Why the Middle Ages matter | HistoryExtra
"‘Why do we think it's so cruel and barbarous? Well I suppose we have this sort of general assumption that things have always got better, that there has always been a general sense of progress. And when people look at 16th century torture implements, they immediately think, something before that must have been even worse. Whereas in reality torture and the cruel implements of barbarity that we can see in some European museums today, and we can read about for Elizabeth England are products of the 16th century. We don't remember in medieval England torture was not allowed, it was against the law. Um Edward II had to get special dispensation to torture the Templars in 1308 and he only did it because his father-in-law the king of France insisted that he'd do it. We didn't on the whole torture people in the the name of the state. Some uh individual sheriffs and Lords took the law into their own hands and there’s an exception to that but there wasn't a legalized sense of torture. That came in in Elizabethan times. But because of this sense of progress that it must have been worse in medieval times than in Elizabethan times, people just think it's backward. And progress is probably the main culprit. And again where do our ideas of progress come from and they really come from the French Revolution and the Marquis De Condor [Ed: Condorcet] says ideas about progress in the 1790s’...
‘Of course the average school child today leaves school knowing more about the world than the greatest scientists of the 16th century’. And I thought, you've really summed up in that one phrase how we, even educated people misunderstand the past. Because we, I don't know when to sow winter wheat. I personally can't ride a horse. I don't know how to store apples so they last 18 months. All sorts of areas of general knowledge that they would have just taken for granted, we've completely forgotten they ever knew. The herbs, the the names of um animals. Um when it comes to how to fight it with a sword, you know how to defend yourself… and then when you go and step inside a cathedral and you you look up and you just see the sophistication of people building in the 12th 13th 14th centuries. And realise that they didn't even have a standardized language. They didn't even have, uh, they didn't have standardized units of measurement. And yet what they created without mechanical uh engineering has lasted 800 years and looks as beautiful as it probably did the day you know it was put up, albeit without the paint. Then you realize it's just a wealth of knowledge we don't do. How do you build something like uh Le Mans Cathedral with uh a crossing over a 100 feet high. Well, no school child could do that today and in fact without the professional background, no trained engineer could do it. You'd need engineering, you would need calculation, you would need computers because we've lost the ability to do it without these tools..
I don't think much has happened apart from technology since the last uh well since the the 17th century in the Scientific Revolution. Most change today and over the years has been rooted in technology and although I know a lot of people and any good historians would immediately jump up and say what about women rights, what about social rights, a lot of the root causes for for there to be these rights are rooted in the technological changes um that took place in the in the distant past. Now, uh, the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century is where we look at most of that technology coming from. But if you include the Agricultural Revolution that preceded it which allows the food supply to support the workers who created the Industrial Revolution, well if that's technology too then it is largely technology that has changed the modern world. Until that point yeah the medieval period was where we see a world which was risen by fighting and war transition to one which was able to expect peace and to look at war as being unusual...
University is kind of, are invented in the 12th century and in order to attend University you have to be a member of the clergy, which is kind of a way of keeping rowdy uni students from getting in trouble. It means that you go to church court if you rip a tavern off and run out on your bill for example but women can't be clergy members... You'll see these women pop up and they will be teaching at universities so Salerno which is the biggest health school has women who suddenly pop up as professors and I'm like where did she come from, who is she, I need to know more about her and everyone's like oh yeah sure, really really good physician and she's good and I'm like how, where, why did you let her in? And they just don't explain it at all. So it's kind of frustrating because they treat it like it's normal but it's not normal technically but we can't sort of find our way in there. And medical work is actually one of these big ways that women can have rather a lot of agency because a great job for women across the board is in midwifery because you're always going to need a midwife. You know that's just that is how things are um and women who are working as midwives are oftentimes like the medical professional that anybody sees, so you know it's all well and good’...
‘Another development that we could say had a dramatic consequence for medieval society was an increase in travel speeds. Why was this so influential?’
‘Right, okay this is one of my special subjects. And uh I don't think many people have, I don't think anybody's ever really noticed how much fast you could travel in 1600 than you could in 1000. Come back to this whole point about technology because people think technology has changed. They think that because of technology of 1600 was pretty much that of 1000, that people couldn't travel any faster in 1600 than they could in 1000. Well that's wrong. The difficulties of traveling in the 11th century was considerable. But then if you look at how fast people really could travel when they were really under pressure. So when they had to get news of an, of a murder or an impending Invasion or or something like this and you look at the speeds they could achieve.
You realize that by the end of the 16th century, people could travel three or four times faster over long distances than people in the early 11th century. And roughly speaking if you want to benchmark, a simple benchmark to compare. When Edward I died in 1307, in in summer on 7th of July, the news was brought back to to London at a speed of roughly 75 to 80 miles per day. Almost exactly 300 years later in 1603, in March when um, uh Elizabeth I died, news of her death was taken into Scotland on the first day at 160 miles in one day. Twice the speed for the same urgency of information, across routes which probably weren't dissimilar. The roads were probably better by 1600. But there had been a doubling of the most urgent speeds. Now if you think about the implications of that for a government. If you've got to wait let's say 10 days for news of a rebellion somewhere to reach you. And then you've got to think about what to do about it. And then you've got to get send a message back and it's going to take 10 days to get back there, that's, you know three weeks for the rebels to do whatever they want wherever they are and wreck whatever havoc. You can't allow that much time to pass, so you have to trust your local Lords to do whatever they think is necessary. You've got to empower the localities. You've got to empower the the local Lords. If you can get that information far faster, if you get in five days and get your infor-, your reply back in five days, well you can rule much more directly. And you can tell the local Lords what they should be doing if they haven't already done it. So the faster things go the more centralized command can be.
And if you extrapolate this and if we step outside the Middle Ages just for a moment. And you realize how big the changes were in the 19th century because of technology, because of speeding up with information, by 1900 we have direct rule of Australia, whereas in 1800 you had to wait three months for the boat to get there. You can see how the the center becomes so much more important when you have speed speeding up. Now going back to the Middle Ages, there's no point in the 11th century having a spy in Germany. Because by the time that he's got his message to you you've probably already heard about the invasion or whatever's going to happen. But if he can get the information to you at, using a European relay at about 200 miles per day, you want to have spies everywhere. And that's why Walsingham has spies in Spain, Turkey, Germany, France, Italy, and obviously throughout the British Isles. Whereas there wouldn't have been any point in the 11th century. So it changes people's entire attitude to information, government, and responsibility’"