[HN Gopher] How to Manage a Dark Ages Estate
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How to Manage a Dark Ages Estate
Author : hnmullany
Score : 91 points
Date : 2021-03-29 11:27 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.le.ac.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.le.ac.uk)
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| > they shall accept no gifts from them, neither a horse nor an
| ox, nor a cow, nor a pig, nor a sheep, nor a piglet, nor a lamb,
| nor anything other than bottles of wine, vegetables, fruit,
| chickens and eggs.
|
| Remarkably similar to most corporate anti-corruption policies of
| today. I've generally seen wording "No gifts over $50". So a
| bottle of wine is fine as a gesture but anything that's expensive
| enough that it likely influences decision making isn't allowed.
| foobarian wrote:
| I find it fascinating how much further that society went toward
| looking like a corporation. It's almost as if everyone born was
| an employee by default, and the referenced "freemen" were the
| exception, being non-employees. And this document could be an
| acquisition contract where the acquired CEO tried to keep his
| company intact under the new owner (hence the words about not
| allowing the new owner to reassign people to different jobs).
| phone8675309 wrote:
| > It's almost as if everyone born was an employee by default,
| and the referenced "freemen" were the exception, being non-
| employees.
|
| I don't know if you're joking, but
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism was a thing shortly
| after this text
| pradn wrote:
| The term "Dark Ages" is not used by historians any more. And it's
| doubly odd because these rules, from Charlemagne's times, were
| the very cause of the "Carolingian renaissance" of the eighth and
| ninth centuries.
| elliekelly wrote:
| Is there a good source where I can read more about this or can
| you elaborate a bit? Why don't they use the term and what term
| is preferred instead?
|
| Edit: Oddly enough, the Wikipedia article[1] includes a few
| sentences/references about how and why the term is no longer
| considered accurate by historians (it "mischaracterises the
| Middle Ages as a time of violence and backwardness") yet
| Wikipedia continues to use the term "Dark Ages" as the article
| title.
|
| [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)
| pradn wrote:
| The article simply uses the term in the title so it can
| discuss it.
|
| Historians prefer the Middle Ages or the Medieval Period.
| Since this is relatively Europe-centric, historians are
| trying to go in the direction of "global Medieval studies",
| to form connections among various regions of the world.
|
| Our periodization is largely Eurocentric. The very long
| lineage of metallic/tool-based terms like the Bronze Age run
| into the obvious problem that bronze arrived in different
| regions at different times.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| > The article simply uses the term in the title so it can
| discuss it.
|
| The words "Dark Ages" do not appear in the text. This is
| the HN post title.
| pradn wrote:
| Oh, I thought they were talking about the Wikipedia
| article's title.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| I think you're right. It was a bit vague and I thought it
| was about the article's title itself.
| zippy5 wrote:
| If the people looking to learning about this subject have the
| "dark ages" misconception, is it so bad to make it easy to
| find via search and then explaining the nuances of the
| misnomer?
| jkingsbery wrote:
| At the risk of stating something obvious, Wikipedia's article
| on the Carolingian Renaissance is a good place to start:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_Renaissance
|
| The term I've seen in books I've read lately is "Early Middle
| Ages" (see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Ages#Early_Middle_Ages).
|
| "Dark Ages" is arguably applicable to the time around
| 500-800, although the other problem is that there's also
| another commonly referred-to time period known as the Dark
| Ages, the Greek Dark Ages, from around 1100 BC - 750 BC.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > yet Wikipedia continues to use the term "Dark Ages" as the
| article title.
|
| The article is about the history of the term "Dark Ages", why
| shouldn't that be the the title? If you go by link counts,
| there are 741 links to the Dark Ages page but 2582 to the
| Early Middle Ages instead.
|
| > Why don't they use the term and what term is preferred
| instead?
|
| "Dark Ages" is itself somewhat ambiguous. In its original
| incarnation, it referred to the entirety of the time between
| the "Fall of Rome" (itself hard to specify) and the
| Renaissance, as its early users saw Rome as the pinnacle of
| human civilization and looked down on everything following
| the end of Rome as unimportant, at least until they
| themselves were bringing back the splendor of Roman
| civilization. Later scholars were instead nostalgic for the
| High or Late Medieval civilization, so instead they narrowed
| the term to exclude their favored era, resulting in it
| referring to only the Early Middle Ages (to ~1000). Some
| people go further still and exclude the Carolingian
| Renaissance from the Dark Ages, pushing its end date further
| still to 800--there's no neat alternative term for this
| range, but Age of Migrations covers much of the themes.
|
| In any case, periodization of that time period of European
| history is immensely challenging. The decline of the Roman
| Empire brings with it a decline in the written record and our
| knowledge of events in the period diminishes drastically,
| only recovering with the Carolingian Renaissance.
| Furthermore, the Roman Empire doesn't fall in an easy
| cataclysmic moment (there's no Battle of Hastings here), but
| instead disintegrates at different rates in different parts
| of Europe, with the final vestige only falling in 1475
| (Principality of Theorodo). Meanwhile, there are several
| overlapping themes going on: the rise of Post-Roman kingdoms
| (such as the Franks and the Lombards), a mass migration of
| peoples (including the Anglo-Saxons and various Slavic
| groups), the Viking Age, the birth of Islam, the Great Schism
| between Eastern and Western Christianity (and other schisms
| within those sects!). For the boundary between the Middle
| Ages and the Early Modern, you can point to "about 1500" and
| note that several major changes happen about the same time
| (including total conversion to gunpowder weapons, Protestant
| Reformation, discovery of the New World, and the Fall of
| Constantinople)--that doesn't exist between Antiquity and the
| Middle Ages.
| michaelpb wrote:
| "The Roman Empire never fell, DEBATE ME"
|
| Though seriously, thanks for writing this up. This is a
| great explanation of how periodization says more about the
| "periodizer" than it represents some sort of objective
| truth about history, magically divorced from the political
| reality of successive historical writers. Debunking bad
| history is important... in this field (CS) I've definitely
| met my share of so-called "STEMacists" whose mental model
| of history sometimes seems to be derived from Deus Vult
| memes... -\\_(tsu)_/-
| jrumbut wrote:
| I can recommend Norman Cantor's _Civilization of the Middle
| Ages_ for a really great review of the different views of
| what happened during and after the deterioration of the
| Western Roman Empire. They range from "a time of violence
| and backwardness" to "a lot of people may not have noticed."
| It's really a great book overall and easier to read than you
| might expect.
|
| He also wrote _Inventing the Middle Ages_ which sounds like
| it might be more focused on your question but I haven 't read
| it so I don't know.
| Balero wrote:
| I found this podcast series really good for the fall of the
| Roman Empire. Long, but really good!
| https://soundcloud.com/fallofromepodcast
| billfruit wrote:
| Is John Huizinga's Autumn of the Middle Ages, a good source
| as well?
| jrumbut wrote:
| I haven't read it and am no expert, but from the summary
| it seems like Huizinga believes that the increasingly
| elaborate customs of the aristocracy in the late Middle
| Ages was a coping mechanism to deal with the intense
| violence of the period.
|
| Cantor says almost the opposite, that they developed
| these customs as a marker of their high status and a way
| to exclude others after they had outlived their original
| role as the fighting class once cavalry charges were no
| longer a dominant tactic. This is one of the rare moments
| in _Civilization_ where the specifics of weapons and
| warfare are discussed, anyone looking for information on
| crossbows and lances will be dissappointed.
| neaden wrote:
| Not to mention a lot of people benefited, like all the
| slaves or people on the margins paying taxes for little
| benefit.
| hnmullany wrote:
| Yes the point of using "Dark Ages" was to point out the
| dissonance between the detailed instructions on how to manage
| an estate and the idea that this was a period of total chaos &
| disorder
| Klwohu wrote:
| Historians use the term frequently.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| This doesn't match my experience at all, so can you expand on
| it? All of my medievalist friends all hate the term and both
| of the Wickham books in my possession have disclaimers about
| it in the intro.
| whearyou wrote:
| As far as I understand this would have been post-dark ages if
| it's during or after Charlemange
| why_Mr_Anderson wrote:
| _and in addition let him be punished by whipping according to the
| law, except in the case of murder or arson, for which a fine may
| be exacted._
|
| Punishment for killing someone was only a fine? Dark Ages indeed.
| Muromec wrote:
| Sending people to prison to do nothing is kinda self-defeating
| if it's _your_ people. And in this context fine is arguably
| worse than being whipped.
| neaden wrote:
| Prison in this time period wasn't really a punishment thing,
| it's what you did when you were trying to ransom someone you
| captured in battle mostly. Punishments would have mostly been
| fines, with some corporal punishment and of course capital
| punishment.
| why_Mr_Anderson wrote:
| That applied to aristocracy only, didn't it? Peasants were
| considered as slightly more intelligent livestock, their
| lives nearly worthless.
| neaden wrote:
| No, peasants had rights which varied immensely depending
| on their exact status and where they were. Still the
| aristocracy couldn't just kill them or take their stuff,
| and one of the primary responsibilities of the
| aristocracy or other landholders was adjudicating
| disputes between peasants. So if we were two free
| peasants who got in a fight, we might end up in court
| with the lord or their representative deciding between
| us, with one or both of us possibly facing fines.
| dmckeon wrote:
| Serfs ("our" people) were beaten, free folk were fined. In the
| US, think W2 employees versus 1099 workers. :-)
| wtdo wrote:
| I'm not sure, but it may be referencing the old Germanic
| weregild.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weregild
| why_Mr_Anderson wrote:
| Interesting, I've never heard about that. Thank you for the
| link.
| pugworthy wrote:
| > 9. It is our wish that each steward shall keep in his district
| measures for modii and sextaria, and vessels containing eight
| sextaria, and also baskets of the same capacity as we have in our
| palace.
|
| For those curious as to the meaning of this one, _sextaria_ is a
| unit of liquid measure (a pint) and _modii_ is a unit of dry
| measure (approximately a peck).
|
| So basically they are aiming to have a standard set of measures,
| which would be important for commerce or tithes of materials such
| as crops.
| SeanFerree wrote:
| Love this! Great article!
| adaml_623 wrote:
| I'm amused that these web pages are from 2008 which feels like
| the middle ages of the internet.
| BlameKaneda wrote:
| "25. They are to report on the first of September whether or not
| there will be food for the pigs."
|
| If there was no food, would the pigs have been slaughtered? Or
| maybe the underperforming staff would have been brought in
| instead.
| dmckeon wrote:
| Pigs would have been expected to forage in the forests, for
| "mast" - acorns from oaks and other trees - and anything else a
| pig might eat. Oak trees tend to produce a small amount of
| acorns in most years, and much more in a "mast year"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mast_(botany) .
|
| Before refrigeration, meat animals might be kept alive as long
| as there was stored fodder to feed them, or slaughtered when
| the weather turned colder, or slaughtered when time and other
| tasks allowed for preserving meat by salting or sausage-making.
|
| So, think of this as an end-of-harvest status report on when
| the crown court can expect to start getting sides of bacon
| delivered, and how many of them.
| cabaalis wrote:
| > 1. It is our wish that those of our estates which we have
| established to minister to our needs shall serve our purposes
| entirely and not those of other men.
|
| It seems like anti-moonlighting clauses are as old as time.
| alekratz wrote:
| So I'm seeing that this is from the 8th century, but they make
| reference to corn and pumpkins, which were imports from North
| America. What's up with that?
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| "Corn" in UK English has historically meant cultivable grains
| in general, not "maize" specifically as in North America.
|
| Also, "pumpkin" is a standard English translation for the Latin
| and Greek terms that, if you want to be pedantic, were just
| "gourd". See e.g. _The Pumpkinification of Claudius_ [0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocolocyntosis
| [deleted]
| pja wrote:
| It's a mistranslation of melon I think.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I think it's a mistranslation. OF. popon -> pompon -> pompion,
| meaning a large melon or (later) pumpkin. I guess it was
| translated as pumpkin rather than melon.
| gh-throw wrote:
| Corn just means grain. The shift to being equivalent to "maize"
| is later, and I think not universal in English-speaking
| dialects (and obviously only happened after the Columbian
| exchange).
| hnmullany wrote:
| This is a translation of the Capitulare de Villis - rules for
| managing Charlemagne's estates - written at the end of the 8th
| century.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I wonder to what extent this is like a statement of corporate
| leadership principles or actual instructions and tasks that would
| need to get done. As in, if I were a steward would I skim this,
| roll my eyes, tuck it away somewhere and get back to work, or
| would I run out and start counting geese to make sure I was in
| compliance?
| ajcp wrote:
| I would imagine it would all depend on the same factors you
| would evaluate as a corporation:
|
| - How likely am I to get audited?
|
| - If I do get audited how much does the language in this
| document allow me to pin it on someone in my org, but not me?
|
| - How powerful am I?
|
| - How rich am I?
|
| - How much does the regime like me?
|
| - How much does the regime need me?
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(page generated 2021-03-30 23:02 UTC)