I was watching game of thrones today and it got me thinking about Middle Ages Europe and I have always wondered how it really was. Thanks in advance (:
Edit: wow, thank you for the replies and stuff (: very interesting.
Edit again: Wow, thank you for the response, /r/askhistorians (: this is my most successful post of all time, too. I have learned a lot today
I would say the drab colors. People in the middle ages were generally as fond of colors as we are, in both clothing and decoration. The walls of medieval buildings were covered with paint and tapestries, and what we're seeing today is only the bare remains of what once was.
As an example, here is a picture from Braveheart, of Edward I's son Edward, and here is a picture of Edward I's chamber at the Tower of London, remade as historically accurate as possible. The decorations on the wall in the first picture are as faded as surviving medieval wall paintings would be today, and for that reason we think of them as "medieval".
Here's a great thread from 9 months ago, where the top answer gives a very thorough accounting of what tropes did and did not exist.
/u/vonadler did an excellent job of answering a lot of the questions I imagine you'd have, but my personal favorite had to be:
Did public inns or taverns exist in 11th-14th-century Western Europe?
Yes, but not as depicted in romanticist medieval texts or fantasy, with a boar over the fire, a bard and the local population meeting to drink, tell tales, eat, dance and be merry. Most inns were a simple farmhouse where the farmer offered you a place and fodder for your horse (should you have one) a place in his bed (most shared beds during this era) and sharing the meal of him and his family. The modern idea of a medieval inn or tavern is more akin to English 17th and 18th century stagecoach inns.
(Edited my original post for grammar)
lights. in movies you'll see torches burning on the wall, one every few feet, even during the day in rooms with great big windows that should let in plenty of light. It makes sense to us, we live in a world where light is part of a room, but that'd be wasteful to do with torches. If it was daylight or a night close to the full end of the lunar cycle, you wouldn't need light, windows would be enough, you just let your eyes adapt to the dark. On stormy nights or nights near the new moon, you might need to bring light with you. So you bring a candle, probably in a lantern. And that's enough light. You don't need a great burning torch to see where you're going, that'd make you lose your low light adapted vision, so you'd only be able to see a few feet in front of you, and the smoke it puts off would choke you. a lantern can light up the ground around you so you can see where you're going, but not make you night blind. So that's what everybody used on the rare occasion they needed it.
One of my favorite answers ever on this sub is /u/agentdcf's advice for someone writing historical fiction. He argues while it's possible to, you know, get every sartorial and architectural detail right, it's almost impossible to get the motivations right in historical fiction. People had different values, social structures led to different opportunities for action, and norms had people react in different ways. When a medieval character seems particularly relatable, that might be a sign that some of their motivations are anachronistic.
I am no expert in the Middle Ages, but there's this beautiful but very slow movie called the New World directed by Terrence Malick. It's set slightly later--17th century colonial Virginia with John Smith and Pochahontas and all that--but one thing Malick chose to emphasize was how muddy the European streets were and how pockmarked all the European character's faces are. Those are two things I believe to be accurate, and were noticeable in this movie because they were so absent in others.
Religion. No one can really imagine the depths of religious feeling and knowledge of the supernatural that was the everyday motivation, context, drive, and purpose of the medieval individual. Fairies and evil spirits were as real as one's neighbours, every event from the weather, to war, from health, to the outcome of a court case, had its cause in the world of the Saints and the angels. Occasionaly in a film someone might pay lip service to the Church, or mention God's name in passing, but it is never front and centre. And it is mostly confined to the priests. Even though most lords acted with exceptional violence and lack of modern Christian values, they saw everything they did, from declaring war on their neighbour, to brutally torturing traitors to death, as infused with religious feeling and motivation.
Oh boy, where to start? I'll stick to my personal favorite: cleanliness. They didn't bathe every day, but people did clean up back then. They washed their hands/faces, no one was really walking around with their face looking like they spent time down in a coal mine. I do chuckle that it's used as a marker in films to distinguish between classes, the poor are really dirty, the nobility are spotless.
Two books I read a while ago and quite enjoyed:
Movie Medievalism: The Imaginary Middle Ages by Nickolas Haydock
Cinematic Illuminations: The Middle Ages on Film by Laurie A. Finke & Martin B. Shichtman
Edit, and this article about cleanliness in medieval films
There are many, almost too many to count, but the ones that annoy me the most are:
I have said this time and time again, the most compact army with the pointy sticks usually won. Knights too, would charge at each other while trying to remain compact and organized.
No, never storm the castle. That's always a terrible idea. The walls exist for a reason; the defenders have every conceivable advantage. Castles have withstood sieges while being defended by twelve Serjeants. At one point, King Frederick Barbarossa and his army withdrew from the siege of Ancona because some lady named Stamira burned his siege towers. It really took that little.
This is actually more annoying when dealing with knights, as they'll at least show some retinue surrounding a king. But knights never really travelled alone, much less in full armor as they do in Game of Thrones. They would travel with a retinue of at least a few servants and men at arms (and Serjeants. No one ever mentions Serjeants). Many knights would also be in someone else's retinue, namely their overlord's (and still have at least a few servants attending them).
One thing I've seen in several places, both in representations of Medieval Europe, but especially Feudal Japan, is the schwing sound a sword makes when being pulled out of a leather or wooden scabbard.
Obviously anyone who's actually held and drawn any kind of sword knows that's not the sound it makes, but there's a pretty good breakdown of why it's such a popular trope, as well as what swords being drawn REALLY sounds like here.
If you skip to 2:00, he gives his breakdown of where the sound likely comes from.
The very high death rate from what we would consider 'treatable' conditions now, because we have antibiotics.
Women dying in childbirth and children not surviving their first few years was a huge fact of life. If birth didn't kill a woman, puerperal fever might, because no one had yet thought of 'germ theory', and the idea of washing hands. Even the idea of 'germ theory' was a few centuries off- disease and illness were more often thought of as illnesses of the soul, or an act of God, rather than medical issues. Babies died very often, due to lack of immediate medical care, and a lack of understanding about infant/early childhood needs. The lack of what we'd think of as basic hygienic practices- washing hands, isolation to try and counter the effects of 'plague' etc were still a very long way off. That influenced everything about every day life- there doesn't seem to be much doubt that a lot of medieval people were just as attached to their spouses and kids as we are now, but sudden death from what we now consider treatable illnesses was a fairly constant thing.
The idea of romantic 'love' didn't really play a part in marriages until recently. Marriage was most often an economic or convenient arrangement, based on the economics/social status of the people involved.
The idea of 'nationalism'. ASOIAF and Game of Thrones seems to assume some regional and continental values, that didn't really exist at that time. England and France and Spain were still barely getting their feet under them as vaguely 'national' entities, and while the East and Asia were seen as possible trading partners, they didn't play much of a role in regional politics.
There's strong evidence to believe that even medieval peasants had a shorter work week and more vacation time than we do. The idea of peasants toiling with their face to the ground in terrible and daylong work conditions is almost patently a fiction.
"Before capitalism, most people did not work very long hours at all. The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed. Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure."^[1]
So while wealth (and by that, remember that wealth in the form of capital is also a recent invention so that should be read in terms of manpower or land) was concentrated in the hands of the few hereditary lords of the period, the idea that they worked their peasants virtually like slaves is reflecting the early industrial work of the 18th and 19th centuries which WAS brutish and slavish, and also very different from medieval work patterns.
The use of Mummerset, especially in settings other than the West Country.
Mummerset is not a real West Country accent or dialect anyway (it's an invented hodgepodge of several of them) and it's certainly not how people in 13th c. Yorkshire or 15th c. Ireland would have spoken!
Not exactly what you were asking, but pretty close: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ecbg1/what_wrong_ideas_about_medieval_europe_might_one/
Not common, but it has become somewhat of a myth. The idea that Knights had to be Lifted onto their mounts due to the weight of their Armour. The best example is in Lawrence Olivier's otherwise great Henry V (1944) In reality Armour was very flexible and of reasonable weight. As others have mentioned it was not uncommon for Knights to fight on foot.
A small thing, but a lot of fiction portray swords as being a lot heavier than they actually were. This is especially true with two handed swords like claymores or a zweihander. The user is often shown heaving the sword in wide arcs. In reality greatswords wouldn't weigh more than 8 pounds..often less than that.