Oh snap. I know of many a road that, when pot hole season is upon us and the roads are falling apart left and right, you can see bricks underneath. Didn't connect the two together but that makes a lot of sense.

Cool stuff.

Kinda always wondered why they didn't remove the old roads. Figured it was due to some sort of historical reason.

Not quite...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Przemy%C5%9Bl

What are you talking about, ballistas were not meant to pierce stone walls, they can't even pierce wooden ships... Stone fortifications were used up to the late medieval times, even with canons its not that simple.

I don't understand the rules of this sub, if questions are only for r/askhistorians, then why is the main page always full of well questions? Even the question is not aimed at "experts".

Is it just a dice roll, on whether the mods let your specific question be posted?

Pretty much, yeah. If you know of any areas near you where roads have been re-routed but the old road surface was left in place you can see it in action.

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Im pretty sure that the Africa Province was wealthier and more urbanized than baetica. Africa is always cited as the breadbasket of the western empire, and the city of carthage second only to rome

It still pales in comparison to the record keeping of Roman Britain that preceded them, though. And I think that’s the point. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is an excellent resource, but it’s far from an exhaustive history compared to the records that exist for the eras before and after it. You go from obsessive Roman record keeping to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to Domesday, basically. You’ve got a story book nestled between two spreadsheets.

EDIT: Please keep in mind I’m painting with the broadest strokes possible and the reality of things is not so cut-and-dried.

A lot of failure kings (like the ones you mentioned and I'd also add Henry III, Edward II, Richard II, Henry VI, and George IV, among others) tend to get a lot of focus in history classes because their reigns tended to bring about a lot of abrupt changes and often mark turning points in history.

Hey guys, looking for a history podcast recommendation. Mike Duncan's History of Rome was my first ever history podcast, I loved it and when that ended I switched straight to History of Byzantium and loved that even more. I've reached the end of that podcast so I am now 450 episodes deep into narrative history. The year is 1180 and I don't want to stop, I want to continue the story, in chronological order...

So I'm looking for a podcast I can binge that

1. is set in Europe or the Middle East

2. narrative format (e.g. year by year storytelling)

3. begins at OR includes the latter half of the 12th century (1150-1200 AD), so I can jump straight to where I left off

4. preferably follows a similar format to HoR/HoB - so, military history but also economic, social, religion etc

5. I actually preferred HoB's more academic approach - interviews with leading historians interspersed through the narrative, so if possible would love that

Any ideas?

Apologies I should’ve been more specific. By not much I meant in terms of info on the Anglo-Saxon religion and mythology which was abolished by the Christians.

I guess socio-political changes through time is practically all history is in the educational sense rather than historical events as a whole.

Yes, that clears up what you are aiming at. While I’m not English myself, I have a very strong preference for history books concerning English history. What I would surmise based on your example is that these sovereigns all are central to periods of socio-political ferment on which a general education will generally pay the most attention, even if - if were to go into academic detail - we can make many remarks around these. General education in any case tends to have this type of focus.

Absolutely incredible.

Is this what we can expect too if we quit maintaining out lawns and there were no other humans or other lawn-obsessed animals around to fix things?

>The archeological record of England generally goes Neolithic -> Roman -> ???? -> Norman.

I think not.

Given the population of the entire island was a tiny percentage of what it is now, and more than 50% of it was covered in forest, there was ample land.

Trying to transplant modern racism onto historical peoples is disgusting. Stop doing it.

You may have heard the statement that everything Henry VIII did and how he asserted his authority on those around him has come to be viewed as the epitome of the word "king." Dictator-like kings, as exemplified in the examples provided, is more or less what I mean. I remember looking at John, Henry VIII and the Civil War in history class, but other than that, I mean I can't help but feel that the curriculum is selectivist in what they prefer to teach. Not much about the Anglo-Saxon period or even that the Plantagenets also held large sways of France. But anyway, back to my question, do you understand it better now?

GEOFIZZ has found something interesting in the next field…

What is the stereotypical king epitome to you, and you mean they get preferred attention?

I mean, they kind of did. The Vikings didn’t so much invade with force as they emigrated en masse and brought their culture with them, eventually overtaking the native Britons as the dominant cultural force in certain regions, particularly what would become the Danelaw. It was a slow cultural shift over decades and centuries, not a bloodbath over a few years.

There was absolutely fighting, because that’s what you did back then, but no archaeological evidence has ever been found to support the narrative that the Vikings showed up and took the island by force, raping and pillaging as they went. The few written accounts of this are likely specific isolated incidents, embellished by the writers. They just kind of showed up and intermingled with the post-Roman Britons and had families.

Also, the Celts did the same thing earlier in history and imported their culture from other parts of the continent onto the Isles, supplanting the cultures that existed in Neolithic and Bronze Age Britain, such as the Beaker culture. There is no reason to treat the Celts as anything nearing “native” or “original” Britons. They were yet another in a long history of people who migrated to the part of the European continent that would eventually become the British Isles, bringing their culture with them. The Celts are a relatively recent culture to show up in that area of Europe and treating them any different than the Vikings is, frankly, ridiculous.

History is more a series of slow regional cultural shifts than it is a series of changes by force of violence through invasion. Those events happened, but they’re not as impactful to the whole of history and the changing of eras as pop culture and pop-history would have you believe.

You also have grass just growing over everything and then stuff builds up between the blades of grass and creates more soil. Over a few centuries those partial millimetres of yearly build-up become centimetres and metres, depending on the location and how long it’s been left relatively undisturbed. If you’ve ever noticed someone’s lawn encroaching on the edges of a sidewalk, that’s the exact mechanism that leads to buried buildings over time. And it can happen relatively quickly.

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*not much we know about them from physical medium. The archeological record of England generally goes Neolithic -> Roman -> ???? -> Norman. Any find that fills in that time between the retreat of the legions and the invasion of the Normans is of critical importance

I remember watching this on the news as a kid

Ah yes, the Meade Hall. I’ve read my Beowulf.