Re: Mentality in Fantasy

On Wed, 27 Jul 2005 14:01:17 -0800, Bill Swears
<wswears@xxxxxxx> wrote in
<news:11eg11ckt597d54@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:

> Brian M. Scott wrote:

>> On Wed, 27 Jul 2005 07:15:32 -0800, Bill Swears <wswears@xxxxxxx>
>> wrote in <news:11ef98i574v1sd4@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> in
>> rec.arts.sf.composition:

>> [...]

>>> Christianity wasn't spreading through europe because it was a neat
>>> idea, it was spread by martial enforcement, and it promulgated the
>>> feudal system as divine guidance.

>> The spread of Christianity through Europe is a good bit more
>> complicated than that. For starters, there was a significant
>> Christian base in much of western Europe before the start of the
>> Middle Ages, thanks to the Roman empire.

> Which only changes the date of enforced conversion, not the fact.

What fact? It's clear that a great many people voluntarily
adopted Christianity under the Roman empire; indeed, the
growth from a minor cult to a very popular religion has with
considerable justification been described as explosive. No
one would deny the existence of forced conversions in a
number of times and places, but one has to ignore a great
deal of evidence to describe the spread of Christianity
throughout Europe as you've done here.

(I wonder how many casual readers stumbling on this thread
would realize that you're a Christian and I have less than
no use for religion at all!)

>> I'm afraid that 'the feudal system' is meaningless as it stands:
>> there's just too much variation over medieval Europe, and the term
>> 'feudal' has been used to mean too many different things by too many
>> different people (including historians). What precisely did you
>> have in mind here?

> manorial economic system.

That's a bit better, though it still leaves a great deal of
room for variation.

> http://www.historyguide.org/ancient/lecture23b.html

Ye gods. That's superficial to the point of uselessness.
Some of it is simply false (never mind that he can't spell
<demesne>): we have quite a few 11th and 12th century
records of peasants, for instance. Life on a medieval manor
was not particularly simple and uncomplicated, because
farming is not all that simple.

> Heh, this entire thread is flawed by efforts to bring
> examples from one part of europe in to justify comments
> about others.

I'm well aware of that problem; it's why I've tried to be
careful to specify when and where I was talking about.
Unfortunately, your original claims were very unspecific in
those respects.

[...]

>>> There can be little doubt that the only authorized religion was
>>> trying very hard to be universal, but it was overlaid on the
>>> culture by force, then used as tool to enforce serfdom for the vast
>>> majority of agricultural labor (and most trades).

> That was intended to be discussing the situation in central europe into
> the 1200s. Any similarity to england in the 1300s and later was purely
> coincidental.

The time isn't a problem, since much of what I wrote about
England pertained to the 1200s and earlier. The conditions
were indeed a bit different; an obvious illustration of this
is the fact that England never developed anything comparable
to the German ministeriales. Probably on average they were
a bit worse. But there was no real need to enforce what was
generally seen as the natural order of things; until after
the Black Death peasant unrest was directed at specific bad
overlords, not at the system.

Tradesmen are another story. By the 1200s artisans in the
increasingly large and numerous towns had been largely
relieved of the servile obligations of their predecessors
(Hans-Werrner Goetz, _Life in the Middle Ages from the
Seventh to the Thirteenth Century_, p.231).

>> Your picture also seems to leave no room for the explosive growth of
>> towns; in England, at least, this is readily observable in the late
>> 13th and early 14th centuries. The large net movement from the
>> countryside to the city implies considerably more personal freedom
>> than your picture suggests.

>> No. It is not the case that most people in late 14th century England
>> were effectively slaves.

These two comments of mine do not belong together. The
second was a response to this statement of yours, which you
deleted without any indication of having done so:

But, wasn't Chaucer himself something of a sport? A
fellow who lived on his wits and his writing in a time
and place where most people were effectively slaves,
writing about a europe that existed mostly in the minds
of the literate, who stood on a pedestal of flesh?

By snipping that statement, you've disguised the fact that
your response to me (immediately below) shifts the
goalposts.

> I hate to seem rude, but we disagree on the severity of
> life in england between the black death and the wars of
> the roses. Most people there would rather have been
> traditional land bound serfs than have the freedom to
> rot on their own.

The severity of life in late 14th century England was not at
issue; I was responding to your claim that in that time and
place 'most people were effectively slaves'.

> By most, I mean the majority of people alive between 1349
> and 1455, by which time the nobility had effectively
> bound them back to the land again anyway.

> Their situation was much darker than that described by
> rural serfdom. The conditions were bad enough to cause
> two peasant revolts; Also, the plague (Black Death) had
> created such a drop in population the fifteenth century
> was ushered in with a state of near anarchy, and yet,
> regardless of title, most of england was agrarian, and
> many or most people didn't recieve money in pay for
> their harvest.

Considering that already by 1400 a great deal of farm and
other labor was performed for wages, often by temporary
labor, and further that during the 15th century land
holdings were increasingly concentrated with the work
increasingly done by hired help, this seems somewhat
unlikely.

> You can say they weren't slaves, but serfdom continued in
> england into the 17th century,

On a very small scale in a few places. By and large it had
in practice disappeared by the 15th century.

> and leasehold wasn't much different. There was a brief
> period right at the end of the 1300s where the loss of so
> many people gave the farming populace greater power, but
> they were back in an effective stranglehold to the
> nobility by the middle of the following century, so it
> wasn't all that much different than slavery in the
> average persons experience.

I'm reminded of my mother's opinion that all wine tastes
like vinegar and all beer like dirt. But she's never tried
to suggest that her inability to discriminate is an accurate
reflection of the facts.

> below is a select quote from
> http://www.britainexpress.com/History/medieval/black-death.htm

All of which is irrelevant to the question of whether 'most
people were effectively slaves', but I want to comment on a
couple of points anyway.

[...]

>> Over the next 2 years the disease killed between 30-40%
>> of the entire population. Given that the pre-plague
>> population of England was in the range of 5-6 million
>> people, fatalities may have reached as high as 2 million
>> dead.

That's probably a little exaggerated. I quote from Philip
Ziegler's _The Black Death_, p.182:

The question [of the pre-plague population of England]
remains open. In so far as any consensus can be said to
have evolved it would probably be that the total
population could have been anywhere within a range of
which Russell's 3.7 million would be the lower point
and 4.6 million or so the higher.

He goes on to discuss estimates of the number of deaths.
His conclusion:

As a rough and ready rule-of-thumb, therefore, the
statement that a third of the population died of the
Black Death should not be too misleading. The figure
might quite easily be as high as 40% or as low as 30%;
it could conceivably be as high as 45% or as low as
23%. But these are surely the outside limits. On this
basis the approximate total for the dead in England
would be 1.4 million. No figures above one million
and below 1.8 million would be astonishing but the
nearer the actual figure approached the median, the
more it would seem to accord with the existing evidence.

[...]

>> The death rate was exceptionally high in isolated
>> populations like prisons and monasteries. It has been
>> estimated that up to two-thirds of the clergy of England
>> died within a single year.

More like 45%, according to Ziegler.

[...]

> Revolts:

> http://www.britainexpress.com/History/Richard_II_to_Henry_V.htm

>> The Peasant Revolt [...] The revolt is sometimes
>> called Wat Tyler's Rebellion. [...]

At least marginally relevant, since one of their demands was
the abolition of serfdom, but the proximate cause was, I
believe, government action against tax evasion and, more
generally, against poor government and administration.

> http://www.zum.de/whkmla/region/britain/wattyler.html

>> The LOLLARDRY was a movement aiming at church reform,
>> originating at Oxford, emerged from the teaching of JOHN
>> WYCLIF. Declared a heretic movement and persecuted, a
>> group of Lollards lead by SIR JOHN OLDCASTLE in 1414
>> rebelled, the rebellion easily subdued.

Hard to see much relevance in what wasn't really a peasant
movement at all. In addition to what can be inferred from
this very brief description, it's worth noting that the
Lollards emphasized reading scripture for oneself.

> 1455 saw the beginning of the wars of the roses.

> Sounds like a fun time to be an agricultural worker in an
> agrarian state to me.

So what? I don't believe that anyone was claiming that it
was a wonderful life.

Brian
.

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