Medieval Society and Culture

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Medieval Society and Culture
By Lauren Greenfield
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Subtitles

• Medieval People
• Economy
• Sports and games
• Language and Literature
• Art
• Religion
• Clothing
• Food

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Medieval People

• Slavery was dying out in this period
• The first relationships of people were in there
  own families
• Most children lived with there mother, father,
  brothers and sisters
• People had died young of diseases
• Hardly anyone went to school
• The rich children were given to monasteries or
  abbeys to be monks or nuns they were taught to
  read and write there
• The poor were raised to work in the fields or
  take care of younger siblings

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Continued

• Children around the age of twelve or thirteen
  went to go work for somebody else
• They either worked in the field, take care of
  babies, and animals, servants, or went to go
  learn a skill
• Most Peasants had rented land from other richer
  man and women
• If there was a war then the owner and the renter
  would have to go to war together
• Sometimes the renters would have to give the
  landowners an amount of chickens, honey, or spun
  wool

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Economy

• They didnt use as much money as they had before,
  instead they had used the stuff that they had
  produced by themselves
• Arabs had imposed peace in this whole place
• Money continued not to be used
• The Crusades helped increase the trade in the
  Mediterranean
• Crusades led the kings of France and England to
  impose a new tax in money, called the Saladin Tax

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Continued

• Through out 800 and 1000, Mediterranean port
  cities like Genoa, Pisa, and Toulouse were doing
  very well
• After 1000, the new port of Venice became
  increasingly powerful
• By 1350, the plague wiped out about one out of
  every three people in Europe, and weakened many
  of the old relationships between lords and
  peasants
• A lot of peasants whose families had died wanted
  to move to the other cities
• So the cities got more powerful than they had
  been before

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Sports and Games

• The games were dice, knucklebones, marbles, and
  checkers
• chess began to be played in Europe toward the
  end of the Middle Ages, and after paper reached
  Europe from China, playing cards also began to
  appear in the later Middle Ages.
•  As for spectator sports, the gladiator games of
  the Roman Empire ended with the fall of Rome.
• In the Christian era, men no longer fought men
  to the death in the arenas.
• In the old amphitheatres many of which still
  continued to be used, men continued to fight
  animals bears and bulls were the most popular of
  these, because they were the most dangerous

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Continued

• In the old circuses , also, horse-racing and
  chariot-racing continued to be popular for a long
  time.
• Instead of the old gladiatorial combats , the
  medieval world introduced the tournament, in
  which armed and armored knights fought each other
  for prizes, and for the entertainment of the king
  and queen and the public

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Language and Literature

• Books were very expensive in medieval Europe, and
  so there weren't very many of them
• Each book had to be written by hand by a trained
  scribe (often a monk), and that took a long time
• And they had to be written on a parchment
• But even though books were so hard to produce,
  and most people couldn't read, there were still a
  lot of people writing books
• More books were written in Europe in the High
  Middle Ages. People soon began to write more in
  languages that people still spoke instead of in
  Latin, and that made it easier for people to
  learn to read their work
• Then in the Late Middle Ages, in England, Chaucer
  wrote a series of great stories in English

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Art

• Medieval art is usually divided into several
  different kinds, each were expressed differently
  in different countries, and which even happened
  at different times in different places as well.
• First is Late Antique art, where some people made
  art in a more or less Roman style, so people
  would know they were Roman Christians, while
  other people were making German art, so people
  would know they were Germans and Arians
• After Late Antique art came Romanesque art,
  where German, Roman, and Islamic elements mixed
  and brought a new energy and excitement to
  architecture ,sculpture and painting

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Continued

• Romanesque art in northern Spain, where Romans
  and Visigoths fled after the Arab conquest, was
  very much influenced by Islamic art
• Romanesque art soon turned into gothic art around
  1100 AD in Italy, and then spread slowly over
  Europe between 1100 and about 1300 ad

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Religion

• People think of the Middle Ages as a very
  religious period, when the Christian Church was
  the most important institution and everybody
  prayed all the time
• The religion was very important to the people in
  the middle ages, especially when they had built
  many of the large cathedrals

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Clothing

• Men mostly wore tunics down to their knees,
  though old men and monks wore their tunics down
  to the ground, and so did kings and noblemen for
  parties and ceremonies
• Men sometimes also wore wool pants under their
  tunics
• Other men, especially noblemen, wore tights under
  their tunics.
• Knitting had not yet been invented, so they had
  to wear woven tights which did not fit very
  tightly.
• On their feet, men wore leather shoes if they
  could afford them

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Continued

• All women wore at least one tunic down to their
  ankles. Many women, if they could afford it, wore
  a linen under-tunic and a woolen over-tunic, and
  often a wool cloak over that if they were going
  outside
• On their legs women sometimes wore woven tights
  or socks, but women never wore pants
• Nuns wore tunics like other women, but generally
  in black or white rather than colors
• Noblewomen often wore fancy tall hats, sometimes
  with streamers coming off them

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Food

• the Middle Ages in Europe, what people ate
  depended a lot on how rich they were
• Poor people (which was almost everybody) ate
  mainly barley
• Sometimes they made their barley into bread, and
  sometimes into pancakes or pizza, and sometimes
  into barley porridge (like oatmeal) and sometimes
  into barley soup. But every day, breakfast, lunch
  and dinner, most of every meal was barley.