18 Middle Ages Facts Your History Teacher Left Out Because They Were Too Busy With the Plague

Medieval history facts earn their virality when they reveal that something modern and unremarkable has a deeply chaotic origin story, and the piggy bank is the gallery’s clearest example of this. Pygg was a type of orange clay widely used to make household vessels in medieval England. People stored coins in pygg jars. Over time, by an accident of phonetics and the evolution of the language, pygg jars became pig-shaped. The oinking ceramic on the shelf at every bank is not a design choice. It is a linguistic inheritance from a material that no longer exists, preserved in a shape it arrived at by mistake. No one planned this. It simply happened, and now it is everywhere.

Surprising history facts about medieval justice carry a specific weight because they reveal a legal system that was, in several important respects, operating on logic that was internally consistent even when externally alarming. Ordeal by combat, wherein an accused individual could demand resolution through a fight to the death with a trained nobleman, and the survivor was simply declared to have been correct all along, is not a system without reasoning. The reasoning is just not the reasoning that courts use now. The accused had options. The options were limited and involved significant personal risk, but they were options. Modern procedural delays take on a different character when viewed from this particular historical distance.

Roger Bacon, a Franciscan friar working in a monastery in Oxford in the thirteenth century, wrote descriptions of carriages moving without horses, flying machines, and devices for traveling underwater, among other predictions that would not be realized for several centuries. He did this without access to any of the engineering that would eventually make these things possible. He was working from logic, observation, and a commitment to the idea that the natural world could be understood and applied in ways that had not yet been attempted. The subsequent history of technology is, in a meaningful sense, a slow process of catching up to what he had already outlined. No notes. Several centuries of notes, actually, but none of them corrections.

The gargoyle entry is the one that tends to produce the most immediate recalibration in anyone who has spent time looking up at cathedral facades wondering about the symbolic significance of what they were seeing. Medieval architects needed to direct rainwater away from stone walls to prevent erosion. They solved the problem by carving open-mouthed figures that functioned as drainage channels. The figures were elaborate because the craftsmen were skilled and because detail was the standard. The gargoyle is simultaneously a piece of engineering, a piece of art, and a drainage solution that has been attributed spiritual significance by everyone who looked at it without knowing it was a gutter. Medieval engineers understood the assignment. The assignment was plumbing.

The medieval bull being roughly the size of a modern calf, and the brown bear going extinct in England by the eleventh century only to be reimported for blood sport, are the natural world entries that best capture the texture of a period in which the relationship between humans and animals was conducted at a scale and proximity that modern life has entirely removed. Everything was smaller, everything was closer, and the management of the natural world was considerably more experimental than the current approach, which is itself not without its own problems.