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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Casually tossing up a pic of Richard III when saying the king can't be told not to be cruel or inflict pain was a chef's kiss! Well done to the production crew. Fantastic video.

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.

Regarding Medieval medicine I just watched a fascinating show about the surgery to remove an arrow from the face of Henry V of England. He was 16 years old and it (the arrow) went in 6 inches.

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.

On the beer question: I’m no expert, but as I understand… It may have been infused with a variety of herbs, whereas, nowadays, that’s limited to just one: hops. Beer and ale should be regarded as a source of nutrition, not just a beverage. It’s liquid bread. In ancient and medieval times, it was considered a significant part of the diet.

Medieval art lacked shadow and light. Which is what most people are used to. Rembrandt made this popular in the 17th century.

I'm sure you could make a pretty artistic film about peace in peasant life. Same family dramas , marriage, births deaths etc. "Real housewives of plot of land near river "

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

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

Were they dirty? No! Did they shit in their own water? Yes.

This was very well done!!!! I really enjoyed learning more about the Middle Ages!!! Hats off to you Matt and the history hit team!!!!

You would think the stench alone would have been enough to motivate them to develop an alternative method of waste disposal. I suppose when you've lived with something for years, you become indifferent to it. The answer about being "dirty" in medieval times was interesting, that they had an underlayer of linen clothing that they washed and changed regularly. This video makes me want to delve more into the history of medieval times from a factual perspective. I loved how he shut down the idea that medieval art was ugly. It clearly was not, and much of their architecture was truly stunning.

I love Matt! He's well informed and a good sport. He even thought there were more questions and was absolute ready to answer!😂

Medieval monks and nuns in hospitals were often more concerned with the state of the soul than the body.

Does anyone else feel a little strange when seeing the podcaster after having listened for so long? It's like seeing the movie after reading the book! Love this video and the podcast

Art student here: there are many reasons why medieval paintings look “bad” compared to today’s standards of realism or compared to renaissance paintings, for example. One explanation being a change in ideology- this also connects to geography. The renaissance saw more and more “accurate” representations of figures because this high-accuracy skill that some painters had became extremely valuable with the introduction of The Academy. As an example, in ancient Egypt, art representing the gods was never “accurate” because they were offerings to the gods, and the accuracy of the piece was not valued at the time, rather the intention. There were also instances where the price you pay for a commission (during the renaissance) was equivalent to how detailed your portrait was. Another factor contributing to the development of higher-accuracy art was the introduction of the camera obscura, where rudimentary projections of a setting or figure are displayed on the canvas for the artist to trace.

5:46 from what I read that was only true in harvest season. But for example in winter there wasn't much work to do. Some historians actually estimated that the average work week for a peasant was just 10 or 20 hours, but with a lot of seasonal variation.

Delightful to watch and listen to

I really enjoyed this session, it was well laid out, and an easy watch, interesting as well,

The story about the children being blinded and having their noses cut off is horrific. I have a feeling I won't forget that one but wish I could

Thanks very much, that was really interesting, informative and entertaining 👍

Ah!! There you are! On my UKposts list!! Wonderful.

Love love love! Would love to see more vids like this.

Thank you! Loved this video. In the end people are just like us regardless of the times in which they lived. We are in a constant state of change, that's all.

that was so interesting! please bring him back, i want to learn more about medieval things!

Loved his passion in defending good name od medieval people :) totally agree with him. And I am looking forward to next show

"medieval people weren't dirty" Immediately starts talking about sewers in the middle of the street lol. (I understand and agree with his point just found the juxtaposition funny)

Thanks for the history lessons.

“So be prepared to hear an awful lot of…idk” 😂😂 I already love this guy lol

Gone Medieval is such a gem of a podcast!

Bravo, maestro, more please.

This is so fascinating

I love this guy. This was very informative. Thanks! 👍

This was great!

Excellent discourse on normalizing Medieval people and culture. Thumbs up

Excellent content, thank you! 👏

Thank you.

So interesting. I learned a lot.

Thanks, very interesting vid.

Thank you for a great video, it was funny, enlightening and I enjoyed it very much

I’m surprised by some of the questions.you have answered them so well.thanks very interesting.

I wouldn't necessarily say medieval knights were muscular in the sort of modern bodybuilder sense, strong certainly, but we can infer from art (and I do think at least for specific periods we have pretty good art on how they might have looked) and from what we know of the kinds of exercise they would have gotten. There's also armour and fashion, in the later medieval period there was definitely a sort of ideal of how a knight should look, think waist, broad shoulders and such. Armour from this period does back this up, as it'd be exceedingly hard for you to fit into a stereotypical suit of gothic plate if you were built like a modern bodybuilder. So they were muscular for sure, strong absolutely, they would have had to be, but not in the sense that we might imagine today.

The 9000 calorie stuff is wild. For some reason I had it in my mind they would eat tiny portions & struggle to eat much most of the time. I don't think I could manage that many calories!

*THE VAST MAJORITY OF THE TIME* the vast majority of the people were pretty happy and pretty well fed, worked for pretty reasonable lords and had pretty reasonable neighbours. The medieval period is 1000 years - we pick out the battles, the famines, the Viking raids, the especially vile lords etc. But 365,000 days is a LOT of days - by far the majority of them were very ordinary, and probably 95% of these days were unremarkable and even the remarkable days didn't affect 95% of people with the exception of plagues.

Love his responses. Doesn't help he's pleasant to look at and listen to lol

"Stop calling medieval people dirty! ... OK, the sewers were horrible."

Saw a video about medieval urinary stones the other day, and that can't be unseen. I'll keep my modern life with access to plentiful potable water, thanks.

I just took a medieval literature class at my uni and hearing my professor speak Middle English was so interesting

Also - with regards to the art, conventional understanding of perspective only came with the renaissance period, so medieval art looks a bit surreal in that regard, i love it and definitely wouldn't call it ugly :)

Can we have Matt cover the renaissance as well ?

I think we tend to think that medieval art is "bad" because there are a variety of approaches to representing reality. To the modern eye, the variety of perspectives can look 'wrong', because we have come to expect a 2D representation of a 3D object or scene to obey certain rules, so that when you can see both sides of something (without the use of a mirror or similar device) your mind rebels. Medieval artists tried to show more than the eye could see. This deserves a whole lot more discussion than a quick comment. Sorry!

“Why were Medieval times so brutal?” The Universe is a brutal place naturally, just as it is beautiful. Welcome to life.

Really enjoyable, and a very personable expert.

he's very watchable, does anyone reccomend any other channels or shows he talks on? I'd watch more of him

I love the part where he talks about the evolution of the English language. I've often wondered how far back we could time travel speaking modern English and still be able to communicate with people.

Love Gone Medieval!

great video!

The picture of vegetables at 4:38 is misleading. Corn, Carrots and Tomatoes didn't come to Europe until much later during colonization of America.

the pictures of vegetables is really funny. Orange carrots weren't a thing, all cabage/cauliflower and variants weren't a thing, tomatoes weren't a thing, Corn, wasn't a thing. I don't actually know if any of these vegetable pictured existed.

Sir, you did an excellent job!

Ive heard that our working week today is much longer than the medieval working week. Personally I preferered working from dawn to dusk digging, growing food, mending fences etc in our family acre garden to 5 minutes in an office. But spring and autumn were the seasons of lots of work. Summer and winter less so.

It’s all drawing imaginary lines but I like the symmetry of taking 1453 the fall of the eastern Roman Empire as marking the start of the early modern period of European history.

After seeing buildings on top of London Bridge at 24:24 I had to go out and do some research to confirm it. I'm still baffled that that's what the bridge looked like in Medieval times!

You know, I don’t recall anyone ever explaining why it was called the “Dark Ages,” so I had to come up with my own theory. I thought it was because there was so much war and disease and famine and such that life was pretty miserable and dark. Thank you for teaching me something I didn’t know I wanted to know!

We actually have a fairly good idea on what medieval beer might have tasted like. Since malted barley was usually dried over wood fires, it likely had a more or less pronounced smokey aftertaste reminiscent of bacon. There are only a few breweries left that still make beer from smoked malts. Schlenkerla Rauchbier from Bamberg, Germany is one prime example of a brand that still does this. Most beer would have been a lot less carbonated than we are used to today, it's just very difficult to keep a wooden barrel pressurized. Likely funky flavors would have been more prevalent since brewing tanks and barrels were not sterile. Modern styles like sours and farmhouse ales deliberately try to recreate these kinds of aromas. Finally, we know that flavoring beer with herbs and spices was commonplace, as still survives in styles like the belgian Wit and the german Gose. Toxic ingredients like belladonna were probably used at least from time to time by shady brewers to save money and increase the "potency" of the drink, leading to a number of places restricting the use of additions to just hops.

List of disagreements: - Renaissance is mostly an art period, the period after the medieval age is called Early Modern Period - Bread was not necessarily the main food for most people, that would be a sort of porridge that you could make tastier with vegetables, berries ect. . Bread becomes fairly common, especially in the late medieval time, but not necessarily on its own. Like cutting a bread into slices and eating those slices with something on top was probably not common (I don't know any source depicting that in medieval times), bread was mostly used as something you dipped into something. Which means you need something to dip it into of course, which could again be porridge for example. - Processing food was something that showed wealth, so meals you got at some fancy event as a nobleman would actually be processed to a high degree. Like the popular "medieval feast" idea of a bunch of people just stuffing meat into their mouths is not very accurate. They would process meat into stuff like meatpies and whatnot. And such a "feast" was a social event and noblemen wanted to show how fancy they are, so they ate in a very civilized manner, the plates for example were often tiny compared to modern ones, because they would only put a little bit of food on it at a time to show modesty and therefore present themselves as good Christians. And even peasants processed food to a degree. Like they did eat meat and not really less than we do today (some even say more), but that meat was usually used as a base for broth for example and you could then use that to make porridge for example. You rarely just ate a big piece of meat at once. - The idea throwing stuff into a big pot is not accurate for most of the medieval age. The dominant form of cooking especially in peasant households was to have a long line of firewood and you had like clay pots you put close to the fire and you would use different pots for different ingrediences and then you sat down, had for example porridge as a base and give other ingrediences from the clay pots on it, similar to some local food traditions in parts of Asia for example. - Knights: The art does give us a hint and another great indicator for the stature of knights are the armor sets we have. The consensus is that knights were bigger compared to peasants, but rather slim. They were trained, but not like Schwarzenegger-style. Their muscles were for specific tasks, they were not bodybuilders. So if anything, they were athletic, but not bear-shaped. If you want a living example: Arne Koets is a trained historical European martian artists and expert in jousting and he actually has a specific diet and training routine to keep his body in shape specifically for those two tasks. - identification of fighters with specific colors and badges was a thing, but not that common. You mostly knew who to fight by staying in your battleline and attacking the people who attack you. - one reason why much of the art we know from the medieval period is relatively simple is because those are pictures from manuscripts and books and you had to keep it simple enough for the next dude to copy it when he sat down to copy your book (by writing/drawing everything himself). And those books were copied many times, so there is a higher probability that it would actually survive until today compared to more skillful single pieces of art. - The "beer was made because water was often unclean" is a myth and stupid and that's not how it works. If you take dirty water and make beer from it, you have shitty beer, congratulations. No, it was mostly a way to have something tastier than just water. And keep in mind, the water would probably be in a wooden bucket, so it would taste stale quite quickly. So beer was just a way to not drink stale tasting water. ect. don't have more time

This was enlightening.

I’ve just heard that archaeologists have found some frescoes in Pompeii depicting a famous legend that I’ve never heard of. It does involve a golden fleece.

5:42 also because they drank alcohol a lot more than we do today, it was a little easier. A pint of ale is around 250 calories so if you had 8 a day that's 2,000 calories and the higher the Alc% the higher the calories so we can be talking 3,500+ calories from alcohol alone. So it makes a little more sense when it is more like 5,000 calories from food, although still sounds a huge amount. Keep in mind also that due to not having heating they also had to use more of their energy on keeping themselves warm.

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

Great video!!

This guy took softball questions personally 😂😂😂

"We don’t change. We’re doing the same thing today, but under different names. We can look back at those people and see how evil that was, but we can’t see it in ourselves."

The Catholic Mass was in Latin until the 60's

He is such a likable guy 👌🏼❤️

I can't remember if we did this in 3rd year Chemistry, or back in 1st year, but we all enjoyed- and were fascinated by- our lab attempt to extract salicylic acid from _'acetylsalicylic acid,'_ more commonly known as _'Asprin.'_ While we were busying away, one of our lab tutors related some of the history of cures for headaches. You see, the salicylic acid we were working hard to extract from the Asprin was a naturally occurring substance in various plants and the ancient Greeks were smart enough (and untroubled by headaches) to have noted (almost 3,000 years ago) that chewing on this particular root/ twig was effective at relieving headaches. While the Greeks didn't know it at the time, that root/ twig they would chew contained therapeutic amounts of salicylic acid - the very same molecule that would one day grow up to be 'Asprin.' so, at 9:56, when our narrator derides the medical efficacy of a past millennium, saying that it can't compare to "getting paracetamol from the shops," he puts his foot firmly in his mouth! The ancestors in question had access to plentiful, free, effective and fast-acting 'Asprin,' so I rather think they got the better end of the deal in this example! Nb: As far as I'm aware, it was via the cultural knowledge, whereby chewing this root/ twig was found to relieve headaches, that led the Bayer corporation to research this plant, discovering the salicylic acid molecule it contained. Bayer also did a little tinkering before foisting their product (Asprin) on the public; Bayer acetylised the molecule, so that it's metabolised faster by the body. In fact, this was the same thing that they did to the Morphine molecule, leading to the discovery of Heroin, by Bayer (in the case of heroin, however, two acetyl groups attach to the morphine molecule, leading to diacetylmorphine - the industrial name for heroin, back in the 19th century). If you were alive sometime within the last 3,000 years (but not in the modern era, that is) then you ALSO would have preferred to chew a twig/ root from a Willow tree, rather than buying "Paracetamol" from the shops!

Were medieval people dirty? Naah, of course not, ya burk. I don't know why people think that! Now let me tell you about those disgusting sewers, and those filthy nasty gong farmers. Seriously though, awesome vid. Three thumbs up.

The medieval people were not dirty, anyway sometimes their sewage was running down the middle of the street.

Very interesting.

4:55 I heared that most medieval peasants ate porridge instead of bread. The reason for this was that if you wanted bread, the miller and the baker both would keep some flour for themselves, so you had less to eat if you ate bread instead of porridge.

I'm seriously doubting the logic on the peasants being happy section. 'Not knowing anything different' doesn't really hold up when there are plenty of examples of people who grow up in deeply sheltered and repressive communities not knowing of the greater world but being terribly unhappy. Also; peasant revolts were not uncommon, why would they revolt if they were content?

The only correction I'd offer is regarding the "muscularity" of the people during the Middle Ages. Today we think of bodybuilders who train with weights for size. But prior to the late 19th century, this wasn't important, even to the "strongmen" of the fair. Strength and muscle size are not exactly the same thing. Today's bodybuilders are strong to be sure, but if you look at powerlifters you'll see they are big, but without the same look. Strength was important prior to modern industrial advantages, so yes they would have been strong. And knights would have wanted to have strength and stamina, but they wouldn't look like the guys at Gold's Gym. They'd be very fit, and would have some muscularity, but not like a football team locker room. Picture Bruce Lee, as an easy example to google pictures of. Very fit, with good muscularity and tremendous strength, but not bodybuilder size.

About Fitness: The lifestyle of a medieval man doesn't necessarily reflect the type of body they had. I practice historical fencing and most people are far from being in shape (and I'm not talking about the nerds who do it because of videogames, even those who train a lot have normal to unfit bodies) because protections and weapons make fighting more efficient than just doing it barehanded so you don't need to have an athletic body necessarily. Likewise, doing hard labour doesn't automatically gives a ripped-off body, many construction workers and farmers are fat (even many soldiers, firefighters, and police officers are fat in real life and they are supposed to be in top shape). Some people with good genetic can look fit without too much effort as long as they do a bit of activity but most don't even by doing sport and that would most likely be the case back then. The people that today look muscular are professional athletes (this concept didn't exist back then) or people who follow specific diets together with specific training plans to look the way they do. About literacy: There are findings of notes written by farmers working in the fields as well as guide books for farming so I don't think illiteracy was as spread as we think. Furthermore, practicing historical fencing entails reading manuscripts from the past and many of these were written in forms of poems so that peasants wouldn't understand them which also means that peasants could at least read simple texts.

Thank you for some facts and sanity! Though you forgot to mention that most peasants lived in anarcho-syndicalistic communes...

1:14 - That's the flag of England, not Britain.