questions. Thank you so much for your time!

The way that medieval coinage would generally work is that a decision would be made about how many coins would be struck from a given weight of metal, which would therefore indicate the value of the individual coin.

So to take the pound as an example, starting with King Offa of Mercia, the Anglo-Saxons established that 240 silver pennies would be struck from one pound weight of silver, and further than one penny was worth four farthings and twelve pennies were worth 1 shilling (which meant that twenty shillings were worth one pound). Offa in turn was borrowing from Charlemagne, who established that one pound of silver was equal to one livre, which was worth 20 sous/sols, which in turn were worth twelve deniers. Keen eyed observers will note that the notations for the different currencies – l, d, s – are the same in the British and Frankish systems. The reason for that is that Charlesmagne and his copiers in England, Italy, Spain, etc. were in turn copying Roman currencies: the “l” stands for “libra,” the “d” for “denarius,” and the “s” for “solidus.”

In other words, tradition and culture matters. Rome was associated with a commercial, currency-based economy and even after the fall of the Roman Empire, the memory of that economy was still strong, so associating your coins with theirs went part of the way towards ensuring that people thought your currency was good.

So for gold coins, you’d figure out how many coins would be struck from how much gold. Again, to take the English example, the “noble” was the first English gold coin to circulate widely. Originally, the noble was 138.5 grains or 9 grams of gold, so that one pound of gold would produce 453 or so nobles.

However, one thing to keep in mind is that, with a metallic standard, the government has to be careful that the cost of the coin doesn’t exceed its value (which means you’re actually losing money by making it), and there’s always an incentive to exercise the right of seignorage by declaring the face value of the coin to be greater than the actual metallic content of the coin (which means you’re making money by making money). Combined with the constant problem of private individuals producing counterfeit coins by clipping, sweating, or plating, the actual weight and purity of the currency in circulation tends to change over time.

I want to write some fanfic about urban lower class people in King’s Landing, mostly because I find that ASOIAF’s focus on the nobility (or nobility adjacent) as all the POVs to be deeply problematic. Can you recommend some resources to look at?

I’d be happy to:

Was the english king/royal family also “not as important as we usually think there were” or is that more of french thing?

It’s really complicated, and depends what period you’re talking about. So here’s how I’d explain the relative power of English and French monarchs:

Under Charlesmagne, there was a relatively powerful bureaucratic state left over from the days when his ancestors who served as “mayors of the palace” (i.e, majordomo) to the Merovingian kings gradually usurped authority from their erstwhile monarchs (not unlike the Tyrells and the Gardeners). The counts (the main direct vassals of the king) were supervised by palace inspectors, whose job it was to keep an eye on the counts and in extreme cases recommend they be removed from fiefdoms for disloyalty or incompetence – as fiefdoms were considered a gift from the Emperor for the lifetime of the count.

At this time, the kings of the Franks were substantially more powerful than any of the warring heptarchs of the Anglo-Saxons.

After Charlesmagne’s death, this system gradually broke down, partially because his empire was divided between his three grandsons and then a lot of infighting took place between and within each of the three sections, but more significantly because the weakening of central authority empowered the regional nobility. The assembly of nobles got the right to decide who got appointed as inspectors, inspectors were now chosen from within districts, all of which meant that they became weak and corrupt. At the same time, fiefdoms became seen as property of the landholder to be inherited by their sons, and taking away a fiefdom was seen as a violation of the social contract. Over time, this meant that the king could only maintain power by giving away land, but then didn’t have land to give away in the future to keep their followers loyal, and it meant that the king’s own land diminished:

At the same time, in England, the Kingdom of Wessex was one of the few Saxon kingdoms to survive the Vikings, and under Alfred the Great reformed its military, its taxation system, military and civilian infrastructure, and legal system, which allowed the West Saxons to annex London, Kent, and west Mercia, then eastern Mercia and East Anglia, then Northumbria, at which point they controlled virtually all of England.

When William, Duke of Normandy, defeated Harold Godwinson in 1066, this entire kingdom fell into his personal possession, an enormous windfall in feudal terms. And the Norman Kings of England managed the hell out of their new acquisition, what with the Domesday Book, the invention of the Exchequer, etc.

For a while, this gave the Kings of England (who were still Dukes of Normandy, remember) more clout than the King of France, especially when the Kings of England managed to get their hands on the western half of France (note the dark blue on the map below represents the lands of the King of France):

However, French Kings from Phillip Augustus onwards were able to capitalize on disunity within the Angevin Empire, the growing wariness of French noblemen in eastern France about the expansion of said Empire, and the troubled reigns of Richard I and John I, to expand his holdings at the expense of the English. Normandy, Anjou, Vermandois, Touraine, and Auvergne were retaken by Phillip Augustus, then Louis the Lion seized control over Toulouse through the Albigensian Crusade, giving the French king a far more contiguous realm.

The English bounced back in the early phase of the Hundred Years War, allowing them to reconquer much of what they’d lost in southwestern France as well as adding the Pale of Calais into their territory, but even at their height they never got back their former north/northwestern provinces.

Eventually, however, the French recovered, and the mobilization against the English allowed the French monarchy to further their consolidation over their own territory.

In many historical novels I’ve heard, it seems like wine is a basic necessity. The nobles and generals have to procure it for their soldiers, their servants and even their slaves, and the instances when a protagonist drinks water can be counted on one hand. Is that accurate? Wasn’t it easier and cheaper to drink water?

racefortheironthrone:

opinions-about-tiaras:

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:

racefortheironthrone:

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.

How did ancient and medieval armies get their horses off their ships?

Great question!

One of the problems that had to be dealt with in medieval warfare was that you had all of these armies where the mounted knight dominated, but if you have to attack somewhere from the sea, you need to take your horses with you.

And so a variety of strategies were used. For example, the Norman Invasion of 1066 involved a flotilla of longships which would land, and then horses would be led off the side of the ship and into the shallows/beach, as seen in the Bayeux tapestry:

And that works well as long as you control the beach-head and have time to get your horses off the ship, get them saddled and so forth, and then distribute them to their waiting riders. It’s not so good if your enemy are right there on the beach and able to disrupt your preparations.

So by the time of the Fourth Crusade, we see specialized horse transports where knights could mount their horses on deck and charge straight off the side of the ship, presumably either via a ramp or gunwales that could be lowered:

And they were quite successful, allowing the Crusaders to surprise the Byzantines with their speed and mobility and seize the vital fortress of Galata, which guarded the northern end of the boom chain that protected Constantinople’s Golden Horn. With the boom chain down, Venetian galleys could sail into the Golden Horn and launch amphibious attacks against the city’s less formidable northern walls.

Inspired by the inquiry about peasant labor hours through the year, is there any research on the labor hours, etc. of artisans and artists? Woodworkers, painters, sculptors, architects, blacksmiths, etc. whose labor sort of varied by the seasons’ change, but wasn’t tied quite as tightly to it?

I would highly recommend checking out Baul Blyton’s Changes in Working Time, pgs 15-17 for a good overview of the literature on this. Hours varied, not so much by the seasons, but by guild regulations and customs (see Saint Monday) and economic conditions (when wages rose, hours often fell). It’s complicated, because you have to balance regulations about daily working hours against the number of holidays.