Maybe we’re not back in the Middle Ages...

Aug 8, 2020, 12:12 PM (21 hours ago)

What are the most disturbing facts about the Middle Ages that most people do not know?

1.The vast majority of children died young. Painfully young- and in a lot of cases because they were swaddled and hung from a ceiling beam in smoky houses to stop them getting underfoot or being hurt by animals and vermin- but then were asphyxiated.

2. Knights began training as pages at 8 or 9 to inure them to violence and did so by being sent away from their parents to a relative or family ally because the process was brutal enough it was not reckoned a parent could do it. The reason for their youth was to make sure all skills were bedrock-level secure but recent studies have also shown that your morality at 8 is still malleable enough to accept the violence without question. Some pages were trained to slaughter pigs with swords that were hung from roof beams to desensitize them to the screams and blood and smell.

3. In Wales dynastic mutilation was common as it prevented men from assuming a title— so brothers vying for important positions or thrones commonly blinded and gelded one another as it was reckoned less horrific than murder. This practice was also common in the Byzantine empire where one unlucky man, learning he was now a potential claimant to the Imperial throne, blinded himself with a needle to prevent himself being murdered.

-The Land Lady

This was such an uplifting article, delivered without context from whatever source my Land Lady back in Harm City got it. The facts are not off, only the context, our sissy context. Do note that these living conditions were almost identical to 17th Century Plantation America, except that the elite [the Planters] were not also brutalized.

-1. Most kids died before 5. Being suspended from the rafters might have caused some asphyxiation. But it was better than being eaten by rats face first like Gil Scott Heron's sister Nell, crushed by the milk cow, or papoosed in the driving rain as the mother worked in the dank fields. The misery of the child was no worse than that of his toiling parents who lived to the ripe old age of 23!

-2. In our age all violence and fighting is evil. But there were once fates worse than being a calloused warrior. This very practical toughening of the page was necessary for him to be able to combat:

Magyar slave raiders who would sweep in to carry off women for the sex trade,

Viking barbarians who would sail up the river to rape and pillage and sell the people into bondage,

Arab, Berber and Turkish pirates scouring the coast for women to abduct and sell and boys to castrate and sodomize,

Packs of wolves dragging humans from their huts...

-3. If you failed to defend your slice of Christendom against the heathen and the Saracen you got castrated, raped, mutilated or killed anyway. We are headed back into that sanguine way.

The Middle Ages was the forge where the conquerors of the world were born in fire and ice, beaten, tempered, quenched and sharpened into human weapons: the heaving North Atlantic and howling Arctic our anvil of despair and the ravening hordes of Africans [Berbers] and Asiatics the thunderbolt hammer that did not care.

May the world devolve into a new forge that will recast our kind into something that would shatter the sissy mind.