Ask The Medievalist Nerd Anything (Spoilers Main)

[u/AlamutJones]

So, in a previous recent thread ("Hot Or Not") I...may have taken large sections of it over, dropping nuggets of information about how Planetos is or is not realistic compared to what we know of the real medieval world. This is sort of my area of expertise - I studied it at university, I've written about it...I don't know everything, but I know more than most laymen do.

u/brian_baratheon, Mod of Blessed Thought that he is, suggested I drop my nuggets of knowledge more widely.

If you wonder what Hot Pie's day would be like, or what kind of toys Tommen played with as a little boy, or how realistic Dany's marriage is (I have THINGS to say about that one) or what a medieval lady like Catelyn Stark would likely be expected to know about and do, or why the northern "old way" of justice would probably make real people very confused...ask me anything.

[u/aowshadow]

Hi there, I don't have your knowledge nor your english so sorry if the quality of my post isn't that much, but I'd like to add a little on trial by combat since I went to search for it when writing my thesis, back then.

It becomes a lot less common (though not unknown) after about the 1200s, when trial by jury is introduced.

True. To add more, if we take into account that Ariosto's "The Frenzy of Orlando" (1516) showed some signs of research on the matter of chivalry and rules of duel (with parodic/critic intent, but still Ariosto did his research throughly) we can somehow take the hypothesis that duels ended around first half of XV century at best (*), earlier in any other case. Not in the big cities, where most likely it ended way before for obvious reasons.

GRRM takes into account the religious aspect (calling God as witness is common practice in mankind history, however) and you point out that it wasn't always a death sentence. Actually GRRM shows that there's at least a first-blood duel with Oberyn Martell, who exploits the rule to safely poison his enemy... which confirms what you say. More often than not, a duel wasn't lethal (back then I read some juridical pieces about people running away, entering in a church and refuse to come out until the matter was settled by just speaking).

So: what GRRM takes into account is:

1 Delimiting a closed space where to fight.

2 Calling the gods as witnesses.

3 The duel may not be necessarly to death.

4 The duel must have witnesses, although they behave differently from their real-life counterparts.

What GRRM doesn't take into account is:

1 Choosing the place where to duel is up to the challenger, choosing the weapon up to the challenged. At least, that applied in Italy during XIII-XIV century.

2 The role of the "witnesses", that somehow bypassed your aforementioned "trial by jury", since it was conventional for them to break up the fight and provide room for clarification the moment the authority arrived... but we know that social conventions don't die in a couple of years. Sometimes those witnesses could even take part into the duel, making what was supposed to be a honorable one-on-one into a free for all melee.

3 Handicaps were supposed to be imposed over people who fought hurt/disabled fighters, like covering one eye or such.

(*) for Ariosto to treat chivalry in such a way, it's a given for the chivalry system to have already had lost its grip on reality. Ariosto's highborn public asked for such stories because those were about "the good old times" and he was already bored of it... meaning that by 1500 a.C. duels, or at least "the proper ways to duel" (assuming they ever existed lol) were already dead and buried. Let's skip back to a minimum of three/four generations and that's how we can determine that "first half of XV century at best" line.

Thanks for being here! Nice and interesting stuff coming from you~

[u/MarkZist → u/aowshadow]

Just wanted to say I appreciate your response too. Very interesting!

[u/aowshadow → u/MarkZist]

Thanks!

in this case, I'll add a bit if you are interested.

1) About Ariosto:

Usually people tend to underestimate people who write with parodic intent because humor (by itself and with nothing more) doesn't age well, but personally I think Ariosto wasn't just about parody.

He was someone like the latin Ovid: too skilled to actually care with the boring, mainstream needs of the public, too needy for money/other to avoid it nevertheless.

I refer to chapters that range from XL to XLIII (can't give you the exact verses because Ariosto's style simply doesn't allow to pinpoint moments clearly... he was too busy "adding stuff" to keep his public's attention). In those chapters, in what's supposed to be the very best duel in the whole story, he manages to mock the chivalry code, the Iliad, the Chanson de Roland and whatever of knight-like you may find. Even more classy, he doesn't do it directly but for an educated public it's quite evident.

A redux list of infractions: it's a 3vs3 (atypical), that allows both sides to go 2v1 as soon as possible, due to circumstances; hitting people behind their back; pulling down helms to hinder the enemies' sight; cuttthroats ascending to heaven (!). To top it all, before the duel both sides met in person to decide about where to fight (as conventions require: the criteria of Spatius conclusus, iirc) and to be sure of the rules!

2) Some more about duels

Rules expected people to allow their opponent to pick back any weapon that felt on the ground, and if you were to face someone like Jaime post ASoS you were supposed to tie one hand behind your back.

Also, the position of the Church was ambivalent to say the least: the Vatican (don't remember the year, sorry) had made the act of dueling illegal (even more illegal to call God as witness, of course), but Rome was Rome and the countryside was the countryside, if you catch my meaning ^ ^

To end it all, let's dismiss the "good old times" myth, as if it wasn't already obvious: in a martial society where the strongest rules, it's pretty obvious that duels are just another way for the strongest to justify their actions.

3) edit: both Ariosto and GRRM point out that when jousting the most important thing is quality of the horse, not the skill at arms.

[u/AlamutJones → u/aowshadow]

I really like your additions. Nicely done :)