#historical errors

[twitterexile]

[petermorwood]

What would you say is the most detrimental, generally conceived "truth" about the mediaeval period? Like your most hated false fact the last most people believe of that period of time.

I’ve got a rotating list, based I suppose on what’s annoyed me most recently.

It could involve yet another “statement” about the weight and awkwardness of medieval European armour: a crane needed to mount a horse, you can’t get up if knocked down, nuts and bolts to get in, can-opener to get out etc.

It could involve medieval European swords being dismissed as heavy, clumsy, blunt, crude hacking weapons and, of course, not as good as a katana aka Japanese Lightsabre.

It could involve “proof”, invariably from games, comic-books and fantasy movies rather than the historical record (where it doesn’t exist) that medieval European swords were back-carried and their three-foot-plus blades could be drawn from that position (which they can’t).

Just now (wait a while) my Number One hate is treating the entire period as “The Dung Ages” - there’s some lovely filth over here, Fifty Shades of Mud.  “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” and “Lancelot du Lac” started the trend, but Python was making fun, and Lancelot was making a statement. Neither were trying to make sense.

Okay, medieval sanitation and medicine was primitive (it was 600+ years ago!) and Technicolour ventures like “The Adventures of Robin Hood” and “Knights of the Round Table” went too far in the wrong direction, but now movie/TV makers revel in the mire to excess, like hogs in a wallow.

It’s gone beyond the Middle Ages in both directions. Take the scruffy Roman legionaries at the start of “Gladiator”; Ridley Scott wanted them scruffy because “they’d been fighting a long campaign”.

Pah.

In reality, long campaign or not they’d have polished up their kit the night before the battle, to look good (and avoid their centurion’s stick), to show pride in themselves and their unit, to be more easily recognised from a distance as the legate conducts the battle, andto impress and demoralize the enemy. “They’re a thousand miles from home, they’ve been fighting us for months, and their armour’s still shiny!” In the movie it was also a lost chance for an impressive visual contrast of shiny Romans in neat formations vs. a disorganised mob of fur-and-leather-clad Germanic barbarians.

Dial the mud back a bit, please.

Even when it is dialled back, its effects spill over into films, TV, games, book covers etc. In a lot of examples, even when things aren’t actively grubby they’re grimdark, the default palate is desaturated and the default costume is something in low-key brown to off-blackleather (though frequently, see “Witcher” etc., with superbly rendered texture.)

Most Three Musketeers costumes at least nod to what gentlemen wore in the France of the early 1600s - big plumed hats, lace collars, bucket boots and occasionally even the uniform tabards of the King’s elite regiment.

The recent BBC version has put them (mostly) into leather generic swashbuckler costumes that IMO are a bit too similar toother leather generic swashbuckler costumes.

They look good, no denying that, but they don’t look like 17th century French musketeers, just generic swashbucklers from name-that-real-or-fantasy generic swashbuckler.