Memory Medieval

🚨EPISODE 31 The grisly death (and life) of Saint Thomas Becket with Dr. Paul Webster. This will serve as a bridge to get us back on track for the Richard series and examine the life, martyrdom, and impact of one of the most influential non-nobles of medieval history! Links👇

If you need something to read about this weekend, let it be medieval spycraft.

Link me to the coolest Celtic archaeological finds you know of

@WanderMrPanda @jollyheretic I've heard of him. Makes sense to me.

@MemoryMedieval Are you familiar with Ed Dutton: @jollyheretic ? [The lack of] Mortality salience, he argues, is one the primary external factors affecting the evolution of Western cultures over the past 300 years.

This stream got me thinking.. The medieval mind is so difficult to really understand, in part because medieval people wanted different things out of life. If you asked somebody today what their ideal life would look like, I have a feeling the most popular answer (Family Feud style) would be something like "Have a good job, have a nice house, maybe kids, and have comfortable things/fun until around 90 or so when I die in my sleep." Mostly creature-comfort consumerism and a painless death. The point of this isn't to say that if, given the same potential luxury and comfort, medievals wouldn't say the same thing, they likely would. But they didn't have many of these options. Life was harder. Death was likely to be unpleasant and there were many reminders (those around them dying unpleasantly). There were not nearly so many creature comforts to acquire. They were not so divorced from nature. And they weren't tapped into things like stonk markets, 401ks, and retirements. Moving to Florida and zoning out in front of a slot machine or cruising 24 times a year wasn't an option. So I think they would have a wider variety of responses relative to today. Many would prioritize being right with God. Many of the elites wanted glory. Many would probably want to see their grandkids or have fulfilling lives in ways that don't speak to material comforts. One of the loudest siren songs of modernity is comfort. It can easily lull you to sleep. And in many ways these rough paradoxical people of the medieval past are difficult to understand because luxury, comfort, and convenience are such a heavy part of our lives, like water to a fish, and barely a part of theirs at all.

@aakashgupta You don't hate developers enough

Let me explain exactly why every new subdivision in America looks like the top photo, because the math is wild. A mature tree increases a home's value by 7 to 19 percent. On a $400,000 house, that's $28,000 to $76,000. A single shade tree produces the cooling equivalent of ten room-size air conditioners running 20 hours a day. One tree on the west side of a house cuts energy bills by 12 percent within 15 years. The bottom photo is worth more, costs less to live in, and sells faster. This has been documented by the University of Washington, Clemson, Michigan State, and the USDA. The data is not in dispute. Removing those trees saves the builder roughly $5,000 per lot. Concrete trucks need twice the dripline radius of every standing tree. Utility trenches need flat ground. A bulldozer flattens 200 lots in an afternoon. Preserving trees adds weeks and thousands per home. So the developer pockets $5,000 in savings and the buyer eats $50,000 in lost value for the next two decades. The person making the decision and the person paying for it have never been in the same room. The Woodlands, Texas is the proof of what happens when they are. George Mitchell bought 28,000 acres of Houston timberland in 1974 and preserved 28% as permanent green space. He forced McDonald's to build behind the tree canopy. That McDonald's became one of the highest-volume locations in Texas. The first office building, designed to reflect the surrounding forest so you couldn't see it from the street, leased completely. The Woodlands median home price today: $615,000. Katy, a comparable Houston suburb that clear-cut: $375,000. Named #1 community to live in America two years running. Fifty years of data. The trees are worth more than removing them saves. Developers clear-cut anyway because they sell the house once and leave. You live in it for 30 years.

@TimothyEveland Congrats man, well deserved!

20,000 followers! Thank you to each one of you! Sincerely! This has been a dream come true. If you love medieval content, follow Medieval Diesel now and join the fun!

I can't speak highly enough of @MemoryMedieval as a contact or show guest. @ThomasWayneRil1 & @_jburden, I don't if know if you'll ever intersect with Medieval history, but @MemoryMedieval is a great guest/source. youtube.com/live/2zsLVN1Rm…

@WanderMrPanda @ThomasWayneRil1 @_jburden Very kind of you, thank you.

The first charge at Hastings: Taillefer the minstrel sword-juggler rode from the ranks singing and tossing his sword in the air!

@Alexand40817790 From current scholarship

@MemoryMedieval I always wonder where the romanticization of this rather incompetent king comes from... probably Robin Hood myths.

The blue part plus England is what France would look like today if Richard the Lionheart had lived another 15 years.

@TunesRank This may come as a surprise to you but Richard and John were very different

@MemoryMedieval Hmmm. I have my doubts about England taking over all of France especially with how quickly they lost it during his brothers reign

@MSugma71483 @MatthewMey20297 @JenniferWi60451 That would be awesome but if somebody would do it right the Hautevilles would be incredible

@MatthewMey20297 @JenniferWi60451 @MemoryMedieval They just need to adapt Sharon Kay Penman’s series on the Plantagenets goodreads.com/book/show/4384…

It's a strange one. I appreciated his fidelity to the story. Generally I enjoyed the movie. However, I thought it was a very poor movie. If he hadn't done the tryptic style of telling the story and just told the story normally, would have been 10x better. I don't think the different povs added anything and all of that time could have been used to flush out events better. An unfortunate whiff, which I enjoyed watching.

@MemoryMedieval That’s a great counterfactual and I actually agree that he would have defended his own lands and taken more.

@Krugerman12 I really enjoyed Harold Lamb's two parter, Iron Men and Saints and Flame of Islam.

@MemoryMedieval I wouldn’t mind it not being recent, as long as it’s worth reading and gives an accurate understanding of the period. I know some stuff on the Crusades can be poor.

Two man things in the Holy Land. 1- They frequently traveled sparsely (when an enemy was near) and very quickly between castles. The network of castles in the Holy Land was very important and sprang up very quickly because sticking to extremely strong fortified positions (and then only moving between them as necessary and sparsely) made it very difficult for the arab armies to do much to them. Saladin is notable for breaking up this fortified web so quickly, beginning with his victory at Hattin, which was so disastrous for the Kingdom of Jerusalem because most of the castles were left with very small garrisons and then no hope of relief. Without the disaster at Hattin, and a castle network of full garrisons, wherever Saladin attempts to siege will be well defended and a relief army will be shortly forthcoming. You can see many other examples of this prior to Hattin. 2- The "fighting march" and "combined arms" tactics. The "fighting march" was a formation where the infantry heavy (as it was difficult to maintain heavy horses in this environment at scale) forces of the Crusaders would form a square with knights in the middle. They would form some number of squares or columns. The infantry would ward off any real charge and shield from most of the arrows, until the enemy was able to be caught out of position or tired, then the knights could emerge from the square and engage the out of position/tired enemy. Combined arms were used at Jaffa, where Richard had spearmen between crossbow teams outside the walls of the city. Unable to be flanked, and with their shields facing the enemy, the crossbow teams were able to return fire as good or better than the mounted enemy while the spearmen kept any charges from breaking the lines. At the end of the battle when Richard sensed weakness, he charged with his cavalry and Saladin's demoralized army had had enough. Now of course there are many other factors that would be at play, I'm not saying this means Europeans get automatic victories. The point here is that it is commonly held that the Mongols had some unique or special style that would have clobbered the Europeans but they had developed and deployed tactics that minimize or neutralize many advantages of the horse archer approach. It is also worth mentioning that Frederick II was making plans for a Mongol invasion of the HRE, instructing his vassals to stock castles, not attack the Mongols in the open, and to pull everything inside. They were preparing for a guerrilla style war with their castles as fortified bases against a Mongol invasion. This would have likely played out unfavorably for the Mongols. The point is that if you take that the Hungary campaign was extremely favorably conditions for the Mongols and that the rest of Christendom had much better ideas on how to fight them, and had deployed those kinds of tactics recently in the Holy Land, and were preparing to do so again... the picture looks much less favorable for Mongols to be successful against other European polities.

@BADALEX_ @timecaptales Wasn't it Bruce who got him into films, which is how we know him in the first place?

@MemoryMedieval @timecaptales Because they never fought in a professional setting.

Chuck Norris held a 183-10-2 record and was a 6x world champion in full contact bare knuckle karate. On top of that, he beat heavyweight kickboxing world champion Joe Lewis 3 consecutive times and also had a brutal sparring match with undefeated kickboxing world champion, Bill Superfoot Wallace, that lasted an hour and a half. According to Wallace, they practically stalemated and "beat the crap out of each other". Chuck was trained in kickboxing/boxing by Benny The Jet Urquidez and was also trained in BJJ by the Gracies and Machados for 20 years. Even being able to submit Carlos Machado himself on occasion. Chuck had a 315 Ibs bench press at 180 lbs bodyweight and was said to have a grip back in the day that nobody could escape from because he was so strong. Even Jean Claude Van Damme said he'd never fight Chuck Norris, despite being a kickboxing world champion himself. Chuck held a 10th degree black belt in Chun Kuk Do, a 9th degree black belt in Tang Soo Do, an 8th degree black belt in Taekwondo, a 5th degree black belt in Karate, a 3rd degree black belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and a black belt in Judo. Rest in peace, Chuck!

@8nOxiEyMNEjnAG6 If he lives 15 more years he probably deposes Philip within 10.

@MemoryMedieval For about two years til Philip Augustus came along 💭

@BADALEX_ 🤝

@MemoryMedieval Excellent analysis. Thank you very much for posting that.

@Krugerman12 Secondary source means something written recently?

@MemoryMedieval What secondary sources on this topic would you recommend in your experience (crusades in general, not necessarily the 3rd)?

If you'd like to read more on the fighting march scribd.com/document/72721…