It's all still more modern than Romans buddy.

Are there any books about the British occupation of Iceland during WW2?

And just like that, Dracula’s reign of terror recommences

Degrees of peasant obligation varied even within the manor or village: while in theory everyone was subject to someone else up to the king, in practice a significant rural minority were free of most or at least some of the more oppressive burdens of villein status, though still subject to universal charges,

Crucial to the system (though much abused) was the role of "custom": a lord couldn't just change the arrangements without a legal cover, and the evolution of estates through successive periods of greater or lesser unfreedom meant that neighbouring holdings might operate under quite different terms, while the need to people newly-reclaimed land with capable tenants might result in milder conditions even as manorialism matured.

Was there a link with market exchange and prosperity? I'd say yes, because when we can identify economic divergence among western regions it's in the areas of least oppression that we later tend to find the economic frontrunners, Holland with its extensive reclamation from the sea being of course the most striking case.

Having more time to attend to your holding and having to surrender less of your produce or limited cash seem likely to have stimulated innovation and commercial engagement. The reverse may paradoxically have applied in a later period when taxes are said to have acted as an incentive to greater effort and output, but at this stage of modest surpluses the development of a commercial sector and freedom to adopt new techniques were probably of greater value.

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Funny, I'd've thought it would've been Prince Albert in a can.

Turns out he's the last remaining triplet alive from the family.. the local garrison commander got freaked out when he came back alive a second time

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I guess after Jesus they wanted a little more of a guarantee?

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>After one of her uncles got violently robbed, her aunt sacrificed a chicken on the altar to "ward off evil spirits following him"

tbh, it doesn't sound like the worst way of processing the trauma of getting robbed.

People do things for a reason, but, if you turn on the news, you'll see that a lot of the reasons are really stupid.

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Indeed, I remember encountering as cause of death the single word "Teeth" in London's 17th-century Bills of Mortality - around 6% of deaths as late as the 1690s.

May have also died of a know dease?.

And there are people today who still do that. I don't know what they know. But if they're doing it, I assume it does something for them.

I often come across sentences like 'Caesar led his men into winter quarters' or 'Hannibal spent the winter somewhere before attacking the Romans.' This raises two questions:

1. Was it possible to wage winter warfare in regions with milder climates such as Palestine, Carthage, or Sicily?

2. When did European armies stop winter quartering and start winter fighting?

Neither Moscow's declaration of war nor the bombings ended it: even after Nagasaki and the USSR's invasion of Manchuria the obstacle remained the position of the Emperor which had been omitted from the Potsdam ultimatum, contrary to the advice of key Truman advisers. It was the US clarification of Aug 11 that "the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese Government to rule the state shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers" that made surrender possible by implying the throne's survival, even if shorn of its former powers.

Agreed. If you poisoned someone with snake venom, and they only went into a coma for a few days before waking up again, the 2nd time around you may want to make sure that they don't get up again...

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You'd need to define "medieval". For some of us in its broader European terms it's the 5th-15th centuries or thereabouts (in which case not much happened between the first-named episode and the later period, because one begins the other, although of course it's never as straightforward as that); for some though it's a narrower period, e.g. the 11th-15th centuries (though even the 14th-15th centuries sit uneasily alongside the preceding "high middle ages"), in which case you'd be asking about what used to be labelled the "dark ages" and the Carolingian and subsequent period.

For the period immediately following Rome's fall (which only ended the western empire, the eastern surviving for another millennium) in the west is the ongoing migration of Germanic peoples into former Roman territory and the establishment of regional kingdoms under various forms of social organisation that would in time evolve into "feudal", manorial or seigneurial hierarchical ties of obligation underpinned spiritually by the spread of Latin Christianity. In eastern Europe it's the survival and temporary recovery of the eastern or Byzantine empire and the westward movement of Slavs, Magyars and others. Along the way we get the revival of money in the west (silver far more importantly than gold), trade and towns, though the big growth comes from the 10th century.

For most of the world, the periodisation's of course largely meaningless, and different start and end dates have to be used for any parallel concept. Even in Europe it's a shorthand, but a useful one provided we're aware of its limitations and the lack of unanimity over even what period's being referred to.