortality rates. People could still leave well into their sixties or older, rather than dying off at modern middle age as the numbers suggest.

    My beef is often with literacy. It was rather uncommon even among the nobility, depending on the precise time and location we're talking about. Assuming I'm not completely misremembering, this was possibly the only plot point in A Knight's Tale that made any actual sense.

    Oh, and that's another thing. Treating everything from 500-1500 AD as if it were all the same, with Picts using trebuchets and William's Normans charging in full plate with lances because That's What Knights Do and the kings in big round-towered stone castles in the 10th century... This one goes back at least to the King Arthur oral traditions, which became a Massive Multiplayer Crossover of legendary characters from throughout the entire millenium. That's not even counting T.H. White's Extreme Silly Edition here.
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    Default Re: Misconceptions of Medieval Times in Media

    2) That arrows are flimsy. Really, being hit by an arrow is really really really nasty, they can drive straight through your body
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    Default Re: Misconceptions of Medieval Times in Media

    Many people thought vegetables were poisonous upto the 17th C or so, so no turnip munching.
    I thought that was tomatos? What did they eat back then?

    I'd assume that meat/game was a rare treat for the common folk, so mostly grains?

    They shouldn't be eating tomatos, potatos, or corn/maize because those are from the New World ;)

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    Default Re: Misconceptions of Medieval Times in Media

    1. Everybody not a noble being an indentured dung farmer toiling under slave-like conditions for feudal overlords. While true in some place in parts of the middle ages, it is not true for the best documented parts and periods of the middle ages, being the 13th century onwards in northern and western Europe. Instead this was a period of independents farmer paying their feudal in a mix of money and produce, with produce being more common in those areas that would later adopt the indentured servitude of dependent farmers.

    2. Everything being produced locally. Again in the later parts of the middle ages this is not just true. By the late 14th century, for example, the Netherlands were strongly dependent on Lithaunian, Polish and Ukranian grain. And in the same vein the fabric industry of Europe was almost exclusively centered in Florence, the British Isles and the Netherlands from quite early in the middle ages.

    3. Everybody but the clergy being illiterate. As early as the 14th century German farmers would keep written records of their possessions and the movement of their assets. We find written records kept by the local peasants who made up low-level courts at least a century earlier in places as distant as Finland or northern Sweden. Likewise literature written by French and German nobles exists as early as the mid-11th century.

    4. Old parents living with their children. With the northern European pattern of late marriages that emerged in the 12th and 13th centuries this is quite unlikely. When people married in their late twenties and had children at about the same age, most old parents would already be dead and those who survived would still work as part of the village community, though likely at reduced efficiency.

    5. Social classes being entirely rigid without any possibility for changing your status other than becoming a monk. The rigid legal distinctions between citizens, nobles and commoners gradually developed over the course of the middle ages, but didn't become entirely rigid until the mid-16th century or well into the renaissance. Before that it was entirely common for a succesful farmer to manage to get a weapon and a banged up armor and enter the service of a higher noble as a knight. At the same time it was also common for lesser nobles to lose their status as a noble in order to reenter the world of feudal obligation when times became too tough to scrape by on their own financially. Likewise the cities provided a venue for people to advance their status if they managed to get an apprenticeship or sink even lower if they failed at it.

    6. Witches were burnt in large numbers by the Roman Catholic Church and frightened villagers. While the witch hunts did exist in Europe, they didn't happen in the middle ages, they happened in the renaissance and were predominantly carried out by protestant princes with what passed for due jurisprudence in the day. They weren't lynchings, they weren't medieval and they weren't really very catholic at all.

    7. The Roman Catholic Church was in general able to control Europe and the beliefs of the time closely. By and large the Roman Catholic Church had to espouse views that were in the interest of the princes in order to uphold the privileged position of the church. Examples of this include the way the king was exalted to hold his own position in the official, catholic theology of the time and the way knights and the warrior codes held as part of chivalry being taken as a formal part of church doctrine. Other examples include of the church being less rigidly in control than commonly believed include the cheapness people got off with adultery and homosexuality in the middle ages, despite the theological arguments of it being the two worst sins. Lithuania being left relatively unmolested and involved in the eastern European politics for the first half of the 14th century despite not yet having converted to Christianity.

    8. Nothing ever freaking change. I don't so much refer to how it is a big mash-up of all medieval periods in Hollywood as it is the view that the middle ages were a static period without significant social change. Apart from the evolution of Christian theology and the constant creep to the east of European culture, there was the rebuilding of the European trade network that broke down in late Roman times and the evolution of such typically western concepts as citizenship and monogamous, lifelong marriages as the only acceptable lifestyle. And then comes the technological advances, which, even if we discount the dark ages, ran the span from developing the wheeled plow to creating clockwork and ocean going vessels. Really, the middle ages were a dynamic period as is to be expected for something lasting that long.

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    Default Re: Misconceptions of Medieval Times in Media

    Quote Originally Posted by TheElfLord View Post

    The thing that really gets me is the protagonist with modern ideas. "The class system is unfair, all religions deserve equal respect" etc.
    this is especially annoying when they just instinctively feel it's wrong despite that they've being taught it since they were born.
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    Default Re: Misconceptions of Medieval Times in Media

    1) Swords were heavy and essentially blunt weapons.
    I'm not sure where this one originated, but I believe we can blame museum curators (What's going to attract most attention, a battered and unadorned blade or a twenty pound monster covered in gold and glitter?) and a certain amount of Victorian Darwinism can probably be blamed as well.
    Anyway, it's untrue and a little thinking reveals why. If a sword, in essence, was a blunt weapon, why go through the costly process of making one when a mace could do the same, only better and cheaper?
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    Default Re: Misconceptions of Medieval Times in Media

    Was I the only one who noticed how many of these Monty Python and the Holy Grail parodied?

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    Default Re: Misconceptions of Medieval Times in Media

    Quote Originally Posted by TheElfLord View Post
    The thing that really gets me is the protagonist with modern ideas. "The class system is unfair, all religions deserve equal respect" etc.
    ug i really really really hate this one. I mean, i really do. How do people like Eragon come up with these extremly modern morality ethics? Bad form
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    Default Re: Misconceptions of Medieval Times in Media

    EE, that's more an Acceptable break from Reality. Many of the medieval ideas would make the characters look like gits or idiots to us, so that's one thing that can be passed up, as it's a general thing, not just from the middle ages.

    Terra: On point 8, from a certain point of view, it was actually true. The middle ages were a brutal step back from the roman empire (The Library of Alexandria....How brutal and stupid can man be for religion and political power?), and there was a massive slowdown in the discovery of new things, and the rediscovery of previous ones. That said, it wasn't THAT static, of course. Humans change too rapidly for most things to hold from one century to another.

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    Default Re: Misconceptions of Medieval Times in Media

    I was talking about change and not progress though, Azerian. And i think it is hard to argue that burning the Library of Alexandria was quite a change from the way things were before for example. The middle ages were a dynamic period, which is not the same as nice or progressive or other positive words we can think of. It just means that there was qualitative change and not ripples in the surface of society.

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    Default Re: Misconceptions of Medieval Times in Media

    Quote Originally Posted by Azerian Kelimon View Post
    EE, that's more an Acceptable break from Reality. Many of the medieval ideas would make the characters look like gits or idiots to us, so that's one thing that can be passed up, as it's a general thing, not just from the middle ages.
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    Default Re: Misconceptions of Medieval Times in Media

    Quote Originally Posted by EvilElitest View Post
    Worked in song of Fire and ice, amazing series that really has some good characters and yet still appeals to a modern audience
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    Consider this: If we have a protagonist who lives in a mercantile-slaver society, wouldn't it be hard to take said character as a Cape-Ish hero if he supported slavery?

    And I wouldn't use SoIaF as an example. Darker than Black settings don't represent reality well, and that's a purely fantastic world.

    Terra: Pretty much what I said. Things changed and all, but slower than they did, much like new paradigms emerge faster now than they did in the time of th French revolution.

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    Default Re: Misconceptions of Medieval Times in Media

    Quote Originally Posted by Azerian Kelimon View Post
    EE, that's more an Acceptable break from Reality. Many of the medieval ideas would make the characters look like gits or idiots to us, so that's one thing that can be passed up, as it's a general thing, not just from the middle ages.
    Still, it's very weird when a protagonist seems to have philosophical ideas several centuries ahead of everyone else in his society. And protagonists don't have to spout their ideas on the class system and stuff like that. George R.R. Martin does this well. While it's obvious that many of the main characters are fairly medieval in their thinking, it doesn't come up so often that it annoys anyone. And when it does, IT WORKS. It doesn't seem annoying. It seems logical, and fits with the setting.
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    Default Re: Misconceptions of Medieval Times in Media

    The notion that the world didn't stink.

    Seriously, even the big cities like Vienna and Venice didn't have very good sewage treatment system, and filth would be emptied into streets.
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    Default Re: Misconceptions of Medieval Times in Media

    Quote Originally Posted by Azerian Kelimon View Post
    Consider this: If we have a protagonist who lives in a mercantile-slaver society, wouldn't it be hard to take said character as a Cape-Ish hero if he supported slavery?
    Yeah, i'm Southern, i've heard plenty of stories about Nathan Bedford Forest during the Civil War. If the story showed both ideas of the character, and yet still condemned his actions, it would be fine
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    Default Re: Misconceptions of Medieval Times in Media

    Quote Originally Posted by EvilElitest View Post
    Yeah, i'm Southern, i've heard plenty of stories about Nathan Bedford Forest during the Civil War. If the story showed both ideas of the character, and yet still condemned his actions, it would be fine
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    As a Cape hero? I can imagine a more humane hero or an antihero promoting slavery, or even a misguided cape who later learns about how bad that perspective is. But you'll have to give me a linky to an idealistic hero that consistently supports slavery and doesn't "grow out" of it.

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    Default Re: Misconceptions of Medieval Times in Media

    Quote Originally Posted by Azerian Kelimon View Post
    As a Cape hero? I can imagine a more humane hero or an antihero promoting slavery, or even a misguided cape who later learns about how bad that perspective is. But you'll have to give me a linky to an idealistic hero that consistently supports slavery and doesn't "grow out" of it.
    1) He is actually shown as a cape hero down there, through for all the wrong reasons
    2) By cape hero you mean perfect? They are boring anyways, you need logical flaws
    3) General Robert E Lee. Best Southerner in the Civil War (other than Longstreet)
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    Default Re: Misconceptions of Medieval Times in Media

    Through on the redeemption note, Forest, (an ex slave trader, who was in charge of a total massacre at fort pillow) and one of the founders (or at least initial supports) of the KKK apparently became disgusted and left. So is that actually redeemption?
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    Actually his involvement with the Klan is a bit vague, but his actions with Pole Bearers association might make a good redeemption part in a movie
    Sorry, i'll stop changing the subject
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    Default Re: Misconceptions of Medieval Times in Media

    Everyone believed in witchcraft

    While superstition was the order of the day, superstition was recorded in the Church as a lesser sin.

    Western Europe may have been worse off. Yet, if you believed in superstition you could be ordered to fast and pray for forgiveness.

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    Default Re: Misconceptions of Medieval Times in Media

    Oh, people believed in witch craft in the middle ages, i don't think anybody is saying that it they didn't. What i am saying is that people didn't go around killing suspected witches very often in the middle ages. All the large witch hunts took place in the 17th century, no matter what side of the Atlantic you look at.

    And Azerian i am not sure that things changed faster in Roman times than in medieval times. The changes were different in nature in the two periods, so it largely depends on what kinds of changes you find significant. However, the exact quantity of change compared to Roman times is less important than the middle ages not being static.

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    Default Re: Misconceptions of Medieval Times in Media

    I wanna know something that's been bothering me for some time.

    I'm certain that medieval armor is at least SLIGHTLY more effective than it's percieved to be. So how effective is medieval armor for real?
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    Quote Originally Posted by Gygaxphobia View Post
    Many people thought vegetables were poisonous upto the 17th C or so, so no turnip munching.
    But how could you not like turnpis?


    Anyways, at the time, the only things most peasants had to eat were vegetiables, grain, and dirt.

    I suspect that there was some turnip munching going on.

    Quote Originally Posted by TheElfLord View Post
    Although this can be taken too far. I read an interesting piece once that argued that due to the lack of sugar in past diets, people's teeth would not be as bad as generally thought.

    The thing that really gets me is the protagonist with modern ideas. "The class system is unfair, all religions deserve equal respect" etc.
    Bloody peasant.
    Last edited by Solo; 2008-06-17 at 10:39 PM.

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    Quote Originally Posted by The Randomizer View Post
    I wanna know something that's been bothering me for some time.

    I'm certain that medieval armor is at least SLIGHTLY more effective than it's percieved to be. So how effective is medieval armor for real?
    actually pretty effective, through hard to move around in. Some of the better stuff could block basic bullet (through these were from old fashion guns mind you). Armor made a huge difference in a fight, hence why knights could defeat peasents easily. Knights biggest problem i imagine would be falling over
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    Quote Originally Posted by EvilElitest View Post
    ug i really really really hate this one. I mean, i really do. How do people like Eragon come up with these extremly modern morality ethics? Bad form
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    Some of it isn't "modern" so much as "not normal in medieval Europe." For instance, the pagan Roman empire was very tolerant of religion, provided that you paid appropriate reverence to the specific gods of Rome and the emperor. Christians were persecuted because they refused to regard the emperor as a deity. Almost anything else imaginable would be tolerated quite cheerfully, hence the popularity of a bizarre mishmash of religions such as the cults of Mithra and Isis within the empire.

    What killed the tolerance was that the Eastern Roman Emperors of the late 300s and the 400s decided to use Christianity as one of the pillars of their control over the state. Which meant they needed a rigorous definition of "orthodoxy," and that they needed to suppress any religious groups that might drift out from under the control of the central orthodox church. The pattern set by the Byzantines was followed throughout much of Europe during the next 1300 years.

    Similarly, other parts of the world often included a variety of mutually exclusive religions coexisting peacefully. Not that there weren't frequent bouts of religious war, or that there weren't lots of kingdoms where the state regarded the church as a vital ally. There were. But it wasn't a universal thing in all parts of the world.

    Gender equality, on the other hand, was a very unlikely thing for pre-industrial cultures, but there were specific reasons for that. The reasons might well go away in a world where women are just as capable of generating lightning bolts with a hand gesture as men are, for instance.
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    Quote Originally Posted by EvilElitest View Post
    1) He is actually shown as a cape hero down there, through for all the wrong reasons
    2) By cape hero you mean perfect? They are boring anyways, you need logical flaws
    Make your hero an unsympathetic bastard in the eyes of the audience and a lot of your audience won't like it.

    In his articles on gaming on this site, Rich Burlew mentions that you shouldn't let the "logical flaws" of your character become a breakdown point for the entire game. It might be a "logical flaw" for your character to refuse to associate with, say, a thief, once the fact that they are a thief is revealed. But if your character storms out of the game in a huff you've just shot the fun in the head. Therefore, it is your responsibility to make sure your character doesn't have issues so large it makes it impossible for the group of characters to work together.

    A similar argument applies to fictional characters. A character who's a despicable jerk in ways that much of the audience will object to is going to be a drag on the story, especially if the author keeps treating him like a hero. I mean, look at Wesley on Star Trek. Wesley isn't even evil; he's just annoying, callow, and accident-prone. And yet much of the audience hated the character and the way that the writers kept having him save the day.

    If you're creating a work of fiction, and you give your 'heroic' character so many "logical flaws" that he doesn't act or think like a person the audience would sympathize with, the audience won't see the character the way you want them to.

    3) General Robert E Lee. Best Southerner in the Civil War (other than Longstreet)
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    Was he honorable? Yes. Was he talented? Absolutely.

    Would he make a good hero for a novel, assuming he remains an unrepentant advocate of secession and slavery? Only among people who thought secession and slavery were really good ideas. And that kind of people is a dying breed these days.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Gygaxphobia View Post
    Many people thought vegetables were poisonous upto the 17th C or so, so no turnip munching.
    This is patently false. Turnips and peas were major staples, and onions, leeks, and early carrots and cabbage were also on the menu, as were various wild roots.

    Anyway, one big misconception is that commoners essentially wore burlap; what little archaeological evidence there is suggests that thread counts upwards of 40 were commonplace.


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    Quote Originally Posted by EvilElitest View Post
    actually pretty effective, through hard to move around in. Some of the better stuff could block basic bullet (through these were from old fashion guns mind you). Armor made a huge difference in a fight, hence why knights could defeat peasents easily. Knights biggest problem i imagine would be falling over
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    Goddammit, EE. That stuff about being hard to move in and falling over being the biggest danger of medieval combat just flat not true. 30 seconds of searching in the RW Weapons and Armor thread could have revealed this. Well, assuming the forums didn't crash while you were searching.

    Look, Randomizer, go look at this here: Swordguy's Essay on Japanese Armor. Understand that European plate is significantly more protective than the Japanese armor detailed in this essay, and not all that much heavier. Modern infantry have been known to go into combat carrying 150+ pounds of weapons, ammo, water, and gear. Full plate generally tops out at 70lbs, and that's generally for jousting plate. Field armor is in the 55-60lb region.

    Movement is quite easy - you lose perhaps the extreme 5% of your mobility, and standing up isn't a problem at all. People do cartwheels and pushups in harness all the time, and vaulting over a horse (from side to side) in full plate is something any given trained fighter should be able to accomplish.
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    Thus, knowing none of us are Sun Tzu or Napoleon or Julius Caesar...
    No, but Swordguy appears to have studied people who are. And took notes.
    "I'd complain about killing catgirls, but they're dead already. You killed them with your 685 quadrillion damage." - Mikeejimbo, in reference to this

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