Biggest MISCONCEPTIONS of medieval CASTLES and LIFE

What was life REALLY like living in a medieval castle and times? There are a lot of falsehoods spread attempting to answer that question and in this video I clear things up.

[somedragontoslay]

Are you telling me that medieval society was an actual complete society and not a collection of bad tropes? Unbelievable!

[IonIsFalling]

“People are people” and “they didn’t understand germs but they understood cleanliness” are two of the most powerful anthropological statements I’ve heard in years.

[CJ_Fx]

Another nuance to the alcoholic beverages from back then is what we call 'tafelbier' (translates to table beer) which is basically a dense and dark kind of beer, Piedboef for instance, which hardly contains any alcohol at all. It's basically a liquid form of brown bread. You wouldn't drink it to get drunk, but rather to fill you up while having a meal.

[Bledoston]

In 500 years there will be a guy in a hologram talking about life in the 21st century: "There wasn't just facebook and twitter, people worked too."

[Marinealver]

Imagine looking at an abandoned office building with no electricity or utility services.
"Wow, these people must have had miserable lives"

[TimSlee]

It's not often you find someone who actually looks into the history and understands that the people of the past were no less human than we are. Keep it up.

[yaldabaoth]

Fact: In Germany, to this day, we are drinking only beer. Every house has a faucet that serves beer.

[TheGPFilmMaker]

People tremendously underestimate both the warmth and heat of fireplaces. When I used to work in historical reenactment I was always impressed with how warm and bright a fireplace plus two small windows would keep our log cabin!

[sevenproxies]

I think a big reason why pork was more common is the fact that pigs are not very picky eaters. They literally ate the household garbage.

So you could invest your garbage from the kitchen (semi-spoiled vegetables, meat, dairy etc.) into feeding your pigs, and end up with tasty pork once the pigs were fattened up.

[rorydonaldson]

Time stamps for misconceptions Shad tackles:
4:28 - Castles are dark, dank and cold.
11:30 - Drinking water was so poor people only drank ale.
15:10 - Human waste was thrown into the streets.
18:02 - People were filthy and had no personal hygiene.
19:43 - People didn't wear color
22:30 - Castles were dull and colorless
24:22 - Shout out to his video on why castles were white (go check it out) .
25:00 - Carrying a long sword was outlawed to the general populace.
27:53 - Food was bland and tasteless (Check out the 4 videos made by the Modern History TV channel for more about this topic) .
32:57 - Food was only cooked over an open fire.
35:27 - Life is nothing but work, life was miserable, people worked all day every day.

Those were the main ones I noticed, hope someone found this helpful

[theApeShow]

Think they are confusing the medieval period with college.

[greyrifterrellik]

I think a good way to look at it is "When checking historical documents, look for the stuff that kinda just *exists, * not the stuff that's specifically highlighted. Highlighted means it wasn't mundane or standard."

[kyomademon]

The water part becomes even more funny when you have places like Madrid which were named precisely after the great amounts of water they had, the arabs named it Mayrit which literally means abundant in water

[StrategosKakos]

30:00Pigs are also omnivores and eat basically whatever a human eats. Thus you can feed it with leftovers and with the bits you cut off in the preparation of your own food (fruit and potato skins, bits of meat not good to eat etc.). Hence, keeping a pig is a bit like having a medieval waste recycler that you can eat when grown.
Also, you do not need access to a larger tract of land to let it graze and/or make hay for the winter months - opposed to a cow.

Sheep and especially goats are very low maintenance and as a bonus will feed on weeds you want to be gone from your garden anyway. So enter the medieval lawn mower (edible). Just have to keep it out of your veggie beds - but your children need something to do so they are not underfoot anyway, dont they?

[Devin_Stromgren]

As a modern farmer, I can confirm, things slow down a LOT during the winter.

[silviomanuel]

Also it's weird to assume that the modern-day look of an ancient non-restored castle is exactly what it did look like in its peak times. Like, there were drapers and frescoes and stuff like that. And believe it or not, people did not paint in those bleak colors you see on some hundreds-year-old paintings. The colors were vivid and realistic!

[fillername]

Something to remember when studying history: People have always been people

[Sorenzo]

Of course they only drank ale.
Why else would you find all the quest givers in taverns?

[FrenchTaunter]

There's also a medieval handbook on raising children (in german), which emphasizes the importance of giving the children time to play every day so they won't get overwhelmed by work. The handbook encourages parents to let children have plenty of time to play all sorts of games.

[scribeslendy]

I can confirm the "thicc stone = thicc insulation" bit. My ex grew up in an old 1800s stagecoach station out in Australia that had been coverted into a house, and the walls were made of incredibly thick stone. There was no or heat/AC, even though it would get above 50c and below 0c out there, but the inside of the house was always super cool throughout the day from the night chill, and in the winter a big fire in the living room would keep the majority of the structure cozy for hours.