Life and Land in Anglo-Saxon England

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/out-margins/life-and-land-anglo-saxon-england

by pepys • 2 years ago

73 49 2 years ago

historytoday.com

0823498723498722• 2 years ago

Beer is læne: you never actually hold it in perpetuity; your possession is but ephemeral.

gerdesj2• 2 years ago

You rent it.

psunavy03• 2 years ago

You buy the beer, you rent the glass and the barstool you sit at to consume it.

GrumpyNl• 2 years ago

In dutch, we use "lenen", very similair.

0823498723498722• 2 years ago

aha, the contemporary english cognate would then be 'loan'.

shmageggy• 2 years ago

What is that large, long-legged, ostrich-like bird in the painting? Was there a now-extinct bird like that in Anglo-Saxon England, or did people keep ostriches or emus or something like them?

graemep• 2 years ago

An ostrich from travellers descriptions?

Possibly peafowl? They were kept in medieval England. There is some bright decoration on the head. The head and legs are too long, but other things in the picture are not to scale either.

jakderrida• 2 years ago

While I'm far from a professional, I'd rule out emu being known to Anglo-Saxons. As for ostrich, seems far more plausible of the two. Not that ostriches were indigenous to any part of Europe, but they were at least known to them through trade. Emu would just be far-fetched, I think.

petesergeant• 2 years ago

An ostrich or a crane: https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/555039/view

I'd say a crane is a pretty good guess though, given it's a falconry picture; Wikipedia says

The common crane (Grus grus) is generally believed to have been a breeding bird in Britain in the Middle Ages. English people prized cranes as the "noblest quarry" for a falconer, and gladly ate them. In December 1212 King John flew his gyrfalcons at cranes at Ashwell, in Cambridgeshire, and killed seven, and on another occasion in Lincolnshire in February 1213 he brought down nine.

seabass-labrax4• 2 years ago

I want to know what happened to the cranes - you'd think a few would escape and survive in the wild. Were they all hunted, or did the environment of Britain become somehow completely unsuitable for them between the middle ages and now? Relevant reading lists welcome :)

seabass-labrax4• 2 years ago

The ostrich seems plausible to me. It is mentioned briefly twice in the Old Testament (Job 39:13 and Lamentations 4:3), and considering that publishing was almost exclusively done by the Church at this time, I presume that the illustrators would have been familiar with it. The Bible doesn't given any description however, so there must have been another source if it is indeed an ostrich.

giraffe_lady• 2 years ago

I went down a related rabbit hole recently after realizing based on a passage in don quixote that all of the characters (and the reader!) were assumed to be familiar with the size and general appearance of an ostrich.

DQ was written in like 1600 but based on chivalric romances from 200-400 years earlier, where it turns out ostriches also come up from time to time, even in heraldry of some characters.

Basically what I came to is that southern europe of that time had a high degree of exchange with other mediterranean cultures including asia minor and northern africa where ostriches were present. And these seafaring cultural and trade spheres also extended into nothern europe and the british isles.

So ultimately I don't think they were going off the bible for it. It's no more unusual than someone from that area being aware of lions or crocodiles and their general appearance. It would probably be very unusual to have seen one, but they would appear in puppet shows and travelers tales for sure. Literate people may have seen them in manuscript illuminations as well.

JR1427• 2 years ago

I think it's a common crane https://ebird.org/species/comcra?siteLanguage=en_GB

retrac3• 2 years ago

The Egyptians domesticated the ostrich and it has been familiar to Mediterranean civilization since. England was part of the Roman world just a few hundred years before the period in question. At that time at least, there were lions in London's zoos and gladiatorial games. I don't know of records to this effect, but there might even have been been ostriches - a favourite animal to import for the games elsewhere in the empire.

It's much less likely there were live ostriches in Anglo-Saxon times but the rich have always enjoyed mangeries and exotic animals. I wouldn't be surprised. And there would be traveller accounts and stories, increasingly mythical to be fair, as large population movements from places where people had actually seen them declined in the post-Roman era.

linearrust• 2 years ago

England was part of the Roman world just a few hundred years before the period in question.

England was never part of the roman world. It was the collapse of the roman world that allowed the anglo-saxons to settle and create england. England was a post-roman world creation. Heck it was part of the destruction crew of the roman world.

sgt• 2 years ago

https://archive.is/LpNs2

Aeolun• 2 years ago

I don't know. If I'd paid for this subscription only to find I get to read 6 more short paragraphs I'd be pretty annoyed.

These online subscriptions just do not make sense if you don't want to read everything they've ever written. And it's the price of a book every month!

swores• 2 years ago

I'm not a subscriber so I'm not arguing it is or isn't worth paying for, but calling a site-wide subscription bad value based on the length of a single article is clearly missing the point, they're not expecting anyone to pay for a single article (even if you might think there ought to be a single article option).

brcmthrowaway2• 2 years ago

Are the germans the originnal eueropeans

bloqs• 2 years ago

sedatk2• 2 years ago

Germans are not even the original Germans.

brabel2• 2 years ago

The history of Europe is fascinating. I think there's not a single "country" today whose ethnicity was not almost entirely replaced with another in the last 10,000 years.

EDIT: I think even 2,000 years is enough.

octopoc• 2 years ago

There are Germans, Slavs (although Slavs might be a Germanic subpeople?), Celts, the pre-Roman peoples in the Iberian Peninsula (they still exist in Spain IIRC), the Romans and the Greeks. Possibly the Finnish and the Hungarians as well? All are white of course. IIRC European has 50k years of breeding only with Europeans, separating them from the rest of the world (Africa, Asia, etc.).

sedatk2• 2 years ago

Slavs call Germanic people “njemac”. It means “mute” as in “people who can’t speak our language”. I’m sure they’re distantly related (Europeans, duh), but I don’t think there’s any direct cultural relation enough to call them “Germanic subpeople”.

imbnwa2• 2 years ago

All are white of course. IIRC European has 50k years of breeding only with Europeans, separating them from the rest of the world (Africa, Asia, etc.).

Uhhh, no. Europe as we know it today is primarily a tripartite congregation of its first hunter-gatherers (such as Cheddar Man), Proto-Indo-European pastoralists from around the Caspian, and agriculturalists from Anatolia and the Levant, with further minor contributions from Central and North Asian peoples such as the Magyars, Huns, and the people who would give the Finnish the language they speak (Finnish not at all being an Indo-European language but an Uralic language, having a Siberian origin). Their varying combinations were only established within the last 4 - 8K years.

retrac3• 2 years ago

No. The prehistoric Indo-Europeans appear to have had no words for the ocean, or ships, or other such things. Or if they did have words for these things, their descendant cultures did not inherit them. This, and many other clues, suggest they originated on the central Eurasian plains. Don't need a word for ocean if you've never seen one.

The Germanic languages are a branch of Indo-European, and this offshoot shares common words for those sea-related things, and also words for many dozens of species of plants and animals (all the tree species, for example, native to the region.) These words have similar properties, and were almost certainly borrowed from an earlier, unrelated culture already living there.

The Basque today speak a language, that, before Roman times, seems to have been spoken all across Spain; it's probably the only remaining relic of what was once hundreds of distinct cultures that existed in Europe, in the neolithic era, before the Indo-Europeans.

tsimionescu2• 2 years ago

The Basque today speak a language, that, before Roman times, seems to have been spoken all across Spain; it's probably the only remaining relic of what was once hundreds of distinct cultures that existed in Europe, in the neolithic era, before the Indo-Europeans.

I don't think that a piece of land the size of the Iberic Penninsula could have spoken a single language in prehistory. Even in the modern day, in places that didn't have a concerted effort to impose a single language, we see a huge diversity. Dagestan for example has 14 different official languages, in a region with 3 million people, and an area almost half the size of Portugal.

Even in the Italian peninsula in the times of Caesar, there were at least 4 major languages spoken - Latin, Umbrian, Venetic, and Etruscan (which is not even indo-European).

snickerer• 2 years ago

The question makes not much sense because the concept of "original Europeans" oversimplifies the complex history of human migration and settlement across the continent.

Europe has been inhabited by various groups of people over hundreds of thousands of years, starting from early human ancestors like Homo erectus, followed by Neanderthals, and eventually Homo sapiens. The idea of a singular "original" group of Europeans doesn't align with our understanding of prehistoric migrations and the genetic mixing that occurred over time.

Modern populations, including Germans, are the result of these extensive, multi-directional movements and interactions, making any one group not "original" but rather a product of ongoing historical processes.

mzi• 2 years ago

I thought the word looked familiar, and wiktionary says it comes from old Norse. In Swedish today it would probably be "låna"

seabass-labrax4• 2 years ago

Ah, hence also German Lehen ('fiefdom'). Oh, how I love Proto-Germanic!

frutiger• 2 years ago

I’m always fascinated by languages. As a native English speaker fluent in other languages but not any Germanic languages beyond basic vocabulary, this comment piqued my interest.

I love Proto-Germanic

Is there something specific (aside from noticing these kinds of similarities in vocabulary) you love about proto-Germanic? Maybe its syntax, or grammar? Or sounds?

Oarch• 2 years ago

That has to be the best paywall I've ever seen

indigoabstract• 2 years ago

Yeah, interesting idea. You either pay up or read it in Latin..

tarkin2• 2 years ago

Reminds me of the Buddhist idea of impermanence; psychologically important in an unstable world

Life and Land in Anglo-Saxon England

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