r/MedievalHistory

France was so much more powerful than England in the 1300s. How did they not seal the deal and win the war in a few years, instead of it taking a Hundred Years' War???

I just started reading the acclaimed history of the Hundred Years' War by John Gumption (first book: Trial By Fire - 1999). The war starts in 1337 and I am up to the year 1339 in the narrative. The situation for England looks hopeless. England has no navy, no money and can't even beat Scotland at Dunbar and the Firth of Forth, who are about to retake Edinburgh. King Edward is impotently leading a tiny army in the Low Countries that can only burn villages instead of fighting sieges or battles. France is rolling up Gascony almost unopposed and raiding the English coast willy-nilly (sacking Portsmouth and Southampton ffs). France is richer, more populous and the far more modern state (with excellent lawfare/lawyers that let them achieve countless bloodless victories).

With France wholly dominant in 1339, how the hell is this going to be a Hundred Years' War??? How did France not win in a few years, from the war's start in 1337?? King Edward should just surrender and pay homage to France. It's hopeless and I want to stop reading because this is so embarrassing for England.

I'm going to have to buy Europa Universalis 5 when it finally goes on 90% sale to simulate this.

I've created an updated map showing the distribution of all recorded Souterrains across Ireland. These mainly date to the early medieval period. Definition is included on the map for reference.

The map is populated with a combination of National Monument Service data (Republic of Ireland) and Department for Communities data for Northern Ireland. The map was built using some PowerQuery transformations and then designed in QGIS.

I've taken on helpful feedback from various comments so please do keep them coming as I love making these maps and am keen to keep improving on them.

So I saw this painting a while ago and noticed one of them in the back on the English side looks to be wearing some sort of either early sallet or maybe an kettle helmet with a visor, aswell as I believe to be a brigandine with a gold velvet or some other type of fabric. if you know anything about the helmet the armour and the style it would be greatly appreciated.

The Kings of Bulgaria and the Avars and how they are possibly related

I've been visiting towns I'd never normally go to for my channel and the gap between what I expected and what's actually there is massive. Went to Berkhamsted last week (a town I've passed through on the train probably 20 times without stopping). Turns out it has a free Norman castle right next to the station. And that's not even the most surprising thing I found there. Feel like we're all guilty of writing off places because of vibes rather than actually going.

Anyone else found a place that completely flipped their assumptions?

Channel if you want to see what I mean (sub if you want to come on the journey with me too)

I feel like in a attempt to revert what some of the 18th and 19th century notions of how "Dark" were medieval Europe, specifically regarding scientific production, I have seen a claims on the internet that the medieval times were just as productive as the classical period, or that the instability and later fall of the western empire didn't affect scientific discoveries. So I downloaded Charles A Murray's database and did a graph to analyze those claims. The graph quantifies the number of works by notable natural philosophers, that appeared in >50% from the 163 Histories Surveys Analyzed by Murray. There is a caveat that I need to add here, the 163 Histories Surveys that were used were made by modern historians, so they probably are biased by modern perceptions of scientific history. And of course this graph does include the Arab world, and china or India.

With all of that cleared it is obvious from the data, that scientific advancements took a big hit during the decline on of the Ptolemaic decline on the second century bc, and later because of the crisis of the 3rd century. And it basically disappeared after the 6th century in christian countries. Only to return in the 11th century, leading up to the renaissance. The main thing is that categoric statements about the entire 1000 years of the medieval period are always wrong, I would have no problem in calling the period of 600-1000 AD "Dark Ages" But after that things were very comparable to the classical period the closer it gets to the 1400s. However I would be very cautious when correcting the dark ages myth from public perception to not end up going too far.