11/26/2022 0 Comments A thousand years of deathThose who owned land, at home or abroad, had both financial control of its produce – wool, wheat, wood, slaves, iron, furs, ships – and, by extension, political control of the people who wished to live or labour on it. Most medieval cultures were indeed heavily stratified in this manner, with divisions between the haves and the have-nots reinforced by patterns of wealth and work. Yet, medieval people were also aware that, when it came to the shape and fabric of individual living, we are all hostages to fate: our fortunes can rise as well as fall.Ĭlearly, the Middle Ages saw itself as having both winners and losers. By the standards of the present day, almost everyone in the pre-modern world right up to the 1800s would be classed as living in extreme poverty. Of course, while I am arguing that we have misjudged the Middle Ages, there is no getting away from the fact that it was, in many ways, extremely tough. Religious tenets like the biblical story of Creation or the potential daily intervention of the Almighty were an accepted, but not necessarily all-consuming, part of a medieval worldview. Rather, it is a baseline for how we see and understand this world, its past, present and future. We do not go around slapping each other on the back and congratulating ourselves on the existence of gravity, constantly expressing gratitude and awe that Newtonian physics stops us from floating off the earth’s surface into space. A good parallel would be the way we think and speak about science today. This is not to say, as the caricature sometimes suggests, that Christianity, Islam or Judaism was all anyone ever talked about. Religion would be something we recognise too from modernity, yet it played a much greater role in the fundamentals of medieval life in a way that is now largely lost. The biggest of these would reach populations of half a million or more and harboured elaborate centres of political power, diverse industries and, later, a university trained intellectual elite. Many of them lived in small towns and villages, the cumulative engines of a largely agricultural economy, and in the absence of jet planes and motorways life might feel surprisingly quiet.Īt the same time, we might visit larger civic centres such as medieval Cairo, Paris, Granada or Venice, whose crowded streets, busy markets and generally condensed living would feel just as bustling as many modern cities. Demographically speaking, medieval populations were significantly smaller: there are roughly as many people in the United Kingdom today as there probably were across the entirety of Europe in the Middle Ages. Most striking, might be its apparent emptiness. We draw them into a sceptical, and often quite gruesome, narrative of the period that has been handed down to us.īut, if you or I were to be transported back a thousand or so years from the present into the medieval past, we would find ourselves in an uncanny place at once startlingly different from and yet strangely familiar to our own. It is a moment often defined by events outside itself, by what it is not, and when we look at medieval artefacts – be they bodies or poems, paintings or chronicles – we have a tendency to emphasise the negative. The centuries sandwiched between the accolades of ancient Greece or Rome and the classical world reborn in the European Renaissance are seen as a static and sequestering time, an idea we read in their different names: the ‘Dark’ Ages or the ‘medieval’, from the Latin medium aevum, a ‘Middle Age’. Exploring medieval bodies is particularly vital today, because their era continues to be much misunderstood.
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