Scotland - zápisky

1. Early Medieval Life and Culture

• Roman influence did not have a majot impact of settlement patterns – iron age hill forsts and promontory forts

• In the northerm and western islands

• Mainly farming system

• Most people lived on a self-sufficient diet of meat, dairy and cereals, supplemented by hunter-gathering

• Northern Britain farming was based on single

1. Hygiene and diesases

• Standing water (bacteria)

• Unburied dead in gutters

• Rubbish in the streets

• Dead animals in the streets

• Famines – childhood malnutrition, anemia, tooth decay (meat only for rich people)

• Sources of this: manuscripts, healing miracles records, archaelogy

• Three scourges – plague, leprosy, syphilis

• 1349 black death kills an estimated 1/3 of the population

• The carrier was thought to be food or inanimate objects (now we know it was mainly through contact)

• Solution: obligatory isolation – cutting of infected communities

• Leprosy – infected people were sent to reside hospitals outside of town, twon permitte lepers to return, they were labelled with a token

• Sympathy with the people – they donated money to create leper hospitals

• Decay flesh = decay of morals (outward) ->leper hospitals often contained a shrine to a saint of healing

• Syphilis (grandgore) – sexually transmittable disease

• Stigma about sexual promiscuity, disease of the soul

• Origin: probably through a sexual intercourse with animal (cattle)

Life & Death

• Expected around 30 (but because of infant deaths – some even lived till 70s)

• Men died often in war, women die in childbirth

• The wealthy lived longer

• How do we know the person is dead? Poking, shouting, mirror to the face to see the breath

• Simple rough wooden coffins, buried on the church grounds (unless you died un-christened, or killed yourself)

• 1314 Battle of Bannockburn – VICTORY FOR SCOTLAND, VERY REMEMBERED

• 1320 Arbroath Declaration – signed by pope