Steven Till

This fun, thirty question quiz looks at your interests, background, lifestyle, and other metrics to determine what job might have best fit you if you lived during the middle ages.

http://ift.tt/2f728DW

I ended up with Clergy:

You are a spiritual person and you are drawn to peace and simplicity in your life. You enjoy reading and writing, spending the bulk of your time in quiet contemplation of creation. The life of a clergy member is a relatively safe and lucrative pursuit in Medieval times and you hold great power in your community. You are drawn to helping and saving as many souls as you can in this life.

That makes some sense for me since I guess I do consider myself a strong spiritual person, always seeking, and obviously enjoy writing, which would have been a primary function of a clergyman, and I also enjoy foreign language study. Since they didn’t have computers back then or stock trading, I guess clergy would be a logical path for me at that time.

I’m late to posting this so I assume most people have viewed the trailer already, but in case you haven’t, it is linked below.

Release date for the movie is set for May 12, 2017.

A slight departure from my normal historical based posts, but I wanted to highlight For Honor, the video game title by Ubisoft coming out Feb 14. Video gaming is kind of a side passion of mine, and I always take note when a game set in the medieval period comes out. While not historically accurate by any means, the game is based in medieval combat with various characters to play as (Vikings, Knights, Samurai) as you battle across various landscapes and countries in both a single player, campaign style narrative, as well as multiplayer, PVP combat.

The open beta launches this week from Feb 9 – Feb 12.

More info regarding the game and beta can be found on Ubisoft’s official For Honor site.

I don’t so much care to discuss current immigration politics, but since that is all the news is covering lately, I thought it would be interesting to look up what immigration was like in England during the Middle Ages. The following article from medievalists.net references England particularly during the 14th – 16th centuries. This period was after the Black Death when the population across Europe was significantly lower and there was a lot more work available.

According to research provided by the Universities of York and Sheffield, approximately 1% of the population of England during this time was made up of immigrants. Today that number is approximately 12% according to this study.

About one out of every hundred people in late medieval England was an immigrant, according to researchers at the universities of York and Sheffield. They have also launched a new database that offers details about 65,000 immigrants who lived in England between 1330 and 1550.

The England’s Immigrants project was created by these universities with support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). It is led by Mark Ormrod, of the University of York’s Centre for Medieval Studies.

The database offers information on the names, origins, occupations and households of a significant number of foreigners who chose to live and work in England during the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries…

Read the full article at medievalists.net, which also provides links to the research database and other articles of interest.

From NPR:

During the Middle Ages, Christian pilgrims en route to Jerusalem had a problem. They needed to pay for food, transport and accommodation during their journey across Europe, which could take months. They also didn’t want to carry large amounts of precious coinage because they’d become a target for robbers. This became an obstacle to worship.

That’s where the Knights Templar stepped in. The Knights Templar were a bunch powerful monks who defended Christian pilgrims. They had a solution to this cash issue. Pilgrims could leave money safely protected with the Knights Templar in England and withdraw it in Jerusalem. No cash needed. Pilgrims could just carry a letter of credit. It was basically a private bank before there was anything else like it. This was a pretty modern idea.

Listen to the full podcast.

Not sure how I missed this story back in August.

A centuries-old hand grenade that may date back to the time of the crusaders is among a host of treasures retrieved from the sea in Israel.

The metal artifacts, some of which are more than 3,500 years old, were found over a period of years by the late Marcel Mazliah, a worker at the Hadera power plant in northern Israel.

Mazliah’s family recently presented the treasures to the Israel Antiquities Authority. Experts, who were surprised by the haul, think that the objects probably fell overboard from a medieval metal merchant’s ship.

The hand grenade was a common weapon in Israel during the Crusader era, which began in the 11th century and lasted until the 13th century, according to the Israel Antiquities Authority. Grenades were also used 12th and 13th century Ayyubid period and the Mamluk era, which ran from the 13th to the 16th century, experts say.

Read more from Fox News.

(Photographic credit: Amir Gorzalczany, Israel Antiquities Authority)

This is an older article from the beginning of the year I ran across recently.

From Alehorn:

A perfectly balanced Medieval Broadsword went missing in 1943 without a trace, and has evaded enthusiasts and academics for nearly a century. Finally, it’s been found – in a Texas restaurant.

The Harriet Dean sword is one of the last remaining weapons from the arsenal at Alexandria, and it’s one that any medieval weaponry expert would have immediately recognized. So when Howard Dixon of Christie’s Auction house saw it amongst a collection of consigned arms for sale, his pulse began to race. He was in “stunned disbelief.”

Read more…

From History.com:

The Viking Age, from the late-eighth century to the 11th century, produced pioneering explorers such as Erik the Red, who founded Greenland’s first Norse settlement, along with powerful kings such as Cnut the Great, who ruled a vast empire in northern Europe.

The six Norsemen listed in the article are as follows:

• Rollo
• Erik the Red
• Olaf Tryggvason
• Leif Eriksson
• Cnut the Great
• Harald Hardrada

Learn more.

I have internal links on my site in the list above to more info on Cnut the Great and Harald Hardrada as I have researched them a bit more since they were around the time of the Norman Conquest of England. Most of my focus over the years of independent study has been during that period of English/French/Norse history.

From History.com:

After 34 years, one of the most extensive conservation projects in history has come to a close as the salvaged remains of Mary Rose have been placed on full public display. For the first time visitors to the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, England, will have unobstructed views of the flagship of King Henry VIII’s navy that sank in battle nearly 500 years ago.

Read more…

A friend of mine recently introduced me to Write On by Kindle. It’s an Amazon sponsored writing community where writers openly share their writing projects, and readers provide feedback. I just signed up yesterday and posted the first chapter of my novel. From the little I’ve perused thus far, the quality of writing and feedback seems really good.

The first chapter of my novel can be found under my profile. I look forward to posting more here as well as following other writers and giving feedback on other stories. There is an option to browse by genre, and it looks as though the most recently revised stories show up at the top. So if you post new chapters or stories or revise your current stories, this should be a way to have your stories filter back to the top of the queue and hopefully gain more visibility and followers.