Medievalists.net

Silver coins from the Islamic world were not exactly rare in Scandinavia (e.g. https://www.medievalists.net/2023/11/nearly-500000-dirhams-were-buried… and trade is a much more likely explanation especially over such large distances. AFAIK trading vs raiding was often just a question of opportunity and might have been done by the same viking/trader group depending on what was more 'convenient' (or: first raid and then setup an adhoc trading point just around the corner to exchange the loot against silver coins because those are easier to carry home - or the classic: do slave raids on the way from Scandinavia to the Black Sea, and trade the captured slaves with the Greeks-slash-East-Romans and Muslims against silver).

The next step would be digitizing the books and manuscripts so scholars can collectively research the finding. https://www.medievalists.net/?s=digitizing&submit=Search I wonder what the cost of this digitization process would be and what research labs can render this service.

> Second, and to some extent as a result of its depopulating impact, the Black Death encouraged both the widespread adoption of existing labor-saving technologies and practices and the development of new ones. In the agrarian economy, this resulted in the widespread adoption of the iron plow, the three-field crop rotation system, and fertilization with manure, all of which significantly increased productivity. https://www.medievalists.net/2021/08/the-black-death-and-the-great-tra…

yeah I m a solo publisher, so I do use AI as an assistant to help with editing, formatting, HTML, and other production work that normally be handled by a team. The historical research, fact-checking, source verification, and overall direction are my own, but I rely on AI to speed up the publishing process. I also take your point about the repetition. That's something I revisit and tighten up, because readability matters more than word count. but, when I write for external publications, the style is much more traditional because I follow each publication editorial guidelines. On my own site, I experiment more with layout and presentation, which can sometimes make the pages feel different. but it look cool If you are curious, here are a few examples of my work published elsewhere: • Medievalists.net: https://www.medievalists.net/2026/06/bell-tower-medieval/ • Family Handyman: https://www.familyhandyman.com/article/history-of-toll-roads/ • Bored Panda: https://www.boredpanda.com/rarest-most-expensive-historical-artifacts-…

>Like nails, or hinges, or gates, or locks, or tools for other workers. Most of these would have been luxuries to most, the exception being the tools which would have still been rare belonging to tradesmen. Nails in the late 1400's a 6 penny nail would have been about 1 USD a piece, a 16 penny nail about 2.60 USD a piece, nails were largely used for nice furniture/chests/affixing hardware which again would have been mostly for those in higher stations in life. Gates, ha, outside of castles gates were wood or movable stones used to block openings in rock walls (this is what the original Húsafell stone, of Strongman fame, was). Same for hinges, you wouldn't have seen too many doors outside of castles and businesses as you needed skilled tradesmen to even attempt to build structures that had remotely square corners. For locks, the Medievalist has a good article about them (it's a great site/publication in general) http://www.medievalists.net/2011/03/medieval-padlocks-an-introduction/ the article is actually linked on that page as a PDF after a brief introduction. Didn't want to direct link the PDF for those with bandwidth limitations.

Do you have any evidence to back your statements? They appear to me to be personal beliefs which are at odds with my understanding of the development of cartography. So far all you've done is repeat yourself. My hypothesis is that different northern hemisphere civilizations used different conventions to orient the map. For example, the primary convention for Middle Ages Europe was that east is at the top of the map. This is well attested. See not only the links I gave but the following links: http://www.turkeyinmaps.com/Medieval.html shows 8 medieval maps. 1) The T-O map of Isidore, "east is towards the top of the map, 2) Beatus World Map, "The east is to the top of the map", 3) World Map of A-Idrisi, "the south is oriented to the top of the map", 4) Ebstorf Mappamundi where the map is "superimposed on a background of the figure of Christ crucified; with His head at the top (East), His feet at the bottom (West) and His hands pointing North and South, an orientation that dominated medieval European cartography" (click on the map for that description; emphasis mine), 5) Hereford Mappamundi, "As previously mentioned, East is at the top of the map", 6) Vesconte Mappamundi, "circular in format and oriented with East to the top", 7) Higden World Map, "oriented with East at the top", and 8) The Catalan Atlas (likely north; the link says it was a portolan chart, 'intended to lie on the chart-table of a ship and always was oriented to the necessities of navigation, thus there is…

If you think medieval artists lacked skill, check out Villard Honnecourt’s sketchbook, especially the insects on folio 7 and Christ in Majesty on 16: https://www.medievalists.net/2024/12/sketchbook-villard-honnecourt/ Medieval art is very stylised, but the quality of the lines, the details in the clothes, the crispness of the composition, all that requires a lot of skill. Check out Jean Bondol’s work for instance https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/tapisserie-de-l-apocalypse-scè… You may not like the style, but being able to produce works like that requires you to be good at art on some level.

You convinced me that they lack skill. The clothing does often look good. In folio 16v ( https://www.medievalists.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Villard_de_Hon… ), it's been overdone and appears to be far wrinklier than fabric could support, suggesting that Jesus is embedded in some kind of strange plant. The faces are terrible in all cases. In general, perspective is off, anatomy is off, and you get shown things that aren't physically possible.

A number of articles and at least one well-known study have been published highlighting the fact that the ranks of the wealthiest landowning families in Britain are nearly unchanged since Norman times — e.g. https://www.medievalists.net/2014/11/englands-1-remained-since-1066/

Your comment made me wonder if anyone did actually organize a horse fight, and it turns out that the answer is yes - in Iceland during the Viking Age[1]. Thankfully, people seem to have found more wholesome activities to do with their horses now, including teaching them to type[2]. [1]: https://www.medievalists.net/2016/08/horse-fights-the-brutal-entertain… [2]: https://www.visiticeland.com/outhorse-your-email/

Cities were loud long before cars. See https://www.medievalists.net/2016/02/the-noisy-middle-ages/ https://daily.jstor.org/a-history-of-noise/ https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/2013/09/30/a-19th-century-write… https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.64.5.514

Paris and Bologna had lots of violent students too at that time. Villon, the poet, famously was a burglar and street brawler during and after his student days in Paris. This article is interesting and compares the sorts of violence that took place in those three places: https://www.medievalists.net/2011/11/medieval-student-violence/

>Their presumed links with paganism and witchcraft meant they were often treated with suspicion. Unfortunately, one of the most cruel forms [0] of medieval "suspicion"-treating. I will spare the details, here. The article is quite shallow, the links are a much better read e.g.: >One European pilgrim who traveled to the Middle East even noted that among the differences between Muslims and Christians was that “They like cats, while we like dogs.[1] Or those wiki-articles [2],[3]. [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat-burning [1]https://www.medievalists.net/2013/10/why-cats-were-hated-in-medieval-e… [2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_depictions_of_dogs [3]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_depictions_of_cats

Here's an article that includes a picture of the breaking wheel [1]. [1]: https://www.medievalists.net/2019/09/archaeologists-discover-medieval-…

Historically, people at a lot of meat. > The researchers studied ten other comparable food lists from southern England and discovered a remarkably similar pattern: a modest amount of bread, a huge amount of meat, a decent but not excessive quantity of ale, and no mention of vegetables (although some probably were served). https://www.medievalists.net/2022/04/who-was-eating-meat-in-early-medi… Simply put, you have an animal who eats a bunch of veggies. It’s gathering the calories for you. Then when you kill it, you harvest those calories. There are other means of collecting calories (farming grains, milk & honey, etc) but for most of human history (even now) meat was necessary as it contained the calories to survive.

> This lack of records led some later scholars to give the years after the Roman collapse the now deeply unfashionable label ‘the Dark Ages’, to reflect the fact they literally couldn’t see what was going on. That is entirely crap. They're called the dark ages because some humanists, full of themselves, started calling themselves the enlightenment and what came directly before their era "dark." Kids those days, am I right? https://www.medievalists.net/2014/02/why-the-middle-ages-are-called-th…

Unrelated to chess, but I find it fascinating that you wake up at 3am regularly. This might just be biphasic sleep [1], and throughout history, it was believed people were more effective between their first and second sleep [2]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biphasic_and_polyphasic_sleep#As_histo… [2] https://www.medievalists.net/2016/01/how-did-people-sleep-in-the-middl…

That sleep "problem" may not be a problem; plenty of evidence suggests that before we invented electric lights, segmented sleep was the norm. These links might get you started on the topic: https://www.sciencealert.com/humans-used-to-sleep-in-two-shifts-maybe-… https://www.medievalists.net/2016/01/how-did-people-sleep-in-the-middl…

Well said. To add to that, even the preference identified in those studies is influenced by the specific societal context. Generalizing that to “women prefer fit men” is incorrect, because we know sexual preferences are heavily influenced by the societal context. For example: https://www.medievalists.net/2020/06/fatness-thinness-middle-ages/

See e.g., https://www.medievalists.net/2013/04/did-people-in-the-middle-ages-tak… which describes the many bathing habits of the Middle Ages that contradicts the original article's claims, including this anecdote: > The Dutch philosopher Erasmus, writing in 1526, notes the fall of the public bathhouse. “Twenty-five years ago, nothing was more fashionable in Brabant than the public baths,” he remarked. “Today there are none, the new plague has taught us to avoid them.” That is, water does spread disease, and public baths went out of fashion during the Renaissance, not the Middle Ages.

That makes a lot more sense than the story in the article, thanks. https://www.medievalists.net/2016/03/why-medieval-torture-devices-are-… Most medieval torture devices were hoaxes. The Iron Maiden being the most famous example.

> university professors complain about standards worsening in their annual intake of students They've been doing that since the 11th Century[1] - if this were even vaguely true, your current average student intake would be somewhere around the level of planaria or possibly tardigrades. It's demonstrable rubbish. [1] http://www.medievalists.net/2015/09/the-long-history-of-teachers-compl…

There are a lot of myths about medieval medicine too. See e.g.: http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/04/debunking-a-myth/ http://www.medievalists.net/2013/08/04/medieval-medical-experiments/

As a former falculty memeber and Theological Seminary student. Academia has a serious issue with quality scholarship. Most people focus on one thing and make bold unsupported grabs. My cool little twist on everyone else (I was into Historical Theology which is the most geeky of Theological disciplines) I liked to show the art of whatever period I was talking about. It would debunk 50% of the crappy research all the time, and this time it didn't fail. Warning slide show for ads but it is a slide show of cats in the Middle Ages. http://www.medievalists.net/2015/08/08/cat-pics-from-the-middle-ages/ Cats as pets, guardians against mice, etc. This myth started about cats because people thought Middle Age people were stupid and that they got the wrong idea about cats and that killed them because then the plague came. If the stupid people just had cats no plague.

This might be better: http://www.medievalists.net/2015/09/10/the-earliest-use-of-the-f-word-…

> For example there's a reason the dark ages are called dark. Most people of the time (except the few educated) didn't know there was something better in another time and another place. They probably thought that's as good as anyone's ever had. I am pretty sure you are wrong on multiple counts there. 1. The "dark ages" were called dark because of a lack of written records, after the collapse of the Roman Empire and its centralised systems and imperial bureaucracy. 2. A lot of people did know there had been a different age before. Even if not literate they would regard the literate as the source of knowledge and every village would have some literate people. 3. Life was better for many people. An obvious example was the decline of slavery ( a huge proportion of the population of the Roman Empire) but the descendants of slaves were not the only people who benefitted from the removal of imperial power, and heavy imperial taxes, etc. https://www.medievalists.net/2023/06/middle-ages-dark-ages/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)

This is... just plain wrong. Example: sleep. Insomnia has a history which predates Shakespeare. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/266971 In fact sleep patterns used to be different. It was normal to wake up for an hour or two in the middle of the night. But people went to sleep much earlier - typically around 7-8pm, woke up for an hour or two about four hours later, and went back to sleep again. In spite of this insomnia was a known problem. https://www.medievalists.net/2016/01/how-did-people-sleep-in-the-middl… So clearly going back to this pattern won't necessarily make everyone sleep better. And so "modernity" is not the issue, and the problem does not have a simple solution. Likewise weight loss. Telling overweight people to eat less is like telling an alcoholic to drink less, or a depressed person to cheer up. It's pointless, silly, and naive and it won't work. The real issue with weight loss is a combination of motivation and psychological reprogramming, with some addictive elements, plus education about nutrition. Also peer pressure. And access to healthy vs unhealthy foods. There may also be underlying medical issues related to metabolism. (And - ironically - sleep patterns also make a difference.) Again, it's not a simple problem. This is not to say that tech non-solutions are better. But the idea that you can reduce issues that millions struggle with daily to a simple motivational sentence isn't any more realistic. Or helpful.

“This type of bath went out of style in Europe for almost a millennium after the fall of Rome, thanks in part to Dark Age scientists’ developing the very unscientific idea that bathing in water invites a host of awful diseases into the body’s pores. For most of the Middle Ages, “most [European] people didn't wash, or even get wet, if they could help it,” Bryson writes. When John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, declared that “Cleanliness is next to Godliness” in a 1778 sermon, he was talking about our garments, not our armpits. This is a minor statement within the article but one which hints at shallow research in some sections. This makes me less confident in the rest of the conclusions. Bathing was very common and encouraged during the “Dark Ages”. A few articles which do a better job than I can covering the hows and whys: https://www.medievalists.net/2013/04/did-people-in-the-middle-ages-tak… https://www.medievalists.net/2013/04/did-people-in-the-middle-ages-tak… http://unusualhistoricals.blogspot.com/2013/01/myths-misconceptions-ba…