Students made Oxford murder capital of late medieval England, research suggests
phys.org
phys.org
The story will spin around a bunch of college students who come from different lower to middle class background. There is a going to be Indian or Pakistani girl who came here to pursue higher studies. She is constantly ridiculed by the upper caste Indian students who are now part of the British elite class society. Then you have an Irish or some kind of GB region person who is also socially suffering. Then you have your usual group of social misfits. They share a common identity of being misfits of those times that is coincidentally representative of the times of present.
Then someone among them kills some elitist upper class royalty type accidentally who was trying to abuse that person. Ah yeah, this going to happen after a party where those misfits are going to dance in a certain way to certain music that they know will popular in TikTok. Then the group bands to together to come up with a serial killer identity to hide the crime. They don't kill people but the do things that make people there is serial killing going on.
Then you have your usual sheninigans. In season 1 a professor joins in their sheninigans who was relucatant. In season 1, finale the professor was almost caught. In season 2, someone actually kills and innocent person and does something drastic in the season finale. In season 3, the professor is killed and one of those misfits has near death experience. In season 4 Jack the ripper is introduced and season 6 part 1 finale Sherlock holmes makes an appearance. People petition RDJ to play sherlock holmes and the famous marvel alumni producer even drop a hint it might could be, but it ends not being RDJ but a random actor. But Jude law or the UK office guy makes a cameo in season 7. Then in after an abyssmal season 8 and the series ends in season 9, with Netflix says a spin off series is going to be launched in the metaverse platform that they recently acquired called Snap, which will attempt to provide an interactive detective and crime investigation experience platform that dynamically changes the TV show as the users participate.
But Marvel being a serial franchise by the metric of average performance the Russo brothers are the most talented director(s).
I am already at mental capacity with Agile terminology, 17 different cybersecurity concepts that might ruin my job and 5 different SQL dialects. I barely have the capacity to remember my youngest kid's name.
I can see how someone who preferred the tone of the earlier films would dislike those two, though. I’m personally not thrilled that their influence has spread to the rest of the franchise as much as it has—just because that tone works well in some of them, doesn’t mean they should all be like that, and with so many films it’s much nicer to have more variety, but I guess the producers are following the money.
At least we can all agree Thor 2 is last. Thought I’d allow arguments for Avengers 2.
[edit] wait, Thor 3 or 4? 4 is the closest I’ve felt to the first time I watched Attack of the Clones, and it wasn’t even because of Natalie Portman. Yes, that one’s bad.
top ten of what?
Guardians 2 I agree was pretty bad
They had the perfect western european historical dispute contextual relationship going on. <I have no idea of western european conflicts but I am going to say the professor is Irish because IRA, and the student is daughter of a british lord because not-IRA>
Who killed them? Why would they even go to a shady part of London where crimes and prostitution happens. That doesn't make any sense. Also on the other hand Dr. Tots actor was a bitch to work with and there was allegations of how he treated atleast one underage actor badly.
Anyway who was the mysterious shadowy figure! Why did he kill them so randomly.
I have no clue who that is, but I would love to have Anthony Hopkins or one of those marvel villains like Ms./Captain Marvel or something to play that role.
Plus the unrealistic portrayal of the lower class ("I'm poor, but let me shell out £100 for a haircut. Yes my car is falling apart, but this is a charming quirkiness of my character, not a severely debilitating financial problem I might need help on")
Oddly, I did work with one Indian guy who had excellent, un-accented English. He spoke like he'd been brought up in London, but in fact he hadn't and English was the 2nd language.
This documentary goes into it:
In a similar vein, I listened to a Google video narrated by an employee whose presentation generally was excellent, but who pronounced "snippet" as though it were "snip pet". It was charming but distracting.
How is this unrealistic? This is literally what poor people do. It's what I did when I was poor.
I also bought the 20 volume Oxford English Dictionary when I was poor. Poor people spend their money on a lot of dumb shit.
BTW, I'm a Nigerian who's just sick of the focus on diversity vs. actually good actors.
In fact, they have sprinkled in dozens of "meme" reaction per season so they can have contract social media managers create 1,000 memes that they plan to distribute across reddit and instagram through power-repost-accounts.
In fact one of their crucial Gen-Z adoption metric is based on virality of those memes. For that metric they have a analytics contract with Reddit where Reddit has said they will provide only provide analytics information of the usage meme pictures and in no way they will push those memes are or corpo-moderate reddit threads around those memes. And also obviously the ad department is a separate department and has no influence on the analytics contract with Reddit.
Point of interest: Philosopher Thomas Hobbes taught at Oxford ~1600. He later wrote Leviathan, in which he characterized the natural state of humankind as "...and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, [...], nasty, brutish, and short."
One wonders whether the Oxford of ~1600 was much better than the Oxford of ~1300.
Things don't seem to have improved much.
What's made the world so much more peaceful? Improved material conditions?
People may not have any particular 'impulse' to violence in a stable, safe society, but may be all too ready to participate in violence in a violent society. Society does not solely reflect the people in it, people also reflect the society they're in.
Also this would seem like a highly nihilistic attitude hardly compatible with the social values of the day. I doubt this could’ve been a significant reason on a societal level.
> A Thursday night in 1298 saw an argument between students in an Oxford High Street tavern result in a mass street brawl with swords and battle-axes
…
> "Knives were omnipresent in medieval society," said Brown. Many cases feature a knife called a thwytel, later evolved to the word "whittle."
> "A thwytel was a small knife, often valued at one penny, and used as cutlery or for everyday tasks. Axes were commonplace in homes for cutting wood, and many men carried a staff," Brown continued. Some 12% of London's homicides were committed with a sword.
Also living conditions were poor and urban populations were highly concentrated and lived in close quarters.
In universities specifically you had very high concentrations of socially highly privileged young men (generally they had legal immunity and could only be prosecuted by the church courts) with a lot of time and energy on their hands.
Steven Pinker's 2011 book "The Better Angels of our Nature" is a detailed examination how less violent societies across the world have become, and the reasons for it.
If you like videos, here's a talk he gave on it [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur...
I think this is a big difference.
The substitute for clean drinking water was "small beer", a brewed ale with about 2% alcohol. Much safer than drinking water from the pump; or, heaven forbid, from the River Thames, which in those days was even more of a sewer than it is now. You'd have to drink a lot of it to get drunk.
TFA describes a murder that happened in "the parish of St. Aldates". St. Aldates Street runs from the centre of Oxford downhill to the Thames at St. Ebbes. St. Ebbes itself was a slum; wealthy people wouldn't live next to a disease-ridden open sewer. The side-streets off St. Aldates are all narrow, dark mediaeval alleys.
Also alcohol in beer does nothing to 'clean' the water (how would that even make any sense?) it's the boiling that kills the bacteria, parasites etc. (and people have understood that boiling makes water safer for thousands of years if not more).
Because alcohol is toxic. This is also why there's a maximum alcohol concentration above which you need distillation: the alcohol kills off the yeast that makes it.
2% may not be enough kill off everything (I'd be surprised if it was), but in the absence of better training on my part (I'm not a biologist), I would assume it would still make a difference.
Alcohol and low pH might significantly slow down the risk of bacteria spreading. Which is relevant if you want to store.
Obviously it's not really that relevant if were talking about making the water safe to drink in the first place because boiling is much more effective.
And again the claim that medieval people drank beer all the time because all the water they had access to is dirty is a myth..
Ensuring access to clean water was something medieval people took very seriously with very severe punishments for those who polluted or tried poisoning sources of drinkable water.
People drank beer because it tasted good and was full of carbs (energy for the day). They even had small beer for breakfast.
Hypothesis: violence is effectively monopolised to a degree it has never been before. So it is used far less frequently but when it is used, is far more destructive (see world wars).
The last duel was like early 1900s maybe end of the wild West era...
edit: I'm joking. It's full of funny stuff, the names they gave these streets and areas is hilarious. And, it feels creepy to read it, I'll be honest!
Interesting. So unlike Cunthorpe, in this case the c-word part probably actually means that thing which it looks like it means.
I remember when that article was featured, it was quite a shock to see my old dorm rooms on the front page of Wikipedia.
Fascinating to think how that tiny little lane used to be the red light district.
This article is interesting and compares the sorts of violence that took place in those three places: https://www.medievalists.net/2011/11/medieval-student-violen...
This is pretty interesting. Imagine a society where you're the police, in fact everyone is the police.
I wonder when the thinking on this changed. It would be unthinkable these days to feel responsible for general public order as a private citizen. At best you'd report whatever the issue was and move on.
In London, I believe the first "professional" police force ("The Bow Street Runners") was created by the magistrate Henry Fielding, author of Tom Jones. That's in the early 1700s. I imagine the idea took some decades to spread across the country.
The same idea that every adult man was responsible for maintaining order was the basis for night watch men duties, which was a duty that every household was supposed to partake in. Obviously, being a night watch man kind of sucks, so the combination of there being a law that compelled people to actually perform their responsibility, and that not everyone actually wanting to perform that responsibility (or really being fit for that responsibility) naturally led to people paying others to get out of duty... and here we go.
“culture of the times” was also in that mix, I bet they would have been quite murderous even without the booze. To my knowledge, a bunch of monks in a monastery are not so murderous.
It's more than likely that class structures at the time simply didn't record deaths of commoners, or else commoners may have simply dealt with such things within their own communities. Official bureaucratic systems of the time (for things that weren't related to extracting wealth) were part of the community of the elite.
That's an interesting claim. Why do you think so? Considering cities were generally more or less run by "commoners".
e.g. https://medievalmurdermap.co.uk/maps/london/ is full of murdered commoners.
Many of the victims murdered by students in Oxford were just ordinary townsmen as well.
—Chaucer, definitely