To be fair, when people write fantasy, it's mostly doing whatever the hell they want. Anyways... 10 Things Fantasy Told Me Happened in the Medieval Era: 1) It was customary for common peasants to enter the court of kings and have a cordial discussion with them. If the guards tried to stop said peasant, then the king was somehow evil OR, if the king were good, they'll stop them. Because, y'know, kings don't give a crap about security in their own castle when random peasants barge in uninvited. 2) Armor was easy to slip on and off much like modern jackets. 3) If a woman got pregnant, she never had to fear the very real, almost certainly-going-to-happen chance that she'd die during the birthing process. If anything else, it'd turn into their equivalent of a modern medical drama with her companions around her observing the birthing. Oh, and the baby would be 100% healthy. No one worried about the baby dying. 4) If someone were injured, there was no real worry of infection or said infection getting worse. 5) Everyone of the nobility were evil, greedy SOBs unless specified by the plot to be otherwise. 6) All vassals/barons/everyone not a king had some sort of tough mastiff. 7) It's easy to swim while wearing heavy armor. Just ask Herr Barbarossa! (Wait, he was the guy who drowned, right?) 8) If you were born deformed/disabled in this time period, take heart for a magical adventure awaits you! You will be lucky enough to meet someone who wants to take you on an amazing adventure. 9) ??? 10) Everyone in the land is willing to take up arms and DIE on behalf of one (1) and singular character, usually a young teen from non-nobility. If anyone has qualms, they're either shunned or are the bad guys.
Actually, LIFE expectancy at birth was around 30; which, when you factor in the infant mortality, meant that MOST people lived the traditional threescore and ten.
He claims to dispel your 'myth,' that a man was old at thirty, but should introduce some evidence to back his claim. Historians argue about this. And we do have evidence that societies from stone age through to the medieval period were actually composed of and ruled by, what in our eyes were very young people. It was one of the topics introduced during the 'History of the World in 100 Objects.' We also have evidence of very old people in medieval times : priests and kings for example, and the biblical aspiration of three score years and ten that must have its origins in fact. Yaffle
If the average life expectancy at birth is 30 years, and half of the people die at the age of 1 through infant mortality, then the other half must live to be 59 years old.
I thought it was just the average age of people who lived back then. I sincerely doubt the minute someone reached their 30s, they dropped dead. Isn't it true that some managed to live to their 70s?
Life expectancy at birth was 30. If you survived to 21, your life expectancy rose to 64. It's a fact of statistics that the longer you live, the higher your life expectancy rises. Imagine I'm 65, and I've got an equal chance of dying in any of the next ten years, between age 66-75, average 70.5, life expectancy 70.5. I survive until I'm 66, so I've just removed 66 from that sample, so I've now got an equal chance of dying in the next 9 years, average 71, life expectancy 71.
So then, in conclusion, this figure of thirty is effectively the mean life expectancy of this period? Is that correct? I was always better at English than Maths. Edited to add: If this is the case it's what I was thinking in the first place, even if I didn't articulate it as well as I may have.
Yeah, mean and average are synonyms. Or maybe at the higher levels of math there's some sort of difference, I don't know, but functionally they're the same thing. So in this case the mean can be misleading because the mode is somewhere 0-2. Like, a LOT of people die as babies, and that throws off the average.
The arithmetic mean is ONE kind of average. The kind that you get by taking all the members of the sample and dividing by the number of members. Like, 5 guys, heights of 180cm, 175cm, 170cm, 165cm, 160cm. Total height of 850 divided by 5 gives mean height of 170 cm. Median is the middle guy when you line them up tallest at the left. In this case, 170cm again. But if you've got another two guys at 181cm, the median moves to 175cm, while the mean only moves to 173.142857cm. Mode is the one that there is most of. No mode in the original distribution, but it becomes 181cm in the second version.
Toilet paper wasn't invented. Many people didn't believe in bathing. Everyone was going around shit-assed. Parents taking care of infants would not have any way of keeping their hands clean, and then they'd go and cook dinner with their shitty hands. And you wonder why I don't write fantasy.
John Chapter 13 tells us that Christ washed his disciple's feet before the last supper, and made general reference to bathing. That was 2 millennia ago, and the Romans were notorious for their love of bathing. Not everybody abhorred the idea of cleanliness!
Just because the Romans were OCD about bathing doesn't mean everyone in Medieval Europe was. Something must've happened to make people think bathing was harmful to their health. @minstrel - It's fantasy. Who says bathing can't be a thing in fantasy? If we can excuse dragons and magic existing, I think we can excuse bathtubs existing. Fantasy is not a 100% accurate portrayal of Medieval Europe. It's its own thing entirely. If you really want to know what life was like in Medieval Europe, fantasy is the last place you should look.
Life expectancy at birth (20-30) was lower in Classical Rome than it was in Medieval Britain (30) - and it got worse (47 vs 64) as you got older. There you go, I knew all that bathing was bad for you!
It wasn't the bathing that shortened their lives. It was their penchant for being thrown to the lions!
Someone may have already mentioned this, but fantasy novels make it seem like horses were readily available to anyone. This was not the case, as horses were the medieval Rolls Royce. Peasants had to walk. LOTR at least got that right (unfortunately--sweet mother, the walking!!)
Ugg. Where do I begin? I've been a re-enacter since I was very young and I can go on and on about misconceptions. Here are a few: 1. Swords were special to each warrior. No, not really. I mean the Swiss mercenaries just carried their swords on back of a big wagon and when war time came along passed them out to the troops. Swords actually, for the most part, belonged to the company and so it wasn't really that special to you. 2. Armor was shiny. Not after they peed on it. And they did peed on it. It's called browning and it makes it more weather resistant. At least that's what I've heard. I've naturally never tried it and my armor is actually pretty shiny. 3. Nationalities. They didn't have nationalities like we know today. When you speak about the "French Army" it's not too likely to be many people who spoke French in it. An army would likely consist of people from all sorts of nationalities. 4. Nobles were loyal to a king and followed him to the end. Okay, maybe they were this, but I do know for certain they often had troubles following simple directions. A king might call a noble to bring himself, two knights, 3 squires and 12 other men in order to form an army. The noble would instead send 3 other men and forget the knight and squire. Hey, trained soldiers cost money. A lot of money. And if they were land owners, did you really want to go through the big messy troubles of who gets his estates? Me neither. 5. Most soldiers died in battle. No, they mostly died of disease. And they all had worms.
Here's something else: Fields of grasses were very cleanly trimmed, hardly any growth of weeds, vines, fallen branches, etc. Navigating through a forest was relatively easy save for a strange fog. Um, this was before lawnmowers and other modern delights were invented. Walking through a field back then must've been difficult and tedious and do you want to enter a twisted forest at night? No sir!!
Oh a couple more I forgot: Everyone wants to be a knight. No. It was expensive to be a knight. There was a period of time when it paid just as well just to be a squire. And there was even a time when NO ONE wanted to be a knight. The king placed extra taxes on knights and if he needed more money, just knighted more people.
That I would be around to see any of it. Even if my older brother survived his birth (which is kind of a long shot) there's absolutely no question he would have killed my mother in childbirth. My mother is 5'2" and weighs all of 90 lbs, surviving pregnancy would never have been an option before caesarians were feasible.
Moss. They used moss. Lots of moss. Moss didn't stand a chance, back then. Now it's taking over my garden. Down with toilet roll!
Princesses are valued for their minds/heart. Nope. I remember when I learned this as a pre-teen it shocked me. The LIES, Disney! (And other series.) A royal daughter was a valuable instrument in forging relationships with other powerful families. She was a trade commodity used to form alliances. Her marriage would be carefully planned for her, not in regards to her as much as the alliance it would forge. I second the one someone mentioned earlier about anyone being able to walk in and talk to the king. That definitely didn't happen. I haven't been around long enough to get a feel for how most people feel about GRRM around here, but in reading the Song of Ice and Fire series, I have been pleasantly surprsed at how much effort he puts in to trying to make his world pretty believable. All of these myths that we've been talking about, they haven't been a problem in his book. There are flaws in the series, but his world is meticulous.
Correct. Mathematically speaking, median is probably a better term/thing to look at. If tons of people die as babies between 0 and 2 years of age then, as you mentioned, that's going to be the mode and a mode like that will seriously skew the average. I guess median doesn't get used too often because, technically, whatever that number is it has to also be an actual number in the set being regarded, so...
I think it is funny that they show so many love scenes but they hardly ever show them taking any showers or baths. Would you really want to roll in the hay with someone that has been out sweating their ass off and they haven't taken a shower in 3 days?
This comes to mind when watching any period film. Gorgeous clothing, regency style drawing rooms, and a human funk that would probably knock anyone of us modern types down for the count.
