24 ms·
What’s wrong with medieval pigs in videogames
- jaclaz 4y agoWell, we do have the Cinta Senese breed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinta_Senese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinta_Senese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinta_Senese#/media/File:Il_Passeggere_(5724676257).jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinta_Senese#/media/File:Il_Pa... that is (still today) actually very similar to what the Author describes as "medieval pigs".
- unglaublich 4y agoThat's a better role model indeed. But the author doesn't say that medieval-looking pigs are uncommon around the world right now. They say that pigs in medieval themed games are represented by pigs as seen in intensive pig farming: confined, fast growing, furless and pink.
- jaclaz 4y agoYep, they (the videogame designers) got the wrong models, in case any of them read the comments here (and accept the critique in the article), the Cinta Senese is proposed as an alternative model. To be fair, if you quickly look for pigs breeds, you will probably find images like this one: https://www.breedslist.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Types-of-Pig-Breeds.jpg https://www.breedslist.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Types-... where all breeds seem rather chunky and short-legged.
- dcuthbertson 4y agoAw. The Gloucestershire Old Spot looks kind of like a floppy-eared puppy. Very cute.
- wincy 4y agoAlso they’re delicious. Our local farmer had some of them and it’s the best bacon I’ve ever eaten.
- 411111111111111 4y agoPurely from a visual standpoint it's also pretty much the only one that still looks to have somewhat natural proportions and skin. The rest just look adipose and/or at risk of sunburn to me.
- simonh 4y agoAlso what they’re fed on makes a huge difference, for any breed.
- ClumsyPilot 4y agothese look much cuter than the farm variety
- stcredzero 4y agoDi Young - Pixel Pig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiC7_167hQ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiC7_167hQ0
- matthewfcarlson 4y agoI thought one of the most interesting points of the article was towards the bottom. Part of inaccuracy is that you'll be wandering around the village in the game and you'll find adult pigs in pens. It sounds like pigs were mostly free-range and in the woods for their adult life. Later on, as the "wilderness" shrank they transitioned to more of a farm animal.
- GiorgioG 4y agoNot medieval times, but when my grandfather was a kid (nearly 100 years ago now), the pigs would roam his Sicilian town and its outskirts. He was about 6 when he decided to piss off a sow in a field. It mauled him and near killed him.
- masklinn 4y agoThat's still standard in Corsica (and I think Sicily though less sure), local pigs are partially feral.
- usrusr 4y agoParts of Corsica, other parts seem to be run by a small breed of cattle who keep pockets of human tenders around. Observing the pigs at the Col de Vergio I imagined to notice a pattern of the bigger/older pigs venturing further away into the wild, as if they eventually developed a certain nagging suspicion but were too trusting minds to really act on it.
- jamiek88 4y agoI love this on a deep level. Great writing. ‘Imagined to notice’ is a lovely way of embracing those flights of fancy. The imagery of the older pigs subconsciously coming to a conclusion they’ll never quite get to really touched me. Thank you.
- jaclaz 4y agoNot exactly "roaming in the town", but just last week I was talking with someone that remembered how - in the late 1950's or early '60's - her family (in Tuscany countryside) had usually three or four pigs that were routinely brought (by her, at the time 8 or 9 years old) to the nearby woods and it happened more than once that one of them would flee and get to the village, and be later brought back by this or that neighbour.
- btilly 4y agoThat article also includes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinta_Senese#/media/File:Ambrogio_Lorenzetti_-_La_citt%C3%A0_del_buon_governo.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinta_Senese#/media/File:Ambro... which is an actual medieval picture with a very recognizable Cinta Senese pig in it. Which is a testimony that at least some medieval pigs looked exactly like that.
- lordnacho 4y agoacoup blog is great for this kind of thing, I've spent hours reading about all the inaccuracies in historical stuff.
- erikig 4y agohttps://acoup.blog/ https://acoup.blog/ - For those as lazy (or lazier) than I
- roywiggins 4y agoSimilar pig lifestyles found a second wind: Hogs of New York https://qz.com/1025640/hogs https://qz.com/1025640/hogs
- TillE 4y agoEver since sophisticated real-time 3D graphics became a thing, I've often heard the idea expressed that we could learn about history by experiencing it "first hand". An incredible VR experience, surely. The problem is that a meticulous recreation is really hard even if you have a bunch of historians doing the work, and very likely to reproduce a ton of modern biases without good documentation of every tiny detail. For medieval Europe, it's probably simply impossible to get right. The written record just isn't good enough.
- landhar 4y agoAlthough I agree with the problem you’ve framed. I still think the idea of building VR experiences to learn and educate about ancient times has a lot of potential. Since, to a great extent, the problem you’ve outlined extends to every medium. And I still believe that movies and books that try to capture the state of the art in our understanding of previous civilizations play a major role in getting people interested and to care about digging deeper into the topics.
- AndrewOMartin 4y agoDefile what I defile, Lisa.
- acomjean 4y agoAssasin's Creed odyssey actually has a "Tour Mode" where you can get a tour of Athens or other open world locations. They tried to make it accurate. https://www.polygon.com/reviews/2019/9/10/20859403/assassins-creed-odysseys-discovery-tour-review-ancient-greece-education-game https://www.polygon.com/reviews/2019/9/10/20859403/assassins... Of course then you get a bunch of historians on youtube complaining that this or that detail isn't 100% correct ... But thats just people
- rsynnott 4y agoThere's also an aspect of "reality is unrealistic". A modern audience would likely be baffled, by, say, brightly painted ancient Roman statues and buildings; while that was the contemporary reality, it's not at all what people expect.
- jszymborski 4y agoMedievalists are going to medieval, but I can't help but feel like the framing is strange... An article that describes how today's pigs are different from yesterpigs is indeed interesting, but do we particularly care how medievally our video game pigs are? Surely Assassin's Creed holds more important factual errors than the correctness of its pigs; neither of which detract from the game. It's probably a much more entertaining game for them...
- LegitShady 4y agono one cares about medieval pigs, and it won't get clicks, so the video game angle is there to draw interest from more normal people.
- frostburg 4y agoYou have no idea about how much Tuscan municipialities care about medieval pigs, especially if they can get a protected designation of origin out of them (also not everyone is willfully ignorant, but I support accurate medieval pigs in videogames, too).
- LegitShady 4y agoif you have to live off selling articles that only Tuscan municipality staff care about, you're going to be eating a lot of beans and rice.
- mortenjorck 4y ago> do we particularly care how medievally our video game pigs are? Details like this are a big part of what makes historical fiction compelling! The more things one encounters that diverge unexpectedly, yet believably from the present day, the greater the sense of immersion.
- jonny_eh 4y agoAnd the more we can learn from it! Ubisoft has shown an interest in using this series to teach history, with museum modes where you can harmlessly walk around, appreciate the architecture, and talk to locals about what life was like at the time.
- forgotusername6 4y agoThey state with only a few examples that medieval pigs were different. Pigs come with such variety it is hard to say that current depictions are wrong based on such a small sample.
- tptacek 4y agoIt's wrong if modern pigs are the result of modern breeding and breeding techniques. Modern pigs are often (usually? almost always?) purebred, for instance, which isn't something you're going to get with pigs that wander around the woods herded like sheep.
- barry-cotter 4y agoNo. Modern intensive training of pigs is a change that’s well within historical periods with extensive records. I guarantee you pigs are like dogs in that the huge majority of modern breeds are less than 200 (250 to be conservative) years old. Before that there were landraces and we know what they look like, at least roughly. Using modern pigs gives a false impression even if I’m wrong about that because until after WW2 pigs in the West that were raised industrially were raised for lard more than lean meat. There have been huge changes in what most pigs look like in living human memory.
- hardolaf 4y agoThey also state that the games are wrong despite many of these games having put in farm more period and location specific research than the author. The author cites a few translations of a few summaries of laws and a bunch of stuff about England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland and then extrapolates across the entire medieval period and all of Europe.
- LegitShady 4y ago
- xkbarkar 4y agoOh come on. Fun read.
- Comevius 4y agoIt's a legitimately interesting observation that we think that domesticated pigs always looked like they do now, when they didn't, and without people like him researching these things we would be equally wrong about many things concerning history. He plays an important part in preserving history. I don't know how we ended up in a situation where selling advertisement on the internet is a more respectable job than preserving history, but it explains a lot.
- coldpie 4y agoWorked on me and I learned something interesting. Seems like a win-win!
- mykowebhn 4y ago
- kotlin2 4y ago
- pmayrgundter 4y agoTotal tangent, but you just made me realize how fast humans could have lost our fur in our past. This is a contentious issue in the debate between hypotheses of savannah and semi-aquatic ecological orgigins. But wow, it could have happened quick.
- dTal 4y agoNote that pigs are sexually mature around 1 year old, so their generations are rather shorter than ours (especially domesticated pigs, which we tend to kill young). If it took pigs 500 years to lose their fur, it might have taken humans 10,000.
- cultofmetatron 4y ago10000 years is not that long in evolutionary terms either.
- MichaelCollins 4y agoBut not unprecedented either. Tibetans got their high-altitude adaptation in perhaps as short as 3000 years. Andeans have a different high altitude adaptation which took no more than 11,000 years.
- waffle_ss 4y agoThe common ancestor from which all of today's Homo sapiens can trace a shared lineage to (i.e. the oldest branch point) is thought to be only 5,000 to 15,000 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_ancestors_point#Of_Homo_sapiens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_ancestors_point#Of_H...
- jcampbell1 4y agoThis is absurd. You are citing computer models that assume no geography and random mating. The MRCA is around 150,000 years old and probably from east Asia, and the identical ancestors point must be older than that and originating in Africa. When a sentence starts with “given the false assumption…” it is best not to adopt the conclusion as a fact.
- mixmastamyk 4y agoThis reminds me of the other day at a "medieval" festival we were offered turkey legs, which I have seen before on TV perhaps, and didn't ponder at the moment. A few hours later thought... wait a minute, turkeys are from North America? Why are these faux Europeans walking around with turkey legs?
- nullc 4y agoImagine it's a wood grouse leg instead.
- Ekaros 4y agoAnd where is rest of the animals? Meat didn't preserve well, so you eat more of it at time to not waste it.
- Tyr42 4y agoWait I thought Turkeys were from near Turkey.
- gwbas1c 4y agoThey're native to Northeastern United States and Southeastern Canada, although there is a peninsula in Mexico that has a different species of turkey. The reason why turkey is traditional at the US Thanksgiving holiday is to honor the first Thanksgiving, celebrated in Plymouth, MA. I live near Plymouth and there are tons of wild turkeys running around here. (Yesterday there were 11 grazing in my back yard.) It's a very beautiful animal, the male makes a display similar to a peacock.
- boomboomsubban 4y agoThe proper noun "Turkey" is very different from a turkey leg. A turkey leg fits our perception of medieval people walking around eating a huge chunk of flesh, though that is also a misnomer unless you're thinking of the nobility.
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
- chongli 4y agoDefinitely an example of the Coconut Effect [1]. If they had consulted a historian versed in swine culture and produced period-accurate pigs it would have been a meme about how weird and alien the pigs look. People don’t care about period accuracy, they care about art that matched their expectations. Suspension of disbelief is the operative word here. Trying to fight against it is tilting at windmills. [1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheCoconutEffect https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheCoconutEffect
- anyfoo 4y agoBut just like we’ve now come to accept again, through modern productions, that horses’ hooves don’t sound like coconut when running on dirt, we might start accepting that medieval pigs looked different. The question is rather how feasible that is to depict with consistency.
- btilly 4y agoThe phrase "tilting at windmills" is an interesting one. It is a reference to Don Quixote attacking windmills because they were giants oppressing the people. Which, today, just seems ridiculous. However the main reason to switch from hand mills to windmills was that it was far easier for the miller to collect taxes when the grain was milled than for tax collectors to go to every peasant and collect taxes there. Not only was it more efficient, but lords who forced their peasants to switch often raised taxes simply because it was easy to do so. This was all current events when Cervantes wrote Don Quixote. And therefore his audience would have been expected to understand that windmills truly WERE "giants oppressing the people"! No point. Just fun trivia about how different a modern phrase looks when looked at from the point of view of its history.
- ericbarrett 4y agoI love this. Similarly, the expression "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" was originally used ironically or mockingly, as it is physically impossible. Some time in the early 20th century it began to be used as an unironic exhortation.
- supermatt 4y agoMy understanding is that domesticated pigs quickly revert to growing fur and tusks within months when feral - effectively becoming more like the pictures in the article. I wonder what causes this change to their “natural” appearance when raised in captivity.
- Loughla 4y agoIt's not that they revert, it's that the care and feeding is a part of this. Most hogs grow tusks, but they are docked or trimmed in some fashion. All pigs, even the "classic" pink cute ones you might think of when you think farm pig are covered in coarse "fur" though it is not as thick as you find on a feral hog like a razorback or some other such thing. Source; was a farmer. Edit: also, I didn't even think about this when I first wrote this, but we also butcher hogs VERY young, so they haven't had time to develop those "wild" traits yet by the time they are market size. So that might be part of it, too.
- Pxtl 4y agoThat explains the tusks, but AFAIK even very young wild hogs have proper feral fur, not the thin coat of bristles you get on a farm pig. I wonder if there isn't an environmental component there, not just age... or it might just be genetics from interbreeding with wild species.
- Pxtl 4y agoYeah, I've always been curious about this too. The article describes 3-year-old pigs roaming the forest, so that sounds very close to a wild lifestyle compared to a modern pig that spends its whole life in a small pen and is slaughtered at 6 months old. I wonder is it just age that causes fur growth? Hunger? Not having 4 walls an siblings to rub against? Exposure to the elements?
- adultSwim 4y agovideogames are the perfect medium for breaking with the stereotype and bringing academic insights to the larger public
- tnorthcutt 4y agoI'm not sure we should trust medieval artwork to provide anatomically correct depictions of much of anything. See, for example, the Bayeux Tapestry [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayeux_Tapestry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayeux_Tapestry
- myself248 4y agoImagine if there was a whole group of people who specifically study historical records and have figured out ways to tell how accurate the depictions of various things may be.
- peterkelly 4y agoNext article will be about how the inventory capacity of ancient warriors is grossly misrepresented.
- jrockway 4y agoYou're missing the difference between being unrealistic to improve gameplay, and unrealistic because someone forgot to check the historical details. Everyone knows that video game characters have an unreasonable ability to carry stuff; they do that not because they imagined that ancient people had larger pockets, but because the game would suck to play if they didn't do it. The wrong pig model doesn't affect gameplay, it's just something that nobody thought to check. If they had used the right one, it would still be the same game.
- bashmelek 4y agoThe article mentions pigs wouldn’t be wandering the village streets, but as a counter example there were the “St Anthony’s pigs” owned by the friars that were legally protected and had free run of the city. Dante alludes to these in Paradiso, where they took on a metaphor of some friars’ greed.
- Contax 4y agoAnd you can still find loose pigs in some places. I personally know the one in La Alberca, Salamanca, Spain, named San Anton (from Antonius/Anthony), the pig wanders the streets for months being fed by random villagers until it's raffled on San Antonio's day.
- kixiQu 4y agoI have read that perceptions of pigs as dirty differing in various cultures comes back to whether pigs in that region were raised as garbage-scavengers or as wild-feeders. Fun to think about!
- NaturalPhallacy 4y agoWhat might even be weirder is if you take modern pigs and let them run wild for just a few weeks they'll start looking very feral. It's bizarre.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jdtang13 4y agoGreat article. Loved the illustrations and references to specific medieval laws. A good example of how an earlier generation's "common sense" was totally different from ours today.
- Pxtl 4y agoDisclaimer: IANAF, this info comes from pure curiosity and reading. He was describing wild boar interbreeding as being the source of fur and tusks but AFAIK any hog allowed to mature in nature instead of captivity will develop fur and tusks. I haven't found clear explanations as to why the fur happens (weather? Food? Sessile vs active lifestyle?), but any hog allowed to go feral in the wild will look like a hairy, angry, dangerous animal. edit: The tusks differ just because of trimming and age. Which fits with the description of the pigs being allowed to roam in captive forests. One thing that stands out is the timeline - the article describes 3 years to mature enough to be allowed into the forest. In modern factory farming, pigs are generally slaughtered at 6 months, and if they're being bred they start breeding at around a year. Treating pigs as immature at below 3 years is a staggering difference.
- ClumsyPilot 4y agoI can't help but feel we've entered into a perverse loop where we make movies / games only pander to stereotypes of their viewers, and we breed ignorance. First of all art seems to be obsessed with medieval European, and all other periods and places are forgotten. The only other period that gets showtime is antiquity in rome/egypt/greece (which is more or less one period). We have a catch 22, that noone knows whats been happening in ancient China or India, and so movies about them are few and far between. Art is meant to elevate and educate. Perhaps this has entered terminal stage because holywood and AAA studios cant even bothered to write a new plot any more, they just make endless remakes Insert some grumble about late stage capitalism
- kixiQu 4y agohttps://witcher-games.fandom.com/wiki/Baked_potato https://witcher-games.fandom.com/wiki/Baked_potato The same kind of "and not even accurate medieval Europe" complaint as the article, when I do agree with you that the myopic focus on Europe is more important, but... the introduction of the potato was so influential to social relations that it is kind of appalling to consider how casually it's used in supposedly pre-Columbian settings!
- aetherson 4y agoIsn't the Witcher set in a wholly fantastic, non-European, realm? Like, obviously to some degree inspired by European fantasy, but it's not like there's an America to go to and bring back the potato from.
- colechristensen 4y agoCorrect, it makes as much sense to complain that Hobbits like potatoes.
- hot_gril 4y agoWhen the media is based around folklore from a particular region, it's understandable to want it to match the region. I don't care about the casting, but if there were redcoat musketeers and samurai-looking warriors in a movie loosely based on old German fairy-tales, it'd be weird.
- DeathArrow 4y agoI'd venture to guess that the way pigs looked in the Middle Ages is not the only historical oversight in video games.
- cmauck10 4y agoI think this strikes a common theme throughout much of the gaming and production industry.
- natural20s 4y agoLooks like a great opportunity for a community driven patch to provide period accurate pig renderings... wait that didn't come out right =)
- yieldcrv 4y agoknowing the gaming and mod community, it would just be 3D models of Blizzard execs
- hot_gril 4y agoMost old food is going to be inaccurate. Everything has been selectively bred since then, and it's easy to forget how many plants were only found in the Americas.
- darknavi 4y agoGoogle says potatoes are from South America and only came to Europe in the 1500s. TIL!
- Scarblac 4y agoAnd tomatoes!
- account42 4y agoWhich are both nightshades, even of the same genus along with eggplants.
- _re0r 4y agoAnd ... conversely the pigs that we know came to North America from Europe around that same time. The early settlers brought them over and released them thinking the pigs would just do the 'pannage' thing in the vast unmapped, unbordered and unfenced forests of America and they'd collect them come winter time at will. Instead, they ran off and procreated and went feral, and rest is history.
- tuatoru 4y agoYeah, breed improvement was a major landowner hobby in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[1] Britain's King George III was nicknamed "Farmer George" because he understood the importance of food for national security. There's also a story about a German prince trying to get his subjects to grow potatoes, and when they wouldn't, he made potatoes a royal vegetable, only to be grown in one royal garden. The garden was carefully arranged to be laxly guarded. Sure enough, potatoes took off. Most of our modern farm animals (and crops) look a lot different to their medieval forebears. 1.https://georgianpapers.com/2017/01/19/farmer-georges-notes-agriculture/ https://georgianpapers.com/2017/01/19/farmer-georges-notes-a...
- shitpostbot 4y ago
- throwaway5752 4y agoIt should be pointed out that other animals are famously distorted in medieval artwork: https://daily.jstor.org/why-are-medieval-lions-so-bad/ https://daily.jstor.org/why-are-medieval-lions-so-bad/, https://mossandfog.com/the-comically-bad-way-medieval-art-portrayed-lions/ https://mossandfog.com/the-comically-bad-way-medieval-art-po... Otherwise, fascinating details on communal foraging, laws, and husbandry.
- bayesian_horse 4y agoThose pigs aren't inaccurately modeled. Of course they are just time travelling pigs!
- MichaelCollins 4y ago> Most notably, however, the medieval pig was not naked and pink at all, but covered in long dark hairs. In appearance, it was therefore not dissimilar to a boar with which it was often cross-bred. Even in the seventeenth century - long after the middle ages - domestic pigs retained some of these traits, as the drawing below from 1610 shows. This seems uncomfortably close to perpetuating falsehoods about modern pigs, which are not uniformly "naked and pink" but in fact often are covered in hair and come in many colors. And I'm not talking about cross-bred boars. I'm talking about pigs. I've seen pitch black pigs with more hair than a bear. Hairy pigs spotted like dalmatians. Pigs with hair as red as a ginger's. Pigs that are mostly pink with black splotches, or mostly black with pink splotches. As for pigs being fast, pig racing is a sport today. Some pigs today are athletic with long legs and move very fast. The fat and lazy ones are probably that way due to their lifestyle as much as their genetics.
- rubyist5eva 4y agoOne video game pig I really enjoy is the giant hog enemies in Bloodborne, the first you encounter being in a sewer of Central Yharnam. Imagine my surprise when I found out that this pig was actually based on an urban legend from the era of feral hogs in the sewers of London (victorian era London being the model for Yharnam in the game). It's these kinds of details in From Software games that really make me appreciate the lengths they go to and the effort involved in creating the worlds for their games.
- unnamed76ri 4y agoSlightly off topic, but it makes me wonder if free range forest pigs could help prevent major forest fires by keeping brush down.
- exhilaration 4y agoThey don't stay in forests hence "feral pigs are widely considered to be the most destructive invasive species in the United States": https://nyti.ms/3TLKZRy https://nyti.ms/3TLKZRy Check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeGyVrcS9eo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeGyVrcS9eo
- jeandejean 4y agoVery interesting article, but as these games are fiction, they do not necessarily need to be accurate, otherwise there are many more utter inaccuracies to be corrected, not to mention the fact that a young girl can freely hang around with her little brother in the 1300s while having her haircut always perfect. Let games be and enjoy the wonderful pictures.
- Sol- 4y agoVery interesting. It's good to be often reminded how things pop culture representations of historical times can present something that I as a layman would consider plausible (pig rolling in the mud in a medieval town? checks out!), but is not really accurate. Of course the pig is just one symptom and there will be many more such things. Probably increasing use of AI to generate art may amplify such things. Not quite the same, but think AI colorization of historical photographs that just need to look plausible - correctness is not the objective.
- rebolek 4y agoIf anything, A"I" would make the problem worse as it depends only on prior art and is not capable of any critical thinking.
- kibwen 4y agoThis doesn't deserve downvotes. AI just regurgitates what it's been taught. It doesn't care about "correctness" in any capacity, only in conformity to the training set.
- anigbrowl 4y agoExcellent work, and a great point that games' educational potential is often wasted. Modern agriculture tends to select for monoculture or prioritize one particular variety that maximizes something (Holstein cows for milk volume, or yellow bananas, or russet potatoes). We have abundance, but often of lowest-common-denominator options whereas periodic scarcity often means richer variety and greater resilience. It's also startling how focused on system sustainability medieval legal systems were, and how profoundly enclosure/privatization laws cannibalized formerly common resources.
- tabtab 4y agoThose aren't chubby pigs in modern video games, they're humans!
- TrevorJ 4y agoDomestic pigs will grow tusks and thick hair if left to go feral. Curious how much of the visual change in medieval pigs is due to the fact that they were free range, more or less.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ambyra 4y agoReminds me of a passage in Jesse Schell's game design book. Playtesters were confused seeing flags of pirate ships blow forward, toward the front of the ship. They were told that sailing ships have the wind at their backs, so everything blows forward. However, so many playtesters were confused and made comments that they just made the flags blow back. Maybe it was the same with the pigs; people just want to see pigs squealing around town, adding to the atmosphere of the game.
- ummonk 4y agoThey won’t blow forward if you’re tacking into the wind though.
- kgilpin 4y agoSquare rigged ships (the pirate ship most people imagine) are designed primarily for speed running with the wind. They would sail more or less down a line of longitude to a trade wind and then sail in the direction of that wind. They could tack of course but they were really not very good at sailing upwind and that was essentially a design trade off to make them better at sailing in the trade wind. Ship builders of that time did, of course, know how to make more maneuverable ships with different types of rigging. These would all be used for different jobs, eg coastal and fishing. But for long distance transport, speed with the trade wind was the most important consideration.
- eloff 4y agoThat would also throw me, it seems intuitive from our land based experience that the flag blows backward with moving things as they push through the air. Like flags on cars. But sailing vessels are propelled by the wind, and usually move slower than the wind as well, so the flags would blow with the wind, forward. I'm sure sailors would not get confused about it, but for people who don't have that experience it seems counter-intuitive. Now if you had a sailing ship moving faster the wind, which is actually possible, I guess the flag would blow backward, well at an angle, because I think you have to be moving at an angle to the wind to go faster than it.
- PeterCorless 4y agoPigs were recorded in Domesday as having woodland to support them. Note that woodlands supporting pigs was primarily comprised of oak, since the pigs fed on the acorns they dropped. Source 1: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/domesday/discover-domesday/interpreting-domesday.htm https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/domesday/discover-domesd... In the modern world, you can manage about 5 pigs per acre. You should be able to do that many pigs or more per acre in the medieval world since the animals were physically smaller for the most part. So in an 80 acre pannage woodland, expect about 400 swine. Some tree types are far more damaged by pig foraging than others since, if they don't get the yummy acorns, they tend to dig up roots, eat the saplings and do other damage. So the oak and the pig are good neighbors. The elder or the olive tree, or even the wild apple tree, all tend to suffer far more damage when used as pannage. Source 2: https://acrcd.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Pigs-and-Trees.pdf https://acrcd.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Pigs-and-Trees....
- jimmywetnips 4y agoWhy does a marketing manager at Scylla know so much about pannage lmao
- PeterCorless 4y agoI used to actively design roleplaying games, and medieval agricultural yields have been a passion of mine since the original Chivalry & Sorcery Sourceboook (1978)[1]. In particular, in the 1990s I wanted to understand Domesday Book in detail to project what a medieval farm would look like as part of Pendragon roleplaying game, which I owned the rights to for a time when I had a company called Green Knight Publishing. The game is back with Chaosium these days, and I remain a fan of the RPG. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Chivalry-Sorcery-Sourcebook-Edward-Simbalist/dp/B0006XRDEC https://www.amazon.com/Chivalry-Sorcery-Sourcebook-Edward-Si...
- OJFord 4y agoAnswer one: we all have our hobbies; actually pig rearing is a bit quaint but perhaps not as obscure a hobbie as you might think. Like competitive marrow growing or something. Answer two: pig farmers have sons and daughters who don't necessarily follow in their footsteps, just as you and I probably know more about <what our parents did/do> than the average <what we did/do>.
- tialaramex 4y agoRight now the New Forest not far from where I live has pannage. https://www.thenewforest.co.uk/explore/wildlife-and-nature/pigs https://www.thenewforest.co.uk/explore/wildlife-and-nature/p... [The word "Forest" in "The New Forest" does not refer to what you'd call a forest today, at that time it would be understood similar to "Nature Reserve" today and its actual purpose was somewhere for the King to hunt deer as recreation. So there are a lot of trees, but not as many as the word "forest" might cause you to expect]
- kodt 4y agoYour telling me this wasn’t a historically accurate depiction? https://youtu.be/4ST_ON9Xm7Q https://youtu.be/4ST_ON9Xm7Q
- 111111101101 4y agoA long as dinosaurs don't have feathers, I'm happy to have some historical inaccuracy in my entertainment.
- b0rsuk 4y ago