It was hardcore. 'Nuff said.
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Is the early middle ages in Europe what hollywood makes it out to be?I don't know what Hollywood makes it out to be, but the early middle ages was an exciting time in European history. The spread of Christianity led to the building of magnificent churches, the establishment of monasteries (often mixed monasteries under the rule of an Abbess - there were many powerful women in early medieval times). Some fantastic literature was produced, such as the Lindisfarne gospels for example, whcih still survive.Towns were built and flourished, in England for instance Winchester was a large and important trading centre. People were not all living in a state of abjec tmisery 9as some of the answers above suggest). Towns were prosperous, and there was trade with many different foreign countries. And while a peasant's life might be hard, they would usually have enough food to support themselves and their families, they certainly did not live on scraps.
Nor was their life all work, they had holidays, church festivals were holidays, the most important bein gChristmas, which lasted for thirteen days (from Christmas Day until Epiphany) and there was Easter, Pentecost (whitsun) nad other holidays. The medieval peasant probably had as many days off work as the average modern person does.
Nor is it true that a widow was shunted off ehr property if her husband died. In fact, widows had definite property rights, and were entitled to inherit at least a third of their hsuband's estate, and if a peasant died for example, his wife would normally retain control of his holding until her own death.
Nor were all peasants equally poor, some were better off than others, and in fact some peasants managed to acquire a lot of land, and eventually rose to join the ranks of the minor gentry.
The coming of the Vikings spread terror throughout Europe, they wrecked havoc with their burning and pillagin from the 8th century onwards. Alfred the Great managed to stop the Vikings from taking over southern England, but in the north they were mostly triumphant, building the city of York for instance.
It was a very exciting period in history.Is the early middle ages in Europe what hollywood makes it out to be?
The EARLY Middle Ages at the time of the fall of the Roman Empire were pretty BAD, certainly not romantic.
The early middle ages weren't called the Dark Ages for nothing.
Without Rome running everything from the military and security to road maintenance..... everything very QUICKLY fell apart.it took a long time to get things back, not to normal, but simply functional.
Which "romantic issue" are you inquiring about?
Anyone in particular you thinking about?
Dark Ages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages
The Dark Ages were a tumultuous time and a period of religious struggle.
http://www.allabouthistory.org/the-dark-鈥?/a>
A suspension of progress
http://www.history.com/content/darkages/鈥?/a>
Early Middle Ages
http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/fcurta/EAR鈥?/a>
During the Dark Ages
http://mr_sedivy.tripod.com/med_hist.htm鈥?/a>Is the early middle ages in Europe what hollywood makes it out to be?No. Simply put, these are commercial images meant to sell tickets to audiences without any historical reference points to work from while they view the "King Arthur" or "Sir Galahad" nonsense on the screen. Keep in mind those were fairy tales evolved centuries after the time period and with little historical evidence or understanding.
What was the time period really like?
Imagine is our society collapsed, leaving us with no police, government, organized distribution of food, materials or even a remote semblance of order. Who would take control if the government and police were gone? Who would provide us with a food supply line?
The likely thing that would develop would be a system of "strong men" who would appear and relegate us to a system of servitude to meet, first, their own needs and, second, provide for us at some minimal level. This would be called a feudal system if we were living in Europe or England a thousand years ago. About 99% of us would belong to a group called serfs and we would be simple farmer workers in a deteriorating countryside without roads or bridges, any laws to protect us or a system of land ownership and rights for anyone except the tiny one percent who were rulers and church clergy.
Our life would be short, brutal and extremely controlled. We could not travel beyond the hut we lived in and the nearby fields we labored in to produce the food the lord of the manor would then consume. We could get by on the scraps from the table he, his family, relatives and thugs ate from. His thugs ran the manor lands as overseers. Likely we would see begging from the local monastery as a primary source of food supply as the monks also lived well, although by their own labor on land donated by some lord fearful of losing his soul for some sin committed. Our children would labor beside us from earliest years to provide for the lord's table. We would have married at 12 or 13 to insure us that children would be old enough to care for themselves when we passed away from hard labor at 30-35 years of age.
Hopefully, your offspring would care for the little ones left by you or at least see them sold to the nunnery or monastery to spend their lives in drudgery, but at least protected from the vagaries of the world outside the walls of the nunnery or monastery.
Your day went pretty much like this with a routine that was pretty much the same six days a week: roll out of the straw bed on the floor with the rats and lice before daylight, and work until dark under the direction of the high shereef, the lord's overseer, and then back home to some porridge of greasy broth and rough vegetables and then back in the old straw lice bed. The shereel might throw in a good lashing or flogging to break up his day and scare the rest of the serfs, if things got a little boring. Not much of a life and usually over by your mid-30's anyway, whereupon your children would replace you as the labor force on the manor when they attained 13 or 14 years of age. Then twenty for them and into the old plot so their kids could replace them.
There were no days off except the occasional feast day prior to some religious holiday, when a local holiday might have been called. Locals drank, gambled and chased the local women with little expectation of improvement and sought only relief from their humdrum lives. The best that can be said for medieval life was that it was oppressively the same, day in an day out.
Pretty much it for everyone except women who died at a rate about twice as men from the mishaps of childbirth, which was pretty usually a once a year affair. If a woman became a widow when some disease or accident took her husband away, she was often shunted off to some nunnery to live out her life because her husband's property was passed to his next living male heir, often a brother or cousin, who would have no use for an extra female and her children, or, if you were lucky, perhaps a son who was old enough to take control of the baronial lands. Not a pretty picture and certainly not one in which medieval life was as imagined by us in the 20-21st Centuries.
A final insult to the peasants or serfs was the little know use of royal privilege to claim any bride on her wedding night from her groom for the bed of the lord of the manor. Small wonder that there were seven major peasant revolts in the medieval time period that raised enough notice to be included in the histories of the times.. The best known was called the Peasants Revolt and is worth looking at some more of the details if you really want to erase the notion of chivalry and medieval knights from your mind:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_pea鈥?/a>Is the early middle ages in Europe what hollywood makes it out to be?
it would much better for you not to believe what in the Hollywood movies. Hollywood just want to make money, not to teach people the real history. On the contrary, it falsifies it a lot.
Unlikely. Life was brutal, short, and rough.
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