What fantasy tropes of medieval history are not historicall accurate?

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

Vikings had no horns on their helmets.

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.

>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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

...

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.

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

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

Also, what this user 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.

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

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.

>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.

I wasn't the user 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Fuck, wrong link, should go here

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

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

...

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.

press.princeton.edu/titles/7705.html

>i posted marxist revisionist fake history

Silly user, 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

>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.

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

>being conquered by the French
>justenglishthings

>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.

Door knobs weren't invented until 1878.

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

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).

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

Hildegard Von Bingen is fake?

>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

By a black guy in America.

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

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.

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.

>child-wedding
How young?

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

Those are my biggest issues.

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.

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.

Hey retard more than one user thinks you are stupid.

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.

Bullets of each and every kind instantly dropping people dead

>lol it's just 9mm

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

>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.

>lol hollywood is always right

Same with knife wounds.

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

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.

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.

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

Who... cares...

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?

No. It was common before the roman conquest wars.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

>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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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?

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.

ur a faget

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.

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.

Veeky Forums 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.

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:
l-clausewitz.livejournal.com/161857.html
l-clausewitz.livejournal.com/195018.html