Tag Archives: Middle Ages History

Games

War of the Roses Game from Paradox Interactive

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The historical PC game experts Paradox Interactive seem to have a new game featuring the War of the Roses coming out. The video below was uploaded in August, but there doesn’t seem to be any news on a release date. If it’s historically accurate, which some of Paradox’s games are, then it could be very interesting for any fans of Medieval history.

Here’s some more information on the game from Paradox’s website:

War of the Roses is a new IP that transports players back in time to the battle-ravaged, dynastic civil war era of 15th century England where ownership of the throne of England was brutally fought over between supporters of two rival branches of the Royal House of Plantagenet – the house of Lancaster (the reds) and the house of York (the whites).

Description

A team-based multiplayer melee combat experience, War of The Roses sees players and their band of knights going toe-to-toe with their opponents using authentic and visceral weapons of the time period including broad swords, long bows and battle-axes.
Built on a stunning graphics engine which vividly portrays the fighting from an up-close-and-personal third-person perspective, War of the Roses features both online multiplayer and a single-player campaign. Players will get the chance to lead their warrior through a rich progression system, gaining upgrades and unlocking new content on their path from filthy peasant to unstoppable armored killing machine.

The years of 1455-1485 in England is an extraordinary and underused setting filled with conflict, treachery and bloodshed. In the wake of the “death of chivalry” at Agincourt in 1415 and the introduction of gunpowder, warfare changed; the gloves came off, so to speak. The old and the new clashed on the battlefield while personal vendettas persistently motivated the desire for war.
War of the Roses – ambitions and goals In War of the Roses, Fatshark take what was learned from Lead and Gold and apply it in a medieval setting, using the Bitsquid tech-engine for high quality visuals and performance.
The driving focus of the game is creating a multiplayer game with the same accessibility as the best competitive shooters currently out there, but in a medieval setting with a primary emphasis on melee combat.
The focus of the core gameplay is on the Multiplayer experience, but we will have an engaging and immersive story driven single player campaign designed to prepare and train players for the multiplayer experience. The single player campaign will give the players direct rewards to use in the multiplayer battles.

Features

  • Large Medieval Multiplayer Mode
  • Single Player Campaign Mode
  • Extensive Persistence System
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Book Review

Zio the Hero by Marc Grimston – Medieval Adventure for Kids of All Ages

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Zio the Hero by Marc Grimston

I came across this medieval adventure story for children over Twitter. It’s by a UK author and seems to be doing very well. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but I’m planning to soon. I would recommend that you take a look at the video – Marc’s tour of Framlingham Castle, one of the locations used in the book, gives a great introduction to the setting of the story.

Here’s some more information about the book from the official press release:

Travel back in time to 14th Century England and to an adventure with dragons, castles, intrigue and murder.

Robert and his twin brothers Timothy and Michael accidentally find themselves transported into medieval England.  They arrive in a forest cottage, where they are expected to recover the missing crown of England.  Has it been lost, or stolen?  With the help of the clumsy but loyal dragon, Zio, their quest takes the boys across the centuries, where they make new friends, and enemies. Will they return home triumphant? Or die trying?  The only way to know is to read Zio The Hero.

Marc Grimston has delivered a children’s adventure story which is already enthralling children, ages 7 to 107.  In an age where many children lack stories with a moral battle between good and evil, Marc is reversing this trend with this exciting story. Marc takes you to Framlingham and Orford castles; both in the 14th and 21st centuries, where the children learn loyalty and honour can overcome all adversities that life can throw at them.  Together with new friends, they experience the power of forgiveness, true friendship and sacrifice.  Their father’s words of wisdom also being at the forefront of their minds, helping them to make the right, but not always the easiest of decisions.

Zio the Hero is a book which encourages children to stand up for truth and respect, even when all around them appears darkness and gloom.

Quotes from reviews:

“Amazing…. What a revelation.”      “This gets kids reading!”                “This is a wonderful book”

Marc Grimston has always been a story teller, writing poetry and short stories throughout his adult life. When challenged to write a children’s novel, Marc reluctantly agreed.  Although comfortable making-up stories for his children at bed time, creating an adventure for them to read for themselves, seemed a big step.  However, drawing on his experiences as a father and medieval re-enactor, Marc rose to the task of bringing his love of history, and his sense of fun and excitement together in an adventure story all children love to read.

Marc believes in the value of self-worth.  With dedication and determination, you can achieve anything.  Through his writing, Marc wants to empower and encourage all children to reach and achieve their goals.

Marc is in contact with several UK schools to work with them to encourage literacy, story-telling and the belief that all things are possible.

Marc takes walks along the beach, when not writing more thrilling adventures in his home town of Southend-on-Sea in Essex.

Zio The Hero (ISBN: 978 1780350479 published by FastPrint, RRP £10.99) is available at www.amazon.co.uk, and can be ordered from all good book retailers.  For more information please visit: http://marcgrimston.co.uk or www.facebook.com/ZioTheHero

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Medieval Culture and Belief, Medieval History

The Black Death and a Jewish Holocaust

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Jews are burned alive during the Black Death.
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I have been reading The Scourging Angel by Benedict Gummer, which is an account of the Black Death in Britain. The books is well worth a look if you are interested in this period of history during the Middle Ages. One thing I came across that I didn’t know is what happened to Jewish populations in Europe when the Black Death began to sweep across the Continent.

Medieval Europeans didn’t know why the plague was upon them. Many Churchmen put the blame on man’s sin – it was God’s divine punishment. But lay people however had more down to earth suspicions and decided that there were being maliciously attacked. Rumours spread that wells were being poisoned by enemies. And enemies in Medieval Europe usually meant the Jews, who were seen as outsiders and subject to myths such as the blood libel (the murder of children), the murder of Christ and well poisoning. The stresses of the Black Death turned people’s attentions to people who were seen as outsiders living amongst them and as the plague spread so did the attacks on Jews.

The Church did try to stop this – indeed Jews were protected by Papal order, but these orders were ignored (the Church was not all powerful in the Middle Ages).

In scenes chillingly similar to what would happen under the Nazis whole populations of Jews were slaughtered. For example in Strasbourg the burning of Jews lasted for six days. This was not just people attacking Jews opportunistically where they found them, but an organized slaughter of every Jew that the city authorities could get hold of.

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Medieval Culture and Belief, Medieval History

New Medieval History Book: Chivalry in Medieval England by Nigel Saul

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Chivalry in Medieval England by Nigel Saul

  • Hardcover: 440 pages
  • Publisher: Harvard University Press (15 Oct 2011)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0674063686
  • ISBN-13: 978-0674063686

I think this is a new title! It’s not always easy to tell after all – for instance there seems to be another title by Nigel Saul The Age of Chivalry, but this is only 144 pages, so I am guessing is something quite different? But then again there is also For Honour and Fame by the same author – see the related articles at the end of this post.

There is a wealth of information on Amazon.com about the book, including lots of glowing reviews. I have read Nigel’s book on Richard II and remember very much enjoying, so I am sure that this and anything else he might have published on Chivalry will be good too!

Amazon.com:

Review

Nigel Saul takes a relatively benign view of medieval noblemen. He rejects the once-fashionable notion that war was all about money and land, and that chivalry was just tinsel. And, although he sees a steep decline in standards in the last medieval century, he thinks that chivalric values did have a real influence in civilizing the conduct of war. Whether one agrees with this or not, his is a view that commands respect. He is a historian with a rare gift for seeing the human lives behind the rather formulaic and impersonal sources of medieval history, and he has written widely about aristocratic culture…Saul can make the most unpromising material speak to us with a directness that can surprise even those who are already familiar with it. This is a rich book that does ample justice to its complex theme.
–Jonathan Sumption (Sunday Times 20110626)

The author of this sparkling book that “puts chivalry centre-stage” explains its substantial contribution to the development of Western civilization through links to the practice of treating prisoners of war with compassion, to the growth of individualism and even to the modern cult of celebrity.
–Christopher Silvester (Daily Express 20110711)

Splendid…Saul has drawn heavily on what he calls this “rich repertory of contemporary witness” to illuminate the relationship between chivalry and the political, military, social and artistic currents of the time. The result is a wide-ranging examination of how the ethos of chivalry defined and shaped knightly culture…As this book so ably demonstrates, [chivalry] influenced every aspect of knightly life: without it, the Middle Ages would have been not only duller and darker, but even more brutal.
–Juliet Barker (Mail on Sunday 20110722)

An entirely original project, and in [Saul’s] hands it proves illuminating…[A] brilliant book. The skill and scholarship with which he has done so fully justify his claim at its opening that chivalry was a major factor throughout the narrative history of medieval England from before the time of Richard I to the aftermath of that of Edward III. Chivalry has often been neglected by historians in that story; Nigel Saul’s vivid and exciting study should make sure that it can never again be left out of the account.
–Maurice Keen (Literary Review )

The era of chivalry was the idealized fantasy that grew out of the military superiority of the armed horseman, and which lasted roughly between the invention of the stirrup and the invention of gunpowder. Nigel Saul is just the right person to tell the story as experienced in England…One of the strengths of his new book is its attention to the visual and the material. The knights of England had property and wealth, and they flaunted them. Chivalry was not only a code of behavior but a style honed both on the battlefield and in impressive residences…Interest in chivalry was revived in the Victorian cult of things medieval, aesthetic as well as moral in scope. It inspired such initiatives as the Marquess of Queensberry’s rules and the codification of laws of war, which Saul links to the later formulation of the Geneva convention. Yet lampoons of chivalry are equally powerful, as epitomized by John Tenniel’s drawings of ungainly knights on horseback that illustrated Through the Looking Glass. That unyielding parody has given us the chivalry of Monty Python and Spamelot, and recently a new Camelot too. Nigel Saul’s clear-sighted history makes these survivals all the more apparent, and all the more puzzling.
–Miri Rubin (The Guardian )

Product Description
Popular views of medieval chivalry—knights in shining armor, fair ladies, banners fluttering from battlements—were inherited from the nineteenth-century Romantics. This is the first book to explore chivalry’s place within a wider history of medieval England, from the Norman Conquest to the aftermath of Henry VII’s triumph at Bosworth in the Wars of the Roses.

Saul invites us to view the world of castles and cathedrals, tournaments and round tables, with fresh eyes. Chivalry in Medieval England charts the introduction of chivalry by the Normans, the rise of the knightly class as a social elite, the fusion of chivalry with kingship in the fourteenth century, and the influence of chivalry on literature, religion, and architecture. Richard the Lionheart and the Crusades, the Black Death and the Battle of Crecy, the Magna Carta and the cult of King Arthur—all emerge from the mists of time and legend in this vivid, authoritative account.

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Magic, Marvels and Monsters, Medieval Culture and Belief

Medieval Magic and Marvels: Matthew Paris and the Music of the Heavens

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Robert Grosseteste
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When a bishop dies the bells ring in heaven according to Matthew Paris. Presumably this was only becayse Robert, Bishop Lincoln was a fairly holy rather than venal example. Indeed this was actually Robert Grosseteste the famous scholastic philosopher and theologian, who criticized the greed of the papacy.

I think it’s interesting that only the friars and priests hear the bells though – the bumpkin foresters don’t! Also it’s interesting that the melodious music is like bells – I guess the link with a place of worship is important here, but is really that the best that heaven could come up with to welcome the bishop?

These are extracts from the Chronica Majora written by Matthew Paris for the year 1253.

Of the music heard in the heavens

During the night in which the said bishop departed to the Lord, Faulkes, bishop of London, heard in the air above, a wonderful and most agreeable kind of sound, the melody of which refreshed his ears and his heart, and fixed his attention for a time. Whilst listening to it (he was at the time staying near Buckdon), he said to some persons standing near him, “Do you, too, hear what I do?” Whereupon they asked him, ” What hear you, my lord ?” The bishop replied : “I hear a supernatural sound, like that of a great convent-bell, ringing a delightful tune in the air above.” They, however, acknowledged, although they listened attentively, that they heard nothing of it, whereupon the bishop said to them: ” By the faith I owe to St. Paul, I believe that our beloved father, brother, and master, the venerable bishop of Lincoln, is passing from this world to take his place in the kingdom of heaven, and this noise I heard is intended as a manifest warning to me thereof, for there is no convent near here in which there is a bell of such a sort and so loud. Let us inquire into the matter immediately.” They therefore did so, and found, as was proved by the statement of his whole household, that at that very time the bishop had departed from this world. This wonderful circumstance, or rather primitive miracle, was told as a fact, and borne evidence to, to the writer of this book, by Master John Cratchale, a confidential clerk to the bishop, one held in great veneration, and of high authority amongst his attendants and friends.

Of the noises of trumpets and bells heard in the sky.

On the same night, too, some brethren of the order of Minorites were hurrying towards Buckdon, where Robert, bishop of Lincoln, was staying (for he was a comforter and a father to the Preachers and Minorites), and in passing through the royal forest of Vauberge, being ignorant of its windings, lost their road, and whilst wandering about they heard in the air sounds as of the ringing of bells, amongst which they clearly distinguished one bell of a most sweet tune, unlike anything they had ever heard before. This circumstance greatly excited their wonder, for they knew that there was no church of note near. When morning’s dawn appeared, after wandering about to no purpose, they met some foresters, of whom, after obtaining directions to regain their right road, they inquired what meant the grand and solemn ringing of bells which they had heard in the direction of Buckdon to which the foresters replied, that they had not heard and did not then hear anything, though the sound still gently filled the air. The brethren, therefore, in still greater wonder went on, and reached Buckdon betimes, where they were informed that at the very time of the night when they had heard the aforesaid melodious sounds, Robert, bishop of Lincoln, breathed forth his happy spirit.

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Magic, Marvels and Monsters

Medieval Magic and Marvels: Cloud Ships

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A fisherman's anchor
Image via Wikipedia

Of course there is another sea above the one we know of – didn’t you realise! One credulous medieval writer certainly seemed to think so.

I came across this extract from Gervase of Tilbury’s Otia Imperialia in C. G. Coulton’s Social Life in Britain from the Conquest to the Reformation, which is a great repository of all things medieval – from the mundane to the most fantastical of medieval marvels.

Gervase of Tilbury was an Imperial official in the 12th and 13th centuries, and wrote a number of works including the Otia Imperialia, which is a miscellany of various wonders – many of them seemingly very fanciful. I love this one about villagers coming across an anchor in a churchyard one foggy day and then a sailor comes down from the misty heavens to free the anchor. As if this isn’t evidence enough of ships sailing above us in the clouds, Gervase then backs this up with another story of a man sailing far overseas losing a knife overboard, and it then landing on his wife’s kitchen table far below.

Coulton notes that “A heavy stone tomb of the kind here described, dating from the late 14th or early 15th century, may still be seen in front of the porch of St Nicholas at Lynn. Iron door- bands in the rough form of an anchor are very common on early church doors :e.g. Sempringham.”

Here’s the full extract from Gervase of Tilbury:

There are some who say that the earth, as a centre in the midst of a circumference, is equally distant from all these extremities, and is surrounded and shut in by sea, even as it is written of the third Day of Creation, “God gathered together the waters that were under the heaven into one place, and dry land appeared.” In our own times there befel a marvellous, but well-known event to prove how the upper sea lieth above us. On a certain holyday in Great Britain, after High Mass, the folk were thronging forth from the parish church, on a morning so misty that it made a sort of twilight amid the gross and watery vapours. Here, on a stone tomb within the precincts of the churchyard, they found an anchor fixed, with its cable stretched tight and hanging down from the air. The people stood in amazement; and, while they were disputing among themselves of this matter, at length, they saw the rope move as though men had been labouring to weigh the anchor. When therefore, for all this straining at the rope, the anchor yet clung to the tomb, they heard through the foggy air as though it had been the cries of sailors labouring with all their might to raise an anchor from the deep. Soon, when they found their labour to be in vain, they sent down one of their fellows, who, as skilfully as any shipman of our own, appeared hanging to the rope and descending with alternate interchange of hands. When, however, he had torn the anchor from the tomb, he was caught by those that stood around, in whose arms he gave up the ghost, stifled by the breath of our gross air as a shipwrecked mariner is stifled in the sea. Moreover his fellows above, judging him to be wrecked, after an hour’s delay, cut the cable, left their anchor, and sailed away. In memory of which event the iron bands of the doors of that church were forged, by a cunning counsel, from that anchor; which bands are still there for all men to see. Here again is a still more marvellous testimony. In the county of Gloucester is a town named Bristol, wealthy and full of prosperous citizens; from this port men sail for Ireland. It befel upon a time that a native of Bristol sailed to Ireland, leaving his wife and children at home. Then, after a long sea-voyage, as he sailed on a far-off ocean, he chanced to sit banqueting with the mariners about the hour of tierce; and, after eating, as he washed his knife over the ship’s side, it slipped suddenly from his hands. At that same hour, at Bristol, the knife fell in through the roof-window of that same citizen (which men in the English tongue call dormer) and stuck in the table that was set before his wife. The woman, marvelling at so strange a thing, was dumbfounded; and, laying aside this well-known knife, she learned long afterwards, on her husband’s return, that his misfortune had befallen on the very day whereon she had found it. Who, then, will now doubt, after the publication of this testimony, that a sea lieth over this earth of ours, whether in the air or above the air?

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