Atlas of Medieval America

[Strategos' Risk]

Well would you want to live in a stinky smelly medieval city where they dump sewage and offal into the streets and it runs into your drinking water? Would you like hordes or rats spreading all over the streets eating garbage and spreading bubonic plague and small pox? Those are the great attractions of the medieval city, I can see why a peasant would want to go there.

Perhaps you can explain yourself better.

Why would anyone move to the city? Because they need work and would fucking die in the countryside.

 

[Hendryk]

Why would anyone move to the city? Because they need work and would fucking die in the countryside.

Yeah, one wonders why all those hundreds of millions in every country in the Third World are moving to cities. Haven't they heard that city life is unsanitary? What could possibly attract them to the favelas of Sao Paulo, the shantitowns of Nairobi or the slums of Calcutta?

 

[Petike]

I like your ideas, but I think Duke would still be called Governers (Guvnah?)

Nice idea. I figure light cavalrymen (including horse archers) would be called "cowboys"... And actually... Wouldn't their be an alternative term for knights as well ? Something like "lancers", "chargers", or (if founded by some fantasy geeks) "paladins" ?

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Why would anyone move to the city? Because they need work and would fucking die in the countryside.

In the middle ages, most people grow their own food in the fields and produce little surplus for sale. If you move to the city, you have to find a job, earn money and buy, not grow your own food, you are then subject to economic conditions, but for the subsistance peasant farmer, it really doesn't matter that the economic conditions are, your overlord taxes you in kind, not in coin, so if he requires 20% of your crop, you give him 20% of your crop and keep the other 80% to feed your family with - that is how feudalism works, its all about feudal obligations and loyalty oaths, money is scarce, and most trade occurs using goods as a medium of exchange. The unemployment rate doesn't matter to the peasant growing his own food, but it does matter to the city-dweller, he can't grow his own food there. There needs to be a powerful reason to get that peasant off the farm where he has guaranteed lifetime employment and into a city looking for work, since most peasants can't find that reason in the middle ages, most stay on the farm and a small minority live in cities, thus cities are very small. 90% of the population live in the countryside where they can grow their own food, they make their own clothes, and that they cannot make they trade for, sometimes a skilled craftsman is called for, but they are not often required by most people.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Yeah, one wonders why all those hundreds of millions in every country in the Third World are moving to cities. Haven't they heard that city life is unsanitary? What could possibly attract them to the favelas of Sao Paulo, the shantitowns of Nairobi or the slums of Calcutta?

The Third World is not in the middle ages, the modern world engages it and provides many with low paying jobs, those jobs pay just enough to entice peasants off their farms, once they are in the cities, those that stay on the farm have more children to help out with farmwork and the people in the cities are then stuck there looking for work as they no longer have the farms they left which supported their families for so long.

 

[Baradas]

The people who live in cities tended to be those who couldn't put up with the feudal system, so you'd get a lot of the misfits and such in the cities.

At least that's what I've read, or sons who couldn't inherit anything would often run away to the cities, and a long the coast they'd be the logical trading centers, and where else would you dock and build ships?

 

[SRT]

In the middle ages, most people grow their own food in the fields and produce little surplus for sale. If you move to the city, you have to find a job, earn money and buy, not grow your own food, you are then subject to economic conditions, but for the subsistance peasant farmer, it really doesn't matter that the economic conditions are, your overlord taxes you in kind, not in coin, so if he requires 20% of your crop, you give him 20% of your crop and keep the other 80% to feed your family with - that is how feudalism works, its all about feudal obligations and loyalty oaths, money is scarce, and most trade occurs using goods as a medium of exchange. The unemployment rate doesn't matter to the peasant growing his own food, but it does matter to the city-dweller, he can't grow his own food there. There needs to be a powerful reason to get that peasant off the farm where he has guaranteed lifetime employment and into a city looking for work, since most peasants can't find that reason in the middle ages, most stay on the farm and a small minority live in cities, thus cities are very small. 90% of the population live in the countryside where they can grow their own food, they make their own clothes, and that they cannot make they trade for, sometimes a skilled craftsman is called for, but they are not often required by most people.

This is why no one living by themselves on a farm ever starved.

 

[Hendryk]

This is why no one living by themselves on a farm ever starved.

Tom's idea of rural life in the Middle Ages seems to be an arcadian utopia where food is plentiful, the weather is always nice, and nobody ever messes with the happy farmers.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

This is why no one living by themselves on a farm ever starved.

Your using "flip flop" reasoning, I didn't say there were no cities, I said medeaval cities were small because most people lived in the country side. Cities in the medeaval ages weren't the important places they would later become. Maybe its because there are a lot of citydwellers on this forum and they thing the world is composed of nothing but cities and the countryside was unimportant and irrelevant. What I'm saying is feudalism is all about local government, nation states barely existed at all, a king had little power without the cooperation of those nobles under him. Feudalism was marked by a lot of private wars between nobles, some even built up armies and challenged the King. Cities were long in decline since the classical era and only started to become important again towards the end of the Middle ages. So how many people disagree with this, and is it because they live in cities themselves?

 

[Hendryk]

Maybe its because there are a lot of citydwellers on this forum and they thing the world is composed of nothing but cities and the countryside was unimportant and irrelevant.

Interesting assumption. Go ahead and say it: we're pretentious urban elitists.

If you must know, I grew up in a small village, and only moved to the city in my late teens. The population in that place is barely 200, woodland begins across the road from the family house, and the main economic activities apart from tourism are shepherding and vineyards. One of my former classmates raises sheep for a living, and my parents have a poultry yard. I believe I have a fairly close acquaintance with rural life, and it doesn't make any difference as far as this debate is concerned.

So how many people disagree with this, and is it because they live in cities themselves?

I see you no longer claim that people wouldn't be moving to the cities, which has been our point all along.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Interesting assumption. Go ahead and say it: we're pretentious urban elitists.

If you must know, I grew up in a small village, and only moved to the city in my late teens. The population in that place is barely 200, woodland begins across the road from the family house, and the main economic activities apart from tourism are shepherding and vineyards. One of my former classmates raises sheep for a living, and my parents have a poultry yard. I believe I have a fairly close acquaintance with rural life, and it doesn't make any difference as far as this debate is concerned.


I see you no longer claim that people wouldn't be moving to the cities, which has been our point all along.

I never claimed it in totality, more as a general statement to the effect that cities weren't popular places in the middle ages, and that most people had good reason to stay out of them, they weren't very sanitary for one thing and they were centers for spreading disease and sources for foul water where their sewage creeped into their drinking water.

 

[General Mung Beans]

One question I have on this is why the Southerners go almost naked like the pre-Columbian Indians. After all in the nineteenth century the South was very warm without any air-conditioning and whatnot yet the Southerners wore normal clothes so why wouldn't the mediaevals either?

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

One question I have on this is why the Southerners go almost naked like the pre-Columbian Indians. After all in the nineteenth century the South was very warm without any air-conditioning and whatnot yet the Southerners wore normal clothes so why wouldn't the mediaevals either?

I agree, lets let the South remain the South and lets not turn it into west Africa or Haiti.

 

[Hendryk]

One question I have on this is why the Southerners go almost naked like the pre-Columbian Indians. After all in the nineteenth century the South was very warm without any air-conditioning and whatnot yet the Southerners wore normal clothes so why wouldn't the mediaevals either?

Probably due to cultural influence from the Caribbeans. Clothes designed to be worn in northern Europe are terribly impractical in a subtropical climate anyway.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Probably due to cultural influence from the Caribbeans. Clothes designed to be worn in northern Europe are terribly impractical in a subtropical climate anyway.

Actually, only Florida is subtropical, most of the South is warm temperate, it simply has longer growing seasons and mild winters.

 

[Venusian Si]

Hmm, didn't White say his world was a result of a Nuclear War. Also, the United States and more specifically the Supreme Court are suppose to be a parody of the Papal States/Catholic Church IIRC.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Hmm, didn't White say his world was a result of a Nuclear War. Also, the United States and more specifically the Supreme Court are suppose to be a parody of the Papal States/Catholic Church IIRC.

I think a nuclear war that targets the cities would kill city folk disproportionately, wouldn't it? One thing I know about cities in America, is that they contain disproportionate percentages of minorities, they are over represented in the nation as a whole in the cities and underepresented in the countryside. If you get into the rural areas, which is what is likely left after a nuclear war, what you are left with is a majority population that is white. Now I can hardly imagine the converse happening, that is a nuclear war that targets the countryside and spares the cities, if that unlikely event happened, then you might be talking about an Africanized population in the South and other places, but is that realistic? The other explaination is people in Africa and Haiti suddenly decided to immigrate to America in the aftermath of a nuclear war.

I don't particularly think the South would be a slave-owning place, we're assuming this didn't happen in the Antebellum South and that quite a bit of history has occured between the end of the Civil War and the "Medeavalization" of America. I don't think the people of the South have any desire for a return to slavery, Slavery has always caused more problems than it solved, and Slavery is not really a particular characteristic of the Middle Ages anyway, it died out in the middle ages, it was more prevalent in the classical period that preceded it. Instead what we have here is feudalism, where the lowest class are serfs, slavery is mostly nonexistant as local governments could not afford it, someone could simply flee one feudal barony and go to another, the local noble doesn't care if someone was an exslave and he feels no obligation to return the supposed slave to the supposed owner.

Even prisoners weren't kept very often, the most common punishments for a crime were an ordeal, a fine, or execution, the lord of the manor could scarcely afford to maintian jail space for prisoners, unless the prisoner was prominent and a ransom could be obtained from them for their release. Jail cells were mostly holding areas for criminals until their fates were decided upon, whether ordeal, fine, or execution.