Seeing a lot of critical responses from medievalists about this BBC 1066 thing. As an early modernist, just to say that I'm happy to confirm that medieval people were indeed covered in dirt all the time and did all sound like they were in the Wurzels.
I'm getting a sense that this show is worth avoiding.
Contemporaneous documentary footage:
As far as we can tell, that is - it's difficult to be certain, because nobody wrote anything down for a thousand years.
Having just returned from 12 days in Somerset I can confirm that this is largely still the case in, and around, Cheddar.
This BBC effort seems such a lost opportunity. There's enough story in the real events to be both educational and entertaining.
This is hilarious 😂
I saw a documentary
🤣 #earlymodernistsunite
And there's me, a medievalist, thinking everyone in EM days were doing this constantly!
At least they weren´t burning witches all the time, like medieval people did. We all know that ugly truth!
Much too busy inventing modernity
Pulling the big modernity switch that emerged in 1485 or 1492 or whenever it started in your particular country. The real reason Briain got a head start in industrialisation is that Richard IIi died slightly earlier than first contact withbthe Americas and so they got a head start on being modern.
How many non white Norman invaders and middle eastern Englishmen have been inserted into it so far as representative of diversity in 1066 ?
Surely if any of them are baddies they would talk with cockney accents?
Are @lollardfish.bsky.social and @profgabriele.com up yet?
Oh this is historical consensus so I don't think they'll mind
it was called "the dark ages" because all the lens filters were covered in soot and muck
The early modernist captures the worm.
Not the Northumbrians.. no Wurzel there ?
It's about time someone stood up and told the truth 👏 Monty Python and the Holy Grail was a documentary
Is there a period-accurate tv show or movie that you would recommend?
The german equivalent of the BBC has done (and keeps doing it) this shit for years. One of the "funniest" things is that they used the set of Hänsel & Gretel: Witchhunters movie set for their documentary. But wait, it gets worse... 1/2
Because the set was not dirty enough, they brought in truckloads of dirt and mud and smeared it all over the set. PS: Movie is a banger. 2/2
This is entrapment
No Anglo-Norman loanwords here please, we'll have the correct Saxon "a whopping big net, ooh arr"
I’m suddenly reminded that the OE word for ‘man’ and the word for ‘fish-trap’ were both “wer”… So, this is a Were-wer!
which is Welsh for squirrel (wiwer)
so if you suspect a neighbor grows a lot of hair and fangs every full moon and you want to catch him, you need to set up a were-wolf-wer?
I maintain that Maid Marian and her Merry Men was, in fact, historical record.
As a fellow early modernist, I would also like to stress how nothing intellectually interesting happened in the middle ages, the renaissance really changed that.
Only in Italy because they had time for reading during the Plague.
I thought it was because they were close to Rome, and one day someone looked around and was like, "Mamamia! Looka at alla deez statues!"
#ZeroPercentScience
*Late modernist enters the chat* I would also like to point out in the Renaissance all they did was make boring statues and write mad real politic blather about the son of sexually incontinent Pope. The Enlightenment is where it all started happening.
*Theodor Adorno enters the chat*
Now we've gone too far.
I knew it
Did they have tiny horses?
How can you think otherwise though? Like…how???????
As a non-historian, this is eerily reminiscent of my and others' attempts to define the (English) Midlands on Reddit.
ghastly! ☕️🧐🇬🇧
As a nineteenth-centuryist, I can concur. Except when they were pulling swords out of stones or wooing maidens.
And all the women looked like Elizabeth Siddal
there was a LOT of that about
A CameLOT of that about...
Excuse me, yet another Early Modernist weighing in, but I do think we need to contextualise more here. This discussion completely ignores the fact that it was constantly dark in the Middle Ages.
And raining
Lots of knights will do that.
And, since it was dark, no one could read the date. In fact, the dark ages lasted only three weeks. They just seemed far longer.
I feel like this is a breakthrough moment.
That's why there's no manuscript evidence! Also why the art is weird because perspective is very hard to do with the lights off
Exactly. It explains EVERYTHING and is, therefore, the best history fact ever.
Back when everything was brightly coloured and shiny. Historians call it the Technicolor Era.
Always good to see that Classicists and Early Modernists can agree on so many things.
Was that how you could tell who was the king?
He didn’t have shit all over him.
😂
I’m not angry John, never. But I am disappointed 🤣
You forget to mention that they kept on dying. Horribly. Often in mud. But not always.
"mud" as I'm reminded from Canterbury
No, you’re thinking of the First World War.
Ah, yes, the Dark Ages.
Thank God we discovered in 1450 that crops grow better in soil instead of mud
And always before age 40, that’s what average lifespan means.
There were two causes of death: plague and catapult
What about witches? Who were an entirely medieval thing and so disappeared in 1450.
or to some innovative beseigeing armies - plague by catapult
Clerks according #deathmedieval
😅
It's all wrong cos in the TV show William doesn't land at Thanet and conquer the island by fire and the sword. He was a bad king or possibly a jolly good thing one or the other, "1066 and All That".
I still have my copy.
It’s all true! Just look at the sources!
Truth. Harsh, but fair.
What? From Penicuik or Bristol (as that's where the surviving original members are actually from!)? 😉
Specifically Nailsea accents because of the Live at the Royal Oak album, which is the source of all medieval accents
And much of Mummerset, on stage and screen, too.
NB - contrary to popular understanding, The Wurzels are as much part of the Bristol music scene as Massive Attack or, erm, Portishead. In this essay...
The Wurzels (feat. Tricky)
Or vice versa.
NB, I really am tempted to write this essay, but I’ve seen the size of my to do list and I don’t like it.
It can be galling to see one's period misrepresented onscreen but that shouldn't be reason to deny historical truths, like that medieval people shuffled around giving it the whole 'my liege' all the time, unless they had cheekbones in which case they were the king
They were also repressed by the violence inherent in the system.
Highly recommend the Media-eval podcast! They haven't posted in a while, but it's two medievalists essentially reviewing movies/shows about the period.
So you're saying that prominent cheekbones are a deformity caused by rampant incest?
this one made me *snort* laughing
There's been a lot of ink spilt on when the medieval period ends and the early modern period begins, which can get in the way of the simple truth: it happened in 1450.
Never before in the field of bluesky were so many historians hurt so badly by so few characters
How about 1485, when a Welsh usurper seized the English throne?
Them’s fighting words John.
Can't see what's controversial there! Started 1450, ended 1750, handing over the baton to modernity, reason, and much worse paintings for some reason
Hey everyone, it's another round number fetishist.
As an early modernist working on Spain, I can happily confirm that it clearly happened in 1492
Columbus, the fall of Grenada and the Expulsion of the Jews! What more could you ask for?
This cheap attempt to create beef between academic areas will not work. *grabs popcorn, eagerly reads replies* Damn it.
God, you’re so good at this. Take it on tour at various faculty meetings.
It would date from the fall of the Roman Empire, wouldn’t it? So 1922.
Day and time or you're not a REAL historian. 😁
25th of March baby, happy new year
Perfect. Up there with the day the Ice Age ended.
Nope, 19th of July - coincidentally, same day Galway was liberated from the Indians.
25th March is just another day to let off fireworks.
Yeah but how come 100 Hundred Years War ending *and* Fall Of Constantinople in 1453 unless everyone knew it was a big deadline like Y2K or the end of 3G networks.
Picking the final date for the 100 years way is very much like naming a Dinosaur at 4.59pm on a Friday - looking at you Argentinosaurs.
Yeah but it didn't go to extra time
I like to round to centuries for the big periods, in which case gotta go with 1500. If we're snapping to events, gotta be 1453, no?
1536-40?
I always think of ‘early modern’ as beginning when I was born, i.e. 1950.
Ha!
That’s when it all seemed to kick off.
Is that when they started to wash?
No, we have to wait for Van Leeuwenhoek and the invention of the microscope.
Nah, the early modern period began when people *stopped* washing and began to wipe themselves down with linen instead.
Early modern is when they invented colour history and they didn't have to go around in shades of drab all the time. Easily confused with being constantly dirty though!
1453.
1517. Maybe 1563. Or 1492. Did I mention that periodization is hot, stinking garbage?
Spengler would like a word..
I hold that it's about 2 pm on 30 January 1649 (in England ), and about a century earlier in Wales, but I accept that's a minority view.
Wait why
In jest - mostly - if you regard the Civil War as just another baronial revolt (which you can sort of make a case for), it sort of makes sense: the difference being that the deposed king was executed in public as a criminal, rather than disposed of quietly, in private. Wales, much more clear cut.
And this is an entirely correct response.
Had this exact same ... 'discussion' with someone in a very hot field at the weekend, while dressed entirely in wool 😂
In the beer tent?
No, worse – on the march!
I have every sympathy with you on that! I am not being entirely serious as you might have gathered (but not entirely flippant, either). We really shouldn't take this sort of thing dogmatically, especially while wearing wool in full sunshine.
I'm a soundly 'Three Kingdoms' man, but even then you've got to explain a fair deal. John Rees' recent book on the 'Fiery Spirits' is a good other side to Adamson's 'Noble Revolt', a revolution from above AND below.
Good GIF, too.
So does that mean Wales would have entered modernity before England?
Maybe, depending on what you think 'modernity' is. Removing the status of Welsh law and the customs of the March (along with that area's legal independence), along with realigning the landholding of huge areas ends something that's established in stages from c.1000. Let's call that the Middle Ages.
Anyway, what I'm really getting at is that, in Wales, the *entire country* (for want of a better word), goes from being private property, in one way or another, to a regular part of the kingdom of England in under a decade. That's genuinely new.
But Henry VIII? Absolutely a medieval monarch. Just with a lot of surviving paperwork. Edward VI? Discuss. Ditto Mary and Elizabeth. James I/VI would have been quite offended, I suspect!
📌
Simply, the entire legal status, basis and structures of government and legal system was harmonised and brought in line with England at the same tome as the monasteries (really important landholders in Wales and its March), were dissolved so between 1536 and 1542. Genuinely revolutionary.
But I am - as a medievalist - mostly taking the mickey out of such arbitrary definitions. You can place these boundaries where you want for whatever reasons you like.
Then the Middle Ages ended in 2130 with the invention of time travel
we won't know until after we get there.
If you like! The longer I work as a historian, the less inclined I am to get hung up on periodisation.
This is one of the questions I regularly put to my survey students on exams.
It's a really useful (if annoying), question. And a great mental exercise.
Owing to a considerable gap in hiring and expertise in our department, it's very rare that I get 1789 as a response...
In art history I think it’s about 1620 in England, which is pretty much exactly when I start to lose interest
The last day of 1599 11:59:59. I'm never sure if it's the old or new calendar. I always kind of fudge the issue unless I need to be serious.
How is there a cartoon for this discourse? I love it! (Leave it to Kate! Hahaha!)
(Who is on here btw - katebeaton.bsky.social)
Just found her after posting!
I love this.
This is how I feel when people talk about “revolutionary” AI technology
Haha
My understanding is that Ireland, the world and Henry VIII were medieval until the exact moment that modernity was birthed by Henry VIII having himself declared king of Ireland. Certainly this is what all the books say.
Its start coincides with the idea of diabolical witchcraft coming to prominence. Coincidence?
1453 to be precise
No, that's when the Middle Ages *began*. As is very widely understood, the Middle Ages are what comes after the Romans.
No, your middle ages begin a little after 40, whether you’re Roman or not.
No, because that was the Fall of Constantinople and thus the end of the world. I won’t be taking questions.
The end of civilisation and the birth of modernity. Discuss.
Fair enough. I think this deserves to be debated at length on TikTok.
Yes, in England in 1450 everyone stopped singing Sumer Is Icumen In and then couldn’t sing anything at all until Henry VIII wrote Greensleeves.
😆
When the royalties go to royalty.
Early modern was best, before it went to America and became too commercial.
I’m not sure I can bring myself to watch it, Wurzels or not.
My sarcasm detector is broken, can someone help me figure out if I should laugh, nudge elbows or scream and share my long thread on why medieval people were big time into being clean.
you should share your thread so i can read it!
bsky.app/profile/fake...
Love the video of the assault course comparison of full armor wearing soldier and modern combatant.
yessssss thank you!
Ah we were just waiting for an early modern art historian to point out how everything looked kind of blue in the middle ages.
