You Wake Up and Find Yourself back In The 11th Century

[Venusian Broon]

You really seem to be looking for the turd in the punch bowl on this one. Most people, finding themselves in a place where they don't know the language, will learn the language, particularly if they have zero contact with anyone that speaks their language.

The curious thing about writing is that it is a very specific skill. While writers of Latin letters may have difficulty learning to write Arabic, the idea here is that the users of this site might find themselves in ancient London where the writing used Latin letters. So the shift is not really extreme. And going from never writing anything to writing is much more extreme than being an expert writer of one language to shifting to a new language.

Secondly, one could promote themselves as taking notes in a secret shorthand where you'd quickly write phonetically so that you could read it back later. Traditionally writing was taught as what we now call Calligraphy. Calligraphy is a very methodical, and beautiful writing style. Go back even 100 years to find countless references to the importance of good penmanship. Modern education teaches methods of writing reasonably fast. A modern person would be able to transcribe a sermon much more quickly and precisely than an 11th century monk. This shorthand could then be relayed to the monk to put into Calligraphy.

Nope, totally disagree with you. Latin would be required when dealing with the church and monasteries - it was when the Protestant reformation came into being that many nations decided to change church material and sermons from Latin to common languages. I suppose you could just wait 400 years or so till that happened. So, if you can't learn Latin, you ain't going to be much use with the largest employer of scribblers.

You would also have to be able to speak 1000 year old French to deal with the aristocrats - assuming we are in the UK.

And English at the time would require you to re-learn how to speak. Unless you were an academic, who perhaps studied Beowulf in its original form, it would sound like a foreign language to most of us ordinaries.

And how exactly is a starving weirdo who can barely communicate with the lowest serf, going to be able to find any 'study material' to get your writing started? There was no paper at the time - the first English mill was opened in the 1400s - vellum was the go to material to write on, and that was extremely expensive. Who is going to let someone who 'writes funny' and is struggling to talk, anywhere near a writing desk where there are people who have spent decades becoming expert with a quill and vellum, and know what they are doing? Since the advent of the PC and the smartphone, I've barely written anything nice on a piece of paper - some scribbles and workings sure, but really unless you have calligraphy as a hobby (another skill, I'd guess is relatively rare nowadays) we'd probably be boned there too!

You are really going to struggle very hard with the language in the 11th Century, unless you had specifically learnt something about the period and its languages.

The more you think about it, the more you realise how badly adapted we'd be to the time period. We'd have very few (possibly no!) skills that would useful. Knowledge of carpentry might be good, wood was everywhere....but you've learnt how to work wood with modern tools. Could you make a wooden plank from a tree trunk and an early medieval saw? It's going to be a bitter learning experience again, so you'd probably need to be an apprentice and start from the bottom again. If they let you!

Perhaps your knowledge of mathematics might wow them? I mean, proper algebra hasn't appeared in England yet, why not 'invent' that, then Cartesian coordinates, then analytic geometry and perhaps try and kick-start a scientific revolution and the Enlightenment half a millennium early. Well, you might be lucky, if you figured out how to speak, then impress the fledgling academics at Oxford...but, actually, I think you'd struggle. You'd be so far ahead of everyone that they'd probably see you as a crank. And I'm not even talking about really contentious things that we take for granted, like decimal irrational numbers (I would bet that all people at the time would not recognise them as actual numbers), but they didn't have negative numbers as a worked-out concept in higher maths (although they would have understood them in terms of debt and credit) or even the number zero at the time. Arab numbers were actually banned by some governments and mistrusted by those Europeans that had come across them. It would be an uphill battle. Even Newton in 1660 produced Principia Mathematica by looking backwards to the mathematics of Euclid and ancient Greek geometry. You'd have to re-learn all this stuff. (Hint, the deep philosophy between the medieval philosophy of maths and sciences was radically different from our current conceptions.)

 

[Vertigo]

My point is that would you even get sufficient time to do this.

Exactly this and what @Venusian Broon said. They're not going to give valuable handwritten documents to some unknown lunatic!

 

[Dave]

@Vertigo I agree too, but @Venusian Broon said the second bit.

You need to do something very extraordinary, very quickly to be noticed. Maybe someone like a magician or illusionist would have the best chance, because you either need to display this talent in front of a crowd to get noticed, or else be taken under the wing of someone wealthy who can sponsor you. Otherwise, you'll starve. Even my idea of mining semi-precious gems only works if you share the takings with some security, otherwise you'll be robbed, and probably murdered before you got to sell it.

 

[svalbard]

I think we are getting tied up with languages. Let's be serious about this. If indeed you did wake up in the 11th century I think we should take it for granted that you would be able to speak the lingo.

 

[Venusian Broon]

I think we are getting tied up with languages. Let's be serious about this. If indeed you did wake up in the 11th century I think we should take it for granted that you would be able to speak the lingo.

Why? It's one of the major problems you are going to have with the whole scenario!

Are you just setting up a "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" sort of event?

Or do you want us to ignore that for the moment, and move onto the other multitude of problems that you'd face?

 

[svalbard]

Why? It's one of the major problems you are going to have with the whole scenario!

Are you just setting up a "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" sort of event?

Or do you want us to ignore that for the moment, and move onto the other multitude of problems that you'd face?

It would just be so much easier to wake up fluent in Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse etc. And as you suggest just get on with the other fun stuff such as table manners.

 

[Cthulhu.Science]

Nope, totally disagree with you. Latin would be required when dealing with the church and monasteries - it was when the Protestant reformation came into being that many nations decided to change church material and sermons from Latin to common languages. I suppose you could just wait 400 years or so till that happened. So, if you can't learn Latin, you ain't going to be much use with the largest employer of scribblers.

You would also have to be able to speak 1000 year old French to deal with the aristocrats - assuming we are in the UK.

And English at the time would require you to re-learn how to speak. Unless you were an academic, who perhaps studied Beowulf in its original form, it would sound like a foreign language to most of us ordinaries.

And how exactly is a starving weirdo who can barely communicate with the lowest serf, going to be able to find any 'study material' to get your writing started? There was no paper at the time - the first English mill was opened in the 1400s - vellum was the go to material to write on, and that was extremely expensive. Who is going to let someone who 'writes funny' and is struggling to talk, anywhere near a writing desk where there are people who have spent decades becoming expert with a quill and vellum, and know what they are doing? Since the advent of the PC and the smartphone, I've barely written anything nice on a piece of paper - some scribbles and workings sure, but really unless you have calligraphy as a hobby (another skill, I'd guess is relatively rare nowadays) we'd probably be boned there too!

You are really going to struggle very hard with the language in the 11th Century, unless you had specifically learnt something about the period and its languages.

The more you think about it, the more you realise how badly adapted we'd be to the time period. We'd have very few (possibly no!) skills that would useful. Knowledge of carpentry might be good, wood was everywhere....but you've learnt how to work wood with modern tools. Could you make a wooden plank from a tree trunk and an early medieval saw? It's going to be a bitter learning experience again, so you'd probably need to be an apprentice and start from the bottom again. If they let you!

Perhaps your knowledge of mathematics might wow them? I mean, proper algebra hasn't appeared in England yet, why not 'invent' that, then Cartesian coordinates, then analytic geometry and perhaps try and kick-start a scientific revolution and the Enlightenment half a millennium early. Well, you might be lucky, if you figured out how to speak, then impress the fledgling academics at Oxford...but, actually, I think you'd struggle. You'd be so far ahead of everyone that they'd probably see you as a crank. And I'm not even talking about really contentious things that we take for granted, like decimal irrational numbers (I would bet that all people at the time would not recognise them as actual numbers), but they didn't have negative numbers as a worked-out concept in higher maths (although they would have understood them in terms of debt and credit) or even the number zero at the time. Arab numbers were actually banned by some governments and mistrusted by those Europeans that had come across them. It would be an uphill battle. Even Newton in 1660 produced Principia Mathematica by looking backwards to the mathematics of Euclid and ancient Greek geometry. You'd have to re-learn all this stuff. (Hint, the deep philosophy between the medieval philosophy of maths and sciences was radically different from our current conceptions.)

This is great.
None of this addresses what I've written very directly, but it is an interesting interaction.

Firstly, I don't think it is very important what unknown language is spoken where you end up. At CE 1,000 a lot of languages were spoken in England. But that doesn't matter. All that matters is that they would all be foreign. But for me, specifically, I've travelled enough countries on a low enough budget enjoying going into the back streets where the kind people of the neighborhood tell me (through pantimine) that I need to get out or the bad people of the neighborhood will kill me to know that one doesn't need to know language to communicate. There is a certain charm to a 60 year old Chilean woman running a finger across her throat, turning her head aside and sticking her tongue out. There is also no mistaking the message.

But learning a few words to communicate with comes pretty quickly if someone wants to communicate with you, and if you have a single ounce of gumption and/or the most mild interest in learning the language you'll be able to do so quickly. Another fun fact, everywhere I've been people have been happy to teach me as much of their language as I've been willing to learn. I haven't found that anyone is stingy with their language.

There is a long history of people going to places where they didn't know the language and then learn the language. Sometimes these people have called themselves explorers or missionaries. For most of human history that is how people looked around and learned about new places and languages. I am startled to hear the absolute fear expressed when it comes to learning a new language from scratch from the native speakers of the language. Immersion is a recognized language learning technique. Learning any language isn't difficult if you are humble enough to learn from everyone around you. I've found that children are often the best teachers. They love repetition and are thrilled with how clever they are to teach an adult something. And its a lot of fun to be an enthusiastic learner with children.

The language problem is only a problem if you let it be one.

So I'll start there.

And frankly all these discussions of potential failing long-term plans miss the much more important first day, or better, first interaction with a local human being...

 

[paranoid marvin]

I agree that if you are accepted in by a community, you will acclimatise and pick up a way of communicating pretty quickly.

The thing is though, that in 11th Century England, people didn't travel very far at all, unless it was to Church or on pilgrimage. If a new person turned up in town who no-one knew, who couldn't speak the language, and who looked different to everyone else, it's unlikely they would have survived long. You would have been seen as a foreigner, and most foreigners back then were those who looted and pillaged..

The only people with any kind of authority owned land or were a member of the Church, and the chances of getting an audience with anyone influential would probably been even less than they are today.

If the bacteria in the food and drink didn't get you, a knife in the guts for the clothes on your back, or a noose round your neck for being a spy/suspected criminal/heretic or devil would be far more likely than being welcomed with open arms as an oracle of the future.

 

[BAYLOR]

I agree that if you are accepted in by a community, you will acclimatise and pick up a way of communicating pretty quickly.

The thing is though, that in 11th Century England, people didn't travel very far at all, unless it was to Church or on pilgrimage. If a new person turned up in town who no-one knew, who couldn't speak the language, and who looked different to everyone else, it's unlikely they would have survived long. You would have been seen as a foreigner, and most foreigners back then were those who looted and pillaged..

The only people with any kind of authority owned land or were a member of the Church, and the chances of getting an audience with anyone influential would probably been even less than they are today.

If the bacteria in the food and drink didn't get you, a knife in the guts for the clothes on your back, or a noose round your neck for being a spy/suspected criminal/heretic or devil would be far more likely than being welcomed with open arms as an oracle of the future.

Im think there is one conceivable possibility for survival . You approach the local parish priest . There is an outside chance you could actually encounter one who might actually want to help you. Then you worry about language.

 

[Cthulhu.Science]

If any of us arrived wearing "the clothes on [our] back and whatever happens to be in [our] pockets" we would be a marvel to behold. An absolute impossibility.

During the middle ages everyone was familiar with how clothing was made from spinning, through final sewing. So much time was spent by so many people to make clothing during the middle ages, everyone knew the process, even if some people were not very involved in the process. Your clothing would be impossible to make at the time. And everyone glancing in your general direction would know it immediately.

Lets consider the humble T-shirt. How did you get thread so absolutely perfect? And so thin and strong. And so much of it. And the weave. Look. It is perfect and tight. You can't really see it. And the stitching. So much tiny, perfect stitching. The hems are all double stitched in perfect parallel. But wait. How did you put it on? The neck is smaller than your head. Was this sewn on your body? Wait again! There is no seam on the body of the shirt. This is impossible. Do you have a loom that is a circle. No. That's impossible. How do you pass a shuttle around a circle? And beyond the details what is this finished fabric that is soft and strong and stretches and comes back into perfect shape. And the colors. White, Black, any modern bright color at all is beyond the abilities of the 11th century, without starting with patterns.

And then the rest of your clothing and shoes. As the local people used their own experiences to try to guess in their minds how your clothing could be made the only reasonable conclusion is that the number of man-hours (woman-hours) required is greater than anyone could imagine. They might confer among themselves without a good solution.

Here you are, the size of an adult, with skin and body as soft as a baby, wearing impossible clothes, speaking an incompressible language, appearing out of nowhere. Old John the smith walked that alley a moment ago and you weren't there. The risk in 11th century London is the viable options of who you are. Devil? Angel? Something else?

---

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Here is a 5 part series about clothing from ACOUP

Collections: Clothing, How Did They Make It?​

 

[Vertigo]

Im think there is one conceivable possibility for survival . You approach the local parish priest . There is an outside chance you could actually encounter one who might actually want to help you. Then you worry about language.

I read somewhere that back then most parish priests were barely educated and couldn't even read Latin and that the Latin service etc. were purely memorized parrot fashion. the centres of education would have been the monasteries and even then probably only the bigger ones.

 

[Dave]

the centres of education would have been the monasteries and even then probably only the bigger ones.

The Universities were created to train clerics, hence 'Doctor of Philosophy'. And as already noted, Oxford and Cambridge are some distance from London for a man without any coin.

If any of us arrived wearing "the clothes on [our] back and whatever happens to be in [our] pockets" we would be a marvel to behold.

I already called them "spacesuits" earlier and said it would be better to ditch them as soon as possible, so as not to stand out, but maybe you are correct in that it is the one thing that we have that proves we are not a penniless fool spouting nonsense. We need to stand out quickly.

I still maintain that language and communication would be the biggest barriers, even if we are now dismissing language to make this 'thought game' easier. While you can make certain simple points and needs understood with hand gestures, more complicated ideas and concepts (Harold's battlefield tactics in 1066, or the position of a new star in the sky) would require a widely understood sign language. I guess that drawings made with charcoal on the tavern's kitchen table might help.

However, the language is only half of the problem. You need to be taken seriously by people in power. The King is surrounded by a circle of courtiers and listens only to trusted advisors on matters of policy. The Court and Nobility are surrounded by soldiers, even when travelling, and you'll need an appointment. Maybe your clothing is a calling card. I cannot see any other way you will get seen by anyone of any importance.

 

[Cthulhu.Science]

Of course there is a very good chance that you'd immediately be captured and tortured as a spy. London in the 11th century was a time of battle, siege, taking and retaking. You might get an audience with someone middling in the royal food chain prior to the torture. If you could speak, what could you possibly say?

And while many here have focused on Latin, there were a lot of languages spoken in England at the time. Here is a look at only the Old English lines. Consider also the various Viking invaders, the French, various Gaelic, additional languages and dialects from the Germanic branch from newcomers from other parts of Northern Europe. Let us consider the Green Children of Woolpit. 12th century and speaking a language nobody understood at the time.

So you having a language that appears to be a mashup of every language spoken in the town might be alarming indeed.

As for where to go? Either to the palace or St. Pauls Church would be obvious starts. And St. Pauls would have some educated priests to attempt to communicate with. Maybe it's time to download a translator app to your phone and be certain to include Latin.

 

[Cthulhu.Science]

Down another line of these posts there is one trade that hasn't changed much in the last thousand years -- Masonry.

A trowel, a string, and a tube (lamb intestines), and you have all the tools necessary to build a straight and level masonry wall. A hammer and chisel if you are also shaping the stone. And a little knowledge of fire building if you are responsible for the mortar. If you are a modern mason with any interest in the history of your trade you'd probably be able to catch up very quickly.

Of course there are those pesky guilds, and masons are strong among them. On the other hand, some of the large public projects, castles, for example, hired anyone showing up and showing an aptitude for work.

 

[svalbard]

To be honest I don't think you are going to get anyone to take you serious in the 11th century unless you arrived armed with a 'boom stick' a la Ash Williams. And then there is the distinct possibility you will end up burnt at the stake.

 

[Cthulhu.Science]

The Universities were created to train clerics, hence 'Doctor of Philosophy'. And as already noted, Oxford and Cambridge are some distance from London for a man without any coin.


I already called them "spacesuits" earlier and said it would be better to ditch them as soon as possible, so as not to stand out, but maybe you are correct in that it is the one thing that we have that proves we are not a penniless fool spouting nonsense. We need to stand out quickly.

I still maintain that language and communication would be the biggest barriers, even if we are now dismissing language to make this 'thought game' easier. While you can make certain simple points and needs understood with hand gestures, more complicated ideas and concepts (Harold's battlefield tactics in 1066, or the position of a new star in the sky) would require a widely understood sign language. I guess that drawings made with charcoal on the tavern's kitchen table might help.

However, the language is only half of the problem. You need to be taken seriously by people in power. The King is surrounded by a circle of courtiers and listens only to trusted advisors on matters of policy. The Court and Nobility are surrounded by soldiers, even when travelling, and you'll need an appointment. Maybe your clothing is a calling card. I cannot see any other way you will get seen by anyone of any importance.

Would you be taken more seriously or less seriously by people in power than a person in a space suit would be today?

Anglo-Saxon England gave much less authority to the church than did Norman England. How would this affect the reaction of people in power?

Would your smart phone be enough to entice the people in power to not murder you on the spot?

Language and communication is a large barrier. The question becomes about surviving the first day. Then the second. And so forth. There is no reason for the peasantry to hide you. Lots of potential risk (angering the people in power) with no upside. Getting you to the people in power has limited downside for the peasants with a potential for an upside. (reward for loyalty)

And the people in power. Is there an upside to keeping you alive? What is their analysis? Keeping you alive is no risk to resources. Keeping an eye on you makes sense. Is there a potential for upside if you are maintained vs tortured? Is there someone at court who thinks they can build an upside finding out what you are about? How do you present your case, without language, that there is value in not murdering you on the spot.

And, if the king is out of London, as he most likely is, then how do you convince the person that you are dealing with that are worth keeping around until the king returns, giving you some time to learn to communicate better. Again, upside for the warden vs downside.

 

[paranoid marvin]

At best you would be seen as mad or a fool. No one worth anything is going to listen to you unless, as has been mentioned, you had a modern weapon.

 

[BAYLOR]

Outsiders were

I read somewhere that back then most parish priests were barely educated and couldn't even read Latin and that the Latin service etc. were purely memorized parrot fashion. the centres of education would have been the monasteries and even then probably only the bigger ones.

Well, so much for that idea.

 

[Cthulhu.Science]

Robert Lacey wrote an interesting discussion of the complexity of life in England in the year 1000. It's hard to know exactly how the sudden arrival of a stranger would be treated, but it is not at all clear that the immediate response would be horrible for the newcomer. Maybe it's time to re-read this one. I remember enjoying it a lot.

 

[BAYLOR]

Robert Lacey wrote an interesting discussion of the complexity of life in England in the year 1000. It's hard to know exactly how the sudden arrival of a stranger would be treated, but it is not at all clear that the immediate response would be horrible for the newcomer. Maybe it's time to re-read this one. I remember enjoying it a lot.

The dominate place in Europe art that was the Holy Roman Empire under Otto III . That might be about the best place to land.