6 ms·

It’s not just weaponry, most of fighting is nutrition, I’m surprised the article doesn’t discuss that. Given that the article says the knights and their weaponr

It’s not just weaponry, most of fighting is nutrition, I’m surprised the article doesn’t discuss that. Given that the article says the knights and their weaponry were correlated to wealth and power, I would expect the knights to be better fed than the peasants as well.

treeman79 6y ago
Working the field all day is going to make someone tough and lean. If it’s a particular lazy knight that enjoys too much food, well. Would be an interesting overlap of nutrition vs fitness vs indulgence.
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  Nutrition in childhood, especially early childhood, is extremely critical to development. The average person historically was remarkably short, generally because of childhood malnourishment. Simply being properly nourished in childhood would have led to a huge height and weight advantage (also probably considerable advantages in brain development). Even into the 18th century the average height of an officer in the British military was about 8in more than that of the enlisted men. On top of that a knight would have eaten a lot more fat, meat, and vegetables than a peasant, who would have lived almost entirely on bread. This wouldn’t have left the peasant totally protein-starved because it was bread made from whole grains, but a knight would have been getting much better returns on their exercise throughout life due to their more varied diet.
  - barry-cotter 6y ago
    > The average person historically was remarkably short, generally because of childhood malnourishment. I believe the average member of the House of Commons was visibly shorter than the members of the House of Lords at least through WWII. Certainly Americans were obviously taller than Europeans until after WWII. Even American slaves were taller and children were generally malnourished until about seven when they became capable of working. Adult height seems to have been unaffected reflecting just how rich the US was comparatively. Complete unfeeling bastards didn’t malnourish children enough to do permanent damage.
    - lostlogin 6y ago
      This checks out - thanks. The below article makes mention of a fact that may complicate things though - big strong slaves were worth more. Presumably slave owners had this in mind so had an ulterior motive for feeding slaves better. It’s one bleak subject. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11718681_The_Heights_of_American_Slaves_New_Evidence_on_Slave_Nutrition_and_Health https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11718681_The_Height...
      - zrobotics 6y ago
        Super horrible, but consider that slaves were incredibly valuable. The middle class of farmers in the antebellum south would barely have been able to afford one, the plantation owners were stupendously wealthy. This, in part, explains why the south was able to wield such outsize political influence. Very bleak, but slave owners had a large economic incentive to make sure their slaves were fit for work (although that didn't cause qualms on other, more brutal forms of mistreatment). The only way they treated them well was in providing food, but that wasn't due to kindness but more from the same motivation to feed a team of draft horses well. It's tough reading, but some of the ledgers kept by plantation owners really drive the point home that they viewed slaves more akin to livestock than people. And they somehow justified what they were doing as christian and moral.
  - s1artibartfast 6y ago
    Do You have a citation for the 8 inches claim? I found this interesting article while looking: Heights across the Last 2,000 Years in England: https://oro.open.ac.uk/53774/3/53774.pdf https://oro.open.ac.uk/53774/3/53774.pdf
    - dodobirdlord 6y ago
      I believe it must have come from Height, Health and History by Roderick Floud, but I can't find a digital copy of that book to link, despite it being 30 years old. The closest thing I could find is another work citing Floud, and only with regard to the difference in height at the beginning of the 19th century. It gives "nearly 6 inches taller", but note that it's comparing 14-year-olds in 1800, when nutrition for the lower classes was on the upswing. > Floud et al. also showed that men who grew up in urban areas were shorter than men who grew up in rural areas, and that there were significant differences in the heights of men and boys from different socioeconomic backgrounds. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, 14-year-old boys attending the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst were nearly six inches taller than their counterparts in the Marine Society https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/6876106.pdf https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/6876106.pdf (bottom of page 101).
      - s1artibartfast 6y ago
        Really fascinating. It sounds like the interclass differences were greater then the variation within England over time.
  - nradov 6y ago
    There certainly was a difference based on nutrition, but the English longbowmen still had to be quite strong. Those bows had heavy draw weights.
    - dodobirdlord 6y ago
      The longbow armies of Wales and England were made up of yeomen, who were certainly well into the upper end of medieval society. There certainly weren't very many of them. There were only 5000-6000 at the Battle of Agincourt, and the loss of ~2500 of them 14 years later at the Battle of Patay crippled the ability of the English to field a substantial longbow army through to the end of the Hundred Years War.
  - questionfor 6y ago
    Would the knight even have access to “bad” carbs / sugar in significant enough amounts to make them so fat that they’d be unfit for combat? It’s not like they can just get another carton of Pringles to finish off the dinner
    - dodobirdlord 6y ago
      Medieval stereotypes about fat people seem to indicate that men who were fat generally got fat from alcohol consumption.
- lainga 6y ago
  The problem was not exercise but malnutrition. It was a question of enjoying enough food vs. having, as Piers Plowman put it, "no penny, pullets for to buy, Nor neither geese nor pigs · but two green cheeses, A few curds and cream · and an oaten cake"
- socialdemocrat 6y ago
  Doesn’t matter how much you work in the field if you are not fed properly. You cannot build muscle without protein. Knights worked out a lot and eat well.
- derefr 6y ago
  > lazy knight That might be possible, but is it likely? A knight is basically a medieval super-soldier: an individual with a huge amount of ongoing personal+state investment going into their ability to project power on the field. Even if they're also a feudal lord who lives within their own holdings (and therefore someone who's not beholden to anyone around them, only to a distant king) everyone working for them is putting a lot of work into keeping the knight's equipment, their horse, etc. maintained and ready to go. Wouldn't those same people push the knight themselves — for their own sakes! — to stay fit, as another kind of "maintenance"? Wouldn't there be mass resentment within a lazy knight's power structure, that would lead to said power structure toppling or mutiny-ing?
  - recuter 6y ago
    Nope, there were a lot of fat and/or incompetent knights. I assure you.
    - derefr 6y ago
      Fat, certainly, but being fat doesn't imply you can't swing a sword on a horse. You can have a lot of core strength and good arms, but if you eat a lot of puddings, the muscle will be covered in enough mass that you'll just look fat. (Especially in a portrait you're just sitting for, rather than flexing for.) As for incompetent knights, I'm genuinely confused: how did they survive in the role for any length of time? (Especially when the only talent pool they would have to recruit underlings from are the very same people they're oppressing. I always figured competence at protecting the outlying villages—where everyone's families live—during invasion, was kinda the reason anyone bothered to work for them at all, rather than towns responding to recruitment attempts exactly the same as invasion attempts, with stoning, boiling oil from the rooftops, etc.)
      - crooked-v 6y ago
        Also, a certain amount of subcutaneous fat is a survival trait when people are regularly trying to perforate you.
      - 6y ago
- rorykoehler 6y ago
  Farmer strength is incredible. I remember rough housing with a farmer friend as a teenager. I was pretty athletic and he was smaller (~15kg lighter) but probably twice as strong as I was. Functional strength. He was basically a teenager with old man strength.
- watwut 6y ago
  > Working the field all day is going to make someone tough and lean. Working in the field all day is not the same as training specifically for combat whole day. And nutrition is massively important for muscle building.
xwdv 6y ago
Peasants ate very well, they had to, in order to work the fields. Salmon were considered peasant food, a peasant would go by the river and fish one up for lunch. Then probably eat some kind of pottage, and bread. Maybe eggs. I'd wager peasants can be tough as fuck, it's only question of how well trained and equipped they are for fighting.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  >Salmon were considered peasant food, a peasant would go by the river and fish one up for lunch. Not without the permission of whoever owns the stream they wouldn't.
- obmelvin 6y ago
  > Peasants ate very well, they had to, in order to work the fields. If one doesn't care about the health of their workers, actually, one doesn't really need to feed them much.
  - xwdv 6y ago
    If one doesn’t give a fuck then there’s also no reason to deny them either. Peasants are responsible for feeding themselves.
    - obmelvin 6y ago
      Perhaps my impression of the state of agricultural yields [0] and fealty payments is incorrect, but I don't think most peasants had enough food to be considered well nourished by today's standards. Sure some grew their own food, but the labor was much more involved than today and they didn't get to keep all of the food. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_Middle_Ages#Productivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_Middle_Ages...
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  Peasants by and large ate pretty poorly, and their diet consisted mostly of bread. They also had an unfortunate tendency to under-nourish children during lean times, because the adults still needed to be well fed so that they could farm. This is the reason why the average height of a European man has increased more than 6 inches since the Middle Ages.
askvictor 6y ago
Might depend on how far the knights/armies were from home, what their logistics capabilities were, or how much they could take from the local peasants or environment.

treeman79 6y ago

Working the field all day is going to make someone tough and lean. If it’s a particular lazy knight that enjoys too much food, well. Would be an interesting overlap of nutrition vs fitness vs indulgence.

dodobirdlord 6y ago
Nutrition in childhood, especially early childhood, is extremely critical to development. The average person historically was remarkably short, generally because of childhood malnourishment. Simply being properly nourished in childhood would have led to a huge height and weight advantage (also probably considerable advantages in brain development). Even into the 18th century the average height of an officer in the British military was about 8in more than that of the enlisted men. On top of that a knight would have eaten a lot more fat, meat, and vegetables than a peasant, who would have lived almost entirely on bread. This wouldn’t have left the peasant totally protein-starved because it was bread made from whole grains, but a knight would have been getting much better returns on their exercise throughout life due to their more varied diet.
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  > The average person historically was remarkably short, generally because of childhood malnourishment. I believe the average member of the House of Commons was visibly shorter than the members of the House of Lords at least through WWII. Certainly Americans were obviously taller than Europeans until after WWII. Even American slaves were taller and children were generally malnourished until about seven when they became capable of working. Adult height seems to have been unaffected reflecting just how rich the US was comparatively. Complete unfeeling bastards didn’t malnourish children enough to do permanent damage.
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    This checks out - thanks. The below article makes mention of a fact that may complicate things though - big strong slaves were worth more. Presumably slave owners had this in mind so had an ulterior motive for feeding slaves better. It’s one bleak subject. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11718681_The_Heights_of_American_Slaves_New_Evidence_on_Slave_Nutrition_and_Health https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11718681_The_Height...
    - zrobotics 6y ago
      Super horrible, but consider that slaves were incredibly valuable. The middle class of farmers in the antebellum south would barely have been able to afford one, the plantation owners were stupendously wealthy. This, in part, explains why the south was able to wield such outsize political influence. Very bleak, but slave owners had a large economic incentive to make sure their slaves were fit for work (although that didn't cause qualms on other, more brutal forms of mistreatment). The only way they treated them well was in providing food, but that wasn't due to kindness but more from the same motivation to feed a team of draft horses well. It's tough reading, but some of the ledgers kept by plantation owners really drive the point home that they viewed slaves more akin to livestock than people. And they somehow justified what they were doing as christian and moral.
- s1artibartfast 6y ago
  Do You have a citation for the 8 inches claim? I found this interesting article while looking: Heights across the Last 2,000 Years in England: https://oro.open.ac.uk/53774/3/53774.pdf https://oro.open.ac.uk/53774/3/53774.pdf
  - dodobirdlord 6y ago
    I believe it must have come from Height, Health and History by Roderick Floud, but I can't find a digital copy of that book to link, despite it being 30 years old. The closest thing I could find is another work citing Floud, and only with regard to the difference in height at the beginning of the 19th century. It gives "nearly 6 inches taller", but note that it's comparing 14-year-olds in 1800, when nutrition for the lower classes was on the upswing. > Floud et al. also showed that men who grew up in urban areas were shorter than men who grew up in rural areas, and that there were significant differences in the heights of men and boys from different socioeconomic backgrounds. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, 14-year-old boys attending the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst were nearly six inches taller than their counterparts in the Marine Society https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/6876106.pdf https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/6876106.pdf (bottom of page 101).
    - s1artibartfast 6y ago
      Really fascinating. It sounds like the interclass differences were greater then the variation within England over time.
- nradov 6y ago
  There certainly was a difference based on nutrition, but the English longbowmen still had to be quite strong. Those bows had heavy draw weights.
  - dodobirdlord 6y ago
    The longbow armies of Wales and England were made up of yeomen, who were certainly well into the upper end of medieval society. There certainly weren't very many of them. There were only 5000-6000 at the Battle of Agincourt, and the loss of ~2500 of them 14 years later at the Battle of Patay crippled the ability of the English to field a substantial longbow army through to the end of the Hundred Years War.
- questionfor 6y ago
  Would the knight even have access to “bad” carbs / sugar in significant enough amounts to make them so fat that they’d be unfit for combat? It’s not like they can just get another carton of Pringles to finish off the dinner
  - dodobirdlord 6y ago
    Medieval stereotypes about fat people seem to indicate that men who were fat generally got fat from alcohol consumption.
lainga 6y ago
The problem was not exercise but malnutrition. It was a question of enjoying enough food vs. having, as Piers Plowman put it, "no penny, pullets for to buy, Nor neither geese nor pigs · but two green cheeses, A few curds and cream · and an oaten cake"
socialdemocrat 6y ago
Doesn’t matter how much you work in the field if you are not fed properly. You cannot build muscle without protein. Knights worked out a lot and eat well.
derefr 6y ago
> lazy knight That might be possible, but is it likely? A knight is basically a medieval super-soldier: an individual with a huge amount of ongoing personal+state investment going into their ability to project power on the field. Even if they're also a feudal lord who lives within their own holdings (and therefore someone who's not beholden to anyone around them, only to a distant king) everyone working for them is putting a lot of work into keeping the knight's equipment, their horse, etc. maintained and ready to go. Wouldn't those same people push the knight themselves — for their own sakes! — to stay fit, as another kind of "maintenance"? Wouldn't there be mass resentment within a lazy knight's power structure, that would lead to said power structure toppling or mutiny-ing?
- recuter 6y ago
  Nope, there were a lot of fat and/or incompetent knights. I assure you.
  - derefr 6y ago
    Fat, certainly, but being fat doesn't imply you can't swing a sword on a horse. You can have a lot of core strength and good arms, but if you eat a lot of puddings, the muscle will be covered in enough mass that you'll just look fat. (Especially in a portrait you're just sitting for, rather than flexing for.) As for incompetent knights, I'm genuinely confused: how did they survive in the role for any length of time? (Especially when the only talent pool they would have to recruit underlings from are the very same people they're oppressing. I always figured competence at protecting the outlying villages—where everyone's families live—during invasion, was kinda the reason anyone bothered to work for them at all, rather than towns responding to recruitment attempts exactly the same as invasion attempts, with stoning, boiling oil from the rooftops, etc.)
    - crooked-v 6y ago
      Also, a certain amount of subcutaneous fat is a survival trait when people are regularly trying to perforate you.
    - 6y ago
rorykoehler 6y ago
Farmer strength is incredible. I remember rough housing with a farmer friend as a teenager. I was pretty athletic and he was smaller (~15kg lighter) but probably twice as strong as I was. Functional strength. He was basically a teenager with old man strength.
watwut 6y ago
> Working the field all day is going to make someone tough and lean. Working in the field all day is not the same as training specifically for combat whole day. And nutrition is massively important for muscle building.

xwdv 6y ago

Peasants ate very well, they had to, in order to work the fields. Salmon were considered peasant food, a peasant would go by the river and fish one up for lunch. Then probably eat some kind of pottage, and bread. Maybe eggs. I'd wager peasants can be tough as fuck, it's only question of how well trained and equipped they are for fighting.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago
>Salmon were considered peasant food, a peasant would go by the river and fish one up for lunch. Not without the permission of whoever owns the stream they wouldn't.
obmelvin 6y ago
> Peasants ate very well, they had to, in order to work the fields. If one doesn't care about the health of their workers, actually, one doesn't really need to feed them much.
- xwdv 6y ago
  If one doesn’t give a fuck then there’s also no reason to deny them either. Peasants are responsible for feeding themselves.
  - obmelvin 6y ago
    Perhaps my impression of the state of agricultural yields [0] and fealty payments is incorrect, but I don't think most peasants had enough food to be considered well nourished by today's standards. Sure some grew their own food, but the labor was much more involved than today and they didn't get to keep all of the food. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_Middle_Ages#Productivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_Middle_Ages...
dodobirdlord 6y ago
Peasants by and large ate pretty poorly, and their diet consisted mostly of bread. They also had an unfortunate tendency to under-nourish children during lean times, because the adults still needed to be well fed so that they could farm. This is the reason why the average height of a European man has increased more than 6 inches since the Middle Ages.

askvictor 6y ago

Might depend on how far the knights/armies were from home, what their logistics capabilities were, or how much they could take from the local peasants or environment.