(no subject)
Jan. 28th, 2014 10:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwydion* From a discussion of why the level of violence in A Song of Ice and Fire is not sustainable in a Medieval setting found here: http://gwydionmisha.tumblr.com/post/74905357047/why-do-they-find-the-violence-in-asoiaf-unrealistic
Why chevauchée was a bad idea and not sustainable:
In support of medievalpoc’s point, chevauchée turned out to be a really bad idea. While people debate whether or not it worked in the short term tactical sense, it was strategically disastrous.
Before chevauchée was introduced, most peasants didn’t care one way or another which royal house was nominally in charge of France. They didn’t really have much sense of France as a country as central control was very weak and they considered themselves inhabitants of whatever town or village they lived in first and citizens of whatever local or regional area had the most resonance for them second. (A person was a Norman, a Breton, a Picard, etc. rather than a Frenchman or Frenchwoman). The local nobility were the government and the king was some one based out of Isle de France who may or may not much say in what happened here depending on the relative strength of the regional nobility vs. the King that given year. A particular local noble might be better or worse than the previous one, but it wasn’t of much interest if the French speaking noble collecting the rent was born in France or England.
The chevauchée changed that, because suddenly it was really clear that the English were vastly worse, because they were burning and destroying everything. Up until this point it didn’t much matter which army came through, the peasants would hide the valuables and try to get paid for more provisions then were stolen. Now one army was the enemy and the locals hated them. They started thinking of themselves as French. They started helping one army and doing whatever they could to hinder the other. This is the difference between indifference and local folks attempting to slit your throats in your sleep. It may seem a small thing, but the English chevauchée is considered a major factor in starting the development of French patriotism/nationalism. After chevauchée, the English could no longer hold the territories the conquered that way for any length of time because they had to contend with peasant uprisings, guerrilla warfare, and sabotage.
By contrast, in areas where the English taxed with a light hand and ruled even lighter, foregoing the chevauchée, pro-English sentiment lingered. Later, when the French Crown came to conquer Gascony, the locals strenuously resisted centralized French rule, and clung hard to their separate identity even longer. You can see traces of this in early modern writing and even later. The French were still thinking of Gascons as strange, fierce, not quite French into the 19th Century, centuries after Gascony had been integrated into the French body politic.
* "All of these outbreaks could have been prevented with vaccines:" http://io9.com/all-of-these-outbreaks-could-have-been-prevented-with-v-1505667747
* "Visualizing The Companies That Have Created The Most Climate Change:" http://www.fastcoexist.com/3024157/visualized/visualizing-the-companies-that-have-created-the-most-climate-change
* "6 reasons female nudity can be powerful:" http://www.salon.com/2014/01/22/6_reasons_female_nudity_can_be_powerful/
* ...And Interfaith called to say they don't do gatekeeper letters fr trans people, so they've just been dicking me around for no reason. They insist that the Washington Gender Alliance "has resources for that" so they don't need to offer services for trans people. I pointed out they are just a support group and can not provide letters and the closest "resource" the Gender Alliance will point me to is Seattle which involves months of expensive commuting and counseling not covered by Medicare. They kept repeating "Gender Alliance as if they were not lying about them having resources to offer. So basically threy lied about offering services for trans people, wasting my time, energy, and money and are lying about what the Washington Gender Alliance can do. I can only assume they are lying to a whole lot of other trans people about services they are pretending to offer and don't.
* Luckily the trans word of mouth network has pointed me to a clinic in Renton that gives informed consent letters It will likely cost me a couple hundred in travel expenses (I'll have to drive down the night before and sleep there) plus the cost of the appointment, but it is much cheaper then travel costs plus psychiatry for a couple of months to Seattle. Thank you trans benefactor for the tip.
* I have lost track. Is this the forth or fifth time my body had a meltdown in a couple of weeks. GAH! I don't have time for this!
* Tomorrow is packed. Phone calls first, then Tibicina and her gentleman are coming for lunch and to hang out afterwards. Then Greenwick and I take more stuff across. Then I try to do final prep for the movers.
* "Sunday Sweets: Deco-licious:" http://www.cakewrecks.com/home/2014/1/26/sunday-sweets-deco-licious.html
Why chevauchée was a bad idea and not sustainable:
In support of medievalpoc’s point, chevauchée turned out to be a really bad idea. While people debate whether or not it worked in the short term tactical sense, it was strategically disastrous.
Before chevauchée was introduced, most peasants didn’t care one way or another which royal house was nominally in charge of France. They didn’t really have much sense of France as a country as central control was very weak and they considered themselves inhabitants of whatever town or village they lived in first and citizens of whatever local or regional area had the most resonance for them second. (A person was a Norman, a Breton, a Picard, etc. rather than a Frenchman or Frenchwoman). The local nobility were the government and the king was some one based out of Isle de France who may or may not much say in what happened here depending on the relative strength of the regional nobility vs. the King that given year. A particular local noble might be better or worse than the previous one, but it wasn’t of much interest if the French speaking noble collecting the rent was born in France or England.
The chevauchée changed that, because suddenly it was really clear that the English were vastly worse, because they were burning and destroying everything. Up until this point it didn’t much matter which army came through, the peasants would hide the valuables and try to get paid for more provisions then were stolen. Now one army was the enemy and the locals hated them. They started thinking of themselves as French. They started helping one army and doing whatever they could to hinder the other. This is the difference between indifference and local folks attempting to slit your throats in your sleep. It may seem a small thing, but the English chevauchée is considered a major factor in starting the development of French patriotism/nationalism. After chevauchée, the English could no longer hold the territories the conquered that way for any length of time because they had to contend with peasant uprisings, guerrilla warfare, and sabotage.
By contrast, in areas where the English taxed with a light hand and ruled even lighter, foregoing the chevauchée, pro-English sentiment lingered. Later, when the French Crown came to conquer Gascony, the locals strenuously resisted centralized French rule, and clung hard to their separate identity even longer. You can see traces of this in early modern writing and even later. The French were still thinking of Gascons as strange, fierce, not quite French into the 19th Century, centuries after Gascony had been integrated into the French body politic.
* "All of these outbreaks could have been prevented with vaccines:" http://io9.com/all-of-these-outbreaks-could-have-been-prevented-with-v-1505667747
* "Visualizing The Companies That Have Created The Most Climate Change:" http://www.fastcoexist.com/3024157/visualized/visualizing-the-companies-that-have-created-the-most-climate-change
* "6 reasons female nudity can be powerful:" http://www.salon.com/2014/01/22/6_reasons_female_nudity_can_be_powerful/
* ...And Interfaith called to say they don't do gatekeeper letters fr trans people, so they've just been dicking me around for no reason. They insist that the Washington Gender Alliance "has resources for that" so they don't need to offer services for trans people. I pointed out they are just a support group and can not provide letters and the closest "resource" the Gender Alliance will point me to is Seattle which involves months of expensive commuting and counseling not covered by Medicare. They kept repeating "Gender Alliance as if they were not lying about them having resources to offer. So basically threy lied about offering services for trans people, wasting my time, energy, and money and are lying about what the Washington Gender Alliance can do. I can only assume they are lying to a whole lot of other trans people about services they are pretending to offer and don't.
* Luckily the trans word of mouth network has pointed me to a clinic in Renton that gives informed consent letters It will likely cost me a couple hundred in travel expenses (I'll have to drive down the night before and sleep there) plus the cost of the appointment, but it is much cheaper then travel costs plus psychiatry for a couple of months to Seattle. Thank you trans benefactor for the tip.
* I have lost track. Is this the forth or fifth time my body had a meltdown in a couple of weeks. GAH! I don't have time for this!
* Tomorrow is packed. Phone calls first, then Tibicina and her gentleman are coming for lunch and to hang out afterwards. Then Greenwick and I take more stuff across. Then I try to do final prep for the movers.
* "Sunday Sweets: Deco-licious:" http://www.cakewrecks.com/home/2014/1/26/sunday-sweets-deco-licious.html
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-29 05:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-30 05:56 am (UTC)Does that mean people don't do stupid violent things that lead to eating the seed corn literally? No. However, in RL situations, these sorts of things are either short term measures, a genocide against one segment of the population thing, or early modern or modern things that require a whole other level of resources and organization than a medieval society can maintain or even create (depending on things like population, technology, infrastructure, etc.). Even in those situations you get massive depopulation in the effected area.
It could only be drastically worse with the really long seasons alluded to in the books. Given real world civilizations in the RL past that delt well with multiple year food storage for multiple year famines, you need an extremely strong centralized government, a large standing army, and a massive bureaucratic organization to handle taxation/food tithing/food storage/Food distribution. RL Feudal type governments tend to have a lot of distributed power with a variable, but often weak centralized government, weak taxation/bureaucratic infrastructure compared to more centralized systems, little or no standing army, and are notoriously bad at handling multi-year famines. Basically, your classic Feudal government does not tax/make people tithe every year in sufficient quantity to store up a five, ten, or even forty year grain supply and distribute it in years when the crops are bad so that pretty much everyone can subsist. Instead, rich people have enough to eat, the middle class tighten their belts, and the lower classes starve and occasionally cannibalize each other if you get a run of bad weather luck. You get boom and bust population curves as a result, even when the over all arc of a century or multiple centuries are generally curving in one direction, you can get some big fluctuations and extreme hardship in regions that are particularly hard hit or that rely on food imports from regions that are hard hit.
As I've been reading ASoIaF and/or watching the show, I am constantly worried about what the hell they are going to be eating at mid-winter if they are burning so many fields and/or killing all the people harvesting what is likely to be the last good crop for years. When I say this I mean it is literally on my mind pretty much all the time. Maybe this is particularly worrisome to me because I've read the RL accounts of the disruption, depopulation, and misery caused by "The Year without a Summer." Also, I know pretty intimately how bad it got when they simultaneously had several years where it rained so much the crops rotted in a large swath of Northern Europe, while a particularly deadly sheep and cattle murrain was going on, both of which were made worse by a particularly virulent influenza epidemic that meant labor intensive measures to, say, prevent sheep that were not sick from drowning when when the river overflowed it bank from the same rain that was destroying the crops. The resulting starvation left survivors, particularly those who were still growing and developing what would become their adult immune systems, with a chronic weakness against epidemic disease a couple decades later when the great pestilence came along. Similarly, I've studied fairly closely the depopulation spiral of the late Roman Empire/Early Middle Ages transition, and the mulch-generational one that came from round after round of the Great Pestilence coming to kill the young that culminated in the deep dip around 1400. So many peasants are dead and uprooted in Westeros by where I am in book three that I'm imagining a Greenland style die off in the North made worse by civil war, invasion, zombies, and the multi-year winter thing to the point there should be hardly anyone or no one left when Summer comes again, with a pretty extreme dip in the Southern provinces of Westeros where I'm assuming more food is surviving storage and presumable they are getting little summers inside the Big Winter. To me, the horrible part of them burning Winterfell, isn't the emotional loss, but the loss of what I'm assuming were massive grain stores intended to feed everyone in the region over the big Winter (and in part the old unique manuscripts, but that always bugs me whatever the context). While they don't mention where exactly thee stores are or that they even explicitly exist, but I can't see how the couldn't if anyone survived previous winters up there ever.
I'm not saying that GRRM isn't doing this intentionally. I don't know him personally and I haven't read all the books. In fact, I'm rather hoping he IS doing it intentionally. That way their is hope of it all making some sort of sense at the end. If it's not intentional... well, there are serious problems and I'm going to be pretty damned pissed off at some point in the future when the last one is published.
In other words, both what you are positing and what was being discussed in that thread can easily both be true. I am hoping that they are.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-30 03:00 am (UTC)Well, I'm glad to hear it sounds like things will work out for you at CRC, despite the long distance. I might be off work as early as 2:30 that day or might have meetings until 4:15 (not sure yet) -- but either way would be happy to drive up to Renton to hang out in the evening.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-30 07:33 am (UTC)