www.UsHumans.net: Chapter 14
Our civilization, from ancient to modern
To better understand today's world, we'll have a look at Ancient Athenian democracy and then the world of the Middle Ages, which occurred about halfway between ancient and modern times. This chapter contains a description of the development of our current ideas of civilization, including our ideas of history, mathematics, science, the factory, government by and for the people, political and religious tolerance, individual liberty, and economic and social justice. Our ideas of liberty came as a response to having lived for a time under unjust conditions. They were not sudden realizations of ours but reactions to unjust demands of authoritarian leaders. We have seen that it is in our social nature to demand mutually beneficial systems. (In Chapter 19 we will see examples of the techniques modern authoritarian regimes use to limit public discussion of their system's performance or of particular excesses.)
In the previous chapters we followed our transition from gatherer-hunter to farmer and then to city dwellers and saw that the daily lives of all city dwellers, anywhere on the Earth, share much in common. Our civilization began with the development of farming villages and with our invention of the city that housed the expanded population. Our collective ideas of civilization and the goals we have in mind have been continuously maturing.
Throughout our history, there have been just a handful of governmental types, economic systems, and religious institutions. This book does not contain long lists of successive kings and queens, nations, presidents, church leaders, technologies, and factories. It is instead concerned with the origination of the idea of each of these things. We have seen that occasionally a political figure temporarily rearranges the map, a charismatic religious leader begins to spread a new viewpoint of the path to living a proper life, or scientists come to better understand nature, our society, and ourselves. Throughout the centuries, technology continually adds additional techniques, tools, machines, and procedures to reduce the physical burden of our lives. As it has been said, our machines were originally made to save time, but lately, they are often made just to fill time.
Astronomy, mathematics, and reading tea-leaves
Astronomy, geometry, and mathematics began to be studied by the people of the very first states. Mathematics helps in planning, bureaucracy, and record keeping. Geometry was studied because builders needed to know the properties of squares, circles, and triangles and such. For example, a builder wants to know if a marked out foundation is square before stacking any bricks to make its walls. If the builder already knows about the geometric properties of a square, he or she will make the following test. One string is stretched from one corner across to the opposite corner of the foundation marks while a second string is stretched between the two remaining corners. Next, the builder looks at the point where the two strings cross each other. If the two strings make a ninety-degree angle then the building will be square.
Astronomy is important because it helps us identify the dates at which seasons begin and end and tells us when to plant or harvest and when to perform certain religious ceremonies. For example, when the star Sirius began to rise at sunrise, the Ancient Egyptians knew it was the time of year in which the Nile would soon flood and irrigate their crops. Astronomical observations of the annually repeating motions of the stars produces an accurate calendar. There are also annually repeating plant and animal cycles. The Lakota calendar has month-names indicating the time of ripening of various fruits and crops, calving cycles, and temperature extremes, see www.nps.gov/jeff/LewisClark2/TheJourney/NativeAmericans/LakotaSioux.htm.
In the big city today, we barely see the stars and planets because of all the street lights. Before cities became flooded with street lights, about one-hundred years ago, everyone could see that all stars rotate as a group while making nightly and annual motions. The stars do not move relative to each other but move as an entire group. However, there are seven special "stars" that wander around within the pattern of fixed stars. These are the visible planets (“planet” is the Ancient Greek word for "wandering star"). The two most-distant planets, Uranus and Pluto, are visible only with a telescope. Astronomy is the endeavor to observe the heavens while astrology is the attempt to predict the future from those observations.
Throughout history, we humans have spent considerable effort in our futile attempt to predict the future. Some ancient states tried to make predictions about the future by observing the random patterns and motions of various objects: the twisting flight of a flock of birds, the entrails of a sacrificial animal, the motions of tea leaves and rising smoke, or the positions of the planets. Archaeologists have found 4,000-year-old Mesopotamian tablets containing astrological discussions. These ancient records show that humans have always been the same in that we seem able to take comfort in any explanation containing any seemingly logical element–for example, flock swirls moving from left to right "predict" that we'll move from famine to feast because both left-right and famine-feast are in alphabetical order. In the next chapter we will see that until about one-hundred years ago, astrology played a much larger role in daily life than it does today. For example, the timing of a hog-slaughter was influenced by the phase of the moon. Astrology plays a smaller role today because the time at which we begin and end work at the factory is already set. Astrology today doesn't go much beyond its daily appearance in our "newspapers." Today we recognize astrology to be nonsense because it fails to provide repeatable results. We can use its acceptance today as a measure of the scientific illiteracy of a population. The only nice thing I can think of to say about astrology is that it is yet another example showing that our civilization today has many direct links back to the first cities and states. Our civilization has been accumulating ideas and techniques since its beginning. Except for our attempts to predict the future, most of our ideas and efforts have enabled us to build something new and useful.
We saw in Chapter 4 that every 26,000 years, the Earth's axis of rotation processes through a complete cycle–or circle–just as a spinning top makes a wide, slow circle as it rapidly spins. (For video clips of the precession of a spinning wheel, visit http://wind.caspercollege.edu/~marquard/astronomy/movies/wheel.avi or the website http://230nsc1.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/rotv3.html.) For the spinning-top-like Earth, the direction toward an apparent “north-star” slowly wobbles through a circle once every 26,000 years. This means that in about 13,000 years the star Vega (in the constellation Lyra) will be the "north star" and that after another 13,000 years have elapsed, the sky will be back to the way it is today with Polaris being the north star. This also means that the constellations have moved by 4/26 = 15% of an entire cycle or circle since the time in which the astrological constellations were defined, which was 4,000 years ago. Fifteen percent of a year is about one month. Through the last 4,000 years, the constellations have rotated in the sky by 15% of a full circle, which means they rise about one month later today than they did 4,000 years ago.
My friend Kelley likes to explain to astronomy students that the apparent positions of the constellations of the zodiac have rotated by one month, out of twelve, since the time at which they were defined. For example, those persons born between March 20 and April 20 are said to be born in the constellation of Aries. If you were born 4,000 years ago, on March 27, then the sun's position at noon on your birthday was indeed within the constellation of Aries. But if you were born on March 27 during some year within the nineteenth century then the Sun's position at noon on your birthday was not in Aries but actually in Pisces. (For the correct signs, see www.jas.org.jo/zodiac.html.) Kelley says there is an occasional reaction such as "What, I'm a Pisces not an Aries; I can't be a Pisces." Astrology and its “prediction” procedures are even older than our realization, by Copernicus in 1543 ad, that the Earth and the other planets orbit around the Sun: its procedures are performed with the assumption that the planets and the Sun instead orbit the Earth. (To see a copy of the original publication by Copernicus, visit www.bj.uj.edu.pl/bjmanus/revol/titlpg_e.html)
The mathematics, geometry, and astronomy of the people of the first cities have been extended by each successive generation, as is still occurring today. Unlike astrology, these subjects have been more productive in that they have improved the quality of life of all of us by building the objects, tools, and procedures of our civilization: astrology may have sent us on a few “goose chases” but has not built any portion of our civilization. Some stepping stone in mathematics include the geometry of the triangle, algebra, and calculus. Everyone is familiar with the Pythagorean Theorem, which is the relationship between the sides of a triangle. This relationship was found in the sixth century bc. In the eighth century ad, the Persian al-Khwarizmi, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Khwarizmi, developed the mathematical subject of algebra. This is another important milestone in the development of the mathematics of our civilization. It allowed many previously cumbersome problems to be more-easily solved. (This also means that if we teach our high school students how to do no more mathematics than algebra then when are restricting our children to the mathematics that built our eighth-century civilization.) Calculus was invented in the seventeenth century by Isacc Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Liebniz, see http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Leibniz.html.
The Ancient Greeks present our first explanations of nature not given in terms of deities
The people of ancient Greece (sixth to third century bc) built upon the mathematics and technology of the previous states of the Middle East. Continuity from the ancient Greeks backward in time is illustrated by the fact that the initial growth of many city-states within ancient Greece (and of the pre-Roman Etruscans) was due to their commercial ties with the older states of the Middle East. Continuity forward in time from the ancient Greeks is seen in the continuing convention of using Greek architecture in important buildings. Another indication of our direct link back to ancient Greece is illustrated by the fact that we all know of Zeus, Hercules, Plato, Aristotle, philosophy, ethics, and democracy. The Hellenistic culture of ancient Greece greatly influenced the entire Mediterranean and Middle East for hundreds of years. (Visit http://classics.mit.edu/Browse for Greek texts and visit www.stoa.org/metis for panoramic views of numerous Greek sites.)
The Ancient Greeks were the first to attempt rational explanations of natural phenomena. Before then, every explanation was given in terms of deities. This was a major stepping stone in the history of our civilization. For example, before that time we would explain an annual river rise in terms of the flood god, but after that time we would explain the rising rivers in terms of the melting snows of nearby mountains. This rational thinking has enabled us to develop more useful machines then would have been possible if we instead explained things in terms of gods. For example, a radio might never have been devised through using predicted interactions between the inductor and capacitor gods who convince the resonance god to react to the electromagnetic wave god.
There may have been other people who thought nondeistically about nature but the Ancient Greeks were the first to record and to develop this way of thinking. It was mentioned above that half the male citizens of Ancient Athens were literate, whereas literacy rates were more commonly 1% in nearby states. The democratic Athenians openly debated ideas. The uniquely literate, open, and democratic aspects of Greek society may have had a lot to do with their being the first in many intellectual pursuits–in contrast to many times and places of the world in which our kings and queens produce centuries-long environments of overly constrained lives and unfree thought.
In The Origins of Greek Thought, Jean-Pierre Vernant describes the beginnings of this new rational thought. In the early sixth-century bc town of Miletus, the three philosophers Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Thales, ushered in a new way of thinking about nature. For them, nature was the object of a detached and systematic investigation, and they began to offer a comprehensive view of the workings of nature that was free of deities. At the time this was heretical thinking. After the shock had subsided, it began to be believed that the entire world might be accessible to human intelligence. Before this time, our mythological beginnings explained how today's world came into being; after this time, it was turned around such that the intelligible world of the present provided an explanation of our beginnings.
For the first time, the origin and operation of nature became an explicitly posed problem in which rational and non-mysterious answers would be sought. Knowledge was de-sacrilized. Vernant says this was an intellectual revolution and that its light of reason could never be forgotten and has never ceased to guide the progress of the human mind. This new way of thinking bounced around the planet, from one person to another, and has continued to be improved upon through the centuries.
It was the beginning of a kind of thought that was outside religion. The old nature-deities would no longer suffice to explain the world. For example, the geometry of squares has no analogy in myth and indicates that the old deities are somehow lacking. Pythagoras did not explain the properties of triangles in terms of the personalities of deities.
Throughout the world, we began to replace the deities of nature with rational explanations of nature. However, it didn't yet occur to us to test our explanations by making measurements. The value of making repeatable measurements was realized only as we began developing the scientific method during the Renaissance and Enlightenment of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries ad. Since then, the improving accuracy of our measurements continually improves the accuracy of our explanations. The peoples of ancient Greece contributed many advances to our way of thinking about nature. Its philosophers thought deeply about what can and cannot be known about nature but they did not perform experiments. Aristotle gave rational explanations of many phenomena but nobody got around to testing these explanations until 1,000 years later.
The Ancient Greeks contributed much to our civilization. They improved the alphabetic writing system of the earlier Phoenicians–who had made improvements of the yet-earlier Mesopotamian systems. They developed formal logic. They debated the nature of being and knowing. They asked what is reality and how can we prove that something is real. Is a number a real object? Is an idea real? Is a horse real or does it just represent the idea of horseness? How can we distinguish between the natural and the supernatural? (Until the last few centuries, the distinction was uncertain.) They also made many technological advances. They made labor saving machines that multiplied the work one person could do.
Their writings about ethics came to the same conclusions as has each of today's major religions. The Greek classics exhibit the virtues of humans. Their moral principles have justice, sanctity, and truth. At the time that the literature of other ancient states mainly discussed gods and rulers, Greek literature contained many heroes who were not gods but were people who overcame challenging situations. The Greek comedies made fun of everybody, even the wealthy citizen who had financed the play's production.
Athenian democracy is described in The Classical Athenian Democracy by David Stockton. Stockton explains that in classical Athens, democracy meant that the people held power in common and that there was equality under the law for both rich and poor. Democracy was meant to protect the people from the random laws of a small, economically privileged portion of society and serve the interests of all citizens, not just the privileged. Through the decades, classical Athens contained 25,000 to 40,000 adult males. About 40% of them were defined to be "citizens" because they held a minimal amount of assets and so were allowed to vote and to hold office–females could not. (Just before the Great Reform Act of 1867, only 40% of the adult males in England had been allowed to vote.) Though only males were allowed to be citizens, every male citizen was allowed to give his view during official, public meetings; women were not allowed to take part.
There are as many reasons for political systems as there are groups of peoples. The people of each region of the world have chosen their own system in response to their own history, culture, circumstances, and preferences. Two particularly important, early viewpoints have been voiced by the ancient Israelite distrust of kings and queens and the classical Athenian distrust of power concentrated in the hands of a few rich persons.
In Early Greece, The Bronze and Archaic Ages, M.I. Finley explains that democracy originated in response to the growing oppression of city residents by the rich few. The first step toward citizen-shared power was taken in 594 bc by the leader Solon. He complained that the unrighteous, privileged leaders could not restrain their excesses and grew rich by stealing for themselves. Solon warned that the widespread economic exploitation, discontent, corruption, and indifference of the powerful was in danger of causing civil strife or even tyranny. He said that he wanted to restrain and correct this unjust situation.
In The Origins of Greek Thought, Jean-Pierre Vernant describes how a royal palace system had began to develop in Mycenaen Greece around 2000 bc. This royal system was similar to those of the many city-states throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East. The Mycenaen palace system was destroyed around 1200 bc when the Dorian people migrated into Greece. This was followed by a political Dark Age lasting for several centuries, in which there were no kings. A dramatic change then occurred in Greece as part of society became involved in overseas trade with the older Middle Eastern states. This portion of the people began to accumulate and display a great wealth and luxury that was furiously denounced by the people of Athens. The people said those who have the most today want twice as much tomorrow and that wealth makes one mad, has no object but itself, and is insatiable. At the root of wealth is a corrupted disposition–a perverse will. Wealth would bring injustice, oppression, and disorder by enslaving the masses.
Before Athens became democratic, politics consisted of the maneuvering combinations of the leading personages of the aristocracy. The people had no say in their government except that they were sometimes expected to rally behind a certain leader or group. Their new democratic wisdom would bring moderation, proportion, fair limits, the golden mean, and nothing in extreme. The people represented civic values as opposed to rich extravagance.
You may have heard of the ancient Greek tyrants. A tyrant was a town-boss who could have his way because he owned much of the town. Foreign trade had brought excessive wealth and social and economic injustice, and in response, the assembly of equal citizens was created. The citizens were equal in that law now applied equally to all. Each citizen could take part in the assembly and each person's vote counted equally. Each person could also take any other person to court.
In several ways, democracy in ancient Athens was more extensive than today's version. For one thing, the daily operations of the city–down to the smallest detail–were discussed in public meetings or assemblies. The entire voting public would meet to decide whether or not to construct a building and who would be paid to do the construction or whether or not to send a cargo ship to a certain port. They would also decide whether their city would go to war with another city. When the citizens voted for war, they knew that they themselves would be the soldiers who would fight and die. Each citizen was allowed to stand and speak during assembly meetings. Each speaker was expected to express his view in a short and to-the-point message. Each man could speak only once per issue and would be ridiculed if he talked too long or strayed from the issue. The leading citizens were those whose advice regularly proved to be good. These men were often expected to speak so that other citizens would know and follow their advised course of action. After this public debate, decisions were obtained by counting votes cast by a show of hands.
The citizens met in an assembly to vote on the issues of the week; there were about forty assembly meetings per year. These issues were preselected by a council of five hundred citizens, each of whom were selected by lot to serve for one year. The city of Athens was divided into ten districts, and to better guarantee a cross section of people throughout the city, the council of five-hundred consisted of fifty persons from each of these ten regions. Before each meeting, the council posted the current issues for all to see and discuss–literacy and public debate were essential. Any citizen could propose a new law or action but if it were shown to be inconsistent with previous laws he would lose his citizenship rights for a few years. Citizens were paid a small fee to attend the assembly meetings so that it would be attended by all, not just those wealthy enough to have free time. (How are new laws proposed, debated, and approved in your nation?)
Democracy in ancient Athens was also more extensive than today's version in that individual involvement occurred as citizens took turns holding various offices. There were no elected officials in Ancient Athens. Instead, governmental positions, such as those of the councilors, were filled by random drawings in which names were picked from a box. The selected persons served for about a year, and no person could serve twice in their lifetime. Where the knowledge of professionals was needed, there would be permanent positions but most governmental positions were temporary. Many Athenians felt that the benefits of more-experienced politicians and officials would be spoiled by a growth in corruption. Today we sometimes find that long-term positions for career politicians leads to aspirations of power and selfish actions.
Today's democracy consists of elections of professional, lifelong politicians who are hired to make our daily decisions for us. Since we have the technology today to make decisions by "a show of hands"–through the internet, for example–it seems to be a safe bet that a change will be coming to today's more-limited form of democracy. Will we all agree to have such an arrangement?
Trials were also decided by the vote of the citizens. Before the time of democracy, if one didn't have wealth and influence it was hard to get access to justice. It was also hard to get justice from wealthy persons because they were conducting the court. Athenian democracy placed the administration of the courts into the hands of the citizens. There were no paid professional judges or district attorneys. The judge and jury were amateurs. The jury were judges of facts and law, and they determined verdicts and penalties. The number of jurymen depended on the severity of the charges. Every sixty-year-old citizen was required to be available to serve as a court arbitrator. He was an ordinary person but had considerable experience of life. At any time, there were several of these arbitrators. Each case was assigned by lot to one of the arbitrators.
Anyone could bring a court charge against any other person. (Do you feel that today you could take court action against any person or corporation, which is organization of persons, that has done you wrong?) A convicted defendant would be fined, lose his civic rights or property, or even his life. The accuser was rewarded if the case was won. However, the accusers would have to pay a fee if they failed to get at least 20% of the jury to agree that the defendant was guilty.
Each year, about 3% of citizens were serving in the government. Through any twenty-five-year period, one-quarter to one-third of the citizens had served in their government. Each year, 15 to 20 percent of Athenian citizens were registered to serve in the courts. Today's parliament and assembly members consist of a much smaller portion of the population, and each member tries to serve permanently. It is also true that the members are not a cross section of the people of the nation. Do you think people today would like to be randomly selected and paid to serve a one-year term in an assembly?
More so than it does today, Athenian democracy meant self-government, individual involvement, participation, and random representation in the daily decision making processes. There was everywhere an ingrained suspicion of the corruptive effects of power. Their system was inefficient in time and labor, unprofessional, cumbersome, uncoordinated, and plagued by annual discontinuity. But never since have the citizens held full control over the daily operation of their own city and government. The people of Athens had total control over the legislative, executive, and judicial portions of their government because the people of Athens were the government. The citizens felt that they were in charge of their own affairs. There was no feeling of "us versus them" as occurs in some of today's representational governments of career politicians. The Athenians knew that only thirty miles away, government was very different.
The Athenian society was open and tolerant of public expression, criticism, and dissent. They wanted democracy because it protected them from the random laws of a small privileged section of society. (In Chapter 19 we will see that still today, these are the characteristics of a people choosing democracy as their form of government.) Legal decisions were no longer made by the upper class who were operating to safeguard their own interests. The people simply wanted freedom and its power along with political equality and freedom from exploitation and injustice. Since we innately react against any interaction that is not mutually beneficial to its participants, we can all sympathize with the desire of the Athenians to protect themselves from the injustice of being overrun by the seekers of wealth and power.
The richest persons of Athens had to pay special taxes for the privilege of being wealthy. They might have to pay the annual expenses of a naval vessel or the costs of a musical presentation or theatrical play–and maybe even be the object of its ridicule. The Athenians later modified this such that the 1,250 richest persons paid for these items in proportion to their wealth.
In The Athenian Constitution, see http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/athenian_const.html, Aristotle described the following essential features of full democracy. If all citizens are to be equal then the people must be sovereign. The will of the people is determined by majority vote in a popular assembly open to all citizens, regardless of wealth or rank. There should be no governing class, instead all citizens should take turns holding office. The officers of the state should be appointed randomly except where it is clear that some expertise is needed. There should be no property qualifications for office and tenure should be short and infrequent. The citizens should be paid for attending the assembly and for serving as jurors in the court. As an argument against professional politicians, Aristotle said that the combined knowledge of many novices exceeded the knowledge of one experienced person. Which of Aristotle’s features of democracy are part of your nation's democracy today?
One group of thirty wealthy persons did manage to take control of Athens for a seven-year period. They wanted to put an end to the egalitarian society so that they could control the wealth of Athens for their own benefit. They managed to do this by pretending that many extreme measures were necessary because of a war that was occurring at that time. For example, instead of all citizens attending the assembly, they "temporarily" restricted its access to just the wealthiest persons, who were then free to act in their own interests. The man Alcibiades of Samos was privy to the real motives of this group and exposed them. Athenian democracy then lasted until Alexander the Great's Macedonians put an end to it by conquering the region. The Athenians enjoyed their full democracy for just a few centuries and then had to wait many more centuries before democracy would return.
In most of our modern democracies, we elect lawmakers from a group of professional politicians. These elected officials take care of the day-to-day business of running the city or state. There are regions (cantons) today in Switzerland (see www.about.ch/administration/index.html#CH_Admin_Kantone) that have assemblies in which citizens meet to decide local issues by a show of hands. Do you think that you would like to be involved in every decision of your local communities' government or would you rather spend your time elsewhere and just leave these things up to an elected official? Can you control every elected official? Will excesses occur if you do not monitor your elected officials? For example, can elected officials take the nation to war on their own whim without needing permission from the general population? If they can then the people are not in control of the members of their government. The Athenian government was a form of democracy that was different from modern forms. If you would like for your city to be totally governed or operated by the people in the same way as occurred in ancient Athens, all you have to do is raise the issue in your hometown and find out if others agree. Luckily today, we less often have to die while improving our government.
The Greek empire was soon replaced by the Roman empire. (We saw that the Roman empire developed two or three thousand years after the formation of our first city-states.) After the fall of Rome in 450 ad, the region of Europe no longer had a single, central political authority. The evaporation of the Roman Empire was followed by a few centuries of rule by local lords. The region saw reduced arts, trade, cooperative activity, and communal projects. (We saw a similar "Dark Age" in Ancient Mesopotamia around the year 1000 bc.)
In the following sections we'll see some of the details of Europe's feudal and manorial system, which lasted several centuries until being replaced by nation-sized kingdoms. The feudal system was a hierarchy of lords and overlords created from a tangled web of obligations. Lords obtained their income from taxes and fees imposed on the peasants living within their manor.
From the time of the first empires of the Middle-East in 2000 bc until just the last century or two, the concerns and goals of our governments were simply those of the king and queen–usually, the expansion of the territory and power of the king and queen. We’ll see that much of the development of European democracy, tolerance, and liberty during the last five hundred years occurred as reactions to the sometimes oppressive manner in which these leaders acted. The concerns of our governments today are more closely aligned with those of the general population: we more often debate health care than the pursuit of foreign conquests. To see how this transition came about, we next have a look at the world of the Middle Ages that occurred about halfway between today and the time of the formation of the Roman Empire.
We saw that full-time farming began about 10,000 years ago as the peoples of various regions of the world found they could not maintain population levels by gathering and hunting as had been done since the time of the first humans. We humans do not want to change our way of life, which has been demonstrably working, unless something forces us to do so. The first people shifting to farming were forced to do so when a drying climate resulted in insufficient wild plant and animal quantities to feed the human population. By chance, full-time farming allows population levels to increase dramatically; farming is soon followed by villages which grow into cities and city-states. The percentage of us humans who were farming increased through each successive millennium. We saw that farming spread outward–sometimes at a rate of ten miles (sixteen kilometers) per generation–from several centers of origination. Some details of farming and city development were given in Chapter 12 for the case of Ancient Mesopotamia.
The world consists of numerous cultural regions. With each successive millennium, there was an increase in the number of those regions that had been organized into region-wide political units. By one-thousand years ago, most every five-hundred-mile-wide (eight-hundred km) region throughout the Earth contained at least one such political unit. Today, the humans of the Earth are organized into about two hundred nations.
By one-thousand years ago, we humans had also completed our expansion onto even the most remote islands of the oceans. The stone statues on Easter Island (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Island) were made at this time. (We see that one way in which we humans celebrate life is by creating works of art, which often express our view of those aspects of life most sacred to us.) Such megalithic monuments were common throughout the world. Also by one-thousand years ago, the Islamic equator was full of trade and artistic and technology activity, see www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook1d.html. During the twelfth century ad, the Hindu temple at Angkor Wat, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angkor_Wat, was built in Cambodia and during the same century, the Buddhist temple Dhammayangyi was built in Burma by the Mon culture, see www.hsdejong.nl/burma/bagan/target_pages/dhammayangyi_pahto_1.html. There were burgeoning urban centers in Central and Southern America, too. In Chapter 12 we had a brief look at thirteenth-century Cahokia in North America and the more recent ways of the Yoruba of Africa. You might like to read about our various cultures and accomplishments in volumes three and four of the Illustrated History of Humankind, edited by Goran Burenhult: Old World Civilizations (volume three) and New World and Pacific Civilizations, Cultures of America, Asia, and the Pacific, which is volume four.
The peoples of every region of our medieval world were busy with life. There is space here for just a few examples. After a partial but illustrative list of Medieval African cities we'll have a closer look at life in Medieval China and Europe. We'll see that in the thirteenth century, few European cities had populations of 10,000 persons while those of China contained one million persons–and necessarily contained extensive commercial activity.
There were many large cities in Africa during the Medieval ages, as described by Hull in African Cities and Towns before the European Conquest. Some of the older cities include Meroe, founded in 560 bc. Meroe, see www.hp.uab.edu/image_archive/um/uml.html, was the capital of the ancient kingdom of Kush and today it is the capital of Sudan. The capital of ancient Ethiopia was Axum, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axum, which traded goods with Mediterranean cities and Ptolemaic Egypt. The capital of the ancient Ghanhian Empire was Kumbi-Saleh, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumbi_Saleh, which had an eleventh-century population of 15,000 persons.
Great Zimbabwe was the capitol of the rural Rozvi Mutapa empire, which thrived between 1000 and 1500 ad, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mwene_Mutapa. Zimbabwe was the center of a group of 150 to 200 towns. By the year 1300 ad, the leaders of Zimbabwe were controlling large cattle herds and the gold trade. Still today, you can see its conical brick towers, which are thirty-four feet (ten meters) tall.
Timbuktu, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbuktu, and Djenne, see www.nmafa.si.edu/educ/mali and http://whc.unesco.org/pg.cfm?cid=31&id_site=116, were the largest cities in western Sudan and were educational and Islamic centers. In the year 1495 ad, the residents of Timbuktu dug a twelve-mile-long canal connecting their city to the port of Kabara. Timbuktu was also a cloth center. At one point it had twenty-six tailors each employing fifty to one-hundred apprentices embroidering tapestries. Some contemporary European cloth made its way to Timbuktu.
Many cities of more than 5,000 inhabitants were located along the Congo river. Kinshasha was the largest with 30,000 persons and was founded in 1530 ad. Merchants in Eastern Africa were trading with Arab, Persian, and Indian counterparts who in turn traded with those from China. There were forty Swahili market towns by the year 1600. The Congoan city of Mbanza-Kongo had a population of 30,000 persons by the year 1700. In the year 1800, the city of Segu had 30,000 persons while Katsina had 100,000.
Many of these were Islamic cities. We saw in Chapter 13 that around the year 600 ad. Islam began spreading across Africa, the Middle East, and along the equator toward Indonesia. In each new region, Islam arrived first in the cities and then spread to the outlying rural areas. Islam formalized education and increased literacy rates wherever it went. Most towns had an Islamic school and every region had its center of learning.
As occurred in many places around the world, African towns and cities were sleeping quarters for farmers who commuted out to their fields. Weaving, dyeing, sewing, metal and craft work were done in the city. Town populations, food surplus levels, and political structures grew simultaneously.
Rulers in Africa collected land taxes, cattle taxes, poll taxes, road tolls, and tribute in the form of agricultural goods, cattle, and luxury items. Taxes were used to pay for public buildings and road construction and safety. Some royal income was used to support artisans working in brass, leather, wood, metal, or pottery. In Medieval Ghana, the king charged a tax on salt entering or leaving his region. Some larger cities collected occupational taxes on butchers, brokers or middleman, farm tool manufacturers, honey collectors, foreign merchants, cloth dyers, palm oil, tanners, and pumpkin sellers and such. Some cities taxed peanuts, cotton cloth, cassavas, nuts, and salt and such. Goods were mostly bartered but some cities minted metal coins.
If the entire supply of a particular item–for example, cowrie or Nzimbu shells–could be controlled then that item could be used for currency. This is really no different than any other medium of exchange, except that it does not have to be manufactured. The only reason certain strips of paper are said to have a particular value today is because its government organization says it has. This is done by stamping denominations on decorated paper and exchanging them for equivalent amounts of goods or labor.
African cities were periodically invaded by Turkish and Arabic peoples and were invaded by Europeans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Chapter 19, we'll see some of the political processes that occurred as the European colonies came to an end in Africa after World War II.
China contains many climates, cultures, and languages and extends across a large area. (The nations with the greatest land area today are, in order, Russia, Canada, China, the U.S., and Brazil. For some scenes of China today, visit www.flyingmonk.com/china.html and www.naatanet.org/heritagemonth/2004/china21.html.) About 10,000 years ago, settled farming villages began to appear in the region of the world occupied by today's China. For example, the village of Banpo (present-day Xian) was occupied 6,000 years ago, as described by Fairbank in China, A New History. The villagers kept pigs and dogs, domesticated water buffalo, made clothing from hemp, and stored their food in decorated pottery. Around the year 3,000 bc, bronze metalworking first made its way to China from Thailand.
It was about this time that those of us humans living in China figured out how to make silk clothing from hand-raised silkworms. About one hundred pounds (45 kg) of mulberry leaves are fed to silkworms to create fifteen pounds (7 kg) of cocoons that can be unwound to produce one pound (0.5 kg) of silk. The resulting silk has to be spun into thread and woven into fabric. (Visit www.hkbu.edu.hk/~inrem/n/g_dp_silk.htm for a video that shows silkworm cocoons being unwound.) Silk remained a Chinese monopoly until the sixth century ad. It astounds me that a few thousand years ago, a person looked at a silkworm cocoon and figured out that it could be used to make clothing. It is surprising how we figure out these complicated, multi-step procedures; we’ve seen that, beginning as gatherer-hunters, we developed intricate plant- and animal-processing procedures and combined efforts on these problems through the generations and throughout the world. For a description of science in ancient and medieval China, see www.rit.edu/~flwstv/china.html.
The first three political dynasties in China developed along the Yellow River and were the Xia (2000 bc), Shang (1600 - 1100 bc), and the feudal-based Zhou (1100 - 220 bc). These were followed by the Qin (221- 206 bc), Han (206 bc - 220 ad.), Sui (589 - 618 ad.), Tang (618 - 907 ad.), Sung (960-1279), Yuan (1279-1368), Ming (1368-1644), and Qing (1644-1912) dynasties. You might like to visit www.bergen.org/AAST/Projects/ChinaHistory/HISTORY.HTM for information about each dynasty. See also www.allempires.com/site/historysections/fareast.htm and www.chaos.umd.edu/history/time_line.html. For a timeline, history, and culture, visit www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/prehistory/china/timeline.html. During these early dynasties, society was still arranged along kinship lines. It should be pointed out that in the development of the first dynasties, the Yellow River was used neither as an irrigation aid nor as a means of transportation because its current was too strong.
Fairbank explains that Zhou leaders believed a ruling family must be morally worthy to receive the responsibility of rule. While other kingdoms asserted either the divine or inherited right to rule, Chinese rule quickly acquired a moral-backed mandate. (In the previous chapter we saw that this idea was incorporated into Confucianism.) As early as the Xia dynasty, the large geographical extent of China was becoming a single society supporting the supremacy of the state over all other activities, including agricultural, technological, commercial, military, religious, and artistic. This state-driven unity of distinct cultures and dialects across China’s large region is similar to the unity created in Western Europe by Christianity. Nearly from the start, the state was the central power in Chinese society, with morality, rites, indoctrination, military monopoly, and exemplary behavior being the means of government. Until the last few centuries, the monopoly of power held by the Chinese ruler was unknown in other regions of the world. Other similarly-sized regions–for example, Europe–have usually been a collection of separate entities controlling only the military and political aspects of society–not its commercial, religious, or agricultural pursuits.
China is also a mixture of religions. We have seen that Confucianism emerged in China around 500 bc at the time that the collapsing empire was being replaced by warring states. Buddhism spread through China during the sixth through tenth centuries ad. Taoism is a later, smaller-scale offshoot of Buddhism involving physical and mental asceticism and magic. Taoist monks are sought for exorcism and for amulets that provide protection from demons. Those of us humans who are Chinese simultaneously practice the ethical and societal guide of Confucianism, the way-of-life and behavioral guide of Buddhism, and the magic of Taoism. These three religions are practiced simultaneously because the three aspects of life that they guide do not overlap. This mixture is explained by Adeline Yen Mah in Watching the Tree, A Chinese Daughter Reflects on Happiness, Tradition, and Spiritual Wisdom. She also explains that the I'ching religion involves the divination of change in life. For example, ten coins are stacked in one pile and then the changes between sequences of heads and tails can be read to divine future changes in life. The I'ching fully explains the use of a set of tossed sticks directing questioners to a numbered answer tabulated in the book of I’ching. About the same time that the ancient and mythical king Fu Xi was promoting the adoption of agriculture, 5,000 years ago, the I'ching pointed out that “the only constant in life is change.” In addition, some Chinese are Christian or Muslim; by the year 900 ad, half the people of the province of Canton had become Muslim.
Chinese rulers saw to the construction of large, public works. The Great Wall of China was built just before 200 bc during the Qin dynasty (221 to 206 bc) and designed to keep the northern Mongols at bay. A picture of the Great Wall can be seen at http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/core9/phalsall/images/gtwall-1.gif. For many images of China, visit www.chinapictures.org/type/travel/great-wall-of-china/. About 700,000 persons built the wall. The Qin ruler also built a mausoleum for himself that housed six thousand, life-sized clay soldiers along with horses and some chariots. The floor of the mausoleum contained a map of the empire while its roof had a map of the heavens. Visit www.chinapictures.org/photo/travel/xian/40219135325707/ to see photos figures of the so-called terra cotta army.
During the sixth through tenth centuries ad,the tribal Mongol nomads of the steppes bordering northern China were organizing into the militaristic system that harassed people as far away as western Europe. (For information about the Mongol Empire, visit www.allempires.com/empires/mongol/mongol1.htm.and www.lacma.org/khan/index_flash.htm.) This harassment prompted one Chinese official to post notices around town: "If the horsemen from the north arrive, I am prepared to die rather than flee." As everywhere, war meant bloodshed and ruin for the countryside and long sieges of walled cities attacked with ladders, wheeled contraptions, and raised causeways. After the Sung dynasty fell to the Mongols, students were taught to hate these invaders but also to acknowledge the people's role in their own defeat. To defend against such attacks, most Chinese cities were walled. Some city walls were thirty feet (10 meters) high and ten miles (16 km) long, and were usually white-washed every third month. In the year 893, one city extended its walls by 18 miles (29 km) by combining the efforts of 200,000 residents.
Mongols captured the Sung capital of Kaifeng in the year 1126 ad. The Sung capital had then to be moved south to Hangchow, which was called Lin-an at the time. Urbanization increased in the south as people moved away from the border with the northern barbarians. In turn, Hangchow was sacked by the Mongols in 1276 to end the Sung Dynasty and begin the Yuan dynasty (1279-1386). The Mongols did not know how to rule China and even allowed foreigners like Marco Polo (see www.korcula.net/mpolo) to take administrative positions. The daily lives of those of us living in China were not as affected by the invasion as was our political system. When the Mongols were ejected by the newly formed Ming dynasty (1368-1644) in 1368 ad, the Great Wall of China was extended in length to 4000 miles, which is about 6400 km.
Jacques Gernet describes the medieval city of Hangchow just before the Mongol invasion in Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion 1250-1276. A summary of his book is given here. (For some additional information, a time line, and many pictures, visit http://depts.washington.edu/chinaciv/contents.htm. Some images from http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/images.html#Historical%20Illustrations will be referred to below. The city of Hangchow is also referred to as Hangzhou. For some images of Hangchow, visit http://www.chinapictures.org/type/travel/hangzhou/1/. The University of British Columbia has information about the medieval city of Quanzhou, see http://www.scarp.ubc.ca/plan545b/quanzhou/qzintro.htm. For reconstructions of thirteenth-century Dadu, which would later be called Beijing, including a temple, home, and canal visit www.taisei.co.jp/cg_e/ancient_world/daito/adaito.html. Taisei also has images and a video showing a reconstruction of a later Ch’in Empire temple at www.taisei.co.jp/cg_e/ancient_world/xian/axian.html. Visit http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/core9/phalsall/ for information about Chinese culture, history, and religion, including on-line versions of religious texts. Visit www.xinhuanet.com/english/index.htm for current news from the Chinese state news agency.
China had the most advanced art (see http://depts.washington.edu/chinaciv/painting/4ptgssla.htm), technology, and bureaucratic institutions in the world. The government had been taking a periodic census since the third century bc and conducted a census every three years during Tang and Sung times. Populations were recorded by district, sub-prefecture, prefecture, and province. The location and amount of cultivated land was recorded and so were the names and ages of family members living within each home. The Mongol invaders required these names be displayed on each house. When this information is combined with business records and descriptions of life made by numerous painters and writers, we get a detailed picture of daily life in thirteenth-century China. Documents describe every shop along a street and even provide rankings of fan shops and restaurants–just as is done today. Some aspects of the city are recorded in great detail, including things ranging from the number of stones in certain streets to the names of courtesans.
Confucian respect for helpful elders binds families, society, and government
Explanations of order within nature, society, and the human body were given in terms of a balanced push and pull among interacting components of temperamental personalities. Order was due to a dynamic balance between changing elements; it was not due to pre-set and strict laws dictating interactions in a never changing cause and effect manner. Each interacting piece learned from the examples of good behavior demonstrated by others and adapted in response.
We have seen that in Confucian ideals, morals and politics were one (see Chapter 13). Confucian ideals teach that stable societies are built from stable families that are bound through the respect earned by benevolent elders. Such a relationship exists between benefactor and recipient and between social superior and inferior, too. Confucian ideals grew children who believed in and practiced respect for parents, elders, bosses, social superiors, officials, and the state.
It was believed that people were good by nature; people would behave badly only when following a bad example shown by an elder or superior. Gernet explains it was believed that people usually conform and behave morally unless they are starving or suffering from extreme cold and such. People's belief in the value of social life was synonymous with faith in human nature and in a tolerance of other people. People wanted to experience life. (These are also Buddhist and humanist ideals.) People preferred social harmony over a disruption of tradition so that original or independent actions might be discouraged (in Chapter 19 we’ll see how the political aspects of culture affect the type of political system used within its region). Still, anarchistic tendencies and unusual mystical views also existed.
Emperor, administration, and a bureaucratic system based on merit
Since the third century bc, China's administrative system was based on each individual's merit, record of accomplishments, recommendations of supervisors, and competitive exams. The lowest bureaucratic positions were filled through a system of qualifying examinations taken by candidates. Tests were first graded by two judges working independently and then by a third judge who had the final decision. To help guarantee impartiality, the graders did not know which test-taker had submitted which test. Since it was usually only the children of the wealthy who had the opportunity to obtain the education needed to prepare for the exams, the resulting government consisted mostly of people from wealthy families who then fervently supported that government in order to defend their own interests.
Those beginning bureaucrats showing the most accomplishment and having the best reviews from their superiors were advanced up the ranks from local to regional and then on to national positions. To reduce personal favoritism, promotions were given only by the central office, which maintained folders on each bureaucrat to record his or her achievements, character, morality, and mistakes. An official typically spent two or three years at each level of government before moving up to the next. This merit-based system was unheard of in contemporary Europe. In fact, eighteenth-century Europeans were shocked when they first learned of this ancient and efficient system. Of course the Chinese merit system was not perfect–for example, central officials sometimes promoted family members or friends. At the end of their career, officials typically retired at age sixty-eight but no retirement pension was paid because, as we have seen, Confucian tradition said children were to take care of aging parents.
Officials had every tenth day off work plus a fifty-four-day vacation each year. They were also given the day off on the anniversaries of the death of a parent and a few days off for their child's wedding. Once every three years they were given a fifteen- to thirty-day holiday with their family; the number of days depended on the distance one had to travel to reach his or her family's home. When an official's parent died, he or she was given three years leave. During leave they would edit literary works, do calligraphy, or paint and such. Merchants and peddlers had few days off work: New Year's day, the anniversary of the patron of their guild, or when in mourning or attending the weddings of their children. Many officials owned pawn shops, rented apartment rooms, and owned large farms outside town. Since officials were also immune from common offenses, Fan Wei piled up a record of misdemeanors of historic proportion.
The governments of the world are sometimes ruined by ignoring troubles, sticking to traditional and outdated methods, corruption, or an inefficient bureaucracy. The bureaucracies of some of the world's governments were hereditary systems passing office positions from parent to offspring. This is often a ruinous approach because it is usually the case that children do not have the same interests and the same talents for the same fields as do their parents. For example, when the offices of ancient Egyptian bureaucracies became hereditary, the resulting inefficiencies sometimes played a role in the dissolution of the dynasty. Corruption played a role in the fall of many Chinese dynasties. When officials are paid too little they sometimes resort to corruption. For example, one governmental warehouse was supposed to distribute free medicinal drugs to the poor but corrupt officials obtained it all to sell at great profit.
The emperor of China had supreme power and will was sacredly followed. He chose ranks and titles for everyone, decried law, and performed rituals maintaining both the empire and his family dynasty along with its ancestral honor. These rituals were simultaneously administrative and sacred acts as there was no distinction between these two aspects of society. Outside the palace, a 150-foot (50 meter) tall sign read "10,000 years for the emperor" while another read "The emperor shares his pleasures with his people." (For images of emperors and the court, see http://depts.washington.edu/chinaciv/painting/4ptgcour.htm.)
The emperor had a council of three to five ministers who met daily. Under these ministers were administrative heads and censors who monitored all officials and their procedures and academicians who executed imperial decisions and published edicts. Below this group were the heads of the departments of finance, rites, war, justice, civil service, and public works. By the seventh century, there were separate offices for sacrifices, banquets, insignia, stables, currency, agriculture, military equipment, education, canals, foreign relations, special legal decisions, communication between provincial and national levels of government, and the family cult of the Emperor. The empire of the southern Sung (1127-1279) divided the nation into sixteen bureaucratic provinces, each having ten prefectures divided into three to five sub-prefectures containing a population of tens or hundreds of thousands of people.
In the year 1046, one hundred million Chinese were being administered by just 18,700 officials–0.02% of the population–including 6,000 military officials who were subordinate to civil authorities. We'll see below that contemporary Europe had no continent-wide government, only more-localized feudal webs of militaristic obligations. Village peasants funded this web through taxes paid in labor and goods to the local lord but were not personally involved in the web. We'll also see in Chapter 15 that in the year 1860, the U.S. government consisted of 36,000 officials–0.1% of the population–governing 36 million persons. The operations of the U.S. government today involves as much as one-third of that nation's Gross Domestic Product.
Other than taxes, there was little governmental intrusion into the everyday lives of the general population of China. (We'll see below how today's computerized bureaucracies regulate many details of daily life.) Occasionally the government organized labor for public works projects that involved hundreds of thousands of people. Work was organized hierarchically, with supervision for each level. At the lowest level, the members of each family worked together under the supervision of its elders. Groups of families formed the next level, just under that of the entire village. At the top-most level were collections of villages. Sometimes the population was organized to defend against a revolt, which usually occurred in response to widespread famine or injustice. Terrible repression would be used against rebellion.
The principle concern of the administration was for peace to exist in the land. Following Confucian teachings, peace in the country was sought through collective responsibility within each village and the esteemed authority of family heads, village heads, and the emperor. No stirring of trouble was allowed. If even accused of stirring trouble, a person would be placed in jail for disturbing the peace.
Jail conditions were wretched and sentences were long. Prisoners were given no food except for that brought by their family. In the hope of discouraging everyone from going to court, the entire judicial system was harsh. Defendants were shackled and were sometimes forced to confess by being beaten and whipped. But the courts did require proof: in the case of theft, the stolen item needed to be presented and in a murder case, they expected evidence of violence to be found on the victim.
The calendar consisted of both lunar and solar cycles. The first day of a new year occurs on the second new moon after the winter solstice, which varies between January 16th and February 13th. The year consisted of twelve or sometimes thirteen moons of twenty-nine or thirty days, giving a total of 354 days per year. To keep an average of 365 days per year and to keep the seasons in the right time of the year, seven moons were added per decade. This meant that some years had as many as 384 days. (For a visual comparison of calendars from around the world, visit http://emr.cs.iit.edu/home/reingold/calendar-book/images.)
The emperor was the master and regulator of time and would distribute calendars each year. The calendar was set by court astronomers and used by farmers to choose planting days. Farmers also used almanacs containing such things as divinations and lists of lucky and unlucky days for taking journeys, conducting business, performing burials, or making buildings. Almanacs also listed the cyclic sign for each day. Signs consisted of sets of ten and twelve symbols combined into sixty different pairs.
Months contained either twenty-nine or thirty days. Thirty-day months were divided into three ten-day periods while twenty-nine day months were divided into two ten-day periods and one nine-day period. The day was divided into twelve parts of 1.5 to 2.5 hours, depending on the length of sunlight, and each division was announced in the city by the beat of a drum. The day also consisted of one hundred quarter-hours of about fifteen minutes each.
People woke at four or five in the morning as bells rang in the Buddhist and Taoist monasteries. Monks would then go through town to receive food from the townspeople. While walking, monks would pound either on iron or on fish-shaped resonators. Townspeople also gave alms to monks on the first and fifteenth of the month and on feast days, too. Monks would also announce any court receptions scheduled for the day. Since imperial audiences were held at five or six in the morning–and begun with a drum, gong, or clapper–officials were done with their day's work by the late afternoon.
Religious festivals, deities, and the ancestor cult
A festival celebrates a certain aspect of life. The New Year's festival was meant to renew life itself: the world was never more than one year old. Since each year began with its own supply of virtues that would be exhausted by its end, the New Year would be welcomed because it began with a fresh supply of virtues. New clothes would be worn and, within the home, the painted images of Chung K'uei the demon-tamer (for an image, see www.npm.gov.tw/english/exhbition/efes0101/selec04.htm) and of the door gods would be replaced with new ones. Also, new peach-wood amulets were hung on the door along with new red streamers.
Many things occurred on New Year's Day. Sacrifices were made to the family ancestors and to the deities protecting the home, including the door, courtyard, well, bed, and hearth gods and the god of the bed who protected the fertility of the parents. Other gods protected against poverty, death, giving birth to only girls, or having clumsy daughters or one who can not embroider. The gods were offered flowers, incense, and food as they were asked to bring peace and health to the new year. On New Year's Day, the image of each god was renewed. Also on New Year’s Day, the god of the hearth reported to heaven about the past year's conduct of each family member. This deity was given special attention just before that report was due. Each village had similar deities for similar protections, as did the empire.
Popular deities were ancient sages, great poets, warrior heroes, illustrious monks, and great Buddhist saints along with Buddhist and Taoist gods. Many deities were appealed to throughout the year and many had a feast day on which they were celebrated. Each god was considered to be obliging and was spoken to as an equal. No god was considered to be all-powerful and each had no function other than its specific protection. Deities were slightly personified but only a few had been given human or animal form. For example, some were given the form of a dog, pig, fox, or of a beautiful woman. The collection of deities changed slowly in time. For example, the gods of the soil and ramparts merged with those of water and earth and were worshiped in many temples and at certain trees, rocks, rivers, and mountains. A uniquely shaped rock at a pool of water might be whipped to end a drought or flood caused by a divine dragon living in the water. People also threw worn out women's shoes and dead pigs into these pools. Some deities were associated with the abilities of mediums, visionaries, and prophets. Holiness or prophecy was often incarnate in the most contemptible of persons, including beggars, madmen, idiots, and struggling peddlers. These special persons employed alcohol, fasting, magical sex, or ecstatic dance while doing their work. The world was also filled with spirits, genies, demons, and ghosts who might take animal form. Some ghosts were thought to be un-avenged murder victims or deceased persons who have not received offerings from their living relatives. These were chased away by loud noises, special potions, or by using written characters believed to be magical.
In addition to virtue, each new year also had evil influences and would experience pestilence. The year consisted of the interplay between temperamental evil and virtue. To ward off pestilence, every family placed willow branches above their door on the first day of the Cold Blood Festival, temporarily making the city much more green. Evil and pestilence would also be chased away with loud noises, drum-banging, and firecrackers that were made by placing a little gunpowder inside bamboo tubes. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fireworks fro the history of fireworks.) The danger coming from solar and lunar eclipses was also fought by loudly banging on pots. People would stand outside banging pots until they could tell the danger had left because the sun or moon returned to its normal shape. It has been noted that this worked every time.
Personal festivals were held to inaugurate a lucky period, encourage beneficial influences, conduct merry-making, or to celebrate a promotion. (During the Sung dynasty, the role of magic in the festivals was decreasing.) A festival's date was scheduled on either the lunar or solar calendar. City-wide festivals included games, theater, clowns, jugglers, feasts, drinking, and games. Games included a third-century ad. version of backgammon, dominos, mahjong (which we'll see becomes popular in the U.S. during the 1920s), a chess-like game, and card games having four kings–one for each of the four cardinal directions. The difficult game of narrow-neck involved the attempt to bounce darts off a wall and into a narrow-necked jar. During a festival, the streets were always filled with dancers, acrobats, musicians, and marionette show makers. Long, wicker dragons concealed dancers who made those dragons appear to fly through the air. (Visit www.chcp.org/mpeg to view a dragon video.) Dragon-boat jousts were held on lakes using boats decorated with flowers and flags. As two boats faced each other, men used pikes in an attempt to push their opponents overboard while spectators lined the shore, drinking and cheering. During festival periods, shopkeepers might give paper horses to their customers and pharmacists might give small amulets or bags of evil-fighting powders. To wish many descendants, friends exchanged little bags containing cereal grains along with melon and fruit seeds. Processions of people dressed as gods emerged from the imperial palace wearing masks and carrying staffs, silvered pikes, or wooden swords along with five-colored flags. These flags had the colors of the four cardinal points–green, red, black, and white–along with yellow, which was the color of the point at the center of time and space. Some festival rice was similarly colored, as were glass lanterns, too.
The Feast of Lanterns was held during the first new moon of the year, typically occurring near February 15th, in which lanterns lit the city all night long. Scenes painted on the lanterns depicted landscapes, people, flowers, bamboo, birds, or furry animals and such. Some were fifty inches (125 cm) in height and some were made to rotate by the force of a trickle of running water; others were shaped liked boats or chairs. Some people suspended a lantern from which they hung pendants or feathered ornaments. Crowds gathered to view the most elaborate lanterns.
The Feast of the Dead was held fifteen days after the spring equinox, which is around April 5th. On this day, many families left the city to visit the graves of deceased relatives in the cemeteries outside town. Family members cleaned the graves, placed food at them, and burned incense. Other families picnicked at a park or lake, and everyone stayed outside to watch the new moon rise at sunset. No new fires were lit during the three days prior to the festival and then an official at the palace bored willow wood to make the first new flame. A new flame still held all of its virtue and so was used to light numerous torches which were then carried around town to lit other fires. (Visit www.deathonline.net/movies/qt/chingming1.mov for a video of today’s ceremony, as held in Australia.)
Some annual festivals were held on numerically important days of the year. People wore charms and amulets on the fifth day of the fifth moon of the year because it was considered to be an unlucky day. The seventh day of the seventh moon was the Festival of Weaving; on this day, children wore new clothes. Since the Che river outside Hangchow always experienced a particularly high tide during the eighth moon, in the year 1066–the year William the Conqueror became king of England–a royal decree was made that forbid daredevils from attempting to swim across the Che river during this high tide.
A festival was part of either the Buddhist, Taoist, family ancestral, or official state religion. For example, the birthday of the saint Lao-Tzu was celebrated by Taoists while the day Buddha first obtained nirvana was celebrated by Buddhists by bathing statues or by ceremonially releasing captured animals. There was little overlap between the festivals of these religions but some festivals were common to all of them at once. The official state religion often involved worship of the emperor's ancestry. A family's ancestral worship and the deities of the home were separate from Buddhism and Taoism. Each person practiced all of these non-overlapping religions.
The ancestral cult sought to maintain links between the living members of the family–including newborn family members and newcomers marrying into the family–and deceased parents, several generations of grandparents, and with clan and lineage heads. The ancestral cult was important because each family was seen to have its own past and its own destiny. The name of each deceased ancestor was written on a tablet and placed on the ancestral altar within the home. Small drops of blood were placed on the tablets to signify eyes and ears as the spirit of the deceased parent was believed to reside in these tablets. Both rich and poor families practiced ancestor worship but wealthy families could be more observant; the emperor's family was the most observant of all. The emperor built ancestral temples, the wealthy built sanctuaries, and the poor made an altar in the main room of their home.
From these few examples, we can see that there was little overlap in the functions of Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, the ancestor cult, and the official state cult. The ethics of Confucianism taught right and wrong and blended everywhere with the proper way of living taught in Buddhist morality. Taoism had less to do with ethics and morality than with magic and exorcism. The ancestral and official cults had no overlap with Confucianism, Buddhism, or Taoism. (Every few centuries, some attempts were made to unify Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism into a single religious view.)
There was a social club for most every hobby and concern, including literary, sporting, and religious societies. Soldiers formed archery clubs, while merchants liked to join football and polo societies (polo came from Iran). The Su family maintained a puppeteer society comprised of many neighbors from their street. There was also the Buddhist society for carrying out pious works. One large Buddhist society had tens of thousands of members. These also served as mutual aid societies that helped members pay the costs of weddings and funerals. Some of these groups still exist today. (In Chapter 15 we'll see that numerous social clubs existed in the farming villages of nineteenth-century New England.)
One gained security, dignity, and respect in the community by forging relationships with as many others as possible. Gernet explains that society consisted of a network of individual relationships binding person to person, family to family, and helper to protector. The practice of religion and the building of social prestige were one and the same endeavor.
From birth, children were taught to be polite, good-natured, sociable, gentle, and obedient (for examples of filial piety, see www.wsu.edu/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_1/filial.html) and to keep good relations with family, to prize self-restraint, to practice the art of give and take, and to be content with one's place in society. (We saw in Chapter 13 that obedience is especially Confucian and that being content and practicing give and take are especially Buddhist practices.) Excessive affection was not to be displayed. Belligerence was discouraged but the ideals of obedience and contentment were not to stifle individuality, ambition, rebellion, or a fighting spirit. (What do you teach to your children?) Those families who obtained these ideals were the heroes of society and were given public recognition by governmental officials. (What sorts of people are the heroes of your society?) These ideals were more easily attainable by the wealthiest families.
To make ends meet, poorer families could not always adhere to the tradition of having all generations living together in one home. Sons were often forced to setup on their own even while their parents were still alive. Poor families sometimes resorted to drowning any newborn who arrived after the distribution of inheritance had been fully allotted. Some mothers tried abortive drugs that sometimes left her or her born-anyway child ill for years. Parents hoped for boys to carry the family line but girls were more easily employed, often as servants in wealthy homes. Since some poor parents resorted to abandoning their infant in the street, hoping that he or she would have a better life in another family, this practice was outlawed in the year 1138 ad. The king instead funded hospitals to care for these children, who arrived at the rate of 20,000 per year. Rich families were allowed to adopt as many children as they liked. In wealthy homes, newborn babies were bathed in warm, scented water placed in large silver bowls. The minute, hour, and date of each child's birth was carefully recorded to help soothsayers and astrologers advising them later in life. Parents would sentimentally keep lockets of their baby’s hair in gold or silver boxes.
Despite the earlier warning by Confucius against trying to force behavior through decree, Tang law dictated that the child who strikes his or her parent or grandparent would be beheaded. Anyone striking a sibling could be punished with two years in prison. The punishment for striking an older cousin was one hundred cane strikes. If a parent broke the bone of a child while administering guidance then the penalty was less severe than if the bone of a stranger had been broken. Servants who killed their master were to be strangled but a master who killed a servant would be given a one-year prison term.
Childhood is universal but each culture includes its unique aspects. On the child's first birthday, various objects–including scales, cloth, knives, Buddhist books, flowers, and thread–would be placed around him or her to see which would be grasped as this was thought to indicate the child's future occupation. Children were rarely spanked. Instead, they would be threatened with visits by either Liv the Barbarian or Big-Eyed Yang "who had a terrifying voice." On the farm, children collected firewood, fetched water, and took the family’s buffalo to water. In town, they helped in the family shop or helped with household chores (did you grow up on a farm or in the city?). Children freely roamed the streets. To mark the coming of age, fifteen-year-old females had their first hairpins placed in their hair and twenty-year-old males received their first cap.
In previous centuries there had been a passion for sports, including boxing, fencing, archery, football, and polo. These physical sports were going out of fashion in the thirteenth century. Marco Polo remarked that the people of China knew nothing of weapons handling, as was popular in Europe, and kept none in their homes because law forbid the possession of arms. He said that neighborhoods were calm and had few quarrels.
In general, girls were taught little except to spin and embroider and meant that a women had few choices for a profession: she might be a midwife, wet nurse, or domestic servant. Women had no independence and were considered subordinate to men. But on the farm and in the shop, the efforts of both husband and wife were needed to make ends meet. This resulted in a practical equality between the pair–except for the occasional husband or wife who acted as a tyrant.
There were a few woman poets, like Li Ching-Chao (1081-1140). Empress Wu Tse-tien (685-704) asked a particular seven year old girl to improvise a poem about her brother's leaving. She expressed her happiness that "In the pavilion of separation, the leaves suddenly blew away. On the road of farewell, the clouds lifted all of a sudden. Ah! How I regret that men are not like the wild geese who go on their way together." (When my older sister married and left, she too enjoyed giving me one last kick.)
The mutilating practice of foot-binding rates in brutality with female circumcision, and both are even more extreme than the practice of some cultures to strap boards to the skulls of growing infants in order to shape their heads, see www.sfu.ca/archaeology/museum/world/ceramicf/t1-3.htm. Fairbank describes how boards are used in foot binding to cause toes to painfully curl under a girl's foot as she grows. This was done because someone had said that small feet are more attractive–or rather, that small shoes are more attractive: nobody could bear to observe the resulting disfigurement. (For a disturbing but explanatory picture, you might visit http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/images/bndfeet2.gif.) Foot binding began in the tenth century. Mothers helped their daughters get through the pain using tricks passed through the generations. For example, a girl would be told to elevate her feet until they became numb so the pain would subside. Its practice began to go out of style in the 1930s. (To learn more about the changing place of women in modern Asian and Arabic human societies, you might like to read some of the books listed in the chapter bibliography.)
Marriages were arranged to form alliances between families. In the same way, many princesses were married off to barbarian rulers in the attempt to promote friendship. Some wealthy families attempted to arrange marriages between their child and the top scorers in the bureaucratic entrance exams. In addition to the tradition of arranging marriages, there were popular stories of love at first sight and of women who could "overturn a kingdom." The parents of poor families sometimes married off their children in hopes of gaining another son or daughter to support them in their old age. There was more chance for poor children to choose their own spouse. Marriages among the poor were accomplished with little ceremony.
Marriages among the wealthy were full of ceremony and tradition involving properly-attired go-betweens and the exchange of many symbolically significant gifts. Soothsayers were told the date and hour of birth of the proposed husband and of the proposed wife. If favorably "soothed," the two families exchanged brightly-colored cards listing all official functions held by family members through the last three generations. The cards also contained a description of the prospective groom's administrative functions, the numerical order of the bride and groom among their siblings, a list of tabooed names that should never be written, and a list of property to be assigned to the bride and groom on their wedding day, including cultivated land, houses, gold, hairpins, pearls, curtains, and fields.
Promises were then exchanged in person as the groom-to-be drank four cups of rice-wine and the bride-to-be drank two. He then placed a hairpin in her chignon to show acceptance or instead sent two pieces of satin to her home to show his rejection. In some regions, this decision was made by a relative who indicated acceptance by sending cloth, rings, two sticks, two onions, and two bowls with four red fish. The richest families would send sticks and fish made of gold. If the engaged couple were yet children, many years would pass before they were married. Until then, more gifts were exchanged on each anniversary of the agreement and again just before the wedding. Each of these gifts were displayed on the wedding day.
The bride moved into the home of her husband's family, and she rarely saw her own family after that. The bride was carried to her new home by honor maids accompanied by singing girls carrying flowers. The procession was lead by one maid walking backwards with the aid of a mirror. Upon arrival at her new home, the bride was placed on a green mat in the doorway and she then stepped over a horse saddle and a scale, though the symbolic meaning of these items has been forgotten, just as the Kalapalo could no longer remember the meaning of certain, ceremonial words. As she first entered her new home, seeds, fruits, and coins were tossed in the doorway to repel bad influences. Children scrambled to pick up these items. (For more information about wedding ceremonies, visit www.chcp.org/wedding.html.)
Wives were usually several years younger than their husbands; their age difference could not be more than that because the generations were not to be mixed. A wife was to be modest, chaste, devoted to her in-laws, and faithful to her husband. Government officials publicly honored those wives who attained these ideals or those, for example, sticking by a husband who was gambling drunkard. A bad wife might be returned to her own family–unless her own parents were dead–for being disobedient, jealous, epileptic, chatterous, or insulting or if she strikes others. If sterile, either she is sent back or her husband might move a concubine into the home to bear children. Of course, he might be the sterile one and the concubine might be impregnated by yet another man. In the city, a wife might have one or more "complimentary husbands." Divorce could occur through the mutual consent of the two spouses.
The funeral ceremony transformed the deceased person into an ancestor. Upon death, the body was washed and dressed as lamentations were said. An expert in geomancy, which is also called Feng Shui, was consulted to choose the burial location. When a wealthy person died, paper copies of servants and carriage and horse were buried to accompany him or her into the other world. Surviving relatives wore coarse clothing and avoided enjoyment.
Confucianism believed it was disrespectful to burn the dead unless the body was too far from home to be easily transported overland. Despite this belief, the poor could afford only to be cremated. In some regions, tradition required the ashes be kept in an urn but in Hangchow the ashes would be scattered to the wind.
Buddhists viewed the cremation as a kind of regenerating transformation of the body. Buddhist monks were always cremated. Beginning in the fifth century ad, a few chose to be burned alive. Cremations were done in Buddhist monasteries, within a large oven, and were accompanied by singing and dancing. Paintings would be burned with the body so that the depicted images could be taken on the journey. It was believed that a similar tribute was being performed on the other side to welcome the deceased's arrival in the other world as life was beginning anew.
It was believed that the world of the dead had a bureaucracy similar to that of the living and that sometimes a scribe in the world of the dead incorrectly wrote down a name, causing that person to temporarily die until the mistake was corrected. This explained comas and such. Sometimes a temporarily-dead person would have the chance to read a scribe’s list of names of people who would die soon; there were many such stories of things considered strange and wondrous.
The children of the poor remained illiterate for life while others attended school, generally from ages seven through thirteen. Through these years, students learned to write twenty new characters each day out of the thousands making up the Chinese writing system. Some parents joined together to employ a teacher for their children. As a person passed a classroom, the children could be heard reciting lessons and playing musical instruments. The emperor's heir had daily lessons in history, astronomy, and the classics while also studying city-plans and layouts.
During the thirteenth century, Hangchow had four universities: the Imperial Academy, the Military Academy, a medical school with two hundred students, and the National University which had fifteen teachers and two thousand students. Students enjoyed free room and board paid by school foundations and took monthly and semi-annual exams. They performed ceremonies honoring deities, the Earth Mother, great generals, sages, and the heroes of old. They studied the classics, memorizing many parts, and were to be familiar with both modern and ancient poets but most instruction was geared toward the exams for entrance into the bureaucracy. In the year 1071, the educational reformer Wong An-shih encouraged additional study of political philosophy and practical administration techniques. Private schools emphasized the culture of the classics. Some students obtained degrees enabling them to become military or medical officials, while other students chose to obtain a doctorate in written works or in history and ritual because the doctorate of letters opened the door to the most prestigious careers. Students usually did not setup their own home until they were thirty years old. By the way, a lawyer had already written a textbook explaining chicanery, dishonest tricks, slander, and blackmail.
The philosophy of order through balanced interactions influenced medical practice: the human body was believed to be healthy when its components of yin and yang were in balance and there were proper circulations of the warm, cold, dry, moist, and fiery breaths. Some related the heart, liver, spleen, lungs, and kidneys to the elements water, fire, wood, metal, and earth. Excessive joy, anger, sadness, fear, love, hate, or desire might cause illness.
To cure the patient, the doctor gave drugs containing mixtures of twenty or so substances, including gems and insect or animals parts. The patient was warned to take the drugs at the right astrological moment or his or her symptoms would worsen. About 800 different drugs were being used. Pharmacists hung a dried calabash over their door to indicate their business and sold medicinal plants and herbs and some ready-made mixtures meant for specific illnesses.
It was believed that the patient's pulse rate identified his or her illness. The doctor might massage the top of one of the patient's thumbs or some other small area of the patient's body. Sometimes the patient was cauterized or treated with acupuncture. (Acupuncture shops were identified by the sign of a white rabbit hung over their door.) Taoist and Buddhist monks performed ancient exorcisms, while surgery was a new approach that was performed only for abscesses and fractures. In the year 1080, the emperor asked all doctors to describe their most successful remedies. Patients often tried several remedies simultaneously and preferred those doctors whose family had been in medicine for at least three generations. Doctors might distribute printed notices describing their services and specialized in such things as arthritis and paralysis, eyes, obstetrics, teeth and throat, charms and amulets, or moxibustion and acupuncture.
Forensic medicine was developed to help the courts distinguish deaths due to strangulation, drowning, blows, and poison; forensic texts gave first-aid instructions for persons found near death in each of these situations. For example, the use of artificial respiration was recommended when a possible victim of drowning was found. (The first European text of forensic medicine was published by Roderic de Castro around the year 1600.)
With a population of one-million persons in the year 1275 ad, Hangchow was the largest and richest city in the world. At this time the largest cities of Europe, which had just recently been permanently settled, had five or ten thousand people–just two had 50,000. (The video Jing, A Chinese Girl, features a typical Saturday and Sunday in the life of a fifth-grade student in today’s (1990) Hangchow; for information about this and other videos, visit www.coe.ohio-state.edu/globaled/display.cfm?parent=32&child=49. For Marco Polo’s description of Hangchow, see www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/polo-kinsay.html.) Since the land area available to the city of Hangchow is limited by its surrounding mountains, rivers, and lakes, the population density was very high–about two hundred persons per acre (one hundred per hectare). Multi-story homes housed the large population while a shop often occupied the lower floor. For paintings of urban scenes, see http://depts.washington.edu/chinaciv/painting/4urbcomm.htm and for photos of modern Hangchow, visit www.orientalarchitecture.com/hangzhou/hangzhoumapindex.htm
There was a daily flow of goods and merchants from the suburbs into the city center each morning and then out again after the merchants had their evening meal, and this flow gave the city a "daily heartbeat." From dawn until the evening meal, there was incessant activity in the city as shopkeepers, peddlers, shoppers, and entertainers carried on their business. Since some shops were open as late as 2 a.m., people carried lanterns to visit taverns, restaurants, singing-girl houses, and tea-houses. Tea was known in China by the third century ad and was widely used by the eighth century, see http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/core9/phalsall/images/c-tea.jpg. Its use then spread to Islamic lands and, centuries later, to Europe.
Though spotters on watch towers looked for erupting fires, the bamboo and wood buildings closely packed along narrow alleys allowed fires to spread rapidly, as fast as two miles per hour (3.2 km per hour). In the years 1132 and 1137, about ten thousand homes were burned–50,000 more were burned in each of 1208, 1237, and 1275. After a fire, displaced families lived in temporary homes on the edge of town or were housed in Buddhist or Taoist monasteries. To help in reconstruction, the sales tax would be suspended on building materials. Valuables could be stored in high-rent storage buildings that were surrounded by water.
Hangchow is located 120 miles (190 km) southwest of Shanghai and 100 miles (160 km) south of the Yangtze river. Over this distance, Hangchow was connected to the Yangtze by an eighteen-foot (6 meter) wide canal, which was built around the year 600 ad. (In Chapter 15, we will see the arrival of canals in the U.S. as the Erie Canal was constructed with a length of 363 miles [580 km].) There was a network of canals throughout China, linking many towns to the major rivers and carrying much daily traffic in goods and travelers.
Canals brought food and supplies into Hangchow from the surrounding areas and were also used to remove the city's trash. Enough rice was brought into Hangchow to supply each of one million residents with 2.5 pounds (one kilogram) per day. Rice came into town by canal and also by ocean from as far away as Canton, which was 1,000 miles (1,600 km) south. By the dawn of each day, about two hundred pigs were brought into town and slaughtered. By the way, we can calculate that if each pig weighs one hundred kilograms (two hundred pounds) then this provides only twenty grams (one ounce) per resident per day–or one kilogram (2.5 pounds) for each of 20,000 wealthier families.
There were numerous canals within the city of Hangchow itself. Lotus flowers were placed in them during the springtime and they were lined with colorful plum, pear, apricot, and peach trees. (Peach trees are native to China and were taken around the world by travelers.) Stone balustrades lined the canal tops to keep people from falling into them, and rainbow shaped bridges, which required a maintenance department, allowed road traffic over the canals. The twenty-foot (seven-meter) wide canals allowed two barges to pass each other. Barges carried rice, salt, wood, coal, bricks, and tiles and such. Until a sluice gate was built during the years 1086 through 1093, each canal had to be cleared of mud every five years. Hangchow's canals were connected to the freshwater lake on the edge of town. This lake was two miles in diameter and was created by damming a number of rivers.
Many boaters provided freight and taxi services throughout the canal system. The boat owner's family lived on the boat and propelled it by pushing a pole against the canal bottom or by raising a sail when out on the open lake. It was easiest to move goods around town on the canals but carters, carriers, and donkeys also used the stone-paved streets. Hangchow's main street was three miles (five km) long, 60 yards (60 meters) wide, and lined with covered shops. Wealthy people rode on horseback, sat in chairs carried on poles by bearers, or rode in six-person, cushioned carts that had curtains. See http://depts.washington.edu/chinaciv/painting/4urbtran.htm for paintings of boats, carts, shoulder-poles, and donkeys.
In some winters the canals would freeze over. During such times, northern visitors might show the people of Hangchow how to store ice in underground chambers for use in the summer. Every year, the emperor would have northern ice brought to Hangchow in fast moving boats that traveled through both nights and days. (In the next two chapters, we’ll see how eighteenth-century Kentuckians stored winter ice and how the ice harvesting industry disappeared as the use of ice-making machines spread through our homes in the 1950s.)
There were many public parks and gardens around Hangchow. Some people went to the park simply to sit and play musical instruments, while other people went to be entertained by the jugglers, acrobats, tight-rope walkers, marionettes, shadow plays, storytellers, acrobats, and theaters presenting acts, dancing, singing, and music. The entertainers earned their living this way. Every social occasion required singing girls, who often played zithers or guitar-like pi-pas as they sang.
People enjoyed sailboat and paddle-boat rides on the three-mile-wide (5 km) lake. Hundreds of boats might be on the lake at once. Many boats were ornamented with carvings and brightly colored paint. Some of the boats were one or two hundred foot (30-70m) long and carried fifty to one hundred persons who would be fed dinner while on board. Following the Buddhist tradition, passengers might choose to buy and then release a turtle or shellfish. Some wealthy families built vacation homes on stilts over the lake water. For photos of the West Lake in today’s Hangchow, visit www.orientalarchitecture.com/hangzhou/WESTLAKE.htm.
In the north, homes faced inward so that only a back wall was presented to the street, but southern homes faced outward in a more neighborly manner. (See http://depts.washington.edu/chinaciv/home/3homintr.htm for some images and information about homes.) A home made of bamboo and wood could be erected in a few hours and was light enough to be moved. The roof was the most important component; it usually had two slopes and its timbers might be carved and painted. Stone was not used in home construction or in governmental buildings; it was to be used only in building Buddhist towers, street paving, ramparts, dikes, and some bridges.
Government buildings and the homes of high-ranking officials began to have upturned edges after 1000 ad, making Eastern buildings curved in comparison to the flat Western styles. A decree dictated that only these two types of buildings were allowed to have either upturned edges or terra cotta ornamentation. A terra cotta figure placed along an eave or the roof ridge usually depicted a dragon or phoenix. Some temple photographs can be found at the Hamilton College website www.hamilton.edu/academics/Asian/TempleCulture.html.
In wealthy homes, scrolls with fine calligraphy were hung on the walls or a landscape scene might be made to cover an entire wall, see http://academic.reed.edu/chinese/chin-hum/landscapepaintings/landscape.html. Antiques, perfume, incense, mosquito smoke, and terra cotta animal figures were used as home decoration. Decorative flowers included peonies, chrysanthemums, daphne, magnolia, orchids, and blossoms from fruit trees. The fanciest homes also had pine tree, flower, and rock gardens and had ponds with gold- and silver-colored fish. These decorative fish were raised in commercial quantities on the edge of town. The homeowner might build little hills duplicating the layout of famous mountain sites, complete with winding streams and waterfalls. (Visit http://depts.washington.edu/chinaciv/home/3garintr.htm for examples of home gardens.) Some families kept cats and dogs for pets.
People sat cross-legged in wide armchairs that had heavy backs. Smaller chairs began arriving from India after 1000 ad. Small, rectangular tables were placed low to the ground. Bedding consisted of rush mats, screens and a pillow. Beds were sometimes enclosed on three sides by panels painted with landscape scenery. The furniture of wealthy people were painted black; only the emperor was allowed to have a red-painted bed. In some homes, beds were placed on hollow pipes that received heat from the cooking stove.
During the fifth to ninth centuries ad, art consisted of paintings, scrolls, towers, statues made of bronze or stone, and Buddhist sanctuaries carved out of existing mountains. For example, in the eight century, a 324-foot (100 meter) high statue of the divine Maitreya was carved out of a single rock. For some examples of art, visit http://depts.washington.edu/chinaciv/painting/4ptgintr.htm or www.chinapage.com/main2.html.
In more ancient times, art and entertainment had been mainly consumed by the palace, temple, and aristocracy, but the demand for art and entertainment increased with the size of the urban population. The streets and parks of Hangchow were filled with entertainment, as was every private celebration. Storytelling expanded as drama and the novel developed. Poetry competitions were held and the best of the entered works were being published. Most popular were poems of failure and disgrace, the passing of time, and the pain of parting.
In China, painting and literature developed together. Since the same brush is used for both painting and calligraphy, which is art in itself, a poet writing in calligraphy was already an artist. Paintings were often accompanied by a poem written in calligraphy. Visit http://depts.washington.edu/chinaciv/callig/callmain.htm for examples of calligraphy and http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/chinese/index.html for on-line literature from China.
In previous centuries, art was seen to be magic. Sung artists wanted instead to make lifelike representations that almost breathe and live. Artists sought to capture the moment and its mood, even its temperature–for example, a cat's eye dilated in the midday sun. A painting might simultaneously depict a landscape from several angles to help viewers put themselves into that place. Artists were now making accurate drawings of buildings, palaces, bridges, homes, plants and animals, children at play and other scenes of daily life. Some artists sought to work in an ecstatic state of delirium brought on by abstaining from food and sex.
Both rich and poor bought these paintings but for the most part, the number of professional artists grew with the number of merchants having money to spend and children to teach. People were making, selling, and buying art and new styles were continually developing. There were twenty drama, music, and dance schools in Hangchow teaching various singing styles, ballet, and puppet and marionette show-making. Musical instruments included Chinese and Central Asian flutes, a xylophone with either six or nine elements, a three- or four-stringed guitar, and reed panpipes made from dried calabash. Puppet shows presented stories of romance, ghosts, history mixed in with fiction, genies, demons, heroes with superhuman strength and skill, social stories denouncing corruption, crime and clever judges resolving difficult cases, stories recounting the life of the Buddha, or stories of strange and wondrous things.
Stories about wondrous things include the following examples. There once was a family who returned home one day to find their house occupied by a giant. The family tried everything it could to get rid of the giant who simply ignored their efforts. Finally, the giant simply became bored and left. Another story concerned one man's dream of his murderer gaining revenge for having been killed by him in a previous life. A popular story described how one day, a group of ten students sought protection from the rain by huddling together and running while holding a single, large mat over their heads but are mistaken for a twenty-legged monster. And there was a tale of a shipwrecked man who lived on an island for thirteen years before returning with his islander wife.
Block printing had long been used to mass-produce single-page religious tracts, images, and money. In fact, books began to be printed in the ninth century. Almanacs, astrological works, and dictionaries and such were among the first books to be printed. Visit http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/images/book-868.jpg to see the first printed book, made in the year 868 ad. Confucian classics were first printed through the years 932 to 953. The Buddhist cannon was first printed during the years 960 to 971. The number of printed increased through the tenth century. There were treatises on mushrooms, fish, crabs, flowers, calligraphy, geography, rocks, jades, coins, inks, bamboo, plum trees, and Chinese history. There were catalogs of useful or interesting facts concerning, for example, cleaning and hygiene. For one thing, the existence of books meant that whenever a literate person felt like it, he or she could enjoy the old stories that in the past could only be heard whenever a bard was around to tell them. But with books came many new stories and topics.
In the year 950, an attempt was made to make movable type out of baked clay, but this project was not pursued because of the fact that about 7,000 different pieces of type are needed to make the 7,000 characters used in the Chinese system of writing. In addition, the excess of available calligraphers meant that the machinery was not needed. About five hundred years later, Europeans would get around to mechanized printing but require just twenty-six pieces of type for their twenty-six letter alphabet. (We’ll see the origin of upper and lower case letters later on in this chapter.)
The twelfth and thirteenth century Sung scholars–for example, Chu Hsi (1130-1200)–were not satisfied by just repeating old ideas. They were renewing art and thought and were reinterpreting the classics and many other ideas, too. For many centuries, cosmology had been despised by Confucianism but now, the origin and evolution of the universe was being linked with ethics because people were believed to be in harmony with the universe. (Those of us humans who are Hopi have a similar belief.) In Buddhism, world and mind are one and the same.
Bathing, cosmetics, and clothing
Hangchow had hundreds of bath houses that also offered tea, alcohol, and massages and were identified by a pot hung over their front door. In the city, the bath houses were popular but some people thought it unlucky to bathe on the days of the rat or hare. Locals preferred bathing in cold water and then splashing hot water on their face. Some bath houses also offered hot bath water, which was warmed by immersing hot stone or metal, for visiting Arab merchants who were more accustomed to Turkish steam baths. In country villages, as was the case for most of us humans until the last century or so, bathing occurred only on the day we were born and again on the day we died.
Toothbrushes did not yet exist but toilet paper was already in use. Some men used oil to make their hair smooth and shiny, and some women used a vegetable-based ointment to protect their facial skin from the winter cold. Pink nail polish was made from crushed balsam leaves. Eyebrow plucking and penciling had been popular since the year 0 ad. Cosmetics, jewelry, and a metal mirror was kept in a box made of lacquered wood, jade, gold, or silver.
We kept warm by wearing layers of quilted clothing and used fur- and silk-lined coats. The wealthy wore fine clothing made from silk, while the common people wore clothing made from hemp. (A painting of two people making silk can be seen at http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/images/silk1.jpg and a governmental manual of silkmaking is shown at http://depts.washington.edu/chinaciv/clothing/11sericu.htm.) Cotton had not yet arrived in China though it was already being grown and used for clothing in Southeast Asia. Everyone wore girdles, which were often decorated with pieces of Indian rhino horn brought by Arab merchants. Footwear consisted of leather shoes, satin slippers, or wooden or hemp sandals. Commoners and soldiers wore trousers, which were first brought to China from Mongolia during the fourth century bc. Marco Polo said there were many elegant dressers in Hangchow. Clothing styles were used to indicate rank among the upper class, almost as rank is indicated in the military. Imperial decree dictated the shape and type of headgear, who was allowed to carry a parasol, and robe colors (see http://udel.edu/~orzada/china4.htm), but these rules were being dropped after 1300 ad. (See http://depts.washington.edu/chinaciv/clothing/clotweb.htm for images of clothing.)
Except for Buddhist monks, every man wore a hat–usually a turban, and occupation-wide hat styles were often adopted by practitioners. Some people wore round, straw hats in the rain. Men were clean-shaven but might have side whiskers or a goatee, while children's heads were shaven except for a tuft of hair in the front. Women wore hairpins made from fashionable materials, and both men and women carried round fans as a new fashion was brewing for folded fans brought from Korea.
There was a great variety of food in China because it is a large land covering many climates. For example there were already eleven varieties of apricot, eight types of pear, and nine kinds of rice. There were no dairy cows or dairy products in China but there were many varieties of tea. Moving outward from China, tea use slowly made its way west along the Islamic equator and then to Africa, Europe, and America. Since tea preparation requires boiled water, there were health benefits–or rather, illness avoidances–for tea drinkers. Throughout the last few thousand years in much of the world, beer has usually been safer to drink than water for the same reason. About fifty varieties of spiced rice wine were made, leaving little need for imported grape wine. Wine was served at body temperature after being warmed by placing its container in heated water. Taverns sold wine and thirst-building salted foods. Drunkenness was a popular diversion.
There were no food taboos but some fervent Taoists abstained from cereals and some Buddhists avoided onions, garlic, meat, and eggs. Its likely that some restaurants in Hangchow specialized in proper Islamic food for visiting Arab merchants. Dates were a curiosity brought by Arab merchants.
Fritters were common as were cakes made from flour, peas, sugar-beans, and candied fruits. The general population ate rice, salt fish, and pork, including livers, lights, kidneys, and intestines called "offal." Dogs were rarely eaten by anyone. Though water-powered de-husking mortars existed, rice was usually sold with husks still attached. Each family removed them before making meals. Wealthy families ate little of these things. They instead ate mutton, shell fish, deer, rabbit, partridge, pheasant, quail, and francolin along with fowl, geese, and fresh fish obtained from the lake. One writer warned that donkey and horse meat were sometimes passed off as deer meat.
People ate at dawn, midday, and again at dusk. For each meal, wealthy people had servants prepare numerous dishes, each in a small quantity. These were served in small porcelain dishes and eaten with chopsticks and spoons. Servants were to cut everything into bite-sized pieces, as is still done today–even in restaurants.
The daily operation of this hand-run but massive city was accomplished through its organization. A middle class of urban merchants emerged during the eleventh through thirteenth centuries. But, Hangchow had but a tiny upper class and a huge poor class; most of the residents were living off the bare minimum. The newly emerging merchant class had to overcome barriers erected by the upper and imperial classes. (Later, we'll see that the same barriers existed for the merchants of Europe.)
The number of persons living in the street increased with the price of rice. The government distributed rice and cash to the homeless during heavy snowfalls, prolonged periods of cold, and festivals. When receiving a promotion, an official traditionally distributed cash to the poor, sometimes by anonymously slipping money under doorways. In the fifth century, Buddhism had introduced charitable institutions, including hospitals, alms-houses, dispensaries, and distribution centers, but the government confiscated many of these in the year 845 and began running its own hospitals for the old, poor, or infirm.
Hangchow trade occurred in four ways: there were state-controlled portions, large-scale trade on the sea and rivers, some luxury trade, and there was trade in the main food supplies. The size of businesses varied from small grocers to shipbuilders. The state set prices for the main products of consumption. In turn, this affected the price of many related products.
Fifteen specialized markets were spread around town. There were markets for each of crab, fish, vegetables, cloth, crab, flowers, olives, oranges, oil, pearls and precious stones, medicinal plants, and books. Salted fish was sold in two hundred Hangchow shops. Restaurants had a variety of hot and cold items that were grilled, roasted, or served raw, including salted fish, and they served noodles with either pork, vegetables, fish, or leeks.
There were numerous varieties of rice. Each day, rice was brought into town and bought by wholesalers who sold it to agents who in turn sold it to shops. The rice shops did not pay for rice at the moment it was delivered to them but contracted instead to pay a few days later. Pork and fish were similarly handled by systems of farmers and fishers, transporters, wholesalers, and shopkeepers.
Small shops were family owned and hired no other employees. Small shops sold for twenty-five strings of cash and earned 1% of that amount each day. If the child of a wealthy family failed the bureaucratic entrance exam then that family night purchase a shop in which that child would sell a certain luxury product to the upper class. That child was called "a shopkeeper by accident" and might become a bookseller, pharmacist, or dentist or sell clothing to the upper class but would not be a noodlemaker or butcher because those occupations were considered low class by the wealthy.
Various shops sold cloth, crafts, wares, wicker products, turbans, fans, toys, spices, rice wine, noodles, fruits, thread, incense, candles, oil, soy sauce, salt fish, pork, and rice. Luxury shops sold perfume, eyebrow blackener, fake hair, jewelry, gold or silver hair ornaments, ivory combs, darts, chess games, oiled paper for windows, calligraphy works, paintings, mosquito-fighting powders, and cats along with the fish to feed them. Marco Polo said the wide range of available goods made Hangchow the greatest city in the world.
There were guilds for each of type of merchant, artisan, and professional, including jewelers, gilders, gluemakers, antique dealers, art dealers, doctors, soothsayers, scavengers, bootmakers, bath house operators and merchants who sold crab, olives, honey, or ginger. Each guild exercised a general control over its members, helped those with no family, and insisted on integrity. A persons could get sixty cane strikes for selling substandard goods or for not meeting regulations. Many Arab merchants said that Chinese merchants were scrupulously honest. Guilds had patron saints who were either legendary or deified heroes. The state requisitioned goods and services simply by informing the guilds of its needs. There were labor guilds, also.
Servants, laborers, and peddlers
In the crowded city, labor services were highly specialized. There were gardeners, secretaries, accountants, concubines, singers, travel guards, embroiderers, and lots of household servants each having a specific function. One household servant saw to the furniture or decorations, another kept the fireplace going or the rooms lit or was in charge of tea and alcohol, and yet another sent out invitations to marriages and funerals. There were cooks and various kitchen staff. Wealthy homes might hire their own jewelers, ivory carvers, embroiderers, tutors, storytellers, musicians, chess players, horseman, copyists, messengers, riddlers, insect trainers, and militia. While the largest homes employed dozens of persons, shops and restaurants employed as few as possible.
Servants were to be submissive and show respect for their bosses who in turn were to treat their employees as family members but many servants complained of being at the boss’s beck and call for long hours and that the slightest fault was punished. Servants often married a co-worker. Urban workers could have relative security compared to the rural farmer, but not at all times.
There were many street peddlers selling hot water, cooked food, horoscopes, sugarcane, toys, and sweets shaped like animals. Some vendors went door to door visiting his or her set of standard customers–often passing gossip along the way. Peddlers announced their arrival by pounding on wood or metal or using their own personal street call; those having the best street calls were invited to the emperor's palace during certain festivals. Peddlers picked up their goods from the wholesaler at dawn and kept 10% of the income from sales.
There were a large number of prostitutes, and they usually had trouble breaking free of their "protectors." Male prostitutes were allowed during some periods and not allowed during others. Crime in the city consisted of the usual bogus good sellers, thieves, swindlers, ruffians, and burglars. Occasionally a gang would block off a street to rob people.
State monopolies, taxes, and currency
Taxes were paid in goods during the Tang dynasty but by the Sung dynasty, they were being paid in currency. The government collected sales taxes and transport fees in addition to the revenue obtained from its monopolies in salt, tea, liquors, and incense. (Still today, nations in Southeast Asia fund themselves through monopolies on a few products.) The state also rented apartments and many state-owned taverns included prostitutes. The state owned many large farms growing crops to feed its army.
Coins were made of copper or tin and had square holes in their center so they could be strung together and more-easily carried, see http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/core9/phalsall/images/tangcoin.jpg. Strings of one-hundred coins were commonly exchanged. Paper money first appeared in the year 1000 ad in the form of a receipt for money deposited in one place that was to be collected in another, hence the nickname "flying money" (see http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/images/papmny.jpg for an early example of paper money.) The first state-issued notes were redeemable in salt or tea but silver- or gold-backed notes were soon being block-printed in huge quantities. The paper notes included serial numbers, series numbers, inscriptions, and a warning that counterfeiters would be decapitated and rewards given to reporters. At this time paper currency was unknown in Europe–as was paper, itself. Europe would soon acquire papermaking techniques through trade with Arabs.
Quality dishware, which later Europeans would call "China," was being exported throughout the world. The quality of clay dishware, from earthenware to porcelain, is determined by the temperature of the oven in which it is made. The technique needed to make porcelain, which requires the highest temperature, was known only in China until a couple centuries ago. The manufacturing of ceramics was the specialty of many Chinese regions, including Kiangsi, Checkiang, and Fukien and there were two ceramics factories in Hangchow.
Tea, salt, silk, earthenware, and porcelain were traded internally throughout China and also through overseas exports to Japan, India, Persia, the East African coast, Malaysia and southeast Asia, the Philippines, and the islands of the South Pacific. China also exported gold, silver, lead, and tin and it imported coral, agate, pearls, crystals, incense, camphor, cloves, cardamom, rare sandalwood and aloe, rhino horns from Bengal, and ivory from India and Africa. When we think of long distance trade we should think of individual persons choosing to buy these products to satisfy their own taste and sense of fashion.
Chinese vessels, which were called junks, were made with watertight compartments to reduce the risk of sinking. Junks had four-man oars, stone anchors, and mat or canvas sails and usually towed a smaller boat carrying water and wood. The largest junks carried six hundred people and tons of goods–and dwarfed the boats made by anyone else in the world. Each junk had to carry a license describing its cargo and naming each crew member. The compass had long been used to navigate across land. Because of ship-building advances, by the year 1100 the compass was also being used to navigate over the oceans. Through Arab intermediaries, the compass would make its way to Europe in a few centuries.
The country farmers and laborers were often living a subsistence lifestyle and did not experience the luxuries enjoyed by wealthy persons living in the city. Often a young peasant's only choice was to join the military even though the population mostly disliked soldiers. In the Huai salt marshes there were 280,000 families–about one-million persons–working for subsistence wages in a condition of semi-slavery. (Throughout the remainder of this book, keep in mind that we want to gauge our civilization-building efforts in terms of the quality of life we can together achieve for all of us–not just for a small percentage of us. Each of us gives our life’s efforts to the whole of society and expects equal benefits from its results.)
There was a range in the size of farmsteads. There were small, family farms, there were large estates, and there were tenant farmers. Some farmers rented or shared a plowing buffalo; others pulled a plow manually, see http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/core9/phalsall/images/plw1.gif. Oil lamps were used on the farm but not in the fire-prone city.
Bad years meant debt and famine or the sale of the farmer's land, and some suicides. Some farmers had to indenture their children for six year's service in exchange for two hundred bushels of rice or millet; a sibling would have to replace a child who died while indentured. Urban populations continued to increase as peasants moved to the cities in search of a better life.
Loans were made to farmers for either a flat fee of 50% of their next harvest or at an interest rate of 20% per month. A two by forty foot (0.5 x 36 meter) strip of silk would be loaned for a period of six months with an interest charge of forty bushels of rice or millet. If that same quantity of silk was not returned after the six-month period had elapsed then the interest charge was raised to forty bushels of rice or millet per month.
Some laborers signed contracts to do farm work from February to October. They earned a monthly wage of eight bushels of rice or millet plus one shirt and a pair of shoes and trousers and had to replace any baskets, knives, hoes, or spades broken while working. Work was done from dawn until dusk and might be timed with a water clock. Sometimes the pace of work was led by a drummer. Farm workers had a break during winter months and worked hardest from June through September. (For videos of rice cultivation in recent Nepal, visit www.digitalhimalaya.com/collections/thakarchive/rice.)
On the farm, some men would winnow and some women would weave. Silkworm raising and weaving were time consuming chores. Children tended pigs and chickens, fetched water, collected scarce firewood, and were lucky to attend school as few villages had schools in which arithmetic and writing could be learned.
Gernet explains that people living in Sung China were polite, courteous, humorous, kind to foreign merchants, and had a taste for social life and conversation. They loved fashion and display, art and poetry, humorous puns and word-play, and the pursuit of pleasure, alcohol, and sex. They showed self-discipline, gaiety, and charm. They believed society operated through human warmth and sympathy and through the exchange of gifts and services.
We next look at some of the details of Medieval European life. We'll see that people spent a few centuries throwing out an unfair manorial system that obligated peasant to lord and we’ll see that the recognition that previous times were better resulted in the European Renaissance and the questioning of everything.
The following description of life in thirteenth-century European farming villages and cities is a summary of two books by Frances and Joseph Gies: Life in a Medieval Village, which includes details of Elton, England, and Life in a Medieval City, which focuses somewhat on Troyes, France. (To see picture of Troyes, you might like to visit http://vieuxtroyes.free.fr/t/engindex.htm). They have written many fascinating books about life and technology in Medieval Europe. You might like to read their entire set of books. The Gies chose to describe thirteenth-century England because written documents were becoming abundant by then; they were scarce before the year 1066 ad. You might like to visit Past Perfect: the virtual archaeology of Durham and Northumberland at www.pastperfect.info to view many videos of England, including the Bronze, Roman, Anglo Saxon, and Medieval Ages. Visit www.virtuallyhistorical.com for virtual reality tours of past places. The BBC website has several animations and virtual reality tours at www.bbc.co.uk/history/multimedia_zone. Visit www.museeguimet.fr/gb/pages/page_id18569_u1l2.htm for hundreds of paintings depicting medieval life. For architecture, visit http://www.pitt.edu/~medart. Visit www.regia.org for descriptions and photos of medieval Europe, including information about occupations and everyday life. See photos of today’s buildings in Elton and Ramsey Abbey at www.imagesofengland.org.uk. See www.lepg.org for a description of daily life in sixteenth-century France. To view original documents involving all aspects of medieval life visit www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook1j.html.
No humans lived in the area of present day England until after 4000 bc because it had been covered by ice for the previous fifty thousand years. When people did arrive in England, after the ice had retreated, they did not take long to begin building large stone monuments. Stonehenge began to be built around the year 3100 bc (See www.stonehenge-avebury.net for panoramic tours of Stonehenge and Avebury. Panoramic views of many other sites can be found at www.britishtours.com/360 and a virtual reality flythrough can be seen at www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/5579/stonehenge.html. Large stone monuments were built by prehistoric farmers in many regions of the world. Panoramic views of many megalith sites around Europe can be seen at www.stonepages.com.)
We saw that farming spread slowly from south to north across Europe. European farming villages typically had a head person along with a group of elders, as explained by Darvill in Prehistoric-Britain. The largest villages contained fifty to sixty houses, which corresponds to about 300 persons, and farmed about 430 acres (100 hectares). This is seven acres (three hectares) of food per family. (The Buster Ancient Farm is a living museum you can visit on the web at www.butser.org.uk. You might also like to take a virtual tour of the iron-age Castell Henllys site by visiting www.castellhenllys.com.)
Until about 600 bc, European farmers utilized the slash, burn, and abandon system in which land was cleared to be farmed and then abandoned after a few harvests. An ox would be used to drag a metal-pointed stick along the ground to allow sowing. After farming one piece of land for a few years it would be abandoned as the farmers moved on to new ground. The decision to move on was made communally through the clan or tribe. After 600 bc, farmers began using a two field system in which one of two fields would be planted in alternating years while the other was left unplanted to give it a year to recover. The farmers would stay in this location for several generations. For those of us humans living in seventh-century Europe, this was our way of life, passed from one generation to the next. Consider also for a moment the fact that the Medieval Europeans did not sprout from nothing; they possessed what was essentially world-wide farming and metalworking knowledge (at this time, population levels had not yet reached iron-making levels on the American continents), and this knowledge had already had a 9,000-year history of development.
Harvested grain was ground by laying it on one stationary stone and then hand rotating a second stone that rested on top of the grain. Grain was poured into a hole drilled though the center of the upper stone. To rotate the upper stone, a wooden handle was placed into a vertical slot in its edge and pulled around by hand. The grain was ground as it made its way outward and emerged from between the outer edges of the two stones.
The farmers dug underground "sunken huts" to store produce but sometimes lived in these huts during the winter months. Later, they built timber-framed buildings covered with branches and clay. This wattle-and-daub house was the typical human home throughout most of the pre-industrial, farming world. The family might live in one end of the home while their animals lived in the other.
A typical village would first contain four farmsteads and seven buildings. After one hundred years it would have grown to contain nineteen large and seven small buildings and then thirty-five large and fourteen small buildings after three hundred years. It would then be abandoned due to decreased farming conditions, a drop in population, or raids by outsiders. Throughout Europe, there were two to five persons per square kilometer. There was abundant land but few persons. Still, in just a matter of centuries the land would be full of people.
After about 50 bc, the Romans forcibly expanded into Europe. You might like to read Julius Caesar's description of his military battles with the native tribes of Europe, see http://classics.mit.edu/Caesar/gallic.html or The Battle for Gaul, and then compare it to a description of the people of the United States and their forcible expansion across North America. Both are similar.
The Romans introduced peas and a few other crops along with the addition of a plow moldboard that turned the soil.(For Medieval technology, see http://scholar.chem.nyu.edu/tekpages/Technology.html.) They brought well and irrigation systems and increased knowledge of fertilizer. As trade grew between Rome and city-less, rural Europe, Rome built roads to carry this trade. The Romans also brought 500-acre (200 hectare), serf- or slave-manned manors or plantations. The serfs would work both their own land and that of the plantation lord, too. The lord lived in a stone manor house. Some manor houses had water moats to keep livestock inside and stock predators outside. You might like to visit www.villa-rustica.de for an on-line tour of a Roman Villa occupied from the first through third centuries ad.
After the Roman Empire dissolved, around 450 ad, European roads, towns, and trade decayed. Many Southern European plantation lords became entangled in a feudal system of mutual aid obligations. (We saw a similar decay in towns and trade producing a feudal system in the Mesopotamian "dark age" after 1,000 bc.) In Southern Europe, some Mediterranean villages were enclosed within the walls of a hilltop castle, while their farmland surrounded those walls. Christianity arrived in England in the fifth century ad, just as Islam was about to spread across Northern Africa. (We see that Christianity and Islam spread more quickly than had farming.)
When Atila's Huns swung through Europe, around the year 450 ad, many towns turned to the Catholic Bishops for leadership because the Bishops had filled part of the power vacuum left by the vacating Romans. But then also, some Bishops and manor lords sacked their own neighbors. Various towns tried hiding, bargaining, fighting, or building walls and castles to protect against attackers who at this time had nothing but hand-thrown projectiles. Town-fortresses dotted Europe by 950 ad but there was no comparison between these towns and the large cities of contemporary China and Islam, or some in the Americas, either. European towns consisted of cattle barns and workshops around a church.
The majority of the manors were not fortified towns or castles but small farming villages. The system of lord's manors spread northward, arriving in France in the ninth century. Invading from Norman France in the year 1066, William the Conqueror imposed the manorial system in England wherever it did not already exist. (What did William conquer? England had only eighteen towns having a population of more than two thousand persons.) Both the earlier Anglo-Saxon and Danish invasions of England, which occurred after Rome's departure, brought waves of immigrants who left some enduring customs. The Roman and Norman conquests instead brought small power groups. These two sorts of invasions of either populations or power groups have occurred throughout the world.
The first-to-be-permanent towns of Northwestern Europe were built in the tenth century ad and consisted of a wooden church and a stone manor house. Through the centuries, the wooden churches were rebuilt in stone. Many of these earliest permanent towns are Europe's largest cities today, some 1,000 years later. (This growth through a 1,000-year span of time illustrates the meaning of a millennium. We saw the passage of several millennia in Ancient Mesopotamia.) Many European towns were first established as Benedictine monasteries–for example, Monk's town, which is Munich, Germany. Other towns grew from military forts. For example Dublin, Ireland began as a ninth-century Viking base camp. (The Vikings raided nearly every town as far south as France.) See www.trytel.com/~tristan/towns/towns.html for information about a particular town.
The Gies say Hilton has estimated that 45% of villages had a population of four to six hundred persons and that the population of 10% of the villages were larger while the remaining 45% were smaller. In the year 1086, the King of England ordered a survey, known as the Domesday Book, of the homes and wealth of England so that he could arrange for efficient tax collection. The survey records 1,300 villages and 275,000 households for a total population of 1.5 to 2 million persons. The population may have previously been higher in late Roman times. Six thousand water mills are also included in the survey and were used to grind grain.
Within the Medieval English village, each wattle-and-daub house occupied a small plot surrounded by a hedge, fence, or ditch and each home plot had vegetable, herb, and spice gardens. Every village had a communal water well from which each family obtained their daily water. Homes had no privy, instead people would walk a "bowshot" from the house. (Luckily, a bowshot is farther than a teaser can throw a rock.)You might like to visit www.pastperfect.info/sites/thrislington/clips/cottageclip.html to view a flyby of a medieval cottage. Visit http://loki.stockton.edu/~ken/wharram/peasant.htm for a view of a peasant house (this is part of http://loki.stockton.edu/~ken/wharram/wharram.htm).
The "crutch" house frame soon arrived from the Continent but roofs continued to be thatched for centuries, even in London. This roof contained all sorts of insects, birds, and rodents and easily caught fire but was cheap and easy to make. Some people might sleep in the house loft. Houses were usually ten by twenty feet (3 by 4 meters) but sometimes 45 feet long (15 meters), with people and their animals staying on opposite ends. Animals and children wandered freely through the home's open door. Homes sometimes had shuttered windows and always had dirt floors. Its dirt floor would be covered with straw or rushes–and scented flowers during the spring. Peat or wood was burned on a raised stone hearth placed in the middle of the house and the resulting smoke exhausted through a simple hole in the roof. For safety, the fireplace might be covered with a ceramic lid at night. Each home contained a single generation from a single family. Clans had been important in earlier Germany, France, and Anglo-Saxon England, but by now had dissolved.
Instead of using one name only, people began adding a new and descriptive "last name." Their last name might indicate their occupation, a personality trait, or the location of their home. For example, a person who lived near the well or the village green might be called John Atwell or Robert Green. Other last names might be Wise, Tanner, Fuller, or Smith.
Many couples conceived before marrying in order to know for certain they were both capable of doing so before becoming committed for life to a barren spouse. The manor lord would charge women–but not men–a fine of six pennies when caught having premarital sex. (Yes, they were actually taxing sex.) When persons being married owned land, the lord collected a merchet fee from the newlywed. To be married, a woman was expected to be at least twelve years old and her husband was to be at least fourteen.
Marriage ceremonies often consisted of "a kiss and a promise." Since this allowed too much room for future debate about that promise, Pope Alexander III (1159-1181) set rules for exchanging wedding vows in public. these vows were then often done at the door of a church and followed by a feast and a dance. (In Chapter 9, we saw that the Kalapalo know which neighborhood couples were married because they are often seen sharing food.) Medieval marriage customs are described at www.drizzle.com/~celyn/mrwp/faqintro.html. Licenses became mandatory under The Marriage Act of 1753. For a discussion of eighteenth-century marriage and weddings, see www.umich.edu/~ece/student_projects/wedding_bride/index.html.
Wedding ceremonies became more elaborate through the centuries. The priest would ask if anyone knew a reason the couple could not be married–for example, due to a blood relationship of less than the fourth degree. The groom counted the bride's first three fingers by saying the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost and then placed a ring on the bride's fourth finger. It was believed that a vein connected that finger with her heart. At the end of the ceremony, the priest would kiss the groom, who in turn would kiss the bride. Wedding vows were beginning to be legally verified by witnesses. In the city, shop owners would have a gargantuan wedding feast with entertainment by magicians, acrobats, jugglers, and musicians. The musicians might be playing the newly invented six-stringed lute or the five-stringed viol, which was the first bowed instrument (for the history of the Lute, visit www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/icon/icon.html and see www.luminarium.org/medlit/lyrics.htm for pictures and sounds). Both were tuned in fourths and fifths and accompanied by other instruments.
The lord also fined persons committing adultery and then sent the case for further prosecution by the court of the church. Divorce was more common among the aristocracy than among the villagers and was usually due to either barren or "bad" marriages.
Mothers gave birth from a crouching position (we’ll see that this practice continued to be used in nineteenth-century North America). Childbirth was dangerous for both mother and child, and the infant remained especially vulnerable to disease during its first year of life. Men were excluded from the room (except for the son being born) when a woman was giving birth. To "aid" in the delivery, every door and drawer was opened within the house and all knots were untied; in addition, the dried blood of a crane and its right foot were placed nearby (How is this related to the story of the delivery stork we hear today?). Catholic priests discouraged the use of magical incantations. Some believed that twins occurred when their mother had slept with two different men. One astrologer said that such multiple births were normal and predicted that if a woman gave birth to a set of seven babies, she would have three boys, three girls, and one hermaphrodite. Birth defects were attributed to supernatural causes.
Children were born at home with the aid of a midwife who quickly rubbed the newborn with magic ointments and salt and then wiped its gums with honey. If the mother died before completing the delivery, the midwife was to cut the baby out in an attempt to save its life or at least to baptize it. The newborn was immediately baptized lest it "die in a state of original sin." If nothing but its head emerged during an unsuccessful delivery attempt, it could still be baptized. The newborn was then washed, sometimes swaddled, its godparents were summoned, and it was carried to the church by a female relative for full baptism. The occasion was then celebrated with a feast in which the home's best material possessions were displayed for all to see. Parishes began keeping written birth records in the fifteenth century.
The mother of the newborn was not to make bread, cook food, or touch holy water and she was not to enter the church building for several weeks after giving birth. She was then "churched," as had been Mary, by carrying a lighted candle to church while wearing her wedding clothes. The priest met her at the door and sprinkled holy water on her. If she had died during delivery then her midwife took her place in the churching ceremony. When leaving the church, if she happened to glance at either a small boy, an evil person, or a person with a defect then it was believed her next child would be a boy, an evil person, or one with that same defect (we saw that the Kalapalo had cautions about glances and such). Why did the Medieval European do these things? They would answer: “Because it has always been so.”
In the village, children were nursed by their own mothers, but wet nurses were often used for children born in the city or castle. Wet nurses were sweetened with gifts but might also be blamed for the baby's illness. If the baby became ill, a doctor would give medicine to the wet nurse.
Children were strictly disciplined and given physical punishment but they were also indulged. Dolls were made of wood or baked clay. Tops, horseshoes, and marbles were used for toys. Children played prisoner's base and blind man's bluff and they would bowl, swim, wrestle, and play dice, chess, checkers, and forms of football and tennis. Ice skates were made from horse ribs. Infants under one-year of age were left alone in the home while their parents worked. Toddlers were watched by a neighbor’s girl. Small children played while older children worked– teenagers were doing the same work that adults were doing.
Old age, death, and inheritance
When people became too old to work, their children began supported them by working their parent's land for them. If an aging person had no children to do this, they might contract with someone to work the land, and in this case, the lessee would give a portion of the income to the leaser. Monks received a daily pension of two loaves of bread and two gallons of ale. Lay people might choose to purchase this pension. In the city, some old people died begging in the streets.
A priest would be summoned when death was close. The priest would be proceeded by a person carrying a lantern and ringing a bell. If the priest said the last rites to the dying person and then that person survived after all, he or she would be expected to go barefoot and abstain from sex until death did come. Upon death, the body was washed and sometimes covered with linen and then sewn into a deerskin cover. The door of the deceased's home was draped in black and a town-crier announced the time of the funeral. The deceased was then wrapped in a shroud, covered with a black cloth, and carried to the church on a two-poled bier, which resembled today's stretcher. At the cemetery, mass was said and a sermon might be given before the person was buried in a plain wooden coffin. Some persons were buried without any coffin. A tombstone was laid flat on the ground. Poor persons attended the funeral with lighted candles and received donations from the loudly mourning family. The funeral would likely be followed by drunken fun–despite complaints from the church. After a few years, bones might be dug up and stacked so the burial plot could be re-used.
Inheritance could be complicated. Land usually passed to the oldest son, or if none then to the oldest daughter or split among multiple daughters. If the oldest son was a minor then the manor took him in until he reached legal age. If no children existed then the land went to brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins. If there were none of these then the manor sold the deceased’s land to a villager. If the oldest son died still a minor before taking possession of the land then it instead went to his father's brother. A person's best animal had to be given to the lord as an inheritance tax. Widows legally received one-third to one-half the land but often owned all of it. Peasant women inherited, bought, sold, and leased land.
The oldest son had to wait for his father to die before he possessed the assets enabling him to marry. Since younger sons would not be inheriting, they instead became soldiers or paid a fee to the lord to enter the clergy. This single, large fee was meant to make up for the many smaller fees that would have been paid had the person remained on the manor. Some fathers bought small plots for their younger sons, other sons became an apprentice in a city, and the rest became day laborers earning pennies a day.
Holidays, entertainment, and clothing
Each season included holidays during which work was suspended, meat and cheese were eaten, stories and music were heard, and games were played. Adult games included plow races, football, wrestling, archery, team games with sticks and balls, cockfighting, bowling, checkers, backgammon, chess, blind man's bluff, prisoner's base, and the much favored dice games. Young women held village men in "prison" until they paid a fine to get out; on the next day men held women prisoner. For Medieval games, visit www.waks.org/game-hist/ and www.regia.org/games.htm and for music, see www.medieval.org/emfaq.
Many Christian holidays were essentially unchanged pagan celebrations appropriated by the church. For example, November first was All Hollows day, which was an old pagan rite meant to propitiate the spirits of the dead. (It should be noted that there was no continental-wide calendar as each city followed its own–even disagreeing on which year it was.) Other celebrations included older pagan elements. For example, during the Feast of the Circumcision, the minor clergy wore their vestments inside out, held their books upside down, lead an ass into church, interrupted services with shouts of hee haw, and then sang and danced in the streets. During the feast of the Holy Innocents, choir boys exchanged places with bishops and officials and conducted services.
Greek and Roman theater had been completely forgotten but Christmas and Easter sermons were being proceeded by dialogue and song, and this activity soon grew again into dramatic stage plays with actors and actresses in costume. Visit http://csis.pace.edu/grendel/projf984b/VM.html for Medieval theater. For Medieval plays, visit www.luminarium.org/medlit/plays.htm. See http://collectorspost.com/Catalogue/medramalinks.htm for Medieval drama links.
Through the High Middle Ages, peasant dress changed little. We wore a belted tunic, stocking, hood, gloves, and leather shoes with wooden soles. But the dress of the nobles changed much during this same period, going from loose, long garments to short, tight, skirted jackets, trailing gowns, voluminous sleeves, elaborate head-dresses, and pointed shoes for women. While the clothing of the rich included many articles and accessories, extravagance in peasant clothing consisted of nothing but fur trimmed sleeves. For samples, see www.virtue.to/articles/extant.html and http://www.ceu.hu/medstud/manual/SRM/costumes1.htm.
Coins of various sizes and copper-silver mixtures were minted by various princes and bishops. (We saw that the origin of metal coins occurred in the Middle East and that of paper money in China.) Throughout Europe, each coin had a value of one penny. A penny was called a pence in England, a denier in France, and a pfennig in Germany. Twelve pennies make a shilling and twenty shillings make a pound. These names were given to multiples of pennies but no such higher denominations were actually minted until a twelve-penny shilling or "grosso" was made in Italy. In France, twenty denier was called a livre. England still uses Lb as the abbreviation of the Latin word for pound. Through the early Medieval Ages, cash slowly replaced barter. What did people buy with cash and how much did it cost? See www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/medievalprices.html for the price of many goods and services.
The office calculating board consisted of lines of counters made of bone. Different lines were used to count each of pennies, shillings, and pounds–that is, multiples of ones, twelves, and twenties. Records were kept on tablets but important correspondence was written on parchment, which was made from sheep skin. Egyptian Papyrus was made from dried grass leaves, vellum was made from calfskin soaked in lime, and in China, paper was made from cloth. Knowledge of cloth-based paper eventually came to Europe through Arab traders.
Villagers were classified in various ways by different manors. A person who owned thirty acres (fifteen hectares), which is enough to feed a family, were called virgaters, while those owning half that much were classified as half-virgaters. Only those villagers owning fifty or one-hundred acres had a good surplus to sell. A villein, which is the English word for serf, was required to work many days per year doing farming labor services for the lord–virgaters owed 117 days per year while half-virgaters owed 58.5. A day's work was defined in terms of various efforts considered to be equivalent–collecting a bag of nuts, working in a vineyard, making a hedge of a specific length in the field, carrying a specific amount of hay, cheese, hens, geese, or eggs or the harrowing or winnowing of thirty sheaves of barley or twenty-four sheaves of wheat.
The villein or serf was not free but not exactly a slave either. They bought and sold goods and bequeathed and inherited land and property. In one village, records show that peasants sold land 300 times in one century. The amount of land sold was less than one acre in 36% of these transactions, between one and ten acres 57% of the time, and more than ten acres in the remaining 7% of the sales. Some peasants bought or sold when they moved into or out of town. Some bought land for their children and some sought to acquire land they could rent out, becoming a peasant landlord.
About 20% of peasants were virgaters, 33% were half-virgaters, and the remaining 46% held less than ten acres of land, which was too little for subsistence. Typically, 32% of land was held by the lord, 40% by villeins owing labor services, and 28% by freeholders who did not owe labor services.
The Doomsday Book of 1086 (see www.domesdaybook.co.uk) lists five categories of peasantry. Free or unfree persons might own land that might itself owe rents and such. Though the following centuries, these categories became more complex, the free became less free while the slave became more free. By 1300 ad, it didn't matter so much whether you were free or unfree. A person's social standing was increasingly determined by the amount of land and the number of animals he or she owned. (For a legal document announcing the Manumission of a Villein in 1278 Visit www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/manumission.html.)
The village was surrounded by its farmland which was jointly worked by the community. The community jointly decided when to plant, weed, plow, and harvest, which fields would be used (some villages were now planting two of three fields), and which crops would be planted. The joint decision-making process was surely a hold over from the beginnings of full-time farming in the region. Villagers planted mostly wheat because it was the most reliable crop and could readily be sold for cash to the residents of nearby towns. Since wheat sales were used to pay rent and other fees, peasants ate little of the wheat they grew. For their own consumption, peasants planted lesser quantities of rye, barley, and oats and grew some beans, peas, and vegetables. This means that the manor lord and the people living in town were eating a bit better than were the villagers who grew the food. (In the thirteenth century, 10% of the population of Europe was living in towns.)
The use of manure as fertilizer was understood but little was used because few animals could be supported by the available feed. Every cow, horse, and ox eats as much grain as does several persons. (Since today’s cattle eat as much grain as would feed one billion persons, which is one-sixth of the world’s population, some people ask if more of us would be better fed by consuming that grain ourselves.) The community also decided when to let the farm animals eat the stubble within the plowed fields and when the animals would be pastured.
The entire farmland was communally worked by all the families of the village. A typical village would have a few hundred persons working on harvest day. Each family worked on the entire area but owned a strip somewhere within the whole. Various families owned some, none, or much land. Those owning no land might be paid by the day working for those who owned more than they could themselves work. Those villagers owning the most farmland also owed the largest number of labor hours to the lord–those owning no land owed very few hours. The lord typically owned one-fourth of the farmland, which might also consist of many strips among the whole or might be separate from all the others.
To plant their crops, a family would walk through the field tossing handfuls of seed from a bucket. They used two bushels of seed per acre (one-half hectare) of wheat but four bushels per acre of barley, oats, peas, or beans. A villager would be fined by the lord for using too much seed. Seed was exchanged between manors in our 9,000-year-old continuing attempt to improve crops. After the villagers harvesting a field, the poor were allowed to gather what they could from its stubble. After cutting grain, it then had to be gathered, bound, stacked, carted or carried to the barn, threshed with a flail, and winnowed by tossing in the air–as we saw was done in Ancient Mesopotamia. Gleaning was done by the youngest and oldest villagers. The village church received 10% of each farmer's crops and placed its share in the "tithe barn"within the village.
All villagers were required to grind their grain in the lord's water-powered grinding mill, bake their bread in the lord's oven, and pay a fee for the monopolized services. (Does any organization today force you to pay it for a certain monopolized product or service?) Peasants would be fined for grinding their own grain at home. The villagers were also required to repair the lord’s mill whenever it broke down. The lord also collected rents, fines, and fees from the people living within his land. Fines were collected for stealing the lord's peas, hay, or crop stubble or for wounding a person. Fees were paid for marriage licenses and inheritance taxes. Some lords made an effort to adopt the newfangled cash manner of doing business. By the year 1300, even serfs were paying half their rent in cash rather than in labor or in battered goods. The lords also sold in town the produce collected as rent from the manor peasants.
For their own consumption, villagers grew food that was less-expensive and less-desirable, including barley and oats. The daily diet of every villager included ale, pottage, and numerous four-pound loaves of maslin bread, which is a mixture of either rye and barley or wheat and rye. Pottage was cheaper than bread and required no milling or baking fees. Pottage is made by allowing barley grains to sprout in a warm, damp place, boiling the result along with anything available–including peas, beans, bacon fat, salt pork, onion, garlic, cabbage, lettuce, leeks, spinach, parsley, apples, pears, cherries, nuts, berries, primrose, strawberry leaves, and roots–and then draining and perhaps sweetening the results with honey. The Gies say "anything that grew went into the pots." Sometimes pottage would be fermented into beer.
Some families owned various animals used to earn money and provide food. Geese could produce five goslings per year. A cow gave 100 to 150 gallons of milk per year, which sold for half a penny per gallon. Sheep were worth one or two shillings each. Each sheep gave fleece, milk, manure, and were sometimes eaten. A single pig could give birth to fifteen piglets per year, which could be eaten when they were two years old. The pigs of the villagers were allowed to roam the forest to eat nuts and such but only if their owners paid a fee to the lord.
Most village families owned little more than a standard set of farming tools, including spades, hoes, forks, sickles, scythes, flails, knives and sharpeners, mallets, weeding hooks, sieves, querns, mortar and pestles, hooks, buckets, augers, saws, hammers, chisels, sheep shears, ladders, and wheelbarrows. Some owned a two-wheeled cart for carrying tools and such, and some owned a plow or a wooden harrow made from tree branches. The lord's harrow had metal teeth. To compare the property of peasant to that of a manor lord, see www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/800Asnapium.html for a complete inventory of a particular manor.
Some families kept egg-providing chickens, fewer had a milk-providing cow. Peasant ate little meat and cheese; more animals were sold for cash to pay rent than were eaten. Dried fish or eels were expensive–or poached from the mill pond. This was a low calorie, low protein diet also lacking in calcium, lipids, and vitamins A, C, and D. Village people were lean in this hungry world.
In Medieval Europe, as for farmers throughout the world, people ate a limited variety of food and it became scarce each year in early spring. We saw that bread and beer were the staple food of Ancient Mesopotamia and that rice was the staple of Medieval China. Throughout the farming world of the last 10,000 years, grain-bread and rice have been the monotonous but staple foods for all of us farmers. Still today, grain and rice account for two-thirds of our food supply.
The Gies explain that a Medieval housewife would simmer pottage or milk if it was available. She made soap with ashes and water so she could do laundry with much scrubbing and beating. She might dash outside to tend to her crying child and then return to find the cat at the bacon, the dog at the hide, her cake burning on the hearth, her calf licking the milk, pottage boiling over into the fire, and her husband scolding the churl. Some contemporary writers recommended the life of a nun over that of a housewife.
While eating, the family sat on either benches or stools at a trestle table that was dissembled at night. Chairs were rare. A cupboard or hutch held wooden and earthen bowls and jugs. Spoons were usually wooden. Thick slices of day-old bread were often used for plates. A thick chunk of bread with a hole in it could also serve as a salt shaker. Hams, bags, and baskets were hung from the rafters to be kept from rodents. Clothing, tablecloths, bedding, and towels were stored in chests. We slept on straw pallets. Few peasants had silver spoons, brass pots, or pewter dishes. (We will see below that the main result of our Industrial Revolution was that it would bring cheap utensils and decorations to our homes.)
The farmers of the village made their own agricultural decisions. The lord did not make these decisions but simply demanded that the peasants produce his share of the village crop. The lord prospered only if the villagers prospered and was the exploiter and beneficiary of the labor of the villagers. Photos of many manor houses can be seen at www.britannia.com/history/wilts/mm-wilts.html. Visit www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~longhurs/house/index.htm for an animation of the interior of a high-cost home.
A small staff was regularly employed by the village lord. Elton's lord employed eight plowmen and drivers, one cart operator, one cow-herder, and one swine-herder. Out in the fields, about one in five sheep would die each year. To keep a close eye on their animals, the cow-herder and swine-herder slept in the barn along with their animals. Each of these persons were paid two to four shillings per year in cash, one pair of gloves, money for the Christmas oblation, and some flour, grain, and salt. The plowmen repaired the plow equipment and took care of the plow animals, which consisted of a mixture of horses and oxen–typically two horses and six oxen. On Saturday, the staff might be allowed to use the lord's plow on their own holdings. Since few villagers owned a plow, the entire community shared those that were available. Other persons "cultivated by foot" using only a spade. The Elton staff also included a cook, a woman who milked ewes, a dairy person, and some seasonal help as the manor lord would hire day laborers as needed. These laborers were usually tenant renters who lived in the village and owned no income-producing land; sometimes, they were itinerant workers. The larger staff of nearby Ramsey Abbey included eighty persons.
A popular guide book recommended that sick animals be quickly sold while another advised that it was better to spend some money on a sick animal than to lose the entire initial investment. Since an old ox would be eaten it could be sold for 90% of its original cost of twelve shillings. The guide books also gave advice on butter and cheese production, animal husbandry, animal feeding, the early termination of the milking of cows and ewes to encourage early breeding, and the branding of the lord's animals to distinguish them form those of the peasants. Old horses were not eaten and so could be sold for only half their original cost of ten or eleven shillings. A guide book might ask the timeless question "How profitable are your plow and stock?"
A single village might be part of one, two, or three different manors. Sometimes a lord would lease a manor to another person–a knight, better-off peasant, or a business person form a nearby city–who hoped to receive more income than was paid in lease. Some villages included a submanor in which one person had tenants of his or her own.
The miller, baker, and blacksmith bought licenses from the lord to operate their shops. One of Elton’s two bakers paid a fee of thirteen shillings per year while the other paid thirty-three. The smith paid two shillings per year for a license but charged four shillings to repair the lord's plow. Villagers were charged a few pennies to shoe an animal.
A tenant paid rent to the lord in some mixture of labor, bread, ale, eggs, cheese, linen, wool, cloth, handicraft items, and cash. Both tenants and lord sold crops for cash in a nearby town. Villager fines were always paid in cash to the lord. A villager could buy an annual license–or pay a fee when caught–to live outside the manor. (This is the reason villagers were said to be unable to leave the lord’s land.) Those who lived for a year within a city were then free of the lord. In Germany the saying went: "A year and a day in a city makes one free." On an unusually small manor, most of the peasants might be free tenants who paid cash rent and performed no labor service. In this case, workers would be hired by the day to farm the lord's land.
A continually shifting set of strangers lived on the village fringe, most were seeking labor work for the lord. A person was paid different amounts through the seasons for each day’s work: between August first and September eighth, a person was paid 2.5 pence per day; these were the most crucial days of harvest time. Between the ninth and twenty-ninth of September, a person was paid one pence per day. Through the rest of the year, September thirtieth through August first, the wage was one-half pence per day.
Larger lords held fifty manors and thousands of serfs. Since lords often held several manors and lived away, they needed a good managerial team on site. A lord might take advice from one of the popular guidebooks for estate management, such as Walter of Henley's Husbandry or Robert Grosseteste's Rules of St. Robert. The lord sent a steward to visit each manor a few days per year to check the accounts. Rents, fees, and labor services were supervised, enforced, and collected by the bailiff and reeve.
Daily operations of the manor were handled by the bailiff, who lived in the stone manor house and reported annual totals of income and expenses along with grain and other inventory figures. Since most bailiffs were illiterate, they tracked manor accounts by making notches in sticks. These sticks would be given to the visiting steward who made detailed, written records on parchment. (Parchment was made from goat skin and sold in eight-inch [20 cm] wide strips that would be sewn end to end into long strips.) Sample lists of revenues and expenditures for typical manors can be seen by visiting www.trytel.com/~tristan/towns/ipswich8.html and www.trytel.com/~tristan/towns/ipswic13.html. The manor was a well-supervised, profit making enterprise. The people of previous ages did not stumble through life but expended the same effort in thoughtful planning and execution toward desired goals.
The bailiff had several duties. He supervised the penning of the lord's livestock, the formation of plow teams, and ordered the repair of the lord's mills and fences. On some manors the bailiff also collected rent from the villagers and tracked totals for labor services performed by each tenant. The bailiff maintained supplies of iron, wood, nails, millstones, horseshoes, carts, cartwheels, axles, iron tires, salt, candles, parchment, cloth, dairy and kitchen utensils, slate, thatch, quicklime, verdigris, tar, quicksilver, baskets, livestock, and the staff's food. Most supplies were obtained from a nearby town. The manor was not self-sufficient.
The bailiff’s subordinate was the reeve. (The modern word sheriff derives from "shire reeve.") Reeves were paid in noncash benefits. For example, they might be allowed to eat at the lord's diner table and graze their animals on the lord's pastures. On some manors, the reeve did not have to perform any of the usual villager farming labors. In the Canterbury Tales, one of Chaucer's (see www.luminarium.org/medlit/chaucer.htm) characters was a reeve who stole from his lord. Each day, the reeve saw that those villagers owing labor service arrived for work and accomplished the necessary tasks. A villager would be fined for missing a day. A villager might sometimes choose to pay that fine to obtain a day off work. A sick person was allowed to miss work for up to one year, but after that, the sick person had to pay the wages for his or her replacement. The reeve had an assistant called by various names, including beadle, hayward, or messor. This duties of this assistant were to fine villagers whose animals strayed into the lord's pastures, to preserve seed saved from last year's crop, and to help the reeve supervise sowing, plowing, harrowing, mowing, and reaping.
The villagers elected the bailiff's staff, including the reeve, who was always a serf or villein. Members of the most-respected families were most often elected to these village positions. Through the years 1279 to 1346, half these offices in Elton were held by just 3.5% of the families. These same families were most often found in court disputes, too.
In Elton in the year 1286, the lord's field yielded 2,000 bushels of barley, 1,000 bushels of wheat (wheat sold for five to eight shillings per bushel), and various amounts of other crops. Yields per acre were one-third to one-half today's values. Through the year, two-thirds of work was performed by hired help. The remainder was done by serfs performing their labor taxes, much of this during harvest. On the singularly-crucial harvesting day, the lord conscripted everyone in sight and hired any other person that was around.
Brewing was done by women in their own home. When a batch of ale was ready to drink, an outdoor sign would be hung and the home would temporarily become a tavern. A favorite pastime of the villagers consisted of meeting and drinking at someone's home. Three gallons of beer sold for one penny. The village ale-taster had to first "verify" the quality of the batch and charge a fee for its sale. The manor held a monopoly on grain grinding and on bread baking–the staples of life–but only collected frequent "fines" for weak or poor quality ale or for selling ale before the village official had tasted it. The manor also placed limits on the price of ale, which varied with the size of the cereal crop.
William the Conqueror codified laws "common to all the land" but medieval law existed midway between clan justice and the modern legal system consisting of the precise interpretation and administration of justice. Medieval courts questioned witnesses to determine guilt or innocence but the king and queen maintained certain centuries-old Anglo-Saxon traditions. For example, the king and queen might confiscate the property of a murderer. (Does the state or the victim's family receive fines and compensation today?) Medieval law was a mixture of scripture, oral tradition, Roman and Germanic law, church decree, and papal legislation. For the laws of the borough of Maldon, visit www.trytel.com/~tristan/towns/maldon6.html.
The legal scholar Gratian, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decretum_Gratiani, worked in the twelfth century to merge and reconcile these components and to pre-select right and wrong in specific situations. We often agree about right and wrong in general but less often in specific and complicated situations. For example, what should be done when a little-used item is found to be defective and so is returned before it has been fully paid for by the purchaser? What portion of the purchase price should be refunded?
The lord, church, and king each held their own courts. Cases involving murderers, professional thieves, and rapist were heard in the royal court, which collected the fines and fees from those proceedings. Minor cases involving serfs and villeins were heard in the court of their local manor. Free persons instead went to the royal court. Cases involving clerics always went to the court of the church. Sometimes an accused person would run to a church to ask for asylum, but when asylum was obtained, it served only as a temporary haven before that accused person would be expelled from the land. Sometimes an accused persons would begin study for the clergy just to take advantage of the lighter treatment of the church towards its own clergy.
Peasants convicted of murder would be hanged, which really meant they were slowly strangled under their own weight, but wealthy persons were instead beheaded in a quick death. Tradition called for the principal accuser either to personally carry out the death sentence or to hire another person to do it. Some murderers survived the bungled attempts of novices who were trying to carry out the death sentence. A condemned man was sometimes allowed to fight in the king's war instead of being executed. Occasionally, an influential friend of a condemned person won a royal pardon.
Prisons did not exist. Fines were instead paid either in money or by working a specified period of time. Castle basements and the larger cities did have jails where defendants might be placed while awaiting trial. A poor person convicted of a minor crime might be held there for a short time and then released.
Trial by combat or ordeal was condemned by the church in the year 1215 as being meaningless. Cruel executions were done in cases of heresy, treason, or witchcraft. Mutilations were becoming less frequent but a thief might still be branded or lose a thumb or ear, rapists would be castrated, and harsh assailants might be blinded. Torture would be applied if a defendant wouldn't otherwise speak. A person would be tortured by pulling his or her teeth, by burning, or by being stretched on the rack.
It was the custom of the land for a person in danger to call out for help; all who heard were required to respond or be fined. For example, one might call for help if being struck or about to be struck. The respondents to that call would take the offender to the bailiff, reeve, or beadle. But this call could not be made lightly, and the caller was expected to have witnesses who could verify the need for the call. If both adversaries called then it was later decided who had been justified.
A meeting was held in the manor twice each year to conduct the lord's business. Fees and fines were collected, labor dues were enforced, manorial officers were elected, and heirs were granted their property. During these meetings, civil and criminal court was also conducted to hear non-murder cases. Assaults occurring within the victim's home and those drawing blood were seen to be especially serious. (Throughout history, attacks causing the loss of blood were taken seriously because even simple cuts had a one in one hundred chance of becoming infected and causing death.) Cases between villagers might involve public slander or unpaid loans of grain or equipment. Interest was charged despite being discouraged by the Catholic church as usury (we saw that usury is also discouraged in Islam).
In the manor court, the villagers acted as prosecutor, witness, judge, and legal authority. This meant that village tradition would be followed rather than written laws specified from above. A handful of villagers would gather evidence (this is similar to today's Grand Jury), describe the custom violated, judge the outcome, and then assess fines and damages. The entire village endorsed the findings of the jury, which meant there would be a general feeling that justice had occurred. The villagers personally knew the people involved in the case and the circumstances of the event; in fact, they would have been discussing the case since the moment it had occurred. An accuser was expected to bring a handful of "oath helpers" to swear to the events and to the accuser's trustworthiness. When a case was initiated, both plaintiff and defendant had to find two persons guaranteeing their appearance in court and payment of any fines incurred. A lord's steward oversaw the proceedings. A novice steward may have consulted The Court Baron. Court records were written in Latin on parchment eight-inches (20 cm) in width. Parchment pieces were stitched end to end to form long rolls. These records were kept because fine amounts formed part of the lord's business enterprise. The lord always received a share of any imposed fines and a share of any confiscated property. One of the two arguing parties would be required to pay the other party–and the lord–for offenses committed. Accusers who did not prove their case had to pay a fine to the lord. If the two parties settled out of court the lord would still received the appropriate fee. When settling out of court, the two parties had to decide the fee portions that each would pay.
Other than rent, fees, and the required labor services, the lord did not interfere with the daily lives of the villagers. The Gies state that the lord was not, as usually pictured, an omnipotent tyrant exercising the power of life and death over villagers. Mostly, the lord was a person living off the efforts of the villagers, whose lives would otherwise have been much easier. The villagers openly discussed politics, religion, and morality without fear of the lord's wrath.
The feudal and manorial system, the Baron’s revolt and Magna Carta, and the peasant’s revolt
The Gies explain that lords relied on the manorial system to get laborers into their fields, money into their pockets, and meat and dairy products onto their tables. The villagers relied on the manorial system to limit their labor and food payments and to guarantee their homes, their grazing rights, and their strips of farmland. This was the European way of life for centuries. But in the manorial system, the lord had the best chance for prosperity. If the lord hadn't taken 117 of 365 day's efforts from each peasant, the lives of those villagers would have been less precarious and more often prosperous.
Feudalism united the elite, or aristocracy, of Europe in a hierarchical, mutual aid society in which a greater lord granted land–a fief or fiefdom–to a lower lord or vassal. The greater lord received loyalty along with military and other services from the vassal, while the vassal received income from the granted land. But this hierarchical, feudal system did not directly involve the peasants who lived on their lord's manor–farming for the lord and themselves. Medieval European society consisted of feudalism of overlords and lords combined with manorialism of lords and peasants. There was a lot of local variation in this system, which lasted about five hundred years, with both farm labor and military service becoming ever more frequently converted into cash payments.
The Magna Carta was a feudal document like other lesser charters between lords and vassals, but this document is also considered to be the beginning of modern constitutionalism. The phrase Magna Carter is Latin for Great Charter. Latin was the language of government and business in Medieval Europe. The text of the Magna Carta can be seen at www.britannia.com/history/magna2.html.
Jill N. Claster (see the references below) explains that the Magna Carta began in 1215, when the nobles of England took advantage of the war-weakened condition of King John to "limit his arbitrary exercise of power in terms feudal obligations exacted." It asserted that the king and queen were also subject to law, not above it. The king and queen could not go beyond feudal custom without the consent of the royal vassals; if they were to try then the vassals had the right to resist this unjust use of power. The barons were trying only to limit the power of the monarchy, not to do away with it. Claster says it is significant that the barons acted as a group rather than as competitors, which they might have done a hundred years earlier, but there was not yet a national self-consciousness. Anthony Black (see the references below) points out that the Magna Carta provided a means of redress against bad government without having to resort to violence.
Friedrich Heere (see the references below) explains that the barons were in no way representing the people, only their own interests. Friedrich says the Magna Carta also asserts "No man shall be taken or imprisoned or deprived of his estates or outlawed or exiled or in any way impoverished, nor will we go against him or send anyone against him, except through the legal judgement of his equals or the law of the land." (That such a document was needed tells us that the royals had been doing these very things. We also see such demands are easiest to make when a ruler has just been weakened.) This means that issues were to be decided by written law and not by the whims of the king and queen. In addition the Magna Carta asserted that the rights of London and other cities were to continue, that protection of foreign merchants would be provided (we've seen that this same protection was expected in Ancient Mesopotamia), and that the magnates had the right to assent to taxation. In fact, a standing committee of twenty-five barons was to control the king and queen; any four barons could raise a complaint that must be addressed. In the thirteenth century, similar documents were being forged in Hungary, Spain, and Poland. We see that these grievances were things only lords would complain about, not peasants. The Magna Carta was not an agreement between “the people” and the king and queen, but between lords and the king and queen.
In the 1240s, these meetings between the ruler–who wanted to use the meetings as an instrument of government–and the barons, knights, burgesses, and boroughs–who wanted to assert their rights–came to be called the Parliament. The word parley had been used to describe any meeting between persons or groups. The king and queen now had to go through Parliament to ask for money or troops. To counteract the constant pressure of the Parliament, the king and queen sought the support of shire knights, burgesses, and town representatives who came to act as a single estate in a lower House of Commons. After a first step had been made in 1295, in 1352 the Parliament was separated into upper and lower houses. It was said that "what touches all must be approved by all" as feudal Europe moved toward democracy.
The feudal and manorial system was fatally stressed by crop failures, like those of the years 1315 through 1317, by the population-decreasing plague of 1345 through 1350, and by the excessive war-funding taxation imposed on the peasants, which resulted in the Peasant Rebellion of 1381. (A description of the last meeting between king and peasants can be found at www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/anon1381.html; a painting of this meeting, The Death of Wat Tyler, is shown at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/utk/england/voice.htm.) The manorial system of servitude dissolved through the 1400s and disappeared in the 1500s in England and France. The ending of the feudal and manorial system worked its way south and east over the next few centuries. Serfdom was not outlawed until the year 1850 in some Eastern European countries.
The population of Europe doubled during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries but then decreased during the fourteenth century as large plagues and famines occurred. Famines begin with rumors, hoarding, and black-marketing and end with hoards of beggars and widespread disease for the weakened. The plague-fighting ordinances issued by the town of Pistoia in Tuscany are shown at www.fordham.edu/halsall/med/pistoia.html. The Gies state that during the famine of 1315 to 1317, theft of food and livestock rose sharply, cats and dogs disappeared, bodies of the poor were found in the street, and cannibalism was rumored. Around the year 1350, the plague reduced the population of Europe, decimating families and leaving few laborers to tend to the lord's crops. (By the way, today we understand that those persons having received a certain gene from both of their parents were resistant to the plague and that this very same pair of genes now appears to make one resistant to HIV.) The lord then enforced labor services with the threat of the stocks and by invoking the Statute of Laborers (see www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/medieval/statlab.htm). The price of land dropped and that of labor increased, but the surviving peasants had extra food and were able to once again eat wheat on a daily basis. This made some writers complain that the peasants had forgotten their "well-ordered," lower station!
When the king and queen needed money, they might impose a tax of one-tenth or one-twentieth the value of each person's assets worth more than a certain amount. Only the poorest would be excluded from this tax. During his fifty-six-year reign (1216-1272), Henry III imposed this tax just five times. During the next thirty-five years, Edward I and Edward II imposed this tax sixteen times to pay for fighting the Scottish. Edward III (1334-1377) imposed the tax forty-one times while fighting the French. He also required that each village send and equip a number of men to fight against France. In 1377, an extra tax of four pence per person over age fourteen was levied. This was followed in 1379 by another four pence plus two-tenths of assets, and in 1381 by four pence plus 1.5 tenths of assets.
The Peasant Revolt of 1381 was the response of the peasants to the tax levies, labor service laws, and other irritants. This was a continent-wide revolt and was dominated by the better-off peasants because they could see greater liberty within reach of force–the more oppressed peasants could not. (In Chapter 19, we'll see that today those people most repressed by the most severe dictatorships similarly believe they can do nothing about their political situation.) The aim of the revolt was the abolition of servitude. It began shifting control of the village economy from the lord to the peasants and allowed peasants to keep more of their own money and efforts for themselves.
In England, John Ball complained that the toil of peasants provided the luxury of the lords. Ball may have been the first person known to write that "All men are created equal" and that "such servitude is against the will of God." Some peasants complained that they wore coarse cloth, ate rye bread, and slept on straw while lords wore velvet and ate spices and wheat bread. The Gies describe an argument between a villager and a knight who was showing little concern that his animals were wrecking about in a graveyard of "lowly peasant bones." The villager pointed out that God made the bones of villagers and knights and they were all indistinguishable after death.
During the revolt, some manorial records were destroyed because they had been used to prove the legality of each person's servitude. Some lawyers were killed. But from then on, records were used to instead prove the sanctity of the family's claim to their land because the records showed they had lived there for generations.
The uprisings were suppressed by the monarchy, nobility, upper clergy, and wealthy townspeople but peasants won an end to the four-pence tax and the Statute of Laborers was from then on ignored. Labor services were relaxed. For example, in Elton, the last fines for skipping the harvest of the lord's crop occurred in 1429. Through the next century, villeins either bought their way free of the lord's fees and fines or simply refused to pay them anymore. The Gies state that the old feudal landlord class was given a devastating blow in 1536 as Henry VIII, fighting with the Catholic church over his divorce problems, issued his Dissolution of the monastic orders. He violently suppressed the largest monasteries and seized their manors, which he then conveniently sold for 1.5 million pounds.
Throughout the planet and throughout history, the daily life of every farming villager was filled with laborious chores. This was also true for the Medieval European farmer who had the added burden of the manorial system. Villeins and serfs resented the labor dues mostly because of the time lost from fulfilling their own needs. People always break free of imposed class systems–though it usually takes centuries–because we feel that no person is better than anyone else and we expect our society to be mutually beneficial for everyone; Anything less is an injustice.
The villagers paid fees to the lord in goods and labor services while living life with little other intervention, setting their own agricultural schedule and settling their own quarrels. Free and unfree conditions had meaning but not as much as we usually imagine today, being more indicative of the level of obligations. The villagers had poor diet, scant sanitation, simple homes and dress, and life-threatening conditions for children. But they also had lives of love and festival, games and ale, fun and fights, and neighbors that they knew and depended on for plowing, harvesting, helping, and bearing court witness. The pressure to change the Medieval way of life came through the growths in population levels and markets that resulted in some villagers reluctantly leaving their land for nearby towns. Arguments, protest, and violence accompanied the change along with some sense of decreased community ties as some peasants became independent landholders. (We'll see that a more pronounced change in community ties will occur as we shift from farming to factory work.) The Gies explain that the peasants were not brutes or dolts but people like us. They were living in an exploitative social system still largely devoid of effective medicine and having a slowly changing technology, but they were becoming modern.
By the thirteenth century, every village and manor had its own church. Each church district was called a parish. Often, a wealthy and enterprising person would have a church built to fulfill his or her own needs. This person would appoint a priest, pay the priest's salary, and receive the income from the church in the same manner as other private enterprises. Later on, a local villager might run that church and receive its income, which was one-tenth of the village’s produce. Sometimes a nobleman would hire a vicar to run the church and expect to receive its profits. One nobleman ran twenty-four churches this way and obtained a total annual profit of 2,200 pounds. In the year 1172, Pope Alexander III decreed that a vicar would receive one-third of the income. By 1300, there were 9,000 parishes in England.
Some rectors were more concerned with income than in giving moral lessons. Some priests understood the teachings of Christ while others were mere parrots. Manuals for priests began to appear listing annual offices and describing ceremonies for baptisms, burials, and marriages. They also provided music, words for mass, and lessons from the lives of the saints. Celibacy was an ideal: priests often had a wife.
Most churches were one-room buildings that had no benches or pews. Some persons brought their own stool while most people sat on the straw-covered floor. A few persons brought hand-warmers consisting of hollow metal spheres containing hot coals. The largest church buildings contained relics from early Christianity, including pieces of stone from the Ten Commandments, the baby teeth of Christ, or the bones and clothes of the Saints. Two different churches displayed the skull of John the Baptist.
In 1287, Bishop Quinel of Exeter recommended that the minimum church furnishings include a communion bread holder made of pewter, a silver chalice, a holy oil container made of pewter, an incense boat to hold the Kiss of Peace, three cruets, a vessel for holy water, images of the patron saint and the Virgin Mary, and a stone alter that had a canopy and cloth covers. Holy water was to be locked away to prevent it from being stolen for use in witchcraft. Over the next few centuries, many churches would be rebuilt in stone.
Sermons had been given in Latin until the twelfth century but were now being conducted in English. Priests gave lessons about the Articles of Faith, the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, the Seven Deadly Sins, or the Ten Commandments and they described each and every corner of Hell. Morals were illustrated with stories of animals, plants, stars, and body parts. Priest also gave practical advice about nursing, sexual morality, and marriage. They advised against usury and magic. Many lessons were drawn from history, legend, contemporary events, personal memories, the Bible, and the lives of the Saints. Worship of the Virgin Mary began in the fourth century and was soon more popular than all the Saints combined.
Priests gave much instruction during confessions. The priest would ask many questions: Have you played or drank on Sunday? Have you sinned in lechery or tricked women into bed? Have you found and kept or borrowed and not returned something? Have you claimed another's deed, celebrated a neighbors harm or grieved their fortune? Have you ate till you barfed? Have you been late to church or listened to a sermon without devotion? Have you taught shrewish children some manors? Have you destroyed grain or rode through grain rather than having gone around it? The penance was to fit the offense without requiring more than could be accomplished.
The life of the priest was to provide an example for everyone. He should be chaste, honest, mild, shaven, and sober and be hospitable to both rich and poor. He was to avoid gluttony, sloth, pride, envy, taverns, games, dancing, and flashy clothing.
Moral offenses were heard in the church's court. Adultery was the most common case. Those found guilty would be whipped–unless they were wealthy, then they paid a fine. The church also heard cases of marriage separations and proscribed penances for "departing from the traditional posture during intercourse."
Consolidation of beliefs and practices were still occurring in the Christian world. Some sects believed Christ was born through Mary's ear or that an impostor died on the cross in place of Jesus. Heretic variations in belief were fought by members of the inquisition who traveled from town to town looking for informants. The heretics might be whipped but usually were not tortured. Some exceptions include the dramatic, public burning of 183 Cathars in the year 1239 in Montwimer (Marne), France.
In general, life was less physically strenuous in the city than on the farm. In addition, people living in the city ate a more varied diet. Both city and rural homes cultivated gardens providing herbs and medicines along with seasonal vegetables, fruits, and flowers, but in the largest cities, housing was beginning to crowd garden spaces. The people of the towns and cities obtained their food from the nearby farming villages; we have seen that food had to be obtained locally because it could not be transported over any distance at all–until the last century or so.
We have also seen that throughout the world, the emergence of population centers is always accompanied by the development of full-time specialists who make better quality objects than those made by part-time hobbyists. European towns contained chandlers, coopers, glaziers, tanners, and tailors and such whose shop was part of their home. They didn’t have a separate building that served as a retail store. At home, some propped open large window shutters to serve as sales counters during the day. (During subsequent centuries, craftspeople–not farmers–comprised the largest portion of Europeans emigrating to the new world.) Each of these shops was operated by the owner with the help of his wife, one or two male relatives, and an apprentice in training.
Shop signs displayed standard symbols to indicate their goods or services to a largely illiterate public. Apothecaries displayed gilded pills, goldsmiths showed unicorns, harness-makers displayed horse heads, and surgeon-barbers displayed red-striped poles. Wine shops displayed a bush. Wine was sold straight from the barrel because bottles were not yet being made in Europe–neither was champagne. Street peddlers sold fish, chicken, fresh and salt meat, garlic, honey, wine, milk, onions, fruit, eggs, leeks, and pastries that were filled with either fruit, chopped ham, chicken, or cod and were seasoned with pepper, cheese, or egg.
Some craftspeople traveled from village to village selling various goods and services, including slaters, tilers, thatchers, animal branders, sheep milkers, malt dryers, animal-shoe repairers, and animal tenders. A tinker would repair brass jars and pans (we still say "tinker around" today). During mowing season, a pair of persons might travel around with their cart offering carting services for hire. The most common traveling workers would repair either clothes, kitchen utensils, or furniture.
Townspeople paid an annual fee to their lord instead of performing labor services. As a city grew its lord became very rich. Farming village lords received much less income. Citizens typically paid a tax of 2.5% on movable property and 1% on real property, but the wealthiest paid a flat tax of twenty pounds. By the year 1250, a sales tax was added along with a per-person tax. These taxes were paid to the lord of the city, who in turn paid a share to his lord. Such shares were paid all the way to the king and queen at the top of the feudal hierarchy, who were now becoming heads of incipient nation states.
Townspeople collectively defended their rights by writing them down in a charter. A charter might record that the townspeople were to have a mayor and council and hold their own lower court. Some charters stipulated that a man could not own a crossbow unless his property was valued at over twenty pounds. (In the U.S. today there is a bit of debate about the original intent of the writers of their Bill of Rights guaranteeing the "right to bear arms." This may provide a clue.)
Townspeople were mostly left alone while the lord was prospering. When not prospering, the lord would increase taxation. Many towns were heavily taxed to finance the lord's involvement in a crusade in the holy land. (Shame on them. Did this group of leaders–and this group of followers–think God wanted them to go kill and be killed in His name.) Sometimes those crusading lords paid a city-sized ransom when their armies were captured. One ransom was 300,000 pounds, which was paid to a Sultan surprised by their lack of haggling. Some town merchants expressed their opposition to crusading: "It is a good and holy thing to live quietly at home in friendship with neighbors, taking care of children and goods, going to bed early and sleeping well. They said they would happily pay for defense against a reverse crusade but it is stupid to die at large expense in a foreign land.
Townspeople had general liberty and some self-government but little democracy. Mayors and council members were sometimes elected by guild members, sometimes appointed by outgoing members, and often came from a small number of families managing to monopolize these positions. For example, half the members of Venice's 480-person council came from just twenty-seven families and in Pisa, thirty families monopolized the council throughout the thirteenth century.
The town court heard cases of petty theft, fraud, and assault and disputes involving property or business transactions. The mayor and a handful of council members might act as judges, receiving portions of each fine and settlement. For example, a murderer would have to pay money to the victim's family. Some typical cases include the following. One man found his silver cup in the possession of another man who proved he bought it from a third man. This third man could not readily prove how he got the cup and so was placed in jail until more witnesses could be found. Another case involved a landlord's attempt to sell the doors and shutters of a house to recover rent past due from its occupant. In another case, the neighbors of a woman took her to court to force her to clean up the foul smelling pipe she placed between her privy and the street. She was fined six pennies and given forty days to remove the pipe.
Towns were becoming more numerous and their populations were expanding. By the year 1150, several towns had two or three thousand persons. The most populous cities in Europe were located in Italy: in the year 1250 Venice had 100,000 persons, while Milan, Bologna, Polermo, and Genoa each had 50,000 persons. The largest cities of Northwest Europe were walled, had ten or twenty thousand persons, and covered an area of one hundred acres to one-half square mile (50 to 150 hectares). The population of Paris was 5,000 persons, Troyes had 10,000, Cork had 10,000, London had 25,000, and Ghent had 40,000. In contrast, we have seen that the population of Hangchow, capital of the Southern Sung Dynasty of China, was one million persons in the year 1275 ad. It was described by Marco Polo as the greatest city on the Earth.
The population of Western Europe was about sixty million persons: Western France had twenty million while Italy had just ten million; Eastern France, Germany, and Poland had a total of twelve million persons; Spain and Portugal seven million; Scotland, Ireland, and Switzerland had one-half million each while England, Wales, and the Low Countries had four million each. The Low Countries were already draining marsh lands and building dykes. In the thirteenth century, one dyke-burst in Holland killed 50,000 people. Visit www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/pop-in-eur.html for European population figures for the years 500 - 1450 ad.
Since buildings were made of wood, fires spread easily in the city; attackers would burn everything they couldn't carry. Walled cities, as we saw was the case in Mesopotamia, were still protecting their residents from attack. A siege was often a battle of food supplies as residents tried to hold out longer than their attackers who could be fed in the field for only a couple of months. Catapults had already been used for 1,000 years but were now becoming stronger through the use of counterweights. Attackers often tried to dig wood-supported tunnels under a wall corner. When the supporting wood was burned, the wall might collapse and provide an opening into the city. The city residents dug counter tunnels to fight this tactic.
Towns were filled with shops displaying goods to the people walking past. In contrast to today’s cities, most everyone was walking. Some people rode litters; carriages were rare and few persons rode animals in town. Only nobles and the wealthiest business persons owned horses; some less-rich persons owned a donkey. Saddles were made from wood and might be ornamented with ivory, metal, or painted leather. Embroidered saddle cloths were used. European horses were being bred for size and so were already larger than those used in Roman times.
Around town, one would see monks and priests wearing brown habits. Artisans wore bright green, red, blue, or yellow tunics and hose while merchants wore fur-trimmed coats. Housewives wore gowns, mantles, and white hats. In a fashion lasting for centuries, some women used face powders to present snow-white skin.
The dirt–or mud–streets were filled with dogs, cats, geese, and pigeons along with odors from trash, animal dung, fish markets, linen makers, butchers, and tanners. Residents were required to clean the street in front of their homes and shops. Each home had its own garbage pit and a privy out back. These were periodically emptied for a large fee.
All buildings looked the same on the outside but the homes of the wealthier contained more floors and were more elaborately furnished. Merchants, now called burghers or sometimes "sire," often had their shops on the ground floor of their three-story home. They lived in the second floor while their servants lived in the third. The merchant might also have a stable or storehouse in the rear. Windows were nothing but oiled parchment that passed little light. An oil lamp might be suspended by a chain and lit after dark. Animal fat was saved for the chandler to turn into candles. Walls were covered with dyed or embroidered cloth. Few homes had a carpet; floors were instead covered with rushes. Beds had a straw-filled mattress, feather-filled pillows, and woolen blankets.
Laundry soap was made from animal fat and wood ashes. Furs were cleaned with a mixture of fuller's earth, wine, lye, and verjuice, which is obtained by pressing apples. Lye and verjuice also help to restore faded colors in cloth. Hardened fur was softened by first sprinkling with wine and flour and then being rubbed after drying (we could use only those chemicals that were readily available.)
In thirteenth-century Europe, citrus fruits were a rare treat. There was no coffee, tea, rice, chocolate, potatoes, tomatoes, spaghetti, noodles, squash, corn, baking powder, or baking soda. These New World and Eastern foods had not yet reached Europe. (Visit www.gol27.com/HistoryTeaEngland.html for the history of tea-drinking in England.) Pilgrimages, crusades, and long distance trade would increase the variety of fruits, vegetables, and flowers and such slowly in the thirteenth century but more rapidly within a few centuries. Nor were there any paper products of any kind in Europe (count the number found in your household today.)
If a family could afford them, expensive spices–including pepper, mustard, ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon, cannal, mace, and cumin–were imported from the orient and kept in locked chests. Some spices were more expensive than gold. Basil, sage, rosemary, thyme, marjoram, and savory might be grown in a house garden and hung inside the house to dry.
Cooking was done indoors over an open fire by hanging a large pot in the fireplace. The hearth consisted of the fireplace and its surrounding brickwork, which could hold smaller fires for heating smaller pots of food. The hearth also provided heat and most of the light. To have hot water, one pot-full might be kept heating on the hearth throughout the day. As we saw had occurred in Ancient Mesopotamia, water was fetched in buckets from a city well. The few pots and utensils owned by a family were hung on the chimney. Cooking utensils were made of iron, copper, pewter, or earthenware. A linen-lined wooden cupboard with external metal bindings contained plates and silver for use on special occasions; pottery and tinware were for daily use.
People sat on benches and ate on a trestle table dismantled after meals. While eating, pairs of persons shared a soup bowl and drinking cup. Manors dictated that spoons should not be left in the bowl, that soup be eaten without slurping or burping, and that people wipe their mouth–but not their nose–with the tablecloth before drinking out of the shared cup. Servants ate after their employers, and leftovers were taken to the door where one or more poor persons were waiting. In previous centuries, beggars were allowed inside to ask for food directly from the table. Many of these persons had left their farming village.
Soup was the standard meal and often included meat or fish. Rabbits, geese, capons, ducks, and chickens were bought from a shop live, with their feet tied together. Fish might be kept alive in a leather tank until dinner time. Sauces were thickened with pestle-ground bread crumbs; stews were decorated with flower petals. Roses and primroses might be stewed for desert. Recipes were complicated. (For medieval recipes, you might like to visit www.netserf.org/Culture/Food_Drink.) Food was preserved through pickling, salting, or smoking or by being dried in the sun.
Capons sold for six pennies (denier in French), chickens for four, rabbits for five, vinegar for two to five pennies per jar, oils for eight, olive-oil for sixteen, and salt for two pennies per five pounds. Pepper sold for four pennies per ounce; sugar and honey sold for even more so few homes had any sweeteners. Honey-dipped rags were an expensive way to sidetrack flies and mosquitoes. (For more information, the Gies refer to Six Centuries of Work and Wages, written by James E. Thorold in 1884 and available online by visiting http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/rogers/sixcenturies.pdf.)
The price and weight of bread was fixed by law and varied with local crop yields. Loaves were marked to indicate who had baked them. Bakers caught cheating were placed in the pillory with a loaf hung around their necks. While shopping, people took care to avoid being tricked by an unscrupulous business person. Some business people camouflaged stale fish with pig's blood, soaked cheese in broth to make it appear richer, or watered wine, milk, or oil to increase its volume. A standard joke involved a sausage-maker's customer asking for a discount for years of loyalty but instead being asked "and you're still alive?" Social status was just as important to the medieval family and shop-keeper as for humans everywhere today. Each family and each person sought respect in the community.
Women were somewhat oppressed and exploited, as we have seen–and still see–throughout much of the world. Women had no political voice in local affairs and could not serve in the town council. But there were some prominent women including Eleanor of Aquitaine and Joan of Arc (for a transcript of her trial, see www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/joanofarc-trial.html). Unmarried women could inherit, sue, make contracts, buy and sell property, and represent themselves or their husbands in court. The church taught that a women is subject to her husband but not to his servant. Wife beating was common but women might also dominate their husbands. Within a few years of the origin of men's pants there was a joke about one man's wife “wearing the pants in her family.”
Privileged women had tutors and learned to read and write, speak Latin, and play musical instruments. They could have a more rounded education than their brothers who mostly learned to hawk, shoot, ride, and play chess. (The game of chess was taking on its current form instead of having two kings per side–per feudal ideas.) Women were not allowed to attend the university. They could choose only to enter a convent, such as at Notre Dame Aux Nonnains, see http://vieuxtroyes.free.fr/t/engndnon.htm, which was founded in the sixth century. Women operated the shop of their husbands when he was away or after he had died. Women worked in many occupations, from seamstress to barber and carpenter, but always for a lower wage then men. In fact, guidebooks recommended hiring lower-cost women to increase profits.
A contemporary poet described the characteristics of a lady: she should walk straight saluting everyone she passes, including the poor. She should be careful not to mislead men with a glance or accept their gifts. She should not drink too much nor cuss, scold others, or talk loudly. She may sing when asked. Bad breath should be held and bad teeth should be covered when close to other people. She should knock before entering a home and should not look inside while passing a home. It was bad manners to talk while eating, to take the best pieces of food, or to criticize the food given by your host.
Keep in mind that both Hangchow in China and Cahokia (see Chapter 12) in North America were contemporary to the thirteenth-century Europe described here. Do you see any similarities and differences in village and city life or in human nature?
There were no public schools educating the general population. The daughters of the wealthy could be taught only by a private tutor, but their sons could receive primary education from a parish priest and then secondary education at a cathedral school. To train clerics, the church founded cathedral schools in the seventh century. But the instructing priests were simply training their own replacements.
Students sat on the floor during class and used bone, ivory, or metal tools to gouge notes on wax tablets. Pupils repeated the instructor's words in unison until they had memorized a topic. Each morning, students recited what they had learned the previous day. This was followed by a discussion period and then a new lesson.
Students laboriously copied books by hand in a chore that required months of effort. Each piece of parchment was first scraped, smoothed, and clamped and then written on by dripping ink from an animal horn. The copyist often wrote a celebration on the last page: "Finished, thank God" or "May the writer be given a cow, horse, goose, or companion." Etiquette directed that books were too valuable to lay on a straw-covered floor, scratch with fingernails, be pounded on, or used to hit somebody. Ready-to-use books could be rented by a student; rental fees were determined by the number of pages in the book. (The original author of a work wrote drafts on wax tablets and the final version on parchment.) For examples of illuminated manuscripts, visit the website www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/medieval/browse.htm.
Students memorized passages from the Roman and Biblical experts–Virgil, Ovid, and the Gospels–that they would frequently quote throughout the remainder of their lives. The points presented in every document and all written correspondence would be given weight by quoting these authorities. The Gies explain that in some letters, as many as half its sentences might contain a quote from the ancient wise, letting them do the arguing for the letter writer.
Universities for the general public began in the eleventh century as priests began taking general students. These “general students” were most often the male sons of wealthy families. No schools yet existed in the villages. Half of the twenty-two universities of twelfth-century Europe were in Italy. The university had no buildings of its own; classes were simply held in the homes of their teachers. Students enrolled at age fourteen or fifteen and were unsupervised at night. They would sometimes fight, gamble, drink, and spend their money on ubiquitous prostitutes. Such behavior lead to fights with the townspeople–sometimes riots were incited. After six years of study, the student had to pass an exam. Students would then become a church official, receive a license to teach, become a scholar, or go on to study medicine or law. (You might like to compare fields of study, career choices, and educational opportunities among the general population of Ancient Mesopotamia, Medieval Europe, and of your nation today.)
University students learned the three subjects–logic, Latin grammar, and public-speaking or rhetoric–meant to build writing skills. History and literature were not taught but they learned arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Until universities began training more than church officials, these humanistic subjects–that is, subjects involving the study of "humans"–were secondary to theology, canon law, and philosophy. Paul Johnson says the school in Mantua was teaching these humanist subjects by the year 1423. Some humanist pupils went from school to school seeking these new subjects.
European scholars did not speak Greek in Dante's time but by 1450, every respectable humanist spoke Greek. Some scholars began studying in Constantinople where an evolved Greek was spoken. They often returned to Europe with previously "unknown" Greek works by Plato and others. Following the Reformation, which began in 1517, university subjects expanded to include history and poetry and such. Physical education, art, and the local language were not yet taught in the university, but we would soon begin to write down and study the grammar of the French, English, German, and other languages. As a language is first written down in the previously existing system of writing of a neighbor, that is when the sounds of its symbols and the spelling of its words are initially chosen.
No science was taught in Europe until knowledge of it began to arrive from the Islamic world. In addition, the Muslim system of "Arabic numerals," using decimal places and zeroes invented in India, began to be used in Europe. As you have experienced, it's much easier to perform arithmetic using decimal rather than Roman numerals. Social science, chemistry, physics, and biology did not yet exist. For example, little was taught about plants and animals other than a few nonsensical rumors: elephants fear mice, hyenas change sex at will, and ostriches eat iron. Sailors were beginning to use astrolabes and the Chinese compass to chart coastlines but university students were still being taught that the Earth's "geography" consists of only the three equally-sized continents of Africa, Asia, and Europe. There was some continent-wide exchange of ideas among the learned through the common language of Latin, but this involved too few persons to generate new knowledge. Human scientific knowledge would expand through the next few centuries, as we saw in Chapters 1and 2.
In The History of Islam, Robert Payne says that around the year 800 ad. the Abbasid Caliphs Harun and Al-Mamun (for more information about the Abbasids, visit http://countrystudies.us/iraq/16.htm and http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0406/feature1/online_extra.html) established universities and astronomical observatories and had scholars translating Greek, Syrian, Persian, and Sanskrit works. For example, al-Farabi (see www.muslimphilosophy.com/ip/rep/H021.htm) worked to harmonize Aristotle's ideas with the Koran; in turn, St. Thomas Aquinas (see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aquinas) studied al-Farabi’s ideas while attempting to put Christian beliefs on an Aristotelian foundation of reason. The written works of the Greeks were part of normal study in the Islamic world but unknown in Europe until "rediscovered" through twelfth- and thirteenth-century Latin translations of the above-mentioned Arabic versions of these books. To accomplish the translation from Arabic to Latin, Jewish scholars in Spain first made a rough translation from Arabic to Latin and then the result was polished up by Christian scholars practiced in Latin. We can believe that inaccuracies would build through successive translations from Greek, to Syrian, to Arabic, to Latin, and then to–for example–English.
For centuries, books in Europe had been copied only by a small number of monks, but after sufficient growth in the market of readers, a new business emerged to hand-copy books for sale to the wealthy public. People liked to read stories aloud for entertainment at home. Books about the lives of the Saints were especially popular but there were tales of swindled or henpecked merchants, beaten wives besting their husbands, and romance, too. A women named Portia was the heroine of the popular novel The Hard Creditor. There was also the story of Flamenca, the wife of a jealous man. She managed to exchange two words each time she walked passed a particular suitor on the street. Through the next several weeks, their conversation slowly built to "yes," but after four months of love she chose to stay with her husband and sent him away. During the twelfth century there was a popular story involving the adventures of a fox, a wolf, a cat, and a lion. For example, in one episode the fox, who was stuck in a well, tricked the wolf into coming down on the other end of the well-rope. As the wolf descended, the fox was lifted out of the well, leaving the now-trapped wolf behind. For examples of hand-writing, visit http://medievalwriting.50megs.com/writing.htm. Soon, the demand for books and the available mechanical knowledge combined into the invention of the printing press, as described below.
High population densities, poor sanitation, diets low in fruit and protein, and cold winters made for short lives. (Only in the last few decades have we come to understand how easy it is to avoid such unnecessarily shortened lives.) Pneumonia and typhoid killed many persons. Leprosy and leper colonies were common–France had 2,000 of them. Crippled people filled the roads on pilgrimage to holy sites. Hospitals were staffed by priests and nuns who tried to help those with simple sicknesses. The hospital did not take patients with leprosy or plague and did not handle pregnancies. Midwives helped deliver babies at home. Medieval medicine was not too effective, consisting of astrology, blood letting, and herbal concoctions. Any quack could sell a remedy. Even the largest cities would have but a handful of licensed doctors who had completed eight years of training.
Medical training included such practical advice as asking for payment while the patient is in pain and covering all bases by telling one of the patient's relatives to expect a recovery while telling another to prepare for death. If a doctor returned and found yesterday's patient dead, training instructed the doctor to avoid looking surprised and instead explain that he knew death would happen and just wanted to find out at which hour the patient had died. Trained doctors learned surgical techniques to correct cataracts and to deal with hernias and kidney or gall stones. Opium or mandrake was used for anesthesia because they would “make the patient sleep for four hours, not feeling knives or fire.” Doctors were also taught that a good surgeon's cutting and burning is not hampered by the patient's weeping. The barber profession was becoming divided into hair cutters, blood letters, and tooth pullers.
For each craft or service there was a trade guild attempting to control competition while upholding quality through surprise inspections. Paris had 120 different guilds. Each guild was run by members working in its field. Officers were usually elected by masters only but sometimes journeymen could also vote. A craftsperson would be fined by the guild if, for example, caught claiming that an object was made entirely of metal when its core was simply wood. Substandard products were confiscated and given to the poor; its maker was fined the object's price. Since it was possible to create famine by fixing prices through the monopolization of foods, guilds forbid a food-seller from contracting at a farm for its eggs or cheese and such. The food-seller had instead to wait for the farmer to arrive at the market and then compete in public against other bidders. Guilds kept occupations apart by requiring, for example, that tailors make only new clothes and not repair old, existing clothes and that clothing repairers never make new clothes. Guilds also set employee wages and adopted holidays.
Guilds set rules concerning apprenticeship durations along with the number of apprentices that one shop could train. Masters were to feed, lodge, and clothe their apprentices: to treat them as the "child of a good family." Apprentices received training in exchange for their mostly-wageless labor. Some apprentices were given a small stipend and some were sent for weekly lessons in reading, writing, and arithmetic but others were beaten. Few apprentices were married. Parents paid a fee to have their child apprenticed in certain fields.
Apprenticeships lasted four to eight years but usually five. The duration of an apprenticeship could be shortened if the student's parents paid a fee to the master. Apprenticeship in goldsmithing and other metalworking fields might last ten years. To demonstrate mastery of their field, apprentices created a "masterpiece." Apprentices had then to show enough funds and equipment to go into business on their own. They then took an oath and paid a fee to the lord or prince who "owned" the guild. Lords sometimes sold their income-providing guilds to other lords.
After repeating the same motion fourteen hours per day for decades, the bodies of many craftspersons became crooked and bent. Each guild helped ill or destitute members and they helped pay hospital and funeral expenses. These activities were often handled by an auxiliary association called a brotherhood. Each brotherhood had its own patron saint who was related in some way to that field of work.
Growing wool industry expands trade
By the year 1300 in Europe, there was more demand by volume for wool than for grain. Wool was grown in the North and then sent south to Flanders, France, and Italy to be made into cloth and clothing. Merchants obtained wool from many places but the breed of sheep in England had the best hair. The resulting clothing was being bought by people throughout the continent. (How many sweaters are made from the wool of one animal?) Each city and region carefully guarded its wool or cloth reputation. Wool is just one aspect of the entire cloth industry. Linen is woven from flax, which is a vegetable fiber grown most everywhere. Silk had been imported from the East for centuries and was a major item of trade in Spain, Sicily, and Italy. These nations were also dealing in cotton from India.
Merchants bought wool in quantity to obtain the lowest cost. A wool agent might form an agreement with a manor or monastery to purchase its entire wool production in each of the next several years. A notarized contract would be made in triplicate, providing a copy for each participant. Wool sold for four or five shillings per stone. Wool merchants began to insist that fleece be shorn in a barn having a board floor rather than one made of dirt.
Several steps are involved in turning fleece (sheep hair) into cloth. Fleece must be cleaned of dirt, beaten, combed to remove tangles and impurities and to get the fibers to form parallel rows, carded to fluff its fibers, spun into thread, wove into cloth, brushed to remove clumps, dyed, cleaned of oils by a fuller, pressed, and folded. These steps were not performed within one factory building but were done by a series of persons, each doing one step–maybe more–and working within his or her own home. A cloth merchant might buy raw fleece and then take it each worker, one after another, in that series of homes. At each step, the merchant would sell the unfinished product to a home-worker who would perform the next step in the process and then sell the material back to that merchant. The merchant bought, sold, and re-bought the material several times as fleece became finished cloth. To begin the process, after purchasing fleece, the wool merchant would take it to a sequence of workers to have it cleaned, beaten, combed, and carded. The merchant then took it to be spun into thread. It was sold to the spinner and the bought back after having been spun. Thread was still being spun by hand but the spinning wheel would soon be invented to handle the demand. The merchant then carted the wool to the house of a weaver and sold it to him or her. The weaver owned his or her own weaving frame. The merchant would specify the weave to be done and then buy the resulting cloth from the weaver. The merchant then sold material to a dyer to be dyed and then bought it back again afterwards. Dying could be done on either finished cloth or on raw wool. The term "died in the wool" refers to the dying of raw fleece rather than cloth. The merchant then had the cloth brushed, pressed, and folded. The Gies describe this as "a factory spread around town."
The Gies mention the legal proceedings against Jehan Boinebroke–a cloth merchant and "notorious skinflint"–in the year 1286 ad. Boinebroke bought wool, sold it to a weaver, bought it back as cloth, sold it to a fuller for cleaning, bought it back, sold it to a dyer, bought it back, and finally sold it to his agents who would sell it at the market. He rented the homes of entire streets to his workers. He was taken to court for tyrannical dealings with the clothworkers. If there was a downturn in the price of any of the above clothmaking steps, he would simply refuse to buy back the cloth. The court case shows the exploitation of labor and the existence of class conflict but also that justice could be obtained: one-third of the claims were honored by the court.
The loom was the only complex piece of machinery involved in the cloth making procedure, and this gave the weaver some leverage in disputes with entrepreneurs like Boinebroke. In fact, weavers brought the cloth industry of Douai to a halt in the year 1246 through one of the earliest labor strikes. Weavers refused to work for the low fees merchants were attempting to pay. The merchants managed to end this little uprising and hoped it would never return. We'll see that in a few centuries, merchants began to lease weaving frames and equipment to these workers who in effect become their employees. When merchants later began gathering that sequence of workers into a centralized building, the factory was born.
In the year 1287, the Elton manor sent 118 fleece to the abbey in Ramsey. Elton's fleece shipment grew four-fold during the next thirty years, and this four-fold increase during a lifetime indicates a dynamically changing world that would be experienced that way by the people of that generation. Sheep were becoming England's national treasure. Within England, profits from wool production resulted in the conversion of much crop land into fenced-in sheep land.
This "enclosure movement" displaced many English peasants from their farms but fewer continental peasants because less shepherding was being done there. The displaced peasants simply packed their belongings and left the village, leaving a few wattle-and-daub homes and a church to crumble through time. The old stone manor house might then be slept in by sheepherders. By the year 1500, 10% of English villages had been abandoned. At the same time, a few craftspeople were moving to villages to circumvent guild membership and restrictions. Yet other villages became proto-industrial towns. For example, Birmingham began to specialize in tanning and clothmaking when its population was just 1,500 persons.
Agricultural techniques were boosting cereal crop yields to seven to one, reducing the threat of famine. Peasants and serfs were also able to accumulate larger land holdings as the lord's burdens on them were reduced. Some peasants began to independently operate their own larger landholdings instead of using the traditional community-wide cooperation in farming. This meant a decrease in communal ties and increases in the inequality of wealth and in the number of landless laborers.
Some cloth merchants made enough money to buy real estate. They might buy homes that would be rented to the weavers with whom they dealt. "Rent" was actually a payment against a home-loan subject to a 10% interest rate. These payments might last for generations. The wealthiest merchants often became money lenders.
The largest bankers in the year 1250 were in Italy. They charged high interest rates to "offset losses" even though the church denounced such usury. A debtor's property would be seized. Sometimes property could be seized from others living in the debtor’s community because the community had a tradition of looking out for its reputation.
Nobleman were the largest debtors; in fact, their loans might take more than a generation to repay. Sometimes a nobleman would levy a sales tax in his manor town to obtain repayment funds while at other times a town would make a loan to a nobleman. Sometimes a nobleman would knight a merchant for his financial services. The Pope once halted all church services in Champagne until a count had paid his loans. To lift the ban, this count repented and promised to conduct a crusade. (Once again, shame on them. Did this group of leaders–and this group of followers–think God wanted them to go kill and be killed in His name.) Another loan of historical proportion was that of Edward III, who borrowed 250,000 pounds from Italian, German, Flemish, and English families so he could invade France. His bankruptcy in turn bankrupted those loaning families. One French king owed two years' worth of his entire kingdom’s income to a banker in Lyons.
The wool industry was expanding into a new economic entity that would soon require centralized ways of manufacturing. It was also moving people from farming villages to the city where they would become both the labor and the market for the products of the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution. In Medieval Europe, there were few luxury goods and they were bought by only the wealthiest of us. Such trade involving only a few craftspersons can not be the business of an entire people or nation. Trade becomes the work of an entire people when it involves most of them such that the general population is both making and purchasing those goods. The cloth trade was slowly growing into such an industry and would soon require the invention of the factory. An important aspect of the Industrial Revolution is that the factory workers are also the consumers of the factory products.
In thirteenth-century France there was a set of ten, annual trading fairs held in towns such as Troyes and Provins. Peasants attended the fair to see the sights and sounds of foreigners and to see the entertainment and animals. They might also sell a hen. The fair was largely a cloth market but people also exchanged handicrafts, local animal skins, and Scandinavian furs along with iron, lead, tin, and copper from Germany, Spain, Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, and England. Meat, cheese, and wine and such were not exchanged because food could not be transported without spoiling. Mostly, European wool and clothing was exchanged for luxury goods including oriental spices and silks, ivory goods, pearls, sugar from Syria, wax from Morocco and Tunisia, salt from Salins (see http://france-for-visitors.com/franche-comte-jura/salins-les-bains.html), alum–used in dyeing and tanning processes, see www.yorkcitylevy.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=39–from Spain and Egypt, and indigo dye from India (for the history of this dye, you might like to visit www.hindu.com/thehindu/seta/2002/04/25/stories/2002042500180300.htm) brought by Italian merchants. Italian dye makers had recently learned from Muslim suppliers how to make red and violet dyes from crushed insects and lichens.
These luxury goods were brought to the fairs by Southern European traders who obtained them from Middle Eastern Islamic traders in Constantinople, Acre, Antioch, or Tripoli. Some of these Arabic traders had obtained goods from Oriental merchants. Arabic traders told incredible tales to the Europeans including stories about lakes guarded by winged animals. (In Chapter 12 we saw that the Kingdom of Saba spread similar rumors about monsters and flying serpents to protect their source of frankincense and myrrh.) Worldwide transportation was expensive: a pound of mace cost as much as three sheep. Spices were guarded "like diamonds" at every step in their sale as purchasers watched for dilutions and checked weights.
Prior to the fair, roads would be busy with the cargo-filled wagons of merchants. Princes were expected to guarantee the safety of travelers on the roads within their regions and sometimes reimbursed travelers who had been robbed. (We saw a similar custom in Mesopotamia.) While attending the fair, the town's lord guaranteed safety for the merchants from dawn until dusk. Some towns used candles to provide nighttime street lighting. (Robert Payne mentions that the eleventh-century Caliph al-Mustansir ordered that the streets of Cairo be lit with oil-lamps.) To pay for this protection, the lord collected an exit tax on goods taken out of the city. This was very profitable for the lord. The lord also collected tolls, a share of rents, weighing and notary fees, and court fees.
In response to high court costs, merchants at some fairs demanded a separate fair-court to try commercial cases. The fair-court carried out other functions. For example, it would arrest an offender who hadn't paid a fee or fine at a fair held in another town. When a fair-court threatened to exclude from future fairs all merchants from the home town of a certain debtor, that town made sure the outstanding debt was paid.
There were twenty-eight licensed money changers at the Troyes fair and there were also currency exchangers, pawn brokers, money handlers, and loan makers. A merchant might deposit money with a handler at one fair to be collected at another. A loan might be repaid at the next fair or its payment might be spread across the next three fairs. In a new development, some started selling the loans due to them at a discount to third parties who would collect the full loan. These notes were called "letters of the fair" and could be used as cash in other fair transactions.
Since travel was dangerous, especially with a wagon load of goods, merchants typically contracted transporters. A transporter might receive one-fourth the sale's profit but pay for all lost goods. Italian transporters typically supplied one-third of the capital for the enterprise and kept half the profits. Most European wholesalers were Italian. The higher levels of population, trade, and business in Italy were a holdover from Roman times and would also result in the European Renaissance beginning there.
Many languages would be heard at the fairs. Arabic traders introduced Europeans to many new things and were our source for words like bazaar, jar, magazine, tariff, artichoke, orange, muslim, gauze, sugar, and alum. Another occasional reminder of the Troyes fair is that we still encounter "Troy weight" in which there are twenty pennyweight to the ounce and twelve ounces to the pound, as was the case for monetary denominations.
Genoese merchant ships first made their way to England in the year 1277. Ocean-going transportation costs less than hauling goods overland. The medieval fairs began to disappear during the famines and plagues of the fourteenth century but trade soon became ubiquitous. The Gies explain that these fairs and their wholesale exchanges were "Big Business in its infancy" and provided the basis for the Industrial Revolution.
The growth in trade meant Europe was emerging from its Dark Age, which is an overly dramatic name for the period following the collapse of the Roman Empire. In the thirteenth century this growth in trade provided sufficient funds, which were unavailable and unimaginable just two centuries earlier, to build great cathedrals. These were being built in the new Gothic style, see www2.art.utah.edu/cathedral. After many centuries in the shadow of their predecessors, architects were proud to have finally surpassed the abilities of the Romans. The increasing height of Gothic cathedrals was developed by stone masons through experience only and not through the use of measurements or calculations of forces. The geometry of triangles and such was used to draw plans on parchment.
The Gothic architects were among the most respected persons in society. They were not as specialized as are today's builders; one might simultaneously be a sculptor, painter, and poet who could build castles, wells, bridges, and water pipe systems. A Gothic cathedral combined the work of many persons, including sculptors, wood carvers, metal workers, and stained glass artisans who would travel from town to town working on cathedrals. About ten churches were being built each year in France alone. A church could be built in three years if funding was available, otherwise several generations might be required.
Iron clamps and pots and bells of brass were made on site. A brass bell is made by pouring molten metal between two clay molds. After cooling, the molds are removed to free the bell which is then cleaned and tuned. Tuning is done by laboriously removing brass from the inside of the bell, which also makes it thinner. Its brass contained thirteen parts copper to four parts tin. The addition of tin was found to make bells more brittle but gave them a better tone. A bishop would baptize a new bell with a prayer for faith, charity, and good weather. The inscription on one bell might read “call the living, summon the dead” while that on another read “sometimes joy sometimes sorrow” or perhaps “marriage today, death tomorrow.”
Gothic cathedrals were built by hand with help from newly invented wheelbarrows and an oxen-powered crane used to lift materials. While Roman masons cut stones large enough to be held together by their own weight, Gothic masons used mortar to cement smaller blocks together. Romans built semicircular vaults of limited height but Gothic masons built buttressed vaults successively reaching heights of 85, 115, 125, 140, and 150 feet (30, 35, 40, 45, and 50 meters). Their spires would rise as high as 500 feet (170 m). Such heights are truly awe-inspiring to every human who experiences them. They are examples of human artistic capability.
These vaults also provide much space that was filled with stained glass windows, which accounted for half the cost of a cathedral. At Chartres, forty-four windows were paid for by princes and lords, forty-two by town guilds, and sixteen by bishops. Stained glass was made in a nearby forest because large numbers of trees were burned to melt the sand. Two parts ash or beech wood were combined with one part sand to make glass. Various coloring-materials were added. Glassmaking techniques could not yet provide functionally clear home windows but it made highly artistic stained-glass cathedral windows. For more information about this glass, visit www.kent.k12.wa.us/staff/CarlSpears/middle_ages/stained_glass.html.
Europeans inherit knowledge expanded in Islamic lands
Astronomy and mathematics were studied in every region of the world, including Ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China, and in Central and South America. Except for America, which had to study independently, the knowledge of each region found its way to the others. Our combined knowledge has accumulated through time and place. Medieval people living along the Islamic equator inherited knowledge from the more ancient peoples, added to it, and then passed it on to other people, including those in Europe, which was beginning its Renaissance. Visit http://scholar.chem.nyu.edu/tekpages/Technology.html for descriptions of medieval European technology. J.D. Bernal includes the history of Islamic science in his four-volume Science in History, some of which is described here. Visit www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/islamic_medical/islamic_00.html to browse the National Library of Medicine exhibit Islamic Culture and the Medical Arts, which includes anatomical drawings of the nervous and muscle systems. See also www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/arabic/arabichome.html. You might like to visit www.cyberistan.org/islamic for more information about Medieval Islamic science.
In the previous section, we met the Persian mathematician al-Khwarizmi who first described algebraic procedures in his eighth-century book Hisah al-Jabrw-al-Muquabalah, or Restoration and Reduction. Trigonometry was developed by Arabic mathematicians for use in surveying and astronomy. Seventeenth-century Europeans were still relying on Arabic textbooks of medicine and astronomy, including The Compendium of Astronomy by al-Fargani (see www.famousmuslims.com/AL-FARGHANI.htm) and The Canon by Avicenna (see www.famousmuslims.com/ibn%20sina.htm). During the European Renaissance, astronomers were able to use nine hundred years of Arabic observational recordings. The science of optics was developed by Arabs making lenses for people with failing eyesight. In the year 1038 ad, Alhazen published The Optical Thesaurus, which was the basis for the telescopes and microscopes developed by later Europeans. Arabs inherited ancient alchemy and turned it into the science of chemistry through experience with a large number of substances and processes. In the eighth century, Jabir Ibn Haiyan’s studies made him the father of chemistry, see www.famousmuslims.com/Jabir%20Ibn%20Haiyan.htm.
While making medicines, Arab doctors were the first to experiment with distillation procedures. This process was developed further in the large-scale production of perfumes. The distilling industry was the first to have scientific procedures. Europeans soon used this process to distill drinking alcohol, which had never before existed. Demand for alcohol first grew during the plagues of the fourteenth century. Laws were soon made to limit its use.
Through the careful study of the separation and purification of salts, Arabs developed the industrial-scale production of soda, alum, iron sulphate, and nitre. These chemicals were exported for use in the textile and other industries. Nitre makes gunpowder.
The weapons of every time and place we've so far seen consisted of knife, sword, and bow and arrow. Nowhere in the world had iron and gunpowder been merged into canon and then hand-held guns. This was first done in Europe, probably through a modification of Chinese bamboo firecrackers. Their low cost and lightweight mobility were their initial advantage over catapults and ballistae. Procedures of warfare among fifteenth-century Europeans had to be rethought. Gunpowder enabled the wealthiest kings and queens to merge feudal lands into nations.
Canon and muskets made "civilized" people invincible when invading and killing "inferior" peoples. Gunpowder–and European diseases–allowed the slaughter of many of the world's cultures. The Europeans felt they were exporting Christianity and "civilization," as did the westwardly expanding people of the United States. Both were demonstrating their superior technology and their inferior morals. We have seen that in the year 1500 ad, cities existed throughout the world, on every continent. As Europeans first landed in the New World, their technology was merely a few centuries ahead of that of the Americans. Compared to the one-hundred-century-long development of technology since the beginning of farming, a few-century difference is no big deal. We have seen that each region of the world takes its turn advancing technology. When one group of us humans drive another culture to extinction, it is a crime as great as driving a species to extinction. Sometimes we manage to do both at once. Many of us today understand that success in life is measured in terms of healthy and happy children and communities, not in the number of "inferior" foreigners killed. The victims were happily being human before they were killed. Guns and killing do not make happy or superior people. (You might like to read Guns, Germs, and Steel, The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond.)
In the dilemma of humanity, the technology of immoral weaponry is always closely related to more useful things. The need to understand gunpowder helped advance the science of chemistry, especially as it lead to the discovery of oxygen. The study of cannonball motion was necessarily mathematical and helped build the science of dynamics generalized by Galileo around the year 1590 and finalized by Newton in 1687 (see Chapter 2.) The technology to build canons from iron tubes was also used to make steam engine cylinders. The development of fire-using steam engines was inspired by the use of fiery explosions to impel cannonballs. The attempt to understand steam engines resulted in the science of thermodynamics. Today’s car engine also uses fiery explosions within cylinders.
The "Dark Age" of Europe was a time of little food surplus and trade. The people of Medieval Europe suffered social and economic injustice through the manorial system. The Medieval Age ended as its restrictive manorial system evolved into something less constraining and as its trade and population increased to levels enabling–or rather, requiring–new solutions. The expansion of the wool industry and the growth of towns, markets, trade, and specialists meant Europe was emerging into a new age. It was beginning its Renaissance.
As a people change their political system–as occurred when Europeans accomplished the expulsion of the manorial system–they are necessarily in a questioning mood. The equalization of society was accompanied by a rebirth in the intellectual pursuits of art and scholarship. The people of the Renaissance wanted to re-attain and surpass the thinking of the past and they were striving to expand knowledge and techniques. An important aspect of this was that they were asking for proof of all ideas. As the people of the Renaissance questioned the validity of accepted ideas, the Reformation would result and the scientific method would be born. They were critical of everything and of all experts and called their opponents barbarians. Criticism of the Catholic church resulted in Luther's Reformation, see www.educ.msu.edu/homepages/laurence/reformation, which began in the year 1517.
The European Renaissance in art and thinking was in place by the year 1300 within the silver and goldsmith shops and in the fledgling universities. Trade volume was doubling with each generation. Markets and commerce were developing into continental entities making some business persons–and their taxing lord–wealthy enough to fund art and architecture, scholarship and universities. (A good starting place for all things art is www.chart.ac.uk/vlib.) But famine and plague occurring in the 1300s delayed the full Renaissance for another century. As plagues killed one-fourth the population of Western Europe, the resulting labor shortage provided a reason to increase the use of mills and other mechanical devices. During the 1400s, Italian trading cities were among the first with public funds great enough to build monumental architectural works. This occurred as popes and princes were taxing commerce. You might like to read The Renaissance, A Short History, by Paul Johnson. A summary of his book follows. He explains that the artists and teachers of the Renaissance emerged from the craft families already working in metal, wood, stone, and cloth.
The Renaissance was a reawakening of art as artists were striving not only to re-attain but to surpass the artistic heights of antiquity. They wanted to stop being less than them, to instead improve on them and exceed their accomplishments. (At the time, there were a few persons who began dressing like Romans because they thought Rome was being reborn.) This rediscovery of art impelled artists to create realistic representations of people and objects.
The Renaissance happened as ideas and techniques bounced between people. It consisted of a series of contributions from individuals building on the successes of those coming before them. The people of the entire continent were contributing their talents as they became unconstrained by manorial impositions and obligations. (Still today, economic and social constraints are keeping too many persons from contributing their talents to the flow of civilization. Our full human blossoming will occur when these unnecessary constraints are removed.)
Paul Johnson explains that the Renaissance received a push from patrons, rulers, and cities competing to expand their power with embellishments of art and scholarship. As did, for example, Federico da Montefeltro (1422-1482) who obtained his wealth through the mercenary trade. Johnson says it was a rare age in which political and military hegemony was partially judged on cultural performance. (On what basis are such entities judged today? On what actions should our leaders and political institutions be judged?)
At the same time these leaders were committing cruel acts to expand their own power, as described in The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machiavelli), which was written in 1513 ad. Machiavelli described the actual political and diplomatic workings of our leaders: the ends justify the means. On a local scale, some cities were busy attacking others in their attempt to control their region. On a national scale, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castille untied their crowns and gave full support to humanist scholarship in Spain. They were soon succeeded by Charles I who became Pope Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire. France was expanding through the years 1440 to 1527 by annexing Gascony, Armagnac, Burgundy, Provence, Anjou, Brittany, and Bourbon lands. A series of French kings wasted many lives and much money trying to invade Italy. (More sloshing empires that are of little consequence in the progress of humanity. Payne describes the work of the fourteenth-century Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun, who studied the typical demise of empires through price inflation, corruption, and waste, see www.humanistictexts.org/ibn_khaldun.htm.) We see that the nations of Europe were being built as conglomerations of feudal hierarchies. Those lords having the largest number of underlords were at the tops of the tax-collection pyramids and so were collecting the largest amount of money and the greatest number of promissary soldiers. They were hence more likely to attempt to engulf neighboring pyramids.
In contrast to Machiavelli's manual of courtly procedures, Baldassare Castiglione (1478-1529) wrote a manual of courtly etiquette for men and women that popularized the ideals of the Renaissance. Francois Rabelais (1483-1553) wrote Gargantua and Pantagruel describing humanism, bawdy humor, peasants, academics, merchants, lawyers, and courtiers. He wrote in French using slang and dialect and made the French enthusiastic about their own language and its potential. His works were both banned and loved. The humanist Michel de Montaigne (1553-1592) wrote informal reflections on people, events, customs, and beliefs and on life's milestones of birth, youth, marriage, sickness, and death. His work was among the first written in a modern conversational tone.
The development of art and scholarship in the Renaissance involved a series of contributions from many individuals. You might like to read in detail about the contributions of Robert Fleming, Erasmus (1466-1536) who wrote In Praise of Folly and influenced Cervantes (1547-1616) who described life in Don Quixote, Thomas Moore (1478-1535), John Colet (1467-1519), Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457), Ulrich von Hutton (1488-1523), and Antonio de Nebrija (1444-1522).
For centuries, European artists had been depicting scenes of Christian saints and their stories. As the works of the Greeks became available in Renaissance Europe, they provided a new world of topics, tales, and inspirations for art. A new fashion exploded in art. The wealthiest of us might have Greek scenes painted on the interior walls of our homes or commission our own portrait. We would wear our best jewelry and want them to be included in the painting.
People of the Renaissance were striving to get to the truth in scholarship and to present the truth in art. They were concerned with realistic descriptions of the world and so believed that the reality of the human form was best depicted in three-dimensional sculpture. Renaissance sculpture advanced as it bounced off a series of contributing artists. Nicola Pisano (1120-1284) was among the first. He was supported by Frederick II who imported ideas from the Eastern Mediterranean. Pisano's accurate depictions of the human body showed emotion and age in living, breathing individuals.
By the year 1300, artists were studying the form and style of Roman ruins along with the technology that made them. For example, the lost-wax process was once again used for sculpting figures–the most difficult of which was that of a mounted rider. The Renaissance was fully under way in the year 1401 when an art competition was held in Florence and won by Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455), who was selected by a team of thirty-four judges. You might like to look at some of the works–in a variety of mediums–of Michelangelo (1475-1565), Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446), Jacopo della Quercia (1374-1438), Raphael (1483-1520), Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), and the later masters, such as Rembrandt (1606-1669). You might like to visit the Rijks Museum in Amsterdam, see www.rijksmuseum.nl, or the Louvre in Paris at www.louvre.fr (be sure to check out the on-line, panoramic views of the museum rooms). Many sites have art through the centuries. See for example, www.kunstlinks.de, www.metmuseum.org, or www.nationalgallery.org.uk. For portraits and biographies of each of the Renaissance persons mentioned in this chapter, visit http://en.wikipedia.org and enter the target last name in the search box.
Renaissance artists were versatile and enterprising. They worked with any material and in any medium for which there was a market. Many studios were operated as a profit-making business, signing contracts detailing the patron's wishes. Much effort was expended to obtain reality in art: actual body parts were recorded in plaster, measured perspective was carefully duplicated, and every mechanical and optical aid inventable was used. For example, Philip Steadman points out that a mirror can be used to reflect an image onto canvas so that the artist has only to trace the image. A fifteenth-century picture displaying mostly left-handers was likely made using such a mirror system. Perspective had been forgotten in the European Dark Age, but from 1430 on, every artist learned perspective. Leonardo understood that the human eye does not perceive scenes with mathematically precise perspective. For example, the Ancient Greeks knew to bulge one of the horizontal lines of temple tops so they'd be perceived as parallel lines though they were not parrallel.
Philippe de Vitre's (1291-1361) improvements in musical notation allowed more precise and varied results. Musical ensembles became popular. Improvements in the technology of instruments allowed the development of the lute, vio, violin, trumpet, woodwinds, harpsichord, and the virginal. By the year 1600, compositions were requiring four-octave instruments. Visit www.music.iastate.edu/antiqua for photos and sounds of medieval instruments.
Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) published On Architecture describing every aspect of the trade, including definitions, concepts, materials, construction methods, town planning, building styles, water supplies, archaeology, restoration, and costs. Every builder used this book. Renaissance buildings spread across Europe as works were commissioned by kings and queens, including the French king Francois I, the Hapsburg king Charles V, King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, and the Jagiellonian dynasty of Poland. The Kremlin in Moscow contains two Renaissance buildings. Soon Baroque and Rococo would come into fashion. (My favorite building is the Baroque belltower of St. Sophia's cathedral in Kiev, which can be seen at www.galenfrysinger.com/st_sophia_cathedral_kyiv.htm . The cathedral is a United Nations World Heritage Site, see http://whc.unesco.org/pg.cfm?cid=31&id_site=527.)
Instead of writing in Latin, works began appearing in French, English, and Spanish and such because writers wanted to reach a wider audience and were beginning to value their own local heritage. The Renaissance in literature began with Dante's Divine Comedy and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (see www.librarius.com). Johnson says that Chaucer and Dante emerged from a vacuum and had no equals for centuries. Chaucer's new magic was to understand the mind of other's well enough to make personalities jump out of the page as no previous author had done. During the previous 1,000 years, there had been few works of poetry until Francesco Petrarca (1304-74) began its revival. He also advocated the study of both Greek and Latin grammar in the university.
Some humanists became private tutors for the children of wealthy families–including daughters, not just sons as had been more common. For example, Angelo Poliziano (1454-1497) taught the Medici family, see http://galileo.rice.edu/gal/medici.html. (In 1427, an early Medici family member had as much wealth as the annual income of 2,000 wool workers.) Some members of the Medici family were amateur scholars and paid for translations, church and building expansions, and family palaces. (What do our wealthy families do with their money today? Where and how do they get their money?) Lorenzo Medici commissioned works of art and was a scholar and poet. He wrote about hunting, woods, nature, love, and short lives. He was a Renaissance man. As the Medici family moved into government in 1537, they brought along their enthusiasm for culture. Two Medicis became popes, while another married the king of France and was mother to three more.
The techniques and knowledge of Renaissance individuals spread through mass-produced books made in the printing press, invented by Gutenberg, see www.gutenberg.de. The steps leading to Gutenberg's machine include Chinese paper making and block printing transmitted to Europe through Muslim commerce, water-powered paper mills of thirteenth-century Italy, and movable type placed into a letter press. The two goldsmiths Johannes and Johann Fust developed movable type during the years 1446 through 1448. Guttenberg solved the last problems of combining moveable type, punch cutting, composing, inking, and pressing paper with a modified screw press. It took him five years to print his first book, the Bible, which he finished in the year 1455. By 1460 he had printed an encyclopedia. Digital copies of Guttenberg’s Bible can be seen at www.gutenbergdigital.de/gudi/eframes. Classic texts were the first to be printed. Printed books cost less than hand-copied versions, which continued to be made only in luxury editions. (In honor of Gutenberg, you might like to visit www.gutenberg.org to read and download free books.)
Before the printing press, only 100,000 books existed on the European continent; only the largest libraries possessed 600 books. By the year 1500 there were nine million books made by printing presses in over sixty cities, including Venice, Utrecht, Budapest, Krakow, and Valencia. A press was first setup in Mexico in the 1550s and in Boston's Harvard College in 1638.
The fashionable appearance of letters was chosen after a few decades of experimentation. For example, in 1501 Aldus printed in a whole book in italic letters. Soon italic came to be used only for emphasis, contrast, or quotation. Carolingian minuscule or Roman type came to be the most popular type.
This is also the time at which we came to realize the scientific method of building knowledge and understandings by making repeatable measurements. Much human talent has been demonstrated in the rapidly developing scientific and technological fields. The success of the scientific procedure is evident to each of us every few minutes as we use a machine or a medicine that is a result of these endeavors. (It might be fun to list the machines and medicines you use during a typical day.) Much human talent has also been shown in the artistic and other intellectual fields.
Through the period 1500-1700 ad, the scientific revolution changed our way of thinking by making it more accurate, resulting in conclusions closer to reality. Before this time we hadn't realized the value of making quantitative measurements. We expected that our guesses and opinions would agree with reality and blindly took their validity for granted without making measurements to test the truth of these opinions. For example, you can sit in a chair and claim: "If I place an ice-cube in a bucket of water, draw a line to mark the level of the water in the bucket at that moment and then wait for the ice-cube to melt, I will find that the level of the water will rise above that line drawn on the bucket." We can talk about this all we want but a better way to know if this will occur is by making actual measurements. Measurements turn out to be more accurate than guesses. We are constantly surprised by measurement that show that nature behaves differently than we had guessed it would. We make the silliest guesses whenever we are aware of but a small portion of a phenomena. After making repeatable measurements we become familiar with a larger portion of phenomena and our conclusions are closer to reality.
Remember from Chapter 1 that the scientific method means "facts learned from repeatable measurements." It also consists of guessing a generalization of nature from initial measurements and then using this generalization to predict nature in a slightly different situation–one in which measurements have not yet been made. More measurements are then made to see if the prediction is correct. If it wasn't correct then the generalization is rethought and more measurements are made. This repeated process produces an increasingly accurate understanding of nature. Today's machinery, medicines, and understandings of nature are a result of our scientific studies. Much of our modern world has been made possible only by our scientific studies. Many times per day we use a machine, medicine, or procedure made possible by our scientific studies. The scientific method changed our way of thinking about the world and it cannot be un-learned.
The Laws of motion that Isaac Newton published in 1687 showed that the motions of the planets of the heavens followed the same equations as an apple falling to the earth. (The previously measured motions of the planets were described by his equation.) Before the scientific revolution, very few aspects of nature could be described by an equation. It came as quite a shock that there was an equation that governed the motions of the planets of the heavens. Before Newton, we did not see the starry sky as a machine or think that it could be made of the same materials found on the earth. The scientists of that time, and still those of today, view it as an incredible feat that a mere person could find an equation that even the heavens obeyed. After Newton published his motion equations, other scientists began searching for equations that might govern other aspects of the world, including biology, economics, government, and psychology.
The questioning mood that produced the Renaissance (1400-1700 ad.) also resulted in the scientific method that was developed during the years 1500-1700 ad. Together, these matured during the Enlightenment (1700-1800 ad.) and helped propel the Industrial Revolution (1760-1820 ad.) after its invention of the factory. These things form much of the foundation of our civilization.
Our ideas for specific liberties resulting from specific injustices
The kings and queens of Europe were sometimes oppressive and the people's reactions to these oppressions resulted in the development of our ideas of tolerance, limited democracy (different from the full-democracy of Ancient Athens), and personal liberty. Our ideas for specific liberties resulted from specific injustices. Take for example, the development of our idea of religious freedom. Sometimes, the kings and queens of Europe would select a church of their own preference and then dictate that everyone under their rule had to attend that particular church–under penalty of death. The questioning intellectuals of the Renaissance responded to this oppression with the development of the idea of religious tolerance. In 1598 in France, the Edict of Nantes guaranteed religious tolerance in that people were free to attend the church of their choice. In England it was not until 1689 that the Toleration Acts allowed the existence of religious sects. The new, "free-church" was a voluntary group–unlike the intolerant state-church. Still today, we hold the idea of religious freedom as a basic tenet of individual rights. This idea is a part of our view of civilization and cannot be un-learned.
We have seen that we have an innate predisposition to form primate social systems. Our demand for liberty results from our social-primate reactions to injustice in the community that is to be mutually beneficial to all participants. We are a social species because we exchange help on any task requiring the efforts of more than a single individual. We are adept at determining which tasks qualify for this exchange of assistance. Our religions emphasis these values and our governments legally define and protect them.
In The Western Intellectual Tradition by J. Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish, the authors point out that the inventor of the steam engine had a larger affect on our way of life than did Napoleon. Electricity and computers have changed our civilization while political leaders have simply adjusted the map. Ideas have a life of their own and serve as stepping-stones to new ideas. The old ideas do not go away; they cannot be un-known. Also, ideas and society continually interact and affect each other. (You might like to visit www.uh.edu/engines on Public Radio’s The Engines of Our Ingenuity for a discussion of technological creativity.) The following description of elements of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions is a summary of Bronowski and Mazlish’s book.
In the seventeenth century, the university intellectuals began to speak of political and constitutional issues. They also began to debate the role of the king and queen. King James I (1566-1625) wrote True Law of Free Monarchy, in which he argued that the king has a divine right to rule and is above the law. (King James also had the Bible translated into English.)
Friedrich Heere describes how wrath was considered a legitimate royal trait. Complete power might be obtained by those kings generating total fear. Some settled for fits of wrath. For example, Henry II, King of England, would throw himself to the ground in a fit of carpet-chewing rage. Henry II said "The displeasure and wrath of Almighty God are also my displeasure and wrath. By nature I am a son of wrath: why should I not rage? God himself rages when He is wrathful." (This reminds me of the impressive performances we saw from raging chimpanzees. Is such a display learned behavior or is it innate to our species? Which of today's political and business leaders perform such displays?)
When seventeenth-century kings and queens needed money for war, they would place a tax on an item–perfume, for example. Parliament–still consisting of only nobility, not common people–tried to require that the king obtain their approval before a tax could be levied. James' son Charles I also believed in divine right, but in 1628, when he needed money for war, parliament forced him to sign the Petition of Right before they would give any to him.
The Petition of Right asked the king to observe the rights of his subjects, demanded a stop to the billeting of troops, demanded an end to the trial of civilians by martial law, stopped arbitrary imprisonment, and stopped taxation without the consent of parliament. This statement of individual rights has been repeated in many later constitutions and are now a part of our collective idea of civilization. In the seventeenth century, individual people now had religious and political ideals. Economic and social ideals would develop in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Worth of individuals over states
Medieval empires had claimed importance over individuals. The Renaissance includes the emergence of the idea of the value of an individual: this is called "humanism." At times, some rulers believed that the individual was only a piece to be used by the state to achieve its own goals. They also believed that it was ok for the state to repress the people because "the ends justify the means," as stated by Machiavelli. The state must hold its position of power among the other states. Such persons felt that a state is more important than its people.
These rulers believed that the tenants of morality didn't apply to the entity that was their state. Suppose a person comes to your home and says "I must kill you for your food to feed my children." We all agree that the person's lack of food is no excuse for this immoral behavior. But a state will sometimes kill to obtain a port, raw material, or any other object of interest. Remember that a state is the creation of a single person or a small group of persons and is maintained by the decisions and actions of that single person or group.
Such immoral behavior by a state is unacceptable by many persons. Today, many of us believe that the state exists for the people and that it must be concerned for the well-being of the people. This has also been expressed in the past. In the fourth century bc, the Confucian philosopher Mencius said that the measure of a ruler's virtue is the well-being of the people. In 1768 ad, Joseph Priestley published The First Principles of Government in which he states that the happiness of the largest number of persons is the standard by which social action must be judged.
In previous chapters we saw that when we lived in bands of fifty persons, decisions were reached by the consensus of the family heads. For example, a decision to move the village would require such a consensus. The first Mesopotamian farming villages were also run this way. It was a later development that the ruler of an empire first claimed that the state was more important than the lives and well-being of the people. Throughout much of the following 4,000 years, the concerns of our governments of kings and queens have often been nothing except the concerns of kings and queens–the maintenance or expansion of their own territory, wealth, and power. We react against such injustices because it is in our nature to demand that our society be mutually beneficial for everyone–because each of us contributes our lifetime’s efforts to its existence, operation, and maintenance.
It has taken us some 4,000 years to overcome the tyranny of the emperor who had used the people's lives for their own goals. The importance of the state has slowly been replaced by the importance of the individual. The concerns of government today are more closely related to the concerns of a person–having a quality life for themselves, their children, and their community. Today's sort of governmental issues more often include things like health care rather than the annexation or colonization of foreign lands. Most of us measure success in life simply in terms of healthy and happy children and communities, not wealth or power. How do you measure success in life? This trend will continue until our civilization is viewed as a collection of us humans rather than a collection of states.
In many places and at places times through the past 4,000 years, people felt that politics was something controlled from above. We often had a fatalistic acceptance of events as they were given to us. Bronowski and Mazlish explain that during the Renaissance, politics began to mean a more or less conscious participation of all strata of society in the achievement of everyday purposes. Do you feel this is true in your nation today?
Government by and for the people
At the time of the English revolution, about 1650 ad, people began to debate whether government should be "by the people and for the people." Cromwell said that government should be for the people but not necessarily by the people. Still others thought that there could be only a single decision maker, a king or queen, but wanted this ruler to be guided by the needs of the people–an "enlightened despot." (This idea played a large part in the French social revolution.) Colonel Rainborough said that a person should be allowed to give consent to be under the government's authority. Ireton said that to give unpropertied persons a say in government would be the end of civil law. He asked, why should unpropertied persons be given a say in government if they have no financial stake in its operation. Today, we feel that government isn't about the protection of wealth but the protection of individual rights and the well-being of the people.
In 1649 in England, the House of Commons first assembled: "Being chosen by the people, and representing the people, the house has the supreme power in the nation." Popular assemblies and representational government have become part of our view of civilization. Political parties were soon to follow and are free associations of like-minded persons. Freedom of political views became part of our idea of civilization.
The university intellectuals began an open debate over theories of state. Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan (see www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/hobbes-lev13.html) in 1651, arguing the absolute sovereignty of the state. In 1690, John Locke wrote Two Treatises of Government (see www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1690locke-sel.html) in which he compared parliamentary government with a limited liberal state. Both these persons stated that contemporary troubles were the motivation for their work.
Locke made government an object of rational analyses and based political science on reason, not tradition. Before that time, government was thought to be a veiled, divine institution that was above examination. It was accepted as traditional heritage. Locke said there was no such thing as a divine right to rule and that kings and queens cannot claim that tradition gives them the right to rule. He said that the cause of the ruin of cities, the depopulation of countries, the disorder of the peace, is not due to the question of whether or not there is power in the world or from where it came, but who should have it. Even if power is dressed up with splendor, it must still show that it has a right to that power.
Locke said that people are born free, equal, and rational. We have inalienable rights of life, liberty, property, and the right to punish anyone who harms us or our property. People create a political or civil society by appointing a government to protect their rights. The government does not give a gift of these rights but instead protects them. The government derives its power from the consent of the governed. Supreme power lies with the people. Locke said that the true function of government is not to impose laws but to discover the proper laws. He believed that there must be laws of nature that govern human society just as Newton's laws governed motion.
Locke was explaining the new realization that people didn't have to live under tyrants. Europeans began to talk about freedoms because they had just endured some centuries of restriction through the manorial system. In other regions of the world, daily life has never been unfree in these ways. While yet other governments have learned that they can keep people from talking about freedoms if they arrange it such that the people's daily life is so harsh that they worry only about obtaining food each day–as long as food is there to be found (as was explained to me by Laszlo Magayar).
Balancing the spread powers of government
In 1748, Montesqieu wrote The Spirit of the Laws in which he compared democracy, aristocracy, monarchy, and despotism, see www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/montesquieu-spirit.html. He argued that the best government is a balance of power by power and divided government into executive, legislative, and judiciary branches. He said that liberty was lost whenever one person or group has all three of these powers.
In Chapters 19 and 20 we will see that much of today's daily politicking consists of the attempt by persons and groups to convince enough people to adopt their view so that legislation can be passed that makes this view become law. In contrast, dictators have to convince nobody. This politicking is necessary because power is spread among many persons so that no individual can dictate the goals, policies, and actions of the entire nation. A consensus between many persons is required before any action can be taken. We have already spent four thousand years in our attempt to free ourselves from the tyranny of political and economic dictators. We will continue to resist encroachments on our liberties
Montesqieu's ideas influenced both the French and American revolutions. He also created sociology by comparing and discussing classes of people. He felt that social facts were subject to natural laws, just like Newton's equation of motion.
Rousseau (1712-1778) asked how can we determine the collective consciousness and the will of the people? His answer was to count votes. The laws of a society do not appear out of nowhere: they originate and operate by the consensus of the people. They represent the way of life that the society has adopted for itself. The will of the people is the general welfare. Votes should be counted to determine the will of the people because a general assembly's decisions will not be guaranteed to represent the general will unless votes are counted. In England, the reform bill of 1832 first gave the middle-class a voice in government. Our view of civilization now includes the idea of making decisions by counting votes. (Again, we can expect that the internet will provide a continuous means of determining the will of the people.) Rousseau also promoted nationalism, which is another part of our view of civilization that had not existed before that time. Through the past, we have viewed ourselves to be members of increasingly large populations, from band to culture, city, and nation. Will we soon come to consider ourselves to be members of the planet-wide human species?
Constitution of the United States
The framers of the Constitution of the United States had the opportunity to put into action the ideas from the European intellectual political debates of the previous centuries. The Declaration of Independence of the United States (1776) proclaims "We hold these truths to be self-evident" because these truths had just recently become self-evident, see www.archives.gov/national-archives-experience/charters/declaration.html. The Bill of Rights of the United States contains a summary of recent ideas of individual liberty that had been learned the hard way. The Constitution of the United States developed the Federal system of joining independent States. It also put into practice a system of "checks and balances" designed to ensure that power is shared and balanced between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government. The Constitution can be seen on-line at www.archives.gov/national-archives-experience/charters/constitution.html.
Through the last two centuries, the changes in our idea of government in the United States include the end of human slavery, the right to the due process of law, income tax, voting rights for those of us who had been enslaved or are female, equal opportunity for all of us, and the redistributions of the welfare state. In the last century, the enlargement of our governments has been a response to the social consequences of the enlargement of our Industrial Revolution's factory businesses, with employment shifting from farming to a reliance on big-business and its economics.
Bronowski and Mazlish explain that the English-speaking colonies of North America were located far from their English government so the populace already had control of the local systems. They did not have to capture the government but only to defend their rights from the encroachment of the distant English government. The American revolution was begun by, and largely controlled by, the upper-class. It did not become a social revolution as would occur a few years later in France.
Numerous travelers talk of other cultures
At this time, Europeans were also learning to have toleration and respect for other cultures. That is, we began to find that our own group's customs are as ridiculous as those of any other group. We were learning to take seriously the ways of the other peoples of the world because they were not "toy people." We began to understand that the newly-encountered, "strange" people of distant regions took their way of life just as seriously as Europeans took their own way of life. This was being learned from the descriptions of the peoples who were encountered by the commercial travelers and the New World explorers. (By the way, one ancient Greek noted that the people in India depict gods as Indians, Africans depict gods as Africans, Greeks as Greeks, and if cows were to draw gods they would surely depict them as cows.) In 1721, Montesqieu wrote Persian Letters in which the customs of France were described from the point-of-view of two Persian visitors. In 1726, Jonathan Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels.
Comparative travel literature asserted the existence of a natural ethics that was independent of the particular customs of any group of persons. Some philosophers felt that there should be ethical "laws" as clear as there are laws of geometry and that these laws should be self-evident to all persons. In Chapter 8, this "natural ethics" was described as the Golden Rule innate to our primate social system.
In past ages, no one thought the future would be better. Instead, things were considered to be static and permanent. The Industrial Revolution resulted in the idea of change and progress. Hegel (1770-1831) said that people are history: to understand people you have to understand history. In the past, history had been used mainly to present examples that might argue a certain moral point. Now, history is important for its own sake. Today we look at the history of everything. We believe that we understand the present better when we understand the past and we always look to the future.
Around the year 1700, the university study of statistics and economics made people begin to realize that the wealth of a nation lies in its capacity to produce goods. Before this time, rulers believed that wealth was measured by the amount of gold in their treasury. In 1776, Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations in which he created the modern science of supply-and-demand economics. He pointed out that not just gold but also labor is a source of wealth because labor produces products that in-turn produce wealth. He said that nations can become wealthy by exporting more goods than they import. (We'll see in Chapter 18 that today's transfers between global corporations have blurred the distinction between imports and exports, and make it hard to determine whether or not a product has been locally made.) Adam Smith also said that the greater part of people's misery is easily removed by increasing education and ensuring the decent living conditions that result from increased wages.
We have seen that each individual within a gatherer-hunter society makes their own tools, utensils, and decorations, but as we formed villages and cities there came to be specialists who would hand craft certain items. The farming surplus could feed but a small number of these full-time craftspeople who would make some of the decorations, tools, and utensils of daily life and supply luxury items to the wealthiest of us. The highest level of art is reached by full-time practitioners due to their concentrated and lifelong practice.
Until two hundred years ago, business and industry mostly meant small craft shops providing a product or service to the immediately surrounding area within a radius of a day’s walk, which is ten miles (16 km) or so. The owner or proprietor worked the shop along with an apprentice or employee or two. They worked together from the home of the owner and sold as much product or service for as low a price as possible–typically selling products for 15% more than they had cost to make. A craftsperson might spend the entire day making a single spoon. This was the state of manufacturing until we stumbled upon the mass production techniques of the Industrial Revolution.
Commerce was occurring throughout of the world: in the Americas, along the Islamic equator, and in Asia and Africa. We have seen that during the medieval period there was a high level of commerce in China and that the European wool industry was expanding into a continental cooperation between northern sheepherders, central cloth makers, and southern wholesalers and bankers. (The Bank of England was created in 1694 as a way to finance English industry.)
Manorial peasants legally tied to the land could not easily move to the city to provide the labor and consumer pool needed for mass production, but by the fifteenth century the demographic situation was changing. By the year 1700, 530,000 persons were living in London, which was 10% of all English people. The second most-populous city in England had just 30,000 residents. We can see that trade, city populations, and laborer-customer populations were growing to such magnitude that the Industrial Revolution would soon arrive as a necessary solution. As the population of London reached one million persons, certain crafts became organized into high-output factories. Our civilization's industrial output dramatically increased with our invention of the factory and its mass production. This occurred around the year 1760 and was the beginning of our Industrial Revolution.
We have seen that before this time, many products were made entirely in people's homes. Some products involve a series of processes. Each of these separate steps was done in a separate home using tools owned by the members of that household. One merchant might take the incomplete product to each home in that series as it was being completed. For example, this is the way we made clothing for thousands of years. Woolen cloth begins by raising and shearing sheep. The wool is cleaned and combed, spun into thread, and then the thread is woven into cloth on a weaving frame. It takes many spinners to make the thread needed by one weaver. Somewhere along the line wool is dyed and finally cloth is turned into clothing. In Medieval Europe, the home weaver bought the thread, owned the frame, and sold the cloth.
During the economic downturn of eighteenth-century England, many weavers began leasing their frames and other product-making tools from that merchant. In effect, these weavers had become wage earners. The wool merchant, or cloth seller, came to own the thread, frame, and cloth. Some of these merchants decided to bring all of their equipment into a single building–a factory–where they could exercise more control over the entire process, including the hours of the workers and the quantities of produced goods. The workers were then traveling to that building to do the work instead of the work being taken to the home of the worker. This was the start of the factory that began our Industrial Revolution.
The overseeing merchant soon found that several persons could simultaneously be making thread that fewer persons turned into cloth and clothing. Since all of these people were working within a single building, it was natural to make increasing use of mechanical power. Such devices had already existed for centuries but no such concentrations of needed power had existed. The first spinning machines were invented in 1760. New machines were continually invented to reduce each newly-found bottleneck in the factory's manufacturing processes.
The industrial revolution began in England where lots of streams flowed year-round to provide water-wheeled power. Soon, water-powered factories were built in most every rural area that possessed such streams. It is significant that these factories were not located in urban areas where they would have met fierce opposition from guilds.
The steam engine began as a power source to remove water from mines. James Watt (today, we use "watts" as the unit of power) improved the steam engine, and began selling them to factories. Steam power replaced stream power after about 1840. The steam engine provided more power than the water-wheel and allowed the machines to become larger and more complex. Since factories no longer had to be located near a stream, they were instead moved to the populated cities where laborers could be found. In addition, the coal industry then rapidly expanded because large quantities of coal had to be brought to the factory towns to be used by the steam engines.
The Industrial Revolution was a change in manufacturing technique–the factory–not a change in machinery. The factory brought together many persons into a single building to produce a final product that was then sold to everyone employed in other factories. The Industrial Revolution meant that human-powered and water-powered factories began to mass produce clothing, utensils, and decorations at a fraction of their previous price. This meant that most every one of us could afford them. This soon lead to the commercialization–that is, the buying and selling–of most everything but also provided the opportunity for nonliving wages and poor working conditions to develop. These conditions were quickly followed by discussion and attempted solutions as government took on a whole new range of responsibilities.
In the year 1760, materials and work were taken to the homes of the villagers to be processed into a product. By 1820, workers were being taken to the factory. Within two generations, the customary way of running industry changed. This was a sudden change that greatly changed life in just a fifty-year span of time. (Think of something that you know has changed between the time of your parents, yourself, and your children.) The expansion of industry changed us from farmers into factory workers. This was as dramatic a shift in our way of life as had occurred thousands of years earlier when we changed from being gatherer-hunters to being farmers. (What is next for us?)
Before the Industrial Revolution our homes typically contained about twenty items: two pots and a ladle, a few wooden or earthenware plates, a chicken-feather bed, a tin candle holder and some candles, two sets of clothes, one mirror, a wooden chair or two having no upholstery, and a few decorations. A log may have served as a bench. We rarely had curtains, pictures, carpeting, or painted homes and we often used sharp sticks as forks and clam shells as spoons. Only the richest of us, the "nobles," could afford to pay other persons to hand-make these utensils and decorations. (We see samples of these hand-made luxury items in today's museums.) The rest of us made many of our own basic utensils using any handy material
In our ancient cities, typically 10% of us were making hand-crafted tools and decorations while as little as 1% of us were buying them. As Medieval farmers moved to town, the laborer-consumer pool grew and commercial markets grew. Today, close to 100% of us are involved in these two activities. A people are industrialized when most everyone is acting as both makers and consumers. In the following chapters, when we look at the explosion of trade occurring with the emergence of the Industrial Revolution, we'll see that manufacturing and commerce levels grow with the number of persons working in factories and the number of consumers purchasing products. Notice that factory workers are also the consumers of the products of other factories. An increase in the number of consumers will in turn cause an increase in the numbers of factories and factory workers. These increases build together until most everyone is involved.
Factory-made objects are much cheaper to produce than are those more laboriously made by hand. The first factories produced low-priced cloth. As increasing numbers of persons bought factory-made cloth, increasing numbers of persons were needed to work in increasing numbers of cloth factories. The number of consumers, factory workers, and factories increase together because each requires and promotes the other two. The next set of factory-made items included clothing, carpets, drapery, brooms, and furniture and such. Soon, most everyone was working in a factory, most everything was made in a factory, and factory workers were buying most everything they used from those factories.
In the early United States, the difference between rich and poor was much less pronounced than it is today. A rich home was distinguished from a poor home by lighting six candles rather than one and by having a full set of dishes and maybe a small piano or pianoforte. As the Industrial Revolution matured, our homes came to contain 200–or even 2,000–items made by us in the factories. We became both the producer and the consumer of these items. For example, by 1830, 20% of U.S. homes had a carpet.
The contents of the homes of the wealthiest of us were less changed by the Industrial Revolution. In the year 1850 they still looked much like those from the year 1750–or even 1650–in that items were mostly handmade from expensive materials. For example, you might like to compare the contents of the homes of wealthy persons in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Amsterdam, see www.museumvanloon.nl/english/collectie.htm and www.willetholthuysen.nl, with those of Kentucky, see www.bluegrasstrust.org/hunt-morgan/photographs.htm.
Chemical processes were also improving. In 1709, people found how to make coke from coal. Coke produces enough heat to reduce iron ore so that iron quickly became the common material. The new industry of iron produced the railroad industry and then the automobile industry. With each emerging industry, a few persons would became as rich as a nation (as will be discussed further below). Today's new industry is the computer and its internet.
Social affects of factory life
As people moved from the villages to the factory towns, villages became deserted. The world's population grew from 60 million to 400 million persons through the years 1700 to 1900. Larger towns have new troubles. The factory owner sometimes allowed poor working conditions to exist. Some people lived in misery and worked long hours for little money. Workers were sometimes less valued than factory machinery. Robert Owen (1771-1858) operated a factory and had programs to eliminate drunkenness, laziness, thievery, crime, and juvenile delinquency.
As factory machinery became simple enough to be run by children, child labor moved from the home to the brutal factory. Newspapers were full of discussions about the emerging, mechanized factory and its social implications, especially about child labor. (Just as today's newspapers are full of discussions about the social affects of the computer and the internet.) Child labor laws were passed during the years 1850 to 1900, and compulsory child education slowly began around 1850. Visit www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/IRchild.htm for descriptions of work, factories, and laws along with biographies of owners and workers and many contemporary interviews.
In response to the social affects of the growth of industrialization, we began to include social programs in our view of the role of government. We will see that this caused government to expand greatly in the 1900s, especially in response to the Great Depression.
Now that we’ve reviewed some aspects of industrialization, you might now like to re-read Ralph Linton’s essay about the diffusion of inventions quoted in Chapter 9.
We have seen that a group of people will change their way of life only when circumstances require change. For example, full-time farming developed in response to high population levels or life-threatening decreases in the gatherable and huntable food supply. It is especially true that in a world successfully but unjustly divided between lords and peasants, between "haves and have-nots," the haves do not want anything to change. We will see this occur in many times and places–for example, in the slavery-practicing plantations of the Southern U.S. In Chapter 19 we will see that the have-nots might be constrained for generations to lives with no hope for improvement, but the moment their lives begin to improve they often demand much more. Luckily, there has always been some region of the Earth not too politically, socially, and economically constrained to advance knowledge and art.
Many aspects of our current civilization have a direct link back to the first cities. Our conventions for calendars and the divisions of months and hours reaches back to Mesopotamia and Egypt. The names and lengths of our months are a result of the egos of the Caesars (see Civilization Before Greece and Rome by H.W.E Saggs). Our civilization has continually accumulated additional techniques, tools and machines. When you look at today's roads, buildings, bridges, farms, aqueducts, cities, boats, pottery and dishes and such, you are looking at things that began as much as five or ten thousand years ago and have been continually improved by each successive generation. The changes in our civilization are due to the changing ideas of us humans in response to changing times. Our civilization is the result of the collective efforts of all us humans. For the hundredth time in this book it will be mentioned that we humans are building the civilization of our own choosing. All of the humans of the Earth have been combining knowledge since the time of the first humans.
We saw that our gatherer-hunter ancestors made decisions through the consensus of all the family heads and that this continued to be the case for the Mesopotamian village farmers until chiefdoms were formed. Kings and queens ruled the first city-sized urban areas formed in Mesopotamia around 3500 bc From 2000 bc until 500 ad, much of the Mediterranean and Middle-East was ruled by empires. Our governments usually consisted of kings and queens and the concerns and goals of these governments were simply those of the kings and queens: the expansion of the territory and the power of the king and queen. In Europe, the collapse of the Roman Empire was followed by one thousand years of local lords in a feudal and manorial system–as did Japan and China–and then nation-sized kingdoms. During the last five hundred years, these kingdoms have become democracies.
We saw that in ancient Athens, the people were the government and that democracy meant that the people decided every detail of the city's operation by a show of hands. Citizens were selected by random lot to fill governmental positions. The origin and purpose of Athenian democracy were to provide protection from the injustice of wealthy tyrants or “city-bosses” who had grown rich through trade with the older kingdoms of the Middle East and came to control much of the town. In response to their attempts to impose their will on all the members of the city, the community gave each person an equal voice in government and the courts. (We innately demand that our societies be mutually beneficial to all members.) The citizens of Athens were its government. Today we simply elect officials who make decisions and run the city for us; the citizens of modern democracy play a smaller role in their own government.
We saw that commercial enterprise had already become massive in Medieval China and how business developed in Medieval Europe. Gernet explains that Europe's lack of continent-wide government allowed the merchant class to more readily assert itself, gain recognized rights, and form its own entity. European towns gained rights through written agreements or charters signed with their manorial lords. China's merchant class became wealthy but no change in societal or political arrangements resulted because a single national government was in place in the minds and culture of the people: we saw that Confucianism teaches that good children make good family structures and in turn, good families make good governmental structures.
J.D. Bernal explains that the heirs to the first Hellenistic burst of natural science were held from further progress by war, economic stagnation, feudal and manorial systems, castes, and large static states. The scientific method developed in Europe as a natural extension of the skepticism of the Renaissance. This skepticism occurred as a new society was replacing an old and nearly stagnant one that was believed to be inferior to its Roman predecessor. This sort of questioning had not occurred in the more established but still static regions of the world. By chance, our understanding of nature dramatically improved as we came to realize the technique of the scientific method. (Remember that science is a procedure to build understanding through repeatable measurements.) The flow of scientific thinking expanded to drive the Enlightenment.
At the same time, expanding commerce and large numbers of laborer-consumers were combined with centralized factories to produce the Industrial Revolution. Factories quickly spread across Europe and the rest of the world. (Visit www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/indrevtabs1.html for tables involving factory production, literacy, population, and railways.) The factory's low-cost mass-production of goods are both made and purchased by laborers. Instead of twenty utensils, furnishings, and decorations in our homes we began to have 200 or even 2,000. This soon lead to the buying and selling of everything in a commercial system.
During the last 500 years or so, our civilization developed the ideas of history, mathematics, political and religious tolerance, science, the factory, individual liberty, and a government by and for the people–operated by elected officials–whose purpose is to protect our personal liberties and to promote economic and social justice. These ideas changed our civilization as they became a part of our view of civilization. We will never un-know these things.
Many of our ideas of tolerance and liberty came in response to having lived for some centuries under oppressive kings and queens whose governance showed a lack of tolerance and liberty. Reaction to a particular injustice sometimes begins with a debate among university intellectuals. This might generate a debate among the general public. The weight of the public produces the pressure for real changes to be enacted. Our kings and queens rarely feel generous and suddenly relinquish power without such pressure from the people. Ideas are more powerful than state-rulers and people are becoming more important than states. This trend will surely continue.
Bronowski and Mazlish point out that our inventions of farming, factories, antibiotics, electricity, and computers and such caused profound changes in our daily way of life while dictators and generals simply made temporary rearrangements in political maps. Our daily life is not drastically affected by which king or queen, foreign or domestic, is collecting the taxes–unless we are killed during the process.
Those of us humans who lived during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment reemphasized the value and dignity of the individual and the importance of the individual over that of the state. We began to rebuild a more-just form of government than had existed for some centuries in the region. We now want our civilization to be such that all individuals are allowed the unrestricted attempt to fully realize their own potential. Each person will then be able to use their personality and talents to contribute to the progress of our civilization. We are not there yet but we humans will not stop until this is the character of our civilization.
The factory is now a part of our idea of civilization. The Industrial Revolution changed the conditions of life for our society and resulted in many waves of changes in response to other changes. These changes include the origination of the factory worker, compulsory children's education, governmental social programs, and an increase in the power of the middle-class. State economies became based on the premise that they must export more than they import. It also became common for people to begin entrepreneurial enterprises. Most everything that could possibly be commercialized did become commercialized.
This chapter contained a brief description of changes in our idea of government and personal liberty. In Chapter 12 we saw that the lives of us gatherer-hunters changed dramatically as we became farmers. In the next chapter, we will look closely at the equally-dramatic change in the way of life of us farmers as we become factory-workers. (We see that we humans have lived in just three general subsistence styles: gatherer-hunters, farmers, and factory workers.) Nothing about today's business and government and our big-city way of life makes any sense until we look at the changes in our way of life as we switched from being farmers to factory workers. Most everyone lived the life of a farmer until the Industrial Revolution. During the decades after 1760, many of us switched from being farmers to being wage-earning, laborer-customers.
Laborer-customers have an increased number of utensils and decorations in their homes, but working for a wage also means that us laborers no longer hold full control over our own destinies because our wages might suddenly end at any moment. We will see that much of Big Government develops as a reluctant response to the social consequences of our shift from farming to factory work. The shift from farming to wage-earning also brought profound changes in community ties. These benefits and drawbacks still accompany the industrialization of any nation today. To make us better understand the magnitude of the change in culture that accompanies the shift to industrialization in any region of the world today, we will look closely at what this shift meant for the people of the United States during the years 1800 to 1850.
As the number of utensils and decorations in our homes increases from 20 to 2,000, does our happiness increase? At what number of tools did our happiness begin? Does our happiness depend at all on this number? Within the U.S. today, as in other regions of the world, there are many homes that contain just twenty utensils and decorations. Are people happier when they live in a wood-frame or brick home than when they live in a grass hut? Since the time of the first humans, most of us have measured success in life simply in terms of happy and healthy children and communities.
In the coming chapters we will look at some aspects of democracy today, including the way political power is now shared among hundreds of politicians in Washington D.C. We'll also look at the cultural characteristics of peoples who choose democracy as their form of government. We'll see that democracy is more than voting and that it is a nation's form of government only for as long as its leaders and citizens are willing to blend priorities through debate, compromise, and consensus. Democracy is more than free speech and other civil liberties. It is a firm belief in the toleration of different views and the right of dissent of others who offer opposing views and priorities. We have seen that a group of people do not want to change their culture overnight. The only form of government that feels natural to a person is that in which they grew. A people might choose democracy as their form of government if they do not view government as a caring and trusted parent or as an institution having the divine right to rule.
Questions
1. Compare your nation's democracy with that of ancient Athens.
2. List some recent national decisions made by the people. List some others made by the military, the poor, the artistic, the wealthy, the religious, or by big business.
3. Governmental decisions were made by majority-vote in Ancient Athens. In today's groups of millions of persons, how do you keep the majority from oppressing a minority view?
4. Would you like to participate in an Athenian style democracy in your city, county, or nation?
5. Why did the Athenians develop democracy?
6. Name some ancient contributors to our idea of civilization. Name some ancient persons who are still known today for their business activities, sports abilities, political views, or religious ways.
7. Why did feudal systems develop in Europe, China, and in Japan? Are there any feudal societies toady?
8. Describe democracy, theocracy, oligarchy, dictatorship, republic, monarchy, and anarchy. What are some benefits and drawbacks of each of these? Which do you prefer? Which system is better-able to define and fulfill goals?
9. What percentage of our personality is genetically inherited from our parents? In recent centuries, many groups of like-minded people have formed their own community to live in their chosen manner due to their strong conviction about a particular lifestyle or aspect of life. Some of these are politically motivated and some are socially motivated, see www.cr.nps.gov/nr/travel/shaker/utopias.htm. Describe the purpose of some of these communities. Since children are a reshuffling of the genes of their parents, do they always choose this one aspect of life as the single most important element of life or does the group often dissolve after one generation? Do their children grow up to have identically strong convictions for the same things? Does this mean these convictions are genetic or learned? Have religiously-based communities been more likely to last longer than a single generation? During the last few centuries, migrations have been composed of independently acting families instead of entire peoples. Do the children of migrants also choose to be migrants and move off to yet another land? Do the children of those who initiate a new democracy in a nation also desire democracy?
10. Why did Europe develop its laws of liberty, tolerance, and democracy?
11. Which is more important, the state, the military, the corporation, the religious organization, or the individual? The majority view or the minority view?
12. What would your daily life be without modern technology? Which lifestyle do you prefer?
13. Where does your government get its money? What does it buy with this money? Who decides what this money should be spent on?
14. How does our civilization change today? What are the roles of politicians, government, religion, people, corporations, criminals, militaries, universities, and the world's nations in changing today's civilization?
15. Instead of defining your nation's wealth in terms of exports and imports, can you define it in terms of individual wealth? Would you define individual wealth in terms of earnings, spending, investing, or by some other measure?
16. Do you prefer a national religion or an independence between church and state? Why did some Europeans begin to think about a separation of church and state? Did the regional mixing of Buddhism and Confucianism, or Hinduism and Islam produce similar political tensions and reactions?
17. Why do persons choose to vote or not to vote in today's democracies?
18. List some good things and some bad things about your government.
19. How do we remove drugs, crime and war from our civilization–or should we? When did these things become part of our civilization? What should be the government's role in removing these things? Design an experiment to test the effects of economic and social injustice on crime rates.
20. What role do you think our wealthiest business owners play in our country's actions and decisions today? Do you feel that the country is run by the people? Do the governmental representatives run the country? Can you take any person or corporation to court when you feel you have been wronged? Can a poor person in your state take a wealthy person or organization to court if they feel they have been wronged?
21. Ancient Athenian democracy consisted of citizens who operated the government. Today's citizens instead elect officials who manage the government and its day-by-day operations for them. Which of these two styles of democracy do you prefer?
22. When did opinion surveys start and what are some uses for these? When did advertising start? What percent of a company's income is spent on opinion poles and advertising today? Do politicians conduct opinion poles? Do they advertise?
23. Discuss the change in market size and company profit during the last 5,000 years.
24. Can you relate England's population level or density to the need for the origin of the factory? Compare England's population at the time to that of some other nations. (Throughout the world, population levels have been seen to increase dramatically–even to triple–after industrialization.) Did water-wheels, home-production practices, or the number of year-round streams play the largest role in the beginnings of England's Industrial Revolution?
25. List some elements of each of the religious views from Chapter 13 in the societies of Ancient Athens and Medieval China and Europe and give some examples of the Golden Rule at work in these societies.
26. In what ways was Athenian democracy related to our social rule to do as we expect others to do and to react against any contrary behavior?
27. What are the characteristics or cultural aspects of a people who choose democracy as their form of government? Which characteristics make a people instead choose strong kings and queens or an authoritarian leader?
28. Did the Kalapalo, Mesopotamian farmers, Ancient Athenians, or Medieval peasants have religious freedom or the right to form political parties? Did they suffer from unapproved taxation, the unwanted billeting of troops, arbitrary imprisonment, or military trials of civilians? Did assemblies of citizens make decisions by voting? Could the leader bring arbitrary harm to a citizen? In each of those societies, which was more important, soldiers, citizens, leaders, business persons, or priests? Was there a balance of power in their governments? How did their economic systems compare?
29. Does industrialization lead to democratization in a nation?
30. In what ways do modern religion and government have the same purpose? In what ways are their goals different? How does each define justice, tolerance, liberty, and our Golden Rule? How does each go about teaching ideals?
31. Governmental buildings of the West often use ancient Greek architecture. What do Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu nations use?
32. How large can a population be before it is no longer able to decide actions by a show of hands?
33. Create a piece of art to describe the progress of our civilization.
34. We saw that some Greek villages grew through trade with older Mediterranean states. Where a similar thing occurs today, there is sometimes a local resentment directed against those within the community who are trading with the larger, foreign states. Did this resentment also occur in those Ancient Athenian villages? What form does the resentment take today?
35. Compare the so-called dark age of Europe around the year 1000 ad with that of Mesopotamia around 1000 bc. Was Europe blossoming, stagnating, or suffering a decay?
36. Make a worldwide plot of population levels, in 500-year intervals, and compare to plots of technology levels, innovation rates, and expertise levels.
37. Compare the sequence of farming and technological innovations in the New and Old Worlds. These two regions were completely isolated from each other, as if there were humans on two different and isolated planets, and so provide two independent examples of human innovation. The similarities and differences in the sequence of innovations and its timing provides clues to the driving forces behind technological innovation.
38. How much did Medieval villagers pay to their manor lord and what did they receive from the lord in return? Were these exchanges just and were the amounts fair? Compare the role of the manor lord with that of today's government. Which is the most dictating or the most intrusive on our daily lives? In what ways did the "contract" between lord and serf differ from that between people and their government today? The manor lord held a monopoly on certain services. What sort of business monopolies exist today?
39. What were the official and social positions of a reeve within a village? When did a sherif's occupation originate. What were the original duties of a sheriff and what similarities between this occupation and a "shire-reeve" from the past resulted in people choosing to use that name for the new occupation?
40. Compare accounting procedures in Mesopotamia, Medieval China and Europe, and today. Why and how is accounting done?
41. What was the origin of your last name? When did your ancestors begin using this name?
42. What portion of your total income today is used for governmental, religious, and living expenses. What portion is paid to governmental and religious organizations? Compare this portion to those of people in Mesopotamia, Medieval China and Europe, the U.S. of the year 1800, and the Kalapalo. In what way do these efforts go into the operations of the community during those times and places? Is your daily life more free or less free than that of a Medieval Chinese or European person?
43. How many families must combine efforts to safely survive by farming? Did any of the world's first farming regions consist of non-communal, independently operated, single-family farms? In various times and places around the world, what was the role of the clan in communal farming?
44. Compare portions of hours worked by individuals that is taken by the government in Ancient Mesopotamia, Medieval manors, and by our governments today.
45. Medieval European villagers would more easily have made ends meet if the manor lord had not leeched off their efforts. What did the lords provide in return for their share of people's efforts? Was it a just exchange? In some times and places around the world, those of us controlling the system find the maximum amount that can be taken from others and still leave them with bare sustenance. Where is this occurring today? Would gatherer-hunters agree to such an unequal system?
46. We have first, middle, and last names today. Can you relate the number of names used by each person to the population density? When did we start having three names and when will we require four? How many names are used in other parts of the world today? Does everyone list their family name first or do some list it last?
47. Compare the reasons for the disappearance of some Medieval villages and today's small towns in the U.S.
48. Chess is centuries old. During the first Star Trek decade a three dimensional version was tried out. Can you make a feudal chess game involving more than two players, or one in which the pieces change role every so many turns, or having a few spies who suddenly switch sides after so many moves, or after so many elapsed moves or enemy captures allow knight movements to be promoted to three spaces up and two over, or where each player begins each turn by adding a square to the board so that it expands in any desired direction–even up or down? This would mean each turn is begun by promoting a piece to a higher rank, exchanging two pawns for one knight, making a prisoner exchange, adding a square, and revealing a spy. Have you ever tried treating every piece as a queen or one having all bishops while the other has all rooks in "lines versus diagonals"?
49. Compare childbirth, weddings, old-age pensions, funerals, and business contracts among the Kalapalo, Mesopotamians, and thirteenth-century China and Europe with those of your own culture today.
50. Compare Medieval farming village life to city life. How do Medieval villages compare with those of today?
51. How did the invention of farming flow into Europe and how quickly and drastically did it change the lives of the gatherer-hunters living there?
52. If you are a descendant of Medieval Chinese, Europeans, or Africans, which cultural details remain in place in your life today and which have changed? The Medieval Chinese, African, and European villages described above occurred seven hundred years ago. How many cultural details changed from seven hundred years before then and how many have changed in the seven hundred years since then? How many 500-year time spans have occurred since we began farming and how many cultural details change during each 500-year span of time?
53. Compare today's guilds with those of Medieval China and Europe. Which functions of a Medieval guild are now handled by the government?
54. Compare wool and cloth industries in Mesopotamia with those of Medieval Europe and Africa. Were the masses of village farmers and urban workers buying the cloth and clothing or were they bought only by the wealthy?
55. Could one band of twenty-five gatherer-hunters decide to make clothes and tools and sell them for food to the members of other nearby bands? Could half the people in a Mesopotamian farming village decide to make clothes and tools and sell them for food to the other half of the residents? When the Industrial Revolution began, what percentage of the population were farmers? What is that percentage today?
56. Would you like to be a stone mason? Compare stone building techniques from Mesopotamia, Medieval China and Europe, and today.
57. Compare educational opportunities and techniques in Mesopotamia, Medieval China and Europe, and today. Compare medical knowledge in these four times and places.
58. Compare long-distance trade in Mesopotamia and Medieval China, Europe, and Africa.
59. How might the European Renaissance been different if Chinese books were being translated in addition to those from Greece? Are translations of both Eastern and Western books readily available today?
60. Which of the world's cultures create works of art depicting human emotions?
61. If we had somehow stumbled across gunpowder about the time our first city-states were beginning to go to war, how would history have changed? It would have been even more unlikely for the discovery of gunpowder to have occurred in the year 1800 or 1900. How would history have been different in this case?
61. What are the causes of dark ages and renaissances around the world?
62. Discuss the role of barriers to travel and language in slowing the movement of knowledge and techniques around the world. Is there free movement of ideas and knowledge today?
63. What was the European Renaissance about? Discuss the role of the Renaissance mood in the development of the scientific method and in our idea of personal liberty and democracy.
64. What was the Industrial Revolution about? Did Renaissance moods play any role in its development? Did the scientific method play any role in its development?
65. What roles did the Industrial Revolution and the scientific method play in the development of European democracy?
66. Describe the role of Confucianism in Medieval China.
67. Compare urban life and commerce in Mesopotamia with those of Medieval Europe, China, and Africa. Compare techniques of building city walls.
68. Describe the flow of knowledge, techniques, and art around the planet through time.
69. Compare the sacking of the capitals of Sung China and Rome.
70. Get a map of the world and color code regions by the population levels feedable by agricultural production. Were our earliest cities located in these regions? Our earliest empires? Our largest?
71. Can rice be transported over larger distances than wheat? Which crop is more reliable, year after year? How does this affect famine rates and supportable population levels?
72. Compare the range of goods sold in Medieval Chinese and European shops. Were these goods available to all the residents?
73. Compare the use of rivers and oceans by merchants in Medieval China and Europe.
74. Some of us engage in fashion contests in which the person with the most expensive clothing, jewelry, home, and furnishings wins. Is this related to our primate social system of competing extended families, or to our desire to care for our children, or are we just seeking mates, or is it something else?
75. What percentage of the population was either making or buying tools and utensils in Mesopotamia, Medieval China and Europe, and England at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution?
76. As European colonizers and conquerors spread around the world, they sometimes explained that their actions were justified because they were exporting "civilization." Do you agree? The people of the U.S. justified their westward expansion into native lands as their manifest destiny. Do you agree?
77. Those of us humans from certain continents have the stomach bacteria needed to digest dairy products but others do not. How long have we been eating dairy products? What does this tell us about the speed with which an animal species can change its dietary habits? How rapidly did our ancestors change from herbivore to omnivore?
78. Did Medieval Chinese tea drinking habits result in less frequent water-born epidemics because of the use of boiled water? As tea-drinking spread around the planet, did water-born disease decrease?
79. Describe the ideal family and community. Can you relate specific ideals taught to children to the overall features of the resulting society? Are the ideals taught to our children attainable by rich and poor alike or only by the children of one class of people?
80. Which cultural elements remain in effect today that originated in Mesopotamia? Which cultural elements remain in effect today that originated in Medieval China, Europe, Africa, and America? Which cultural elements remain in effect today that originated during the Renaissance or Enlightenment?
81. List some things common to Kalapalo, Mesopotamians, Yoruba, and Medieval Chinese and Europeans.
82. Compare birth, puberty, wedding, and funeral ceremonies around the world.
83. Compare the goals of art in Medieval China and Europe during the Renaissance.
84. Last names were often taken from a person’s occupation, including smiths of all types. Since a great number of persons today have “Smith” for their last name, does it mean that these craft-persons had greater than average numbers of children?
85. Discuss some aspects of China today, see www.worldbank.org.cn/English/Content/chn_aag02.pdf.
Primary sources for the chapter
The Origins of Greek Thought, Jean-Pierre Vernant, 1982, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York.
The Classical Athenian Democracy, David Stockton, 1990 Oxford University Press, Ofxord.
Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion 1250-1276, Jacques Gernet, 1962, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California.
Life in a Medieval City, Frances and Joseph Gies, 1969, Harper & Row, Publishers, New York.
Life in a Medieval Village, Frances and Joseph Gies, 1990, Harper & Row, Publishers, New York.
The Renaissance, A Short History, Paul Johnson, 2000, Modern Library, New York.
The Western Intellectual Tradition, J. Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish, originally published in 1960 by Harper & Row Publishers. Reprinted in 1993 by Barnes and Noble Books, New York.
Suggestions for further reading
Past Worlds, Atlas of Archaeology, Time Books, 2003. This book covers every region of the world throughout time, including hominids, gatherer-hunters, farmers, traders, and industrialists. It also describes art, technology, culture, and everyday life.
The Archaeology of Greece, an Introduction, William R. Biers, 1980, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York.
Early Greece, The Bronze and Archaic Ages, M.I. Finley, 1981, WW Norton & Co, New York.
The Economic and Social Growth of Early Greece, 800-500 BC, Chester G. Starr, 1977, Oxford University Press, New York.
Cults, Territory, and the Origins of the Greek City-State, Francois de Polignac translated by Janet Lloyd, 1984, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Daily Life in Greece at the time of Pericles, Robert Flaceliere, 2002, Phoenix Press, London.
Politics in the Ancient World, M.I. Finley, 1983, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Ethics, Aristotle, 1953, Penguin Books, London.
The Republic, Plato, 1955, Penguin Books, London.
The Laws, Plato, 1970, Penguin Books, London.
The Politics, Aristotle, 1962, Penguin Books, London.
The Athenian Constitution, Aristotle, 1984, Penguin Books, London.
Hellenistic Science and Culture in the Last Three Centuries BC, George Sarton, 1987, Dover Publications Inc, New York.
The Harvest of Hellenism, F. E. Peters, 1970, Barnes and Nobles Inc, New York.
The Archaeology of Early Historic South Asia, The Emergence of Cities and States, F. R. Allchin, 1995, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
The World of Thought in Ancient China, Benjamin I. Schwartz, 1985, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
Chinese Philosophy in Classical Times, Edited and translated by E. R. Hughes, 1942, J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd, London.
China, A New History, John King Fairbank, 1992, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Sources of Chinese Tradition, Compiled by Wm. Theodore De Bary, 1960, Columbia University Press, New York (in two volumes).
An Intellectual History of Modern China, edited by Merle Goldman and Leo Ou-Fan Lee, 2002, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Literature of the Eastern World, James E. Miller, Jr., 1970, Scott, Foresman and Company, Illinois.
Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean, An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750, K. N. Chaudhuri, 1989, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Merchants & Faith, Muslim Commerce and Culture in the Indian Ocean, Patricia Risso, 1995, Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado.
The Empire of the Steppes, a History of Central Asia, Rene Grousett, 1996, Barnes and Noble Books, New York.
Literature of the Eastern World, James E. Miller, Jr. et. al., 1970, Scott, Forsman and Company, Glenview, Illinois.
A History of South-East Asia, D.G.E. Hall, 1981, St. Martin's Press, New York.
The Epic of Latin America, John A. Crow, 1980, University of California Press, Berkeley.
A History of Africa, J. D. Fage, 1995, Routledge, New York.
African Cities and Towns before the European Conquest, Richard W. Hull, 1976, W. W. Norton & Company, New York.
A Brief History of the Caribbean, from Arawak and Carib to the present, Jan Rogozinski, 2000, Plume Book, Penguin Group, New York.
Claiming a Continent, A New History of Australia, David Day, 1997, Angus & Robertson, HarperCollinsPublishers, Sydney, Australia.
The History of Islam, Robert Payne, 1995, Barnes and Noble, New York.
Science and Civilization in Islam, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, 1968, Barnes and Noble Books, New York.
Daily Life of the Aztecs on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest, Jacques Soustelle, 1961, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California.
The Pueblo Revolt of 1680: Conquest and Resistance in Seventeenth-Century New Mexico, Andrew L. Knaut, 1997, University of Oklahoma Press.
The History of the Incas, Alfred Metraux, 1969, Random House Schocken Books, New York.
Daily Life in Palestine at the Time of Christ, Henri Daniel-Rops, 1961, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California.
Daily Life in Ancient India, Jeannine Auboyer, 1961, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California.
A New History of India, Stanley Wolpert, 1977, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Daily Life in Ancient Rome, Jerome Carcopino, 1940, Yale University Press, London and New Haven.
Life in Ancient Rome, F.R. Cowell, 1980, Perigee Books, New York.
As the Romans did, A Sourcebook in Roman Social History, Jo-ann Shelton, 1988, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
What life Was Like is a 25-volume series by Time-Life Books that covers many of the world's times and places.
The Other Side of Civilization, Readings in Everyday Life, volume I edited by Peter N. Strearns and volume II edited by Stanley Chodrow, 1979, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, New York, New York.
Prehistoric-Britain, Timothy Darvill, 1987, Yale University Press, New Haven and London.
A History Of Medieval Political Thought 300-1450, Joseph Canning, 1996, Routledge, London and New York.
The Medieval Experience 300-1400, Jill N. Caster, 1982, New York University Press, New York.
The Medieval World Europe 1100-1350, Friedrich Heer, 1998, Welcome Rain, New York.
Political Thought in Europe 1250-1450, 1992, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
The Illustrated Chronicles of Matthew Paris, Observations of Thirteenth-Century Life, Richard Vaughan, 1993, Alan Sutton Publishing, Phoenix Mill.
Revelations, The Medieval World, James Harpur, 1995, Henry Holt and Company, New York, New York.
Power and Profit, the Merchant in Medieval Europe, Peter Spufford, 2002, Thames & Hudson, New York, New York.
Lost Country Life, Dorothy Hartley, 1979, Pantheon Books, New York, New York. Dorothy describes “how English country folk lived, worked, threshed, thatched, rolled fleece, milled corn, brewed mead, ploughed, reaped, spun wool, churned butter, kept bees, wove baskets, and carried on all the other tasks of daily rural life."
Classics of Western Thought, Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, Karl F. Thompson, 1980, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York.
The Great Documents of Western Civilization, Milton Viorst, 1965, Barnes and Nobles Inc, New York.
The Rise of the West, William H. Mcneill, 1963 & 1991, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition 400-1400, Marcia L. Colish, 1997, Yale University Press, New Haven and London.
Cities and The Rise of States in Europe AD. 1000 to 1800, Charles Tilly & Wim P. Blockmans Editors, 1994, Westview Press, Boulder CO.
Gold & Spices, The Rise of Commerce in the Middle Ages, Jean Favier, 1998, Holmes & Meier, New York.
The East India Company, Trade and Conquest from 1600, Antony Wild, 1999, The Lyons Press, New York, New York.
The Italian Renaissance, J.H. Plumb, 1961, Houghton Mifflin Com, Boston.
The Prince, Nicolo Machiavelli, 1993, Wordsworth Editions Ltd, Hertfordshire.
The Enlightenment, Peter Gay, 1966, W.W. Norton & Company, New York.
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Edited by Mark Goldie, 1993, Everyman, London.
Worldly Goods, A New History of the Renaissance, Lisa Jardine, 1996, Nan A Talese, New York.
The Industrial Revolution is discussed in Industry and Empire, E.J. Hobsbawm, 1968, Penguin Books, London.
Democracy in America, Alexis De Tocqueville, Edited and Abridged by Richard D. Heffner, 1984, Penguin Books, New York. See also http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/home.html.
The History of Government, (in three volumes), S. E. Finer, 1997, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Guns, Germs, and Steel, The Fates of Human Societies, Jared Diamond, 1997, W.W. Norton & Company, New York.
Life in Medieval Times, Marjorie Rowling, 1979, Perigee Books, New York.
Memoirs of a Medieval Woman, The Life and Times of Margery Kempe, Louise Collis, 1964, Harper & Row, Publishers, New York.
Life in a Medieval Castle, Frances and Joseph Gies, 1974, Harper & Row, Publishers, New York.
A Medieval Family, The Pastons of Fifteenth-Century England, Frances and Joseph Gies, 1998, HarperCollinsPublishers, New York.
Magdalena & Balthasar, An Intimate Portrait of Life in the 16th-Century Revealed in the Letters of a Nuremberg Husband and Wife, Steven Ozment, 1986, Simon and Schuster, New York.
Down the Common, A Year in the life of a Medieval Woman, Ann Baer, 1996, M. Evans and Company, Inc., New York.
For everyday life in Elizabethan England, see http://renaissance.dm.net/compendium/home.html.
For a 360-degree panorama of a castle see www.360history.co.uk/keniworth_castle/tower_view.htm.
Feudal Society in two volumes, Marc Bloch, 1961, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Town Government in the Sixteenth Century, J.H. Thomas, 1969, Augustus M. Kelley, Publishers, New York.
The State in Early Modern France, James B. Collins, 1995, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer, 1964, Bantam Books, New York.
(The list of suggested readings in Chapter 1 contains some books involving the history of science.)
Science in History (4 volumes), J.D. Bernal, 1971, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The Exact Sciences in Antiquity, O Neugebauer, 1969, Dover Publications, New York, NY.
The Scientific Revolution, Stevin Shapin, 1996, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
The changing place of women in modern Asian and Arabian society are described in the following books.
Bound Feet and Western Dress, A Memoir, Pang-Mei Natasha Chang, 1996, Anchor Books Doubleday, New York.
Red Azalea, Anchee Min, 1994, Berkley Books, New York.
Watching the Tree, A Chinese Daughter Reflects on Happiness, Tradition, and Spiritual Wisdom, Adeline Yen Mah, 2001, Broadway Books, New York.
Behind the Veil in Arabia, Women in Oman, Unni Wikan, 1982, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Leaving Mother Earth, A Girlhood at the Edge of the World, Yang Erche Namu & Christine Mathieu, 2003, Little, Brown and Company, Boston. Yang and Christine describe life in matriarchal Moso society in the Himalayas.
Copyright © 2009 Robert Dalling, www.UsHumans.net
