How to Manage a Dark Ages Estate
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Edit: Oddly enough, the Wikipedia article[1] includes a few sentences/references about how and why the term is no longer considered accurate by historians (it “mischaracterises the Middle Ages as a time of violence and backwardness“) yet Wikipedia continues to use the term “Dark Ages” as the article title.
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)
The article is about the history of the term "Dark Ages", why shouldn't that be the the title? If you go by link counts, there are 741 links to the Dark Ages page but 2582 to the Early Middle Ages instead.
> Why don’t they use the term and what term is preferred instead?
"Dark Ages" is itself somewhat ambiguous. In its original incarnation, it referred to the entirety of the time between the "Fall of Rome" (itself hard to specify) and the Renaissance, as its early users saw Rome as the pinnacle of human civilization and looked down on everything following the end of Rome as unimportant, at least until they themselves were bringing back the splendor of Roman civilization. Later scholars were instead nostalgic for the High or Late Medieval civilization, so instead they narrowed the term to exclude their favored era, resulting in it referring to only the Early Middle Ages (to ~1000). Some people go further still and exclude the Carolingian Renaissance from the Dark Ages, pushing its end date further still to 800--there's no neat alternative term for this range, but Age of Migrations covers much of the themes.
In any case, periodization of that time period of European history is immensely challenging. The decline of the Roman Empire brings with it a decline in the written record and our knowledge of events in the period diminishes drastically, only recovering with the Carolingian Renaissance. Furthermore, the Roman Empire doesn't fall in an easy cataclysmic moment (there's no Battle of Hastings here), but instead disintegrates at different rates in different parts of Europe, with the final vestige only falling in 1475 (Principality of Theorodo). Meanwhile, there are several overlapping themes going on: the rise of Post-Roman kingdoms (such as the Franks and the Lombards), a mass migration of peoples (including the Anglo-Saxons and various Slavic groups), the Viking Age, the birth of Islam, the Great Schism between Eastern and Western Christianity (and other schisms within those sects!). For the boundary between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern, you can point to "about 1500" and note that several major changes happen about the same time (including total conversion to gunpowder weapons, Protestant Reformation, discovery of the New World, and the Fall of Constantinople)--that doesn't exist between Antiquity and the Middle Ages.
Though seriously, thanks for writing this up. This is a great explanation of how periodization says more about the "periodizer" than it represents some sort of objective truth about history, magically divorced from the political reality of successive historical writers. Debunking bad history is important... in this field (CS) I've definitely met my share of so-called "STEMacists" whose mental model of history sometimes seems to be derived from Deus Vult memes... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Could you please comment in a few words on that?
You gave a very, very interesting overview of the period, thanks!
Prior to gunpowder weapons, the primary infantry weapons are going to be some variant of pike or a warbow or crossbow (if you're an archer). Earlier hand-held gunpowder weapons than the arquebus exist, but they are more unwieldy weapons and as a result don't supplant the dominant infantry weapons. But when arquebuses show up, armies change fast. By about 1520, every European army is using them. I don't have firm stats on the rest of the world, but by the early 1600s, pretty much every conflict--including indigenous peoples attempting to resist European colonizers--involves both sides using gunpowder weapons. Pikes weren't rendered obsolete until the development of the bayonet in the 17th century, but the infantry units needed to mix pikemen and arquebusiers to be competitive, basically modern combined-arms doctrine but happening 500 years ago.
[1] In this case, a "match" is a burning piece of rope that is used to ignite the primer. The key innovation here is that a mechanism is used to hold the match so that it can be inserted into the primer by moving a trigger.
My vision of medieval armies was similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_warfare#/media/File:B... (this is just an example) - where the battle was done with pikes and swords.
The term I've seen in books I've read lately is "Early Middle Ages" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Ages#Early_Middle_Ages).
"Dark Ages" is arguably applicable to the time around 500-800, although the other problem is that there's also another commonly referred-to time period known as the Dark Ages, the Greek Dark Ages, from around 1100 BC - 750 BC.
He also wrote Inventing the Middle Ages which sounds like it might be more focused on your question but I haven't read it so I don't know.
Cantor says almost the opposite, that they developed these customs as a marker of their high status and a way to exclude others after they had outlived their original role as the fighting class once cavalry charges were no longer a dominant tactic. This is one of the rare moments in Civilization where the specifics of weapons and warfare are discussed, anyone looking for information on crossbows and lances will be dissappointed.
Historians prefer the Middle Ages or the Medieval Period. Since this is relatively Europe-centric, historians are trying to go in the direction of "global Medieval studies", to form connections among various regions of the world.
Our periodization is largely Eurocentric. The very long lineage of metallic/tool-based terms like the Bronze Age run into the obvious problem that bronze arrived in different regions at different times.
The words "Dark Ages" do not appear in the text. This is the HN post title.
It seems like anti-moonlighting clauses are as old as time.
For those curious as to the meaning of this one, sextaria is a unit of liquid measure (a pint) and modii is a unit of dry measure (approximately a peck).
So basically they are aiming to have a standard set of measures, which would be important for commerce or tithes of materials such as crops.
- How likely am I to get audited?
- If I do get audited how much does the language in this document allow me to pin it on someone in my org, but not me?
- How powerful am I?
- How rich am I?
- How much does the regime like me?
- How much does the regime need me?
Punishment for killing someone was only a fine? Dark Ages indeed.
https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2001/apr/19/20010419-0220...
Remarkably similar to most corporate anti-corruption policies of today. I've generally seen wording "No gifts over $50". So a bottle of wine is fine as a gesture but anything that's expensive enough that it likely influences decision making isn't allowed.
I don't know if you're joking, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism was a thing shortly after this text
Also, "pumpkin" is a standard English translation for the Latin and Greek terms that, if you want to be pedantic, were just "gourd". See e.g. The Pumpkinification of Claudius [0]
If there was no food, would the pigs have been slaughtered? Or maybe the underperforming staff would have been brought in instead.
Before refrigeration, meat animals might be kept alive as long as there was stored fodder to feed them, or slaughtered when the weather turned colder, or slaughtered when time and other tasks allowed for preserving meat by salting or sausage-making.
So, think of this as an end-of-harvest status report on when the crown court can expect to start getting sides of bacon delivered, and how many of them.