twilight2000 in little_details

Medieval Resource

Feb 08, 2012 07:13

Great resource for "What did people do: in a Medieval City?" jobs, duties, careers - a really comprehensive list! from jaylake

EDIT: Please see syntinen_laulu's comment below - there is clearly issue with this list, so take it as a starting point and check it with other sources. If you can't use the OED (you need to be subscribed or at a library that is), there are ( ... )

tags: europe: history, ~resources, ~middle ages

Comments (22)

charlycrash

More generally, this is basically the best resource ever for writing period pieces in the Middle Ages. And is generally a really fun, interesting read.

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bopeepsheep

Beat me to the rec! I'm waiting for someone to do one for every major historical period, now.

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charlycrash

YES. Someone, please do this. I would buy the living poo out of that.

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hyarrowen

Ian Mortimer's got another one due out soon. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Time-Travellers-Guide-Elizabethan-England/dp/1847921140/ref=pd_sim_b_3

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Thread (15)

grace_roberts

Ooh me too.

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serria

Awesome, looks like this will be extremely useful for me!

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pico_the_great

Excellent list. Reminds me of this, which gives you specific demographics numbers. Always helpful!

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syntinen_laulu

Sorry: that list is absolutely craptastic.

I read it and kept saying 'Oh, no, it wasn't! No, surely not' and eventually logged into the OED and checked up on just some of the 'occupations' in the list that sounded un-medieval and just plain wrong to me. Here's a random sample of words in that list that are totally NOT medieval with the first recorded date of their use in English, in date order ( ... )

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charlycrash

Yep re: chimney-sweeps. I'm fairly certain that your average villein or reeve had open gables on their houses rather than chimneys (causing the range of respiratory illnesses we're only too aware of in the days of tobacco, long before anyone knew what a cigar was). Non-peasants I don't know; I seem to remember seeing a number of abbey kitchens with chimneys.

At any rate, as you say, peasants were paying their lord wood-penny to collect wood to burn out of his woods. I would imagine that coal was pretty expensive by comparison, especially for a villein.

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syntinen_laulu

Not only your average villein - Penshurst Place, the home of the aristocratic Sidney family, still has a chimneyless fireplace in the centre of its great hall!

And yes, you're right, abbey kitchens had chimneys, and by the late Middle Ages the lord's rooms in more modern aristocratic residence had fireplaces built against the wall (instead of in the middle of the room) with chimneys. But (a) wood smoke doesn't produce anything like the amount of soot that coal does, and (b) these were wide open flues that you could simply put a ladder up (or some of them had steps built in) and send a kitchen-boy up to scrape the sides. It wasn't till you got long narrow flues caked in coal-soot that chimney-sweepign became a skilled full-time occupation.

NB the point about coal in the Middle Ages - and indeed up to the age of the canal and the railway - was that it wasn't available at all to anyone not living next to the sea or a navigable river. Transporting a heavy low-value commodity like coal by cart on the roads of the time just wasn't

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twilight2000

Thanks for fact checking the list - a lot of "good" lists out there turn out to be more "interesting" than "accurate".

Thanks for checking!

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Comments (22)

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