The 11th Century?
Would that be when WIlliam The Conqueror treated Yorkshire with the respect it deserved and wiped it pretty much clean?
Archaeologists investigating human bones excavated from the deserted mediaeval village of Wharram Percy in North Yorkshire have suggested that the villagers burned and mutilated corpses to prevent the dead from rising from their graves to terrorise the living. Although starvation cannibalism often accounts for the mutilation …
"The Harrying of the North did happen."
Certainly. But that doesn't preclude exaggeration. We know (because they were important enough to be documented) of pre-conquest Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Danish landowning families who went on into the post-Conquest period. Swein of Hoyland and Aleric of Emley are a couple of examples.
Swein's son Alan adopted a Norman patronym and was known as Alan Fitzswaine (Fitz = "Fils de" and was used for some time in the same way as Icelandic patronymic system). Swein gave his name to the village of Hoylandswaine and Alan Fitzswaine founded the church of High Hoyland. I think the dynasty ran on a little longer but died out or at least lost importance.
The family of Aleric of Emley followed a similar but more successful path. Emley was retained as a sub-tenancy of the the Manor of Wakefield. They also acquired Sprotborough as tenants-in-chief and gradually acquired many other interests in the area. The patronymic eventually stabilised as Fitzwilliam. The Fitzwilliams became important coal owners and iron masters in the industrial revolution.
Yes,
A moment's desk research by the wannaby academic would have taught him that.
" After Harold's defeat, the English in the north were not defeated and would not obey William. Danish fleets sailed up the Rivers Tyne and Wear, the Scots marched to Gateshead, and the English in Durham and Northumberland gathered together on the Black Fell.This was in the year 1068. William marched north with his army. The battle took place on the Black Fell.The hardest fighting was on Shadon's Hill, Washington. After a terrible conflict, William won. The Danes sailed away in their
ships and the Scots fled home.Then the fierce Normans destroyed everything. Villages were burnt, men, women and children were killed. The land was left desolate. There is nothing in the Domesday Book about Washington. "
"Then the fierce Normans destroyed everything. Villages were burnt, men, women and children were killed."
Which villages, men, women and children?
The evidence is that it wasn't all. History isn't always written by the victors, sometimes it's written by the victims but both have a tendency to exaggerate.
Do you believe that Noah's flood really did inundate the whole world?
Is it different?
We have fake news, they have legend and rumour.
Unemployment, fear of random death...
They have problems with tooth decay, which we are re-introducing.
They have no antibiotics, we have ones that are loosing effectiveness.
They have witches, we have (insert your choice here, I couldn't decide)
Can't see it somehow, we just record things differently
"Who would have thought then that walking dead would have become a useful source for cheap entertainment? Or maybe it happened back then too"
Has The Walking Dead being going on for 1000 years, or does it just feel like it?
Sheep.
The landowners discovered that there was more money to be made having sheep on the land than peasants mostly growing food for themselves.
So it was necessary to enhance productivity going forward to leverage market synergies, reach a global market and achieve dynamic sales targets necessary for maximising cashflow - to kick the peasants out.
In the C16 it was sheep - The village that sheep ate
Try Shakespeare, and if that's too easy try Chaucer, unreadable for many English people*. Though in Ireland we have some good stories up to 500 years older than Chaucer. As few Irish speakers can cope with pre 1948 spelling, naturally even the pre-10th C stuff is unreadable.
Demons - Daemons
I just discovered Fay comes from Fae, which is the old singular for the plural Faerie, though why Morgan is Le Fay rather than La Fay maybe needs a Frenchman to explain, unless she was a he. Oddly Morgan (Morien) is more often a male name, in Wales, where the name and story comes from.
I love the Mediaeval stories.
[*Actually reading it out loud with a rustic English or Welsh accent helps a lot, as a lot of the time it's eccentric spelling]
I believe that Mediaeval is more correctly represented as Mediæval however due to various technical limitations in technology (and Americans, who are generally poor at spelling) the æ ligature(?) was dropped in favour of the separate letters. Not sure when/why it morphed into Medieval as well (probably the same buggers who keep forgetting the letter u and replacing the letter s with the letter z).
> I believe that Mediaeval is more correctly represented as Mediæval however due to various technical limitations in technology
And to recover the IT and anti-Microsoft angles, that's what Windows and its inexcusable lack of a compose key have brought to us.
To the "where is the IT angle brigade": You're welcome. ☺
Thanks Madge - you've just solved an 'istorical conundrum.
So they *were* evil witches in that village. Developed a new incantation, a prototype of systemd.
Well, when the truth was out, there was one possible way to save civilisation, wasn't there?
We're all doomed, I tell 'ee.
Ahh I spot an analogy with the behaviour and pitiful attempts to slow it down, of many off out consulynts roaming the corridors of Whitehall. Not to mention a number of 'almost' Zombie tech companies (we see you HPE) who just don't understand that they have turned off their life support and it is all taking a little time for the information to reach the board.