Medieval Historian Answers Google’s Most Popular Questions About Life In The Middle Ages

I won’t ever get tired of history and how people have lived. I often wonder that people 300 years from now will see us.

imagine going back 1000 years & calling their art ugly whilst showing them an abstract painting

It is hard to imagine food without New World items such as potatoes and tomatoes.

Truth! The people of the "Dark Ages" were not, somehow, "dumb." The time period was "dark" because we know very little about them. The fall of Rome, "barbarian" invasions, the Plague (among others), etc., people were just trying to stay alive, they weren't interested in writing down their history. They had more important things to worry about.

"Hey Matt, how are you doin'?" "Well that's a tricky question..."

Q: Why were the Middle ages also called the Dark Ages? A: Because they had so many knights... [I'll get my coat.]

My neighbour has a medieval cottage with an original dirt floor in the back room. It sounds dirty doesn’t it? Once a year the room is cleared of furniture and a mixture of sour milk and chalk is poured over it. It takes about 3 -4 days to set, and works exactly like lineoleum.

Regarding Medieval art, one thing to keep in mind is that whilst some artists were absolutely capable of realism (and it's a myth that da Vinci was the first to paint in perspective), art in general was seen as far more iconographic. It was meant to convey meaning that could be understood by anyone. So when you see Medieval icons of Saint George slaying the dragon, they will all have similar tropes even in artwork made centuries apart specifically so that someone doesn't have to read the book to understand what the artwork itself depicts. Symbols and meanings were far more important then than getting perceived "reality" across. Funerary effigies are an excellent example where I will fully agree Matt Lewis as well - the individual faces shown in funerary effigies are seldom very representative of a person, and more than not show a more generic face. But their clothes and armour tend to be very specified to that person, and indeed the best way for us to learn about things like plate armour is often through funerary effigies accurately depicting armour and us being able to compare that with the few extant pieces we have remaining. I also used to think Medieval art was a bit goofy, but learning more about it I think it's quite beautiful. It's capable of conveying meaning through simple means, does so much with so little, and even in places where the anatomy looks funny or the faces are less expressive, it can still show entire battlefields or wars in a single painting.

Strange women, lying in ponds, distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.

5:42 just to add they also needed more calories, due to the fact they didn't have heating, more of the energy from your food had to be used to keep you warm. Also alcohol is high in calories, so a lot of those calories were accessed through that.

Beer: Hops were not widely used as the bittering agent until around the 18th century. It was usually local herbs and spices that would balance the cloying sweetness of the unfermented barley sugars. Try to find a gruit, that is a revival of a hopless beer style. Overall, beer was usually less alcoholic, less bitter, more spiced, drunk fairly fresh, and was slightly hazy and sour.

I love this video. Internet: Why did this basic thing happen in medieval times? Matt: Basic answer.

Matt seems like such a sweet guy, i need more of him reacting to more offensive myths about people in the past

What did medieval women look like?" "Women???" 😂

Another note about guilds: They would be used in order to regulate businesses. A guild could, for example, determine the price range that all its members were allowed to charge for certain goods or services, which in turn meant that no single member could just undercut all of their competitors to push them out of the market. Guilds often had the political influence to cause local laws to be enacted that prevented non-members from working in the same craft in a city, or merchants from selling imported goods at too low a price. Guilds also often offered a sort of insurance for their members, providing for members who had fallen ill until and were unable to work until they recovered, and paying the spouse of deceased members a pension. Guilds also enforced quality standards and regulated the training of aspiring craftsmen, which made them an important and well-accepted institution within medieval cities.

Him: Medieval people weren’t dirty “How did their sewers work” Him: Badly 😂😂😂

All you have to do stop and consider the Sunday scaries, blue Mondays, Hump day and TGIF to realize that people today are not happy in one sense but, at the same time, most of us aren't miserable. In the medieval period and really right up to the late 19th century most people were doing basic productive tangible work that contributed to survival and the quality of life in their community which might have given people a far greater sense of purpose than most people's jobs today, even if it was more arduous.

Fun fact: The four humours are still the basis of many "personality tests" today. Whenever you see a quadratic matrice as basis (e.g. MBTI, Kersey Temparament Sorter, 16PF) it is based on the "Four Temparaments" which is a transfer of the four humors onto people's emotions. Only about a hundred years ago a new system, the lexical hypothesis, was proposed and has led to new personality tests like The Big Five or HEXACO.

From what I've seen and read ,medieval hospitals were more like hospices than hospitals. Quite often it was a place for those who were at the end of their life or close to it. Obviously some people did recover through the rest they got in a hospital but I would imagine the death rate was extremely high.

Medieval art wasnt bad, it was just stylised. A lot of it is actually amazing and highly technical.