A Thousand Years Nobody Called "the Middle Ages"

Nobody who lived between roughly 500 and 1500 believed they were in the middle of anything. The label came later, from writers who needed a dark age behind them so their own era would shine. The record they skipped over includes public bathhouses in towns of any size, somewhere between 80 and 120 days a year free of ordinary work, universities from Bologna to Kraków, juries, parliaments, double-entry bookkeeping and the mechanical clock. It also includes serfdom, trial by ordeal, torture written into criminal procedure, and the repeated massacre and expulsion of Jewish communities. At the center of this episode is one English village, Elton in Huntingdonshire, whose court rolls show what happened after the Black Death killed half its people: wages rose, rents fell, and unfree tenants began walking away. East of the Elbe, the same shortage of labor pushed peasants deeper into bondage for another four centuries. Places: England, France, the Holy Roman Empire, Iceland, Sicily, al-Andalus, the Baltic #MedievalHistory #BlackDeath