conuly | In addition to the chimney and potato issue from my earlier post...

northern Europe (including the British Isles) did not have eating forks until the 17th century at the earliest. The eating fork wasn't commonplace in Italy until the 14th century, and it took a while to spread out from there.

I don't care how refined and polite your character is, if your setting predates the arrival of forks in her region she washes her hands and eats with her fingers the way God intended. You can show her good manners by demonstrating that she will "let no morsel from her lippës fall, Nor wet her fingers in her saucë deep". Probably she doesn't double dip either.

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From:

mama_kestrel

That's why finger bowls were provided! She might also eat some things from the tip of a knife.

From:

greghousesgf

in the SCA I got taught very early on that eating with a knife and/or a spoon was accurate for the early middle ages but not forks.

From:

conuly

It's one of those things, like potatoes in Europe or horses in the Americas, that you think everybody knows until you see that they don't.

I understand people not recognizing the recency of domestic chimneys, or buttons as clothes fasteners, or any of a myriad little essentials that we don't realize are new to the world, or at least to the region in question.

But I honestly thought everybody knew about forks.

(Then again, considering the source - which I'll name and shame as Disney - I'm possibly holding them to entirely too high a standard.)

From:

gwydion

Buckets are a very late invention relatively. We take them for granted, but wooden buckets are 14th Century in the HRE and spread out from there. So 15th century is fine in a lost of places. 16th is for sure, but all those wells people fell into in the middle ages were open holes (No neat little stone circle with roof) with no wooden buckets on a pully.

It's pretty much leather or ceramic for most medieval or earlier western settings.

From:

conuly

That is now going to irritate me whenever I see it on TV or in a movie.

From:

gwydion

Yes. Once you know, you can never unknow. :)

From:

peoriapeoriawhereart

And no highly starched lace ruffs (aka the donut of fame) until you have long handled forks to dine with the devil.

Also, check your sumptuary laws if you want 'historical accuracy'; medieval Europe does have black people but you're going to screw the pooch by the wrong people wearing the wrong things or too many of something.

They do change rather a lot over time, and it's one way to double check how prosperous echelons are feeling. Also, rules about what will ire the 'fair folk' relate to norms, such as gifting personal servants with garments no longer in fashion/in need of cutting down. (That does become an engine of conspicuous consumption once mechanized cloth production is ready to fulfill demand. But that's way later than forks.)

From:

mindstalk

My impression is that sumptuary laws were frequently violated.

From:

conuly

This is undoubtedly one of those "depends on time and place" dealios, isn't it.

From:

peoriapeoriawhereart

Granted. But how they were violated tended to be intentional. Or pointed to a custom that authorities were trying, possibly futilely, to change. In any fantasy setting one is free to create sumptuary laws to fit or discomfit world building.

Laws typically point to things that people do. If no one does them, no law is needed to prohibit the things.

From:

gwydion

This, this, this.

From:

conuly

Laws typically point to things that people do. If no one does them, no law is needed to prohibit the things.

IDK. The annals of stupid laws suggest otherwise. Then again, we can assume that one person did whatever-it-is, and it caused a whole thing, and then they said "It's a free country, there's no law saying I can't!" and now there is one.

From:

peoriapeoriawhereart

Most stupid laws are ones that have been retained well past their use by dates, were constructed to allow someone to say they took a stance or tangle up an adversary in a difficult to parse law or are for something normal people wouldn't think people would do and are sadly mistaken (cf. Having to prohibit stowing hazardous materials in crew quarters.)

Not being even legal adjacent, there may be options I'm unaware of.

From:

conuly

The two which spring to mind are one about it being a crime to carry food in your backpocket, and another about it being unlawful to let your donkey sleep in a tin bathtub on a porch.

The first, at the core, turns out to be a law against luring horses away from their property and then claiming them as "your" horse, after all, it followed you home.

The second is because one person did it one time, and there was a freak flood, and it took a long time to rescue the panicked donkey, and this could all have been avoided if the animal had been properly stabled.

From:

peoriapeoriawhereart

That first one is an interesting way of legislating without point blank Saying Something. I am intrigued.

If the donkey had been properly stabled, would it have drowned, and thus not needed rescue? I'm wondering if that law was the best they could compose to make sure the pain of an ass endeavor would not be forgotten.

From:

conuly

IIRC, the animals in the stable were all fine, because they weren't floating around in a bathtub, and so they were able to simply walk to higher ground.

From:

peoriapeoriawhereart

Oh, good. I do wonder if that donkey was special needs that it was sleeping on the porch in the first place? But I am no expert on equines.

From:

gwydion

There is no stopping other people from using forks in medieval settings, but I stubbornly always pose mine eating with fingers off a shared trencher and the like. I'd just keep doing accurate feast stuff I learned doing research back in grad school and the you could tell who was paying attention because they'd pick up medieval table manners from me. I was that person who kept refusing to pose new world foods, and who loved descing subtleties.

On a late medieval game I played, I kept insisting on posing going to change out of my jousting armor into more sensible armour for general melee, etc.. I noticed other people starting to do it too after a few tourneys.

I was also that asshole with the rant about how for most of tourney history they were free range war games and a team sport with aggressive recruiting of top athletes and that thing we think of as tourney jousting is basically a very late development after tourneys had become nearly irrelevant, but that it is a lot cheaper to film Tudor era jousting than real jousting and also more dramatic, so that's what we get on film.

From:

ioplokon

I always assumed that jousting had a similar trajectory to pro wrestling where everyone realized you could get the same social and economic benefit without risking death as much and so it evolved into the Tudor version (also like... with any athletic contest, presumably some of them were fixed?), plus with a more "showbiz" setup you make sure the crowd has something interesting to watch whereas the more chaotic version, you can easily miss the good bit & also the optimal strategy is usually defensive and thus less interesting, so you introduce rules to produce a more spectator-friendly contest.

How far off the mark am I here? I definitely think in film, pro-wrestling is the modern touchstone they use for tourneys, so that could be leading me astray.

From:

gwydion

You aren't wrong at all.

Keep in mind it was very much a pro athlete situation from square one, with a handful of big pro teams with expensive recruiting practices to attract the best players. You also had free knights who would band together to compete in a particular tourney, because a lone knight was basically fucked. These guys were generally younger sons who owned little more than Armour, weapons, and a horse or two. The goal was to capture as many guys and horses as you could to basically ransom and hope your prowess would attract the attention of one of the lords with a pro team. You'd get adopted into their household and you could get very rich at it, if you were very, very good and extremely lucky. William Marshal started out as one of those younger sons with the horse, arms, and armour, was good enough to spark bidding wars and poaching attempts he could leverage for more goodies, used his in with the then heir to Henry II (who predeceased his father) for wider political power, got heavily involved in throne wars (Richard hated him), ended up married to an heiress with a bunch of kids and owning a quarter of Ireland. Most guys though? Barely eked out a living and were one loss or serious injury away from penury and at best a career as an outlaw or merc, at worse dead or a begger.

It was incredibly expensive to host early tourneys. You had the cost of attracting and maintaining a team. How had the prizes to furnish that needed to be big enough to attract other pro-teams and enough randos to make up one or more extra teams. You had the hospitality you were expected to offer and you couldn't afford to look stingy to the other big Dukes and Princes and the like. The tourney grounds themselves needed to be large with lots of good landscape features for tactics and stratagems. You needed to be able to to ambushes and the like. This means you are about to destroy a village and it's output for the year because bits of in may get knocked over or burned and the surrounding fields trampled. (the villagers were evacuated for the duration, but you can easily imagine how they might have felt about it). You needed a village in there because war games, basically, and places they were like to be fighting real wars would have them, so including them for tactical reasons makes sense if you are that level of rich and thus uncaring of serf feelings and livelihoods.

The early tourneys were about keeping your elite fighting unit sharp and battle honed, and hopefully discouraging the other guys rich and powerful enough to form pro teams from invading your lands because they do not want to fight your guys with real sharpened weapons.

It was hugely fucking expensive and there's a reason England's only pro team played nearly all away games in France for literally centuries. Like an English tourney was rare as fuck and they only did it for really big things, usually when they were not only celebrating something massive, but also when they were hoping to impress a continental power.

We are talking 5-7 tourneys on the circuit total in a "good" year when there wasn't a major war on in France or the like.

I can not possibly underline the expense enough.

So eventually tech changes made heavy cavalry less important in land warfare in the fifteenth century. Like you needed them, but cannon and longbows shifted the balance. Full on tourney's were super expensive. Stuff like waves of yersinsa pestis and other epidemics had dramatically lowered the population to 900 levels by 1400, causing massive economic upheaval. France and England were sporadically at war for most of the 14th and the early 15th, which way cut down on tourneys even in non plague years. Live if the English army is devastating Normandy right now, you definitely don't hold tourneys in the north and at least half the tourney teams are in the field, maybe all of them depending on how united the French are that year or if there is also fighting in the south. Post-1350, if you force evacuate a village to devastate it and it’s environs for sport, you are pretty much begging for a peasant revolt in France or England.

So you can definitely see how the cost benefit ratio started tilting dramatically 'round about then. Still, they were prestige things and it really did totally make sense to scale down from a more free range pro-football model and switch to a more spectator friendly pro-wrestling model, complete with people deliberately falling off their horses dramatically to let the king or the Prince/Dauphin win.

It was at this point in the development that the Tudors gain control of England. Henry VII in particular was really, really into Arthurian imagery as propaganda to try to reunite England after most of a century of sporadic civil war. He leaned way the fuck in on New Camelot and romanticized chivalric tradition (Instead of the real thing which is not what most people think because Tudor and Victorian imagery overwhelmed earlier models). Like, literally named his oldest son "Arthur" in hopes king Arthur would rule after him. Commissioned a physical round table and did reenactments. Toured the country doping Arthurian themed pageants in major cities. Threw tons of pagentry and imagery laden new style tourneys with one on one jousting Henry VIII was really really really into it. He was raised to be Lancelot or Gawain for hois brother basically. He loved the new pro-wrestler style tourney and doing it when he was way too old to be when he got the serious head injury that basically turned him into a monster for the back half of his reign.

Victorians loved romanticized versions of already romanticized Tudur versions of chilvalry and Arthuriana and a lot of our film imagery ends up being Victorian ideas of the Middle Ages. Also, again, way the fuck cheaper.

Edited Date: 2020-09-09 09:38 pm (UTC)

From:

ioplokon

Wow, thanks for all the info. It's really fascinating to think about how pro sports work in a non-capitalist economic system (I guess to some extent you have the Soviet sports but... It's really not the same kinda thing, is it?) - I keep thinking like, 'so who gets the gate' (on the Tudor ones) but obvs that's not so much an issue the more feudal (and less mercantile) we get. It's clearly more like a state dinner than modern sports.

Also. Man. Henry VIII as like, jousting's Chris Benoit is really strange and sad and terrible. That's why I get mad at athletes who are saying covid-19 is so different because it affects their families - like, you think concussions don't? I mean like obviously the risk is not identical but it strikes me as really naive to not be thinking about tbi in the same way (esp if you are taking unnecessary risks)

From:

gwydion

My Late Uncle John's entire adult life was shaped by football injuries he got before he turned twenty.

I absolutely agree.

From:

ioplokon

I'm so sorry for your loss.

I do feel a bit hypocritical because I love to watch and play contact sports and obviously there's a lot of inherent risk. But there's a difference between the risk of playing a sport and reckless play (and the systems that reward reckless play).

With the pros I think there is some room for back and forth, but with school sports? Safety and concussion prevention have to be the priority. My friend's parents pushed him into hockey rather than football, which says a lot about how dangerous high school football is.

From:

gwydion

Oh definately

From:

conuly

I don't mind people doing it in their own SCA or whatever activities, but I do object to it in fiction. Either set your story in Fantasyland, or get it right!

From:

gwydion

Fair enough. :)

From:

conuly

The exception, of course, is A Knight's Tale, because it just is. They did non-humorous anachronisms right.

From:

gwydion

I agree with you there. And it's really, really hard to pull off.

I am a lot more tolerant of anachronism if they are 1. Making it clear they are not being accurate (which they did), and 2. The tone feels correct, if that makes sense. (I'd argue they got the feel right).

It's the ones where they are takking themselves very seriously and pretending to be historical but are not even close (I am glaring SO HARD at Braveheart) that sen me right up a tree.

Edited Date: 2020-09-09 10:50 pm (UTC)