That document was found in the out-sized exhibits section of the Committee on Economic Security’s papers, and I didn’t find anything else relating to it or its author Lewis Baxter or Economic Security Associates in the rest of the CES’ papers. The only other place I’ve found this Lewis Baxter mentioned anywhere is that he wrote an unsolicited amicus brief to the U.S Supreme Court on monetary policy in a case in the 40s (I think).
I think that Lewis Baxter and his model are historical lacunae, where we just don’t have the sources because they didn’t survive to the present.
They tended not to be the best soldiers per se, but the most disciplined, because you wanted them to be on their guard to defend the person of the monarch. Hence why Royal Guards “may not eat, sleep, smoke, stand easy, sit or lie down during your tour of duty.“
“Too many strange faces, Tyrion thought, too many new players. The game changed while I lay rotting in my bed, and no one will tell me the rules.” Synopsis: Tyrion attends a Small Council meeting and finds out he’s engaged. Mazeltov? SPOILER WARNING: This chapter analysis, and all following, will contain spoilers for all Song of Ice and Fire novels and Game of Thrones episodes. Caveat lector.…
First of all, let me just say thank you for what has to be the most Scottish ask I’ve ever gotten.
Second of all, I have found some sources that might help you to understand the Clan Campbell point of view. To start off with, you’ll probably want the Oxford Companion to Scottish History as a reference tool. Next, Edinburgh University published a three-volume History of Clan Campbell by Alastair Campbell, which covers the history of the clan from the founding to the present.
If you’re looking for material specifically on Clan Campbell’s many feuds, there’s Oliver Tompson’s The Great Feud and Ronald Williams’ The Heather and the Gale.
And if you still need more material, there is in fact a Journal of the Clan Campbell Society put out by the Clan Campbell Education Association, which runs to more than 30 volumes.
This isn’t entirely true in my understanding, Steven.
My own learning as a pure layman is that most people did drink mostly water. When clean water was available (or even not-that-clean-but-passable-water) that was what they drank.
However.
Much historical fiction, and indeed much historical writing, takes place in contexts where clean water wasn’t readily available, or with social classes that had ready access to the finer things in life. Armies on the march tended to befoul the fuck out of any water source they came across. Cities were just cesspits of disease, poisoning the rivers and water tables they were built on for leagues around. And in those contexts people are going to be drinking beverages with alcohol in them because, indeed, it is either much safer, or they’re of a social class where they can afford it. Because we’re not reading about the 90% of the country that lives a rural lifestyle and mostly drinks mostly water they pull from wells, streams, and rivers, with the occasional alcoholic drink mixed in.
I could be wrong here, tho.
Consider this a placeholder until I find the post where I did the research on the royal decree that limited inns to one per village, because people liked to drink just that damn much.
Ok, I knew I had read this somewhere. So to give one example of how much medieval people loved their booze: in 965, King Edgar the Peaceable of England issued a royal decree that there could only be one alehouse per village, “and had pegs put in the drinking cups to mark how much any person might consume at a single draught.” So in a country of between 1-2 million people living in 13,000 towns and villages (which suggests around 153 people per village), there were at least two alehouses per village (or one alehouse per 76 people).
See, the thing about the “rural lifestyle” is that it usually gives you the raw materials to brew your own ale and beer and then sell the surplus to your neighbors. To quote from Margaret Schaus’ Women and Gender in Medieval Europe:
People did drink water, but the cleanliness of the water was quite iffy, so people tended to drink alcohol as it was safer.
Ale was the common drink of people in northern Eirope; it also played a prominent part in medieval culture. Safer to drink than water, the grain-based beverage provided an important part of people’s daily nutritional requirement…for most of the Middle Ages, brewing was dominated by women. Because of its importance, ale’s production and sale became subject ot extensive regulation; as a result, alewives (women who brewed and/or sold ale) are much more visible in the records than most other medieval female workers.
In England, the late thirteenth century assize of ale, enforced by local officials, regulated the price and quality of ale…brewing was a domestic skill expected of medieval women, Because ale spoiled quickly, many rural households alternated between brewing their own ale and selling any surplus, and purchasing it from neighbors. Brewing for sale was a part time occupation, undertaken to supplement household income…
…demand for ale increased with rising living standards after the Black Death, providing more opportunities for women to earn a full- or part-time living from brewing…in England there was an increase in the number of alehouses…
And then hopped beer spread out of Germany into Northern Europe starting in the 14th century, and as hopped beer “lasted longer and could be made in larger quantities,” you get even more booze, now produced more by men who could afford to make the “greater capital outlay” required to brew hopped beer.
Byzantine slavery was a direct outgrowth of Roman slavery, and Rome was undoubtedly a slave society, with anwhere between 4.6-19.3% of the population enslaved (see Kyle Harper, Slavery in the Late Roman World, 2011). Specifically on Byzantium, a huge, huge part of Byzantium’s Black Sea trade was in slaves, and Byzantium not merely acquired slaves by the tens and not hundreds of thousands at a time for use in a variety of industries at home, but also sold slaves widely across the Mediterranean, there were slave markets in many Byzantine towns and cities (the one in Constantinople was known as the “Valley of Lamentations”). So I think it counts.
For more on this, check out Youval Rotman’s Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World(2009), and Hadjinicolaou-Marava’s’s Rercherches Sur La Vie Des Esclaves Dans Le Monde Byzantin (1950), which are both important monographs in their own right but should also provide some useful bibliography.
Seemingly for the first time in recorded history, lords from all over Westeros had gathered together. The greatest Targaryen king in history had summoned them together to provide a peaceful mechanism for deciding the succession of the Iron Throne. And thanks to the fecklessness of Viserys I, their work would make a peace that would last only 28 years.
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hiddenhistoryofwesteros asked: Why is the Faith so weak in comparison to the RL Catholic Church? Different paths of historical development, basically. The IRL Medieval Catholic Church benefited from a number of factors: It was the only pan-Western European (pan-European, when Rome and Constantinople could agree that I + I = δύο) institution when the Roman Empire fell and the first medieval…
Different paths of historical development, basically.
The IRL Medieval Catholic Church benefited from a number of factors:
It was the only pan-Western European (pan-European, when Rome and Constantinople could agree that I + I = δύο) institution when the Roman Empire fell and the first medieval kingdoms of the Franks, the Lombards, etc. were forming. Not only did that give it a certain amount of prestige, but it also meant that it was the only institution that could coordinate across borders, the only common authority that feuding kingdoms might appeal to.
It was the largest landowner in Europe at a time when land was the major source of political, economic, social, and military power. And because it was a corporate landowner, unlike with feudal lords, land wasn’t given away as dowries or split between sons or sold off to pay for ransoms, and there were no cases of the land falling into escheat because the only heir died intestate. The corporate entity kept growing and growing, century after century, and so the estates consolidated and could take advantage of economies of scale and do really long-range investments, making the Church a real economic engine of the Middle Ages.
It was also almost exclusively the source of literacy, learning, and communication. Churchmen were the literate class, especially early on, so in every court in Europe there were clergy serving as officials of state, bureaucrats, scribes and secretaries, as well as their religious duties. Since Church Latin was the only common tongue in Europe – the lingua franca well before diplomats started speaking French – the Church was immensely important in international communication. Up until the invention of the printing press, monks copying out manuscripts was basically the only source of books.
The Faith had none of these advantages.
When the first fair-haired Andal pirates landed on the shores of Westeros, they brought the Faith of the Seven with them, but no institutions – there was no High Septon and no council of the Most Devout to exercise managerial control, no network of septs and septries dotted across the continent for the Faith to draw revenue and manpower from. Instead, the warlords and adventurers very much followed their own truth, carving the seven-pointed star on their chests and letting the Seven speak to them (and surprisingly, the Seven told them to go forth and carve themselves kingdoms). While holy men no doubt would have influence on religious matters, as long as the Andals were smiting the heathen and cutting down their weirwoods, there’s not a lot they could say to shape the actions of the warrior caste they were dependent on.
For a brief period, the Faith could exercise some influence through the Arryn Kings’ patronage, but once the tide of Andals spilled out into the Riverlands, the petty kings and warlords and adventurers had no reason to listen to the King of the Mountains and Vale. And so the Faith would have to follow in their wake, building as they went.
And then the Andal tide broke, first on the rocks of Moat Cailin and the equally stony shores of the North, and then again on the stable, powerful, and dynamickingdoms of the West. Here were these foreign power structures, thousands of years old, who were assimilating into the Faith to be sure, but on their own terms and following their own interests, rather than the Faith’s terms and the Faith’s interests. So the Kings of the Rock and the Reach would become patrons of the Faith, but there would be no “Donation” of “Constantine”, no independent state.
Moreover, the Faith would also have to deal with competition from another pan-continental corporate institution, one which had been operating for thousands of years, which controlled access to literacy, learning, and communication, and which had advisors whispering into the ears of every lord in Westeros: the Citadel of Maesters. Now, I believe that there was a compromise between the Faith and the Citadel (incidentally, if someone could send me an ask to remind me to explain why I think the Andal language was key to this compromise…), but it was one where the Citadel’s monopolies and jurisdictions would be respected. Septons and septas could teach basic literacy and the tenets of the Faith, but the rest would be the domain of the maesters.
So when I talked about theDictatus Papae and the Walk to Canossa in previous asks, it’s actually a good example of how the two institutions were different. Here was Gregory VII, one of the most important Popes in history, laying down the law to cement the authority of the Catholic Church vis-a-vis the Holy Roman Emperor:
The Church is autonomous. Bishoprics and other offices belong to the Church alone, even if these positions had become mighty feudal states, Imperial Electors even. Only the Pope had jurisdiction over Church officials and lands, legal disputes involving the Church had to be settled by him in Rome, and so on.
The Pope is supreme over secular officials. Here Gregory really ran wild, stating that “all princes shall kiss the feet of the Pope alone,” and “it may be permitted to him to depose emperors.“ This, when Emperors had previously appointed and deposed Popes.
The Pope can dissolve the bonds of feudalism itself, through proclamations of excommunication, interdictionn, anethema, and so on. As Gregory put it, “He may absolve subjects from their fealty to wicked men.” And Gregory would do so, punishing Emperor Henry IV for attempting to assert authority over the Prince-Bishoprics of the Holy Roman Empire.
“The Roman Church has never erred. Nor will it err, to all eternity–Scripture being witness.“ That’s the origin of Papal infallibility, although less immediately relevant to the crisis.
This was somewhat controversial, to say the least. Henry IV responded by declaring Gregory “at present not pope but false monk,” calling for a new election of the Papacy, and challenging Gregory: "I, Henry, king by the grace of God, with all of my Bishops, say to you, come down, come down!” And while the Papally-sponsored rebellions in 1073-1075, and then again from 1077-1088 did force Henry IV to do penance in the snow at Canossa, in 1080 Henry IV was ready to fight back.
In 1080, Henry IV proclaimed Clement III to be the true Pope, reasserting Imperial authority to name the Pope, after Gregory had blessed Rudolf von Rheinfeld, the elected Emperor of the rebels. The next year, Henry invaded Rome and when Gregory VII called upon his Norman allies from southern Italy, they promptly sacked the city and Gregory was forced to flee when the citizens of Rome rose up against him, and died in exile.
If that’s what happened to a Catholic Church that was far more powerful than the Faith ever was, imagine what would have happened to a High Septon who tried to pull a stunt like that against the Lord of Oldtown and the King of the Reach. It wouldn’t have been the first time a High Septon was assassinated, and it wouldn’t be the last.
Synopsis: Retreating from the Battle of the Fist of the First Men, Sam Tarly slays a White Walker with the help of Small Paul and Grenn.
SPOILER WARNING: This chapter analysis, and all following, will contain spoilers for all Song of Ice and Fire novels and Game of Thrones episodes. Caveat lector.
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