YES. This whole thread is the best thing and betterbemeta’s tags (above) are on point. I would love actual ‘realistic ancient battles’ where like ten actual fighters and whatever serfs they can persuade to accompany them posture and try to intimidate each other, or have an Official Scrum on a mutually beneficial day. That and just…cattle raiding.
I guess in post-collapse terms it’s theoretically different because your whole raider gang exists to nick other people’s shit so doesn’t need to cultivate or craft much except perhaps to make them more self-sufficient in weaponry, armaments, and other logistical things that’ll enable them to raid harder and more often. That’s exactly why, on the other side of things, as many citizen’s as possible in your vulnerable good-guy farming commune might need to be militia members to protect themselves from people who can dedicate their full-time everyday energy to Being Raiders.
I say in theory because, even if you’re nicking other people’s shit, why not treat that as a bonus? Why not look to history’s peoples who placed a particular import on raiding as a way of life, and notice that none of them were just straight-up predators. They had enough agricultural or pastoral or pescatoral (is that a word?) infrastructure to subsist, and then the luxury, the surplus, came from attacking other people part-time, very occasionally. Look at norse folks going viking; look at the invasive pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe. Just in terms of the caloric requirements and risks inherent in combat, you’re not gonna want to do that full-time. Training to do it well will take more calories and they need to come from somewhere. You pick your battles. You take without fighting at all where you can – so intimidation and making enemies surrender without having to fight is important here; c.f. pirates of the Golden Age – and you fight rarely and only when you know you can a) win, b) benefit hugely from it.
THANK YOU
i think this post has changed my world. literally.
the ‘death is cheap’ approach to warfare only really came on the scene in the 19th century, and not full-blown until WW1. the american civil war and similar conflicts, with mass charges against cannon and the like, that’s a very modern approach to warfare and it assumes manpower is your cheapest resource.
in a non-industrialized setting, manpower is your most EXPENSIVE resource. you don’t throw masses of bodies against a position unless you’re an idiot, except in very rare cases – say, xerxes vs the 300 – where numbers are your only advantage and you don’t have any other options.
in pre-industrial warfare, tactics could make a shockingly outsized difference. there are many documented cases of a few commandos or a surprise flanking move defeating an army ten, twenty times their size. well-trained, well-equipped soldiers are not expendable in that setting. they are your best hope of winning. a medieval warlord would no more throw away his knights, archers, sappers, or other trained troops on massed action than a modern general would throw away her heavy bombers on a strafing run. that’s not how you use those.
just as the modern general uses long-range missiles for bombardment before sending in rare and expensive things like helicopter gunships for close engagement, the medieval warlord used mobile cavalry to isolate and harrass the enemy, and archers to soften them up, before picking his moment and ground to strike with heavy cavalry.
as ellis points out, these trained and equipped troops need a lot of support. reducing the enemy’s support was an essential tactic. when fantasy writers have a siege happen, they tend to think it’s just about starving the other guy or breaking down the wall. but the besieged army often ran into trouble long before that. running out of arrows was a problem, for instance, and when you eat your horses you no longer have a cavalry. a lot of times, that heroic ‘sally forth’ business that broke a siege one way or the other was just because it was eat the horses or use them, and a knight on foot was no longer able to fulfil his tactical role, so the leader rolled the dice rather than have his knights downgraded to footsoldiers.
one result of the need for civilian support for these troops was that you really, really didn’t want to slaughter the peasants if you could help it – at least not if you were taking over the territory, or thought you might want to at some point. it’s not like you could just ship a hundred thousand political prisoners from moscow to work the farms. the peasants WERE the land. without them, it was just a lot of mud you had to get across. you couldn’t stay, you couldn’t use it.
so i’d advise a moratorium on medieval armies burning every farm they pass, and slaughtering the inhabitants of cities they occupy. a few particularly ruthless warlords in history did that a few times, to make a point, and it was shocking back then, or it wouldn’t have worked. alaric sacked rome as revenge, not a takeover bid; you wouldn’t do that to a city you wanted to keep.
Thank you.
Fantasy writing has often forgotten how essential communities are to support that sort of setting.
This post has some good points, but
it’s generalizing them WAY too far.
So, first off: the number of food
producers you need per full time non-food producer is not constant
across all environments and agricultural systems. The Vikings are
probably one of the worst areas to generalize from, because they
lived in an area that was very poorly suited for their agricultural
crops, to the point where their economy was dependent on raiding for
subsistence survival and iirc there was some abandonment of
settlements because the land just wasn’t set up for survival based on
grain crops. You should assume that numbers pulled from them are the absolute highest
end.
Somewhere like Ireland, with a year
round temperate climate that allows multiple growing seasons and has
high rainfall, is going to have a much lower number of food producers
per non-food producer; somewhere like Incan era Peru, with
centralized agricultural planning and spectacularly high producing
plants like the potato, will be lower still. If your food producers
are pastoralists who mainly herd instead of growing, things are again
very different; same with people who subsist mainly off of orchard
crops with wildly different labor requirements; etc.
Side note: I always see people talking
about food production historically, but very rarely cloth production,
which has generally been equally labor intensive and vital. I would
really love it if people paid attention to this.
As for the death is cheap thing –
yeah, warfare at pretty much any time in the ancient past is not
going to be exactly like modern warfare. That said, there were
absolutely periods and places where throwing peasants at the enemy
was a standard approach. To a certain extent, the reason that empires
like Rome and China were so powerful was that their
centralized planning, their vast populations and (at least in Rome, I
know less about China) their slavery-dependent food economies allowed
them to keep throwing more troops at rebellious provinces until they
won.
There have also definitely been
recorded historical incidences of slaughtering huge percentages of a
local population, such as the Mongol conquest of Baghdad or the
Turkish conquest of Constantinople. (These instances also involve
enslaving most or all of the survivors.) On a smaller scale, the
herem institution or rite among nomadic populations in the Bronze and Iron Age Middle East involved the slaughter of entire villages as a
prerequisite to taking them over and settling there.
None of this negates the fact that for
many other times and places, warfare might look more like stealing
cattle and maybe exchanging a couple projectiles, or posturing at
each other for a few hours, or a fist fight between rival families in
the market place.
In general, assume that there isn’t
an “in general,” historically.
Some relevant citations:
[On Viking agricultural economies being
poor]
“Feasting in Viking Age Iceland:
sustaining a chiefly political economy in a marginal environment” –
Davide Zori, Jesse Byock, Egill Erlendsson, Steve Martin, Thomas Wake
& Kevin J Edwards, in Antiquity 87.
“The Midsummer Solstice As It Was, Or
Was Not, Observed in Pagan Germany, Scandinavia and Anglo-Saxon
England” – Sandra Billington in Folklore 119.
[discusses Peruvian and general
American agriculture, including some stuff about orchard crop systems
too]
1491: New Revelations of the Americas
Before Columbus – Charles Mann
[discusses the herem
institution mentioned above, as well as some information about
pastoral economies, though neither are a focus of the work]
The Legacy of Israel in Judah’s Bible: History, Politics, and the
Reinscribing of Tradition – Daniel E. Fleming
You can verify the information about the conquests of Constantinople
and Baghdad by checking Wikipedia, so I’m not going to cite those,
and basically any decent book about Roman warfare will include the
vast population advantage; I got that from a Roman history class.
That all gave me immense pleasure.
Just adding that in 1241, the mongolian armies under the rule of Batu khan invaded Hungary with around 90 000 soldiers, while the hungarian army consisted about 50 000. Still middle ages!
Also the invading army killed around 40-50% of the population in the span of a year (around 1.5 million people).
That said, after laying ruin to basically the whole of Eastern Europe, they went home the next year, possibly because the hardships of consolidating their rule (too big expansion in too little time, they couldn’t get the stone castles/cities either) and supporting the army.
This would make some pretty spectacular movie while being totally realistic!
Medieval castle stairs were often built to ascend in narrow, clockwise spirals so right-handed castle defenders could use their swords more easily. This design put those on the way up at a disadvantage (unless they were left-handed). The steps were also uneven to give defenders the advantage of anticipating each step’s size while attackers tripped over them. SourceSource 2Source 3
Not really the best illustration since it totally negates the effect by having a wide open space for those ascending. Castle tower staircases tended to look like this:
Extremely tight quarters, with a central supporting pillar that is very, very thoroughly in the way of your right arm.
Wider, less steep designs tend to come later once castles moved away from being fortresses to simply noble family homes with the advent of gunpowder.
Oh! Pre-gunpowder military tactics are my jam! I don’t know why, but this is one of my favorite little details about defensive fortifications, because the majority handedness of attackers isn’t usually something you think about when studying historical wars. But strategically-placed walls were used basically worldwide as a strategy to secure gates and passages against advancing attackers, because most of the world’s population is right-handed (and has been since the Stone Age).
Pre-Columbian towns near the Mississippi and on the East coast did this too. They usually surrounded their towns with palisades, and they would build the entrance to the palisade wall in a zigzag – always with the wall to the right as you entered, to hinder attackers and give an advantage to the defender. Here’s some gates with some examples of what I’m talking about:
Notice that, with the exception of the last four (which are instead designed to congregate the attackers in a space so they can be picked off by archers, either in bastions or on the walls themselves) and the screened gate (which, in addition to being baffled, also forces the attackers to defend their flank) all of these gates are designed with central architectural idea that it’s really hard to kill someone with a wall in your way.
In every culture in the world, someone thought to themselves, “Hey it’s hard to swing a weapon with a wall on your right-hand side,” and then specifically built fortifications so that the attackers would always have the wall on their right. And I think that’s really neat.
Ooh, ooh, also: Bodiam Castle in Sussex used to have a right-angled bridge so any attacking forces would be exposed to archery fire from the north-west tower on their right side (ie: sword in the right hand, shield on the useless left side):
These tactics worked so well for so long because until quite recently lefties got short shrift and had it trained (if they were lucky) or beaten out of them.
Use of sword and shield is a classic demonstration of how right-handedness predominated. There’s historical mention of left-handed swordsmen (gladiators and Vikings), and what a problem they were for their opponents, but that only applies to single combat.
A left-handed hoplite or housecarl simply couldn’t fight as part of a phalanx or shield wall, since the shields were a mutual defence (the right side of the shield covered its owner’s left side, its left side covered the right side of his neighbour to the left, and so on down the line) and wearing one on the wrong arm threw the whole tactic out of whack.
Jousting, whether with or without an Italian-style tilt barrier, was run shield-side to shield-side with the lance at a slant (except for the Scharfrennen, a highly specialised style that’s AFAIK unique.) Consequently left-handed knights were physically unable to joust.
The construction of plate armour, whether specialised tournament kit or less elaborate battle gear, is noticeably “right-handed“ – so even if a wealthy knight had his built “left-handed” it would be a waste of time and money; he would still be a square peg in a world of round holes and none of the other kids would play with him.
Even after shields and full armour were no longer an essential part of military equipment, right-hand use was still enforced until quite recently, and to important people as well as ordinary ones – it happened to George VI, father of the present Queen of England. Most swords with complex hilts, such as swept-hilt rapiers and some styles of basket-hilt broadsword, are assymetrical and constructed for right handers. Here’s my schiavona…
It can be held left-handed, but using it with the proper thumb-ring grip, and getting maximum protection from the basket, is right-handed only. (More here.) Some historical examples of left-hand hilts do exist, but they’re rare, and fencing masters had the same “learn to use your right hand” bias as tourney organisers, teachers and almost everyone else. Right-handers were dextrous, but left-handers were sinister, etc., etc.
However, several
predominantly left-handed
families did turn their handedness into advantage, among them the Kerrs / Carrs, a notorious Reiver family along the England-Scotland Borders, by building their fortress
staircases with a spiral the other way to the OP image.
This would seem to be a bad idea, since the attackers (coming upstairs) no longer have their right arms cramped against the centre pillar – however it worked in the Kerrs’ favour because they were used to this mirror-image of reality while nobody else was, and the defender retreating up the spiral had that pillar guarding his right side, while the attacker had to reach out around it…
For the most part Reiver swords weren’t elaborate swept-hilt rapiers but workmanlike basket-hilts. Some from Continental Europe have the handedness of my schiavona with thumb-rings and assymmetrical baskets, but the native “British Baskethilt” is a variant of the Highland claymore* and like it seems completely symmetrical, without even a thumb-ring, which gives equal protection to whichever hand is using it.
*I’m aware there are those who insist “claymore” refers only to two-handers, however the Gaelic term claidheamh-mòr
– “big sword” –
just refers to size, not to a specific type of sword in the way “schiavona” or “karabela” or even “katana” does.
While the two-hander was the biggest sword in common use it was the claidheamh-mòr; after it dropped out of fashion and the basket-hilt became the biggest sword in common use, that became the claidheamh-mòr.
When Highlanders in the 1745 Rebellion referred to their basket-hilts as claymores, they obviously gave no thought to the confusion they would create for later compilers of catalogues…
My name is Calfe & Im too young to know yet what do with my Toung!
So till my Mom say “Dont Do That!” Ill stick it out And lik this cat.
My little Calfe, Im proud of yu– yur living like the Big Cows do. Yur doing just what Mom have said– for yu lik cat, and cat
lik bred.
Bad meme execution. 0/5 stars.
These poems are supposed to be imitative of 17th/18th century middle English poetry (pre-dating dictionaries and formalized spelling conventions) not early 2000s chatspeak, not babytalk.
These poems are also supposed to be in iambic diameter, giving them a pleasing songlike rhythm. The above has inconsistent syllabic structure from line to line.
These attributes are clearly illustrated in the prime:
So tired of people on this website and their flagrant disregard for syllabic structure.
No respect for the craft.
1. first of all, how dare you. i would never, N E V E R, put forth a cow poem with inconsistent syllabic structure. these may not be my finest work, but the iambic dimeter is IMPECCABLE. check my scansion again and come back to me. I guess “know what do yet” is not ideal, but it falls within the constraints of the form. i’m genuinely appalled by this. i have SEEN inconsistent scansion in this meme, i do NOT approve of it and i have NOT done it. how dare you. HOW DAR EYOU!!!
Secondly: it is not absurd to suppose that the linguistic constraints of a Cow Poem would depend on the figure to whom Cow speaks. In the original (and perfect) “i lik the bred,” the narrative cow, like a Chaucerian non-characterized narrator, directs her speech to an imagined and unspecific listener; not to “the men,” who are characters within the poem, but to some more general audience. (See the Canterbury Tales prologue for an example of this voice in action.)
Later, poem_for_your_sprog has Cow address contemporaries like “dog.” You will notice that the voice of Cow varies slightly, in speaking to Dog, from her voice in the original “I lik the bred.” WHY, then, can we not extrapolate that Calfe – who is, after all, a narrator of limited capacity, being only a Baby Cow with a Baby Cow’s simplicity – would have its own variant voice? And why, too, would Cow not speak differently to her own Calfe than she does to an animal peer, or to reverent imaginary auditors? These are experiments within an emerging form – flawed experiments, certainly, but not mistakes ipso facto. Again: HOW DARE YOU!!!!!!!!
my name is Cow, and as yu see, its worth yor tiyme to studye me. but if yu dont like what yu red,
take 2 deep breths
and lik the bred.
I am willing to concede on second reading that the syllabic structure is passable, and in that regard I’ve wrongly impugned the integrity of your work, however I maintain that your Frankenstinian amalgam of fake middle English with fake modern American baby talk is thoroughly unconvincing as either middle English or as modern American baby talk.
It’s an aesthetic failure, IMH(inh)O*
You’ve created the linguistic equivalent of a spork — vitiating two perfectly serviceable tools by attempting to fuse them.
Writing ‘till mothere says / do not do that,’ would have conveyed roughly the same idea without feeling quite so awkwardly anachronistic.
My name is Rave, and I can see you’re bent on pa- tronizing me! ”Anachronistic” frankly seems a misplaced word to use of memes. But since you want to start that fight, let’s step outside and do this right.
Dude: if you want to not get wrecked you’d better get your facts correct.
Like, “Mothere,” friend, is not a word that Geoffrey Chau- cer ever heard.*
So “my name is Cow… i lik the bred” seems to be the Hot New Meme, and I like it. Here’s an odd thing about it, though; a lot of the cutsey animal talk I see on the internet (especially birb-speak) sometimes reminds me of Middle English, but “lik the bred” takes it even further and sounds downright Chaucerian, and it isn’t just the rhyme and cadence. Some of the “lik the bred” pastiches I see around don’t really work because they’re in just plain doggo-fran speak (haven’t decided if Doggo-fran and Birb are the same thing or not), but the ones that really hit all the same notes as the original have something going on with the mangled vowels and spelling that’s not the same as the mangling in Doggo and/or Birb. Maybe some time I’ll gather up some examples and look closely at the vowels and spelling and try and sort out precisely what’s up.
my name is Cow i make yu think of likking bred and tayking drink i studdy buks that i have herd so wen yur gon i rite the werd.
now yu may think wen reeding this “yu typ with hoofs, wy dont yu miss?” i ask yu now be pashent, plees i type with tung i lik the kees
Re: the OP – I don’t think Doggo-fran and Birb-speak are the same at all, but it’s tricky to articulate why (probably because I’m not actually a linguist).
I think Doggo-fran revolves around intentionally switching out syllables in words (or adding them onto mono-syllabic words) – although actually I’m not sure precisely what @runecestershire is referring to here but the other thing that comes to mind is the ‘bork’ meme speak which revolves mostly around the nonsense sentence structure ‘you are doing me a [verb]’. Both cases seem to me to be a lot more specific in usage than Birb-speak.
Birb-speak revolves more around intentionally bad spelling and grammar, often with an overblown sense of urgency to imitate something being typed (and thus spoken) loudly, at high speed and with little accuracy (although there are two slightly different memetic forms of Birb-speak – one originating from the @probirdrights Twitter and the other from the @importantbirds Tumblr and their styles, while similar, are not identical).
But the OP is indeed correct that proper-sounding ‘i lik the bred’ poems have a very specific structure and language to them which is distinct again from the other examples.
I have also noticed this! I thought I was alone in thinking they sounded like middle english!!
A few of the spellings used in the “i lik the bred” poems are almost exactly the same as those in my Chaucer text.
I thought this too…
apparently every nerd on tumblr thought this and for once it took a few days for one of us to write a treatise… are we okay?
ok, see – it took me awhile to come onboard with the lik the bred meme because I assumed it was a a parody of a Chaucerian poem that I hadn’t read and I kept meaning to research it to figure out what poem it was!
I’m pretty sure it’s intentionally a Middle English pastiche isn’t it? Cos it originated in the context of a recreation medieval kitchen.
I love it, I was wondering what the next ‘animal talking in pidgin/misspelled/grammatically odd English’ meme would be.
We’ve had lolcats, doge, birbs and now this. Am I missing any?
Colophon: a statement at the end of a book containing the scribe or owner’s name, date of completion, or bitching about how hard it is to write a book in the dark ages
Oh, my hand
The parchment is very hairy
Thank God it will soon be dark
St. Patrick of Armagh, deliver me from writing
Now I’ve written the whole thing; for Christ’s sake give me a drink
Oh d fuckin abbot
Massive hangover
Whoever translated these Gospels did a very poor job
Cursed be the pesty cat that urinated over this book during the night
If someone else would like such a handsome book, come and look me up in Paris, across from the Notre Dame cathedral
I shall remember, O Christ, that I am writing of Thee, because I am wrecked today
Do not reproach me concerning the letters, the ink is bad and the parchment scanty and the day is dark
11 golden letters, 8 shilling each; 700 letters with double shafts, 7 shilling for each hundred; and 35 quires of text, each 16 leaves, at 3 shilling each. For such an amount I won’t write again
Here ends the second part of the title work of Brother Thomas Aquinas of the Dominican Order; very long, very verbose; and very tedious for the scribe; thank God, thank God, and again thank God
If anyone take away this book, let him die the death, let him be fried in a pan; let the falling sickness and fever seize him; let him be broken on the wheel, and hanged. Amen
Steel Phoenix Studios 
