I've been playing and running Ars Magica for a few years now and the more I read the more I find that a lot of my modern assumptions about the medieval period have been fundamentally wrong.
Here are a few examples:
The low population (particularly in England)
The largest city in Medieval England was London, with about 25,000 people in the 1220's, but this was unusually large. This is the size of a very modest modern town like Newport on the Isle of Wight. or you could squeeze them into the stadium of Darlington Arena. But there's only 20-30 settlements with over 1000 people. Aside from these 20-30 larger towns, most are too small to support permanent shops, relying instead on temporary markets or fairs.
The effect of darkness
We are accustomed to being able to turn on a light and trivially illuminate a room at night.
However modern lightbulbs are impressive. The lighting options for medieval people were much much more limited. Most people would have to do with rush lights (cheap candles made from animal fat and reeds) that emit light similar to that of a lit match. Proper wax candles were relatively expensive especially for daily use. Full lanterns with glass did exist at the time but were relatively rare and expensive. Even the largest stone castles would be illuminated primarily by firelight, making the darkness of the night much more of a concern. Magi often have magical solutions, but without such magic, writing or studying during the night is a more complex affair than you might imagine.
Transient Monarchs:
We often think of monarchs as being based out of a palace or castle, surrounded by guards and courtiers and dispatching underlings to do things for them, but medieval monarchs were very often on the road performing circuits of the lands they controlled. Living in relatively modest temporary accommodations such as Welsh Llys system.
What things have other people noticed that surprised them because modern media skips over them?
Information moves at the speed of travel, not the speed of light. Since the telegraph in the C19th we've been living in a world we can know what is happening in far-off places as quickly as someone can write it down. But information in the middle ages moves at the speed of a horse or a ship, or maybe a pigeon. Which has obvious implications for adventure design.
We have this idea that the Middle Ages was all about monarchs and lords, and that there’s usually one person whose word is law. The manner in which the Order of Hermes governs itself, with every wizard getting a vote, seems unusual and even contrary to the setting, an example of the Order as modern.
But, in fact, you’d be hard pressed to find an adult in Mythic Europe who wasn’t very accustomed to the idea of voting on things. Guilds, to which every craftsman in town belonged, routinely voted on matters. Villagers voted on issues. Priests voted. Indeed, one of the oldest and most famous examples of voting is the process by which the Pope is chosen.
One big thing: the importance of the extended family or clan as a political entity. We are used thinking about medieval rulers (kings, barons, capos) who imposed their will on those "below them". Instead, the fundamental unit in most (but crucially not all) medieval Europe was not the person, but the clan, and people were cogs in the clan machine to a much greater extent than we often imagine. It was the clan that expressed a clanhead, rather than a clanhead who ruled the clan; sure, the eldest male might inherit the duchy by law or custom, but in practice if the eldest male was a fool and failed to maintain clan consensus he'd find himself replaced one way or another with a competent sibling, cousin etc. When you had a feud, or debt of gratitude, it was typically with another clan - and it was typically not your feud or debt, it was your clan's. And it was the clan that owned and administered land and wealth as a sort of superhuman entity, and had rights and duties. Nations were, by and large, networks of dozens to hundreds of clans all connected by one or at most two degrees of separation through blood ties; a clan's daughters and their offspring were essentially seats on the "boards" of other clans, paid dearly with rich dowries and two-way bonds of allegiance.
One small thing: many medieval copyists could not read, and copied books as one might copy a drawing or a map. The venerable Bede reportedly deplored how the scriptoria of monasteries, in his time, held many books that nobody could any longer read. And yet those books got copied over and over, the knowledge therein preserved albeit inaccessible.
Im am not sure which text of Beda you refer to here. Please quote.
Beda Venerabilis is an Anglo-Saxon Benedictine monk who died 735 AD. The Benedictine rule (cp. 42) enjoins monks to read an edifying book in the evening - but that would refer to full monks, not to the many illiterate brothers in a monastery. Benedictine monks occupying themselves with scribing sacred texts were held in high regard - so it is very unlikely that Beda would assume them to be illiterate.
Does he somewhere drastically and graphically describe a sterile practice to deplore the decay of English monasteries in his time?
Bret Devereaux (https://acoup.blog/) is very good on military matters: why an army could only move slowly, but couldn't stop. Why a general had very little say in how a battle was fought after it started, and would even find it hard to know what was happening.
I note that filling a three tun barrel with a "natural liquid" suitable for burning as a lamp oil, with a duration of Moon, is just CrAq 10. (Base 2, +1 touch, +3 moon.) If your covenant is particularly large or has a particularly high demand for light, someone might have to cast that more than once a month to keep it supplied.
Csilla of Tremere, a maga who for some unknown reason time-shares my brain, specifically recommends a version of the spell that creates castor oil, despite the less-pleasant smell. This avoids the issue, seen with other oils, of grogs diverting the oil for use as food, with the usual consequences when the duration runs out.
Csilla of Tremere would like to make some remarks about those who would spend the vis and the time to make such a device (particularly with unlimited uses/day) rather than just learning and casting the equivalent CrHe 20 spell occasionally. I have suppressed these remarks as violating forum decorum.
She also notes that if the spell specifically creates twisted, knotty, crudely split firewood instead of "nice, fireplace sized logs", the wood is less likely to be diverted ("usually by lazy idiots") for uses other than burning, which saves on the accidents caused when the diverted wood suddenly disappears at the end of the spell duration. ("Not that such a measure stops boys from deliberately setting up pranks where things rest on wood that will disappear," she adds in disgust.)
I'd rather see it as an advantage. The leftover oil after deep fat frying, fondue bourguignonne etc is both stinky and a hassle to get rid of. If anything a Sun duration would be preferable for that...
The time would be the same to make the item as to learn the spell, but the item will remain even if the maga is away or ill, and more importantly, will never botch to send her into twilight.
I've found that most covenants that have a Herbam source generally run a surplus of the stuff, so as long as you can make the item in one season, there's little difference between making an item or inventing a spell. Once you've conjured a few forests and filled your granaries with wheat, you start looking for ways to use the stuff.
The wisdom of solving the problem of disposing of used deep frying oil at the price of having the people who consumed part of the oil suddenly becoming un-nourished (to some degree) when the spell duration expires depends a lot on how harsh the Storyguide is about interpreting sudden un-nourishing.
But regardless of whether temporary-duration cooking oil is a good idea, having lamp oil that disappears after Sun duration is just a logistical nightmare, since it means the lamps can't be filled with oil before sunset. And given that, making the Moon-duration lamp oil something that no one will eat means you won't ever have any covenfolk suddenly get hit by weeks of sudden un-nourishment when the spell expires.
(Csilla adds, "Or worse. Consider the case of a grog who has been sneaking and selling lots of the covenant's spell-created olive oil to a village priest with a particular taste for the stuff. Then, when the spell ends, the priest is wracked with hunger pangs. Now, how many different ways can you imagine that going wrong?")
Fair, at least as a general approximation.
The absences are a decent point, and it is, for example, possible that Adler of Bjornaer was thinking ahead to preserving the forest around the covenant even after her departure from this world.
But as far as a botch, well. If a maga is the sort of person foolish enough to pick the middle of a stressful situation as the perfect moment to cast a formulaic spell to make roughly five tons of firewood that will last for two to four weeks, having her in Twilight will probably be a relief to her sodales.
Ohhh yeah, especially for the serfs. Privacy is a privilege of the wealthy, and even then less often than you'd think. Farmers? Pile the extended family into the shared "bed" (probably just straw on the floor) and get ready for any or all of the married couples to get busy. Your sense of propriety will be stabbed to death with haste and without mercy.
Another lodging note, related to the whole "only the rich have their own rooms" thing, that's worth keeping in mind if you're dealing with nobility or equivalent and servants thereof (which most covenants do) - servants generally lived where they worked. I don't mean "in the same household," I mean "in their workspace." The chefs sleep in the kitchen, the armorer sleeps in the smithy, the stable hands sleep in the stables, etc. Soldiers and cleaning staff often slept atop the tables they took meals at.
Lack of privacy and acute sense of propriety in medieval stories did become strange bedfellows. Take a look at the legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller.
So it was generally the patron to allow a servant to take a spouse - which involved providing some private space not only for the couple, but also their future children.
But there were of course still occasions for those not allowed to marry. One of them was harvest time and the work on fields and in orchards: l'uva fogarina is an old Italian country song being quite explicit about it.
I am still trying to understand whether people drank ale so much that it replaced water. I realize ale was safer than water and that it was very low in alcohol, but did peasants really have that much access to ale? How often did peasants drink water in their day to day lives?
Having work in the malt industry, I searched a bit the history of beer making.
Ale or beer was nothing like modern beer: it was not filtered and also lighter in alcohol. In fact, it was rather thick and monasteries were pilgrims would stop would serve beer/ale as... meal. The beverage at this time was still containing whole grains, only partially converted into alcohol (thus the lower alcohol content), so it was probably a combination of cereals soup mixed with beer.
It does not look sexy presented that way, but it was probably safer than most water available (between the low cooking required to brew barley and the subsequent alcohol production it was rather efficient at getting rid of most bacteria & other unwanted micro-organism).
Brewing would however not work against ergot fungus that was responsible for ergotism also known as Saint Anthony's fire (or Danse de St-Guy in French). Ergot will be the base ingredient to synthetise LSD but much, much, much later in the 1930s, by a Swiss doctor.
You're missing the point. Drinking water Will make you sick, everyone knows this!
There was no understanding of why you got sick, so no understanding that you should boil the water.
People would drink (very weak, by modern standards) ale, wine or fruit juices. And also ate a lot of gruels and soups. Because drinking water made you sick. Especially in areas where many people lived, which (by definition) is where most people, well, lived. Even today, I wouldn't recommend drinking untreated surface water.
This is likely to also be the reason for the widespread popularity of tea in Asia, btw.
Now
Yes. Every household made their own. With mixed results, obviously. It has been argued to be one of the main reasons why cereal agriculture became so widespread.
