Top Ten Controversies of Middle Ages History

It’s no secret that I somewhat enjoy controversy. I don’t enjoy making people mad, of course, but I must admit that when people confront a controversial idea or situation they generally learn something—usually something about themselves. Please don’t imagine that I’m talking about any BIG controversies or politics; like I said, I do not enjoy seeing people get mad. Think of me as the annoying guy who yells at the screen about inaccuracies when watching “The Lord of the Rings”: merely annoying.

In the spirit then, of exploring controversies, I thought that I would explore a group of well-known aspects of Medieval history. The first are a list of ten items of history that are commonly believed, but that the majority of scholars don’t agree with. The second is a list of my own humility; it is a list of things that I was personally certain about and had to unlearn when I found out that I was wrong. If you find yourself disagreeing with these lists that’s fine—most people will find something they dislike in them. Just remember that if you want to be certain about anything here researching is the only way to resolve it.

So, without further ado, I present:

1.Ring a Ring O’Roses
Everyone is familiar with this children’s rhyme, usually known nowadays as “Ring Around the Rosies,” being a song derived from plague-ridden England. Specific words are pulled from the song and attached to some of the more horrible aspects of the bubonic plague pandemics. However, the majority of scholars reject this view.

The rhyme is first written in 1881, in the American Mother Goose or The Old Nursery Rhymes. There is some evidence, however, that the rhyme existed in 1790. However, there is nothing earlier. Also is the problem that there exist dozens of differing lyrics to the song (the lyrics we have today just got written down more through the 19th century), and most of them are nonsense words that have nothing to do with illness or sickness. The song is also in Modern English, so it cannot be older than 1500 or so. The idea is that the song would originate in Renaissance England, become so popular that it endures three hundred years and crosses the Atlantic, and is never written down throughout all this time. The song probably originates as an excuse for children to dance in early colonial America.

2.The “F” Word
I don’t want to get into too much detail, obviously, but sometimes swearing can be very interesting. One idea of the origin of the “F” word is that English longbowmen would have their pulling fingers removed when captured by French armies; the remaining uncaptured English began to show their two fingers (very bad in Europe) to the enemy showing that they could still “pluck yew”. Many other origin ideas relate the word to a variety of bizarre acronyms of (modern English) words describing the meaning of the “F” word.

The word descends from Old Germanic roots, and many linguists trace the word to a constructed Indo-European word that would have been spoken millennia ago (and meant exactly what it does today). Also, most scholars feel that the “backwards Victory sign” (don’t do it!) predates Roman times and has always been closely related in meaning to the “F” word.

If this entire section made little sense to you, I honor your innocence and hope that it never does.

3.Dirty People
Most people are learning that this one is false. Once upon a time the Middle Ages were viewed as a very dirty time. We laugh at Monty Python (“Dennis, there’s some lovely filth over here!”) but while farming is dirty work, we now know that people enjoyed baths and the feeling of being clean. We have no documentation that anybody ever thought that a layer of dirt kept one from getting sick – this idea about the Middle Ages in particular seems to be of Victorian origin, and is still popularly heard today in making fun of the Medieval approach to illness (based around miasmal airs and odors).

Bathing was popular throughout Europe, and was sometimes considered a social event and pleasure (in fact, the Papacy once considered telling people not to bathe because it could lead to sin). The accurate way to express it to someone would be that Medieval people kept themselves very clean; they were just horribly unsanitary because they lacked any understanding of microbes and disease mechanics.

4.Poofy Pants and Arabian Garb
Poofy pants are fun to make and are fun to wear. They look nice and can add a lot to an outfit. They are also very un-Medieval. European clothing was rather tight and form-fitting (if your form was the same as a cardboard box, I suppose). Near Eastern garb was looser, of course, but not as loose as our beloved poofy pants (also, there’d be no belly buttons showing; I Dream of Jeanie is completely modern). Also, coins were used as decoration for camels, curtains, and other such things, but not for decorating one’s face or… um, behind. That appears to have arisen during the 1920s and 1960s.

5.Kilts
The Scottish Great Kilt, in particular. If you’re wondering what a Great Kilt is then watch (an edited copy of) Braveheart. They are everywhere in that movie. The trouble is that they are not anywhere in Medieval Scotland. Scotland had kilts, it is true, but they were, by all contemporary descriptions and accounts, very simple kilts. Pants were common, as well. A Great Kilt is a kilt composed from many yards of fabric and are terribly expensive to produce in terms of sheep and man-hours required. The likelihood of their existence in the Medieval period is not high. Also, for fun, check out the idea that Clan Plaids originated in the Middle Ages—you’ll find that there isn’t much consensus from scholars about whether such patterns arose before, during, or after the Middle Ages.

In the case of the Great Kilt (and the constant curiosity about what might or might not be worn underneath one), however, most argue that it appears after the Middle Ages ended. You will find some historians who disagree, but the majority say, “No Great Kilts.”

6.Chivalry
“Courtly Love” is a term that is hotly debated even today, no pun intended. There is very little consensus on whether it even occurred or was simply an ideal that people imagined but never acted upon. (Basically, courtly love is the idea that the best kind of love was an impossible love, like that between two people married to two other people—some people might kill me for making such an over-simplification!) Whenever a discussion on courtly love comes up it’s fine to have a side or an opinion on its historicity, but bear in mind that the matter is far from closed, even today!

Also, Medieval chivalry was very much about being able to use horses in battle. Yes, you read that right—chivalry is about horses. In regards to how men and women treated each other, chivalry developed so that a man would show his masculinity by doing things towards women. Holding a door isn’t about who you’re holding it open for, it’s about the person holding open the door. It’s a way of saying to the world, “I am a manly man!”

7.The Inquisition
Spain had an Inquisition in an effort to re-establish the Catholic faith as the European monarchs slowly re-conquered land from the Islamic Moors of southern Spain. This was mostly just a firming up of the faith of the Christians and kicking the Jews out of Spain. Fewer people were killed and fewer people were tortured than modern people generally think. Torquemada existed, it is true, but his role has been greatly exaggerated. It is true that certain Inquisition leaders created some really twisted forms of torture to extract forced confessions of guilt, but many times the reasons behind such torture were political or economic in nature. One of the reasons that nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition is that it doesn’t reach the levels of people’s expectations. You have almost as much chance of being burned at the stake anywhere else in Europe for having heretical ideas without the blessing of an influential political leader.

8.Absolute Monarch
There is no such thing as an absolute monarch in the Middle Ages. It didn’t matter where you fell in the social ladder: if you pushed your authority too far somebody was going to get on your case. The Magna Carta is a great example of what happens when a king decides to be an absolute monarch: he gets almost killed by those underneath him and gets stripped of some of his authority. The British parliament was in charge of taxes and they let the monarch know it occasionally by denying them to him. The feudal-esque systems throughout Europe kept the peace mostly through not upsetting those with responsibility above or below you. Nobody was exempt; even the popes learned through experience that they couldn’t rule with absolute authority. Wars and politics abound in Medieval Europe precisely because people were trying to gain as much power and influence as possible without getting themselves killed by other equally power-hungry monarchs and confederacies.

9.Beer
How many times have you heard it: Medieval people drank a lot more alcohol because that was the safest form of getting water? Don’t fall for it! There are many things wrong with this idea, the first of which being that alcohol consumptions actually contributes to dehydration!

Modern society is used to the idea of treating water for microbes. We’ve grown up with stories about giardia parasites (the “runs”) and other dangers of natural water. The simple fact is that people in the Middle Ages drank water, microbes and all. Some historians feel that people had better immunological responses to parasites back then because of the constant exposure; people drank from springs, wells, and rivers. Obviously, if water was found to cause illness it was avoided, but to say that such things drove people to drinking things like beer and wine is silly.

Most scholars feel that people in the Middle Ages consumed alcohol for exactly the same reasons they do today.

10.No Scientific Advancement
This is an unfortunate side effect of our public perception of the Renaissance: if there was such an explosion of learning and advancement during the Renaissance (there really wasn’t an explosion, per se) then whatever happened before must have been a dead period for advancement.

People have always been smart, and the Middle Ages were full of mini-Renaissances plenty. Art and writing flourished among the learned, and many scientific advancements were many in the fields of agriculture, architecture, irrigation, and health. Did you know that the wheelbarrow was invented during the Low Middle Ages? Imagine that: the Romans didn’t even have the wheelbarrow!

Scholars in the Middle Ages read Greek and Latin works just like in the Renaissance. In fact, the transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance has become so blurred by further discoveries of Medieval advances that some historians question whether there should even be such a distinction between the two periods anymore. It appears that there wasn’t ever a “dead” period for the Renaissance to flourish out of: things had been flourishing, albeit a bit more slowly, ever since society recovered from the fall of the Roman Empire.

Top Five Things I Thought People Were Wrong About, Only to be Proven Wrong

The following list explains some ideas about the Middle Ages that I assume to be incorrect. It was only later after being presented with reach by others, or by doing my own, that I found out how wrong I was to disbelieve them. Maybe someday something from the list above will be transferred down here.

1.Expensive Salt
I thought that it strained credulity to believe that salt was once as expensive as a precious metal. Can’t you just mine it from the ground? Don’t animals enjoy licking natural salt licks? The surprising answer was that salt was not mined in Europe until the 1700s. Before this time salt had to be gathered from evaporated brine or from the ocean and was extremely difficult to obtain. The average person got the salt they needed from their natural diet.

2.Clean Vikings
Vikings! Pirates, pillagers, and all-around meanies! Hard to imagine that they, as a culture, valued a certain level of cleanliness, eh? Most Viking tribes and cultures kept their bodies washed and cleaned and often spent time in personal grooming. They were NOT sanitary in their conduct, but employed various means to keep their bodies, faces, nostrils, and ear canals clean and clear.

3.No Flat Earth
No intelligent person ever thought that the Earth was flat; there were a few in BC times, but nobody after the beginning of the Christian Era though it. Columbus’s troubles in talking to the courts of Portugal and Spain related not towards some belief that people would “sail off the edge” but rather that the distance by sea between Europe and Asia was too far to sail (imagine how far it would be without the Americas getting in the way). Columbus argued that the circumference of the Earth was far smaller than had previously been calculated. There is also no evidence that his sailors feared for their lives on the voyage—people had sailed beyond the horizon for years due to storms and curiosity—there just wasn’t anything out there, people thought.

4.The Gun
The joke goes, Those who live by the sword die by those who live by the gun. The sword represents ancient warfare and the gun modern. Except that the gun is a far older instrument that one might think. Canons had been used since at least the 13th Century, and the gun was soon developed as people tried to figure out how to make a canon that required fewer people to use and operate. Eventually by the end of the Middle Ages hand-held gunnes existed; they were notoriously dangerous to use, but the use of gunpowder, canon, and even guns, started to level the battlefield at a much earlier time than people are used to thinking.

If you want something really cool to research, look into the history of gunpowder in Medieval warfare. It’s rich with stories of hellfire, scientists, and people who paid farmers for animal urine.

5.Existence of Printing (Just not Movable Type)
Gutenberg’s press changed the world, and there is no question about it. However, the innovations wasn’t the press itself, but the creation of movable type. Presses have existed since antiquity, but required the entire page of the printing to be carved into a block of wood for inking (inking wood!). The idea of printing a book was absurd because each page would require a separate carved page. Movable type was just the idea that each letter was carved and could be shuffled as needed. However, printing of tracts, deeds, charters, and pamphlets existed throughout the Middle Ages.

So there are my lists of accurate and inaccurate ideas about the Middle Ages. Feel free to disagree with them as you will; you can probably find a historian or two to agree with you. Also, don’t let this dissuade you in creating and acting out a persona, if you want to do that. Personas are about both historical study and fun!