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Jul. 9th, 2017 08:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI have been reading more about Norwich, and therefore the economics of several centuries.
Norwich was biggest, albeit when biggest meant ten to thirty thousand people.
... fantasy novels never seem to really get their heads around that part. It's like they can only imagine those one or two giant places, and not grok the ordinary sized world.
Norwich was one end of the trading routes of the Hanseatic League.
... the Hansa are some good reading indeed. Now there's a whole slice of history I've not yet understood. Traders being biggest most political with many plenty violence available.
... sounds most best for an RPG supplement. Have I just not remembered reading about them? Or is there a gap?
All the all everything went in, like timber and resin and fur, and went to buying, mostly, cloth.
It's the Strangers again, a few centuries earlier. The economic importance of really good cloth cannot be overstated.
I wonder if all them fantasy works going :eyeroll: at princesses and their fibrecrafts really understand that. Spinning (flax maybe) straw into gold was a bit literal. Fancy tapestry was one way to turn time into big money, for sure.
Norwich also had 'relief for the poor' pretty early, and had poor people represented in politics, and a whole history of politics shouting. Apparently it was 'contentious' for so long they'd got an infrastructure going to keep it just shouty and not fighty. This involved pubs and churches and a very early history of literacy and local printing presses, because then you can go out have a drink raise a toast to the wrong dude, get told off about it on Sunday, and then turn your argue into pamphlets, which get answered in kind. Especially since 'church' didn't just mean the one sort of church, partly because of the Strangers, there was room for more sorts. And therefore more argues. Now that's a model of civic engagement I can get my head around.
The printing bit is more from our end of history. Back nearer the start of Norwich there was printing money - a mint, with Norvic on the coins. Which is how you can tell it was a pretty successful place even back then.
And then all the work that went in to building the cathedral...
... I've got to be honest, sometimes I wonder what we could have been doing instead of building cathedrals. It's an awful lot of effort to make a really impressive meeting hall for your invisible and, importantly, omnipresent friend.
But cathedrals do push the limits on the technology, and draw a lot of show off together in one place, and then on the whole keep it there for everyone to stare at later. So they do accumulate neatness.
All of this is mostly a couple afternoons wiki wandering.
Now I want to get some proper books with sources and further reading and so forth.
Norwich was biggest, albeit when biggest meant ten to thirty thousand people.
... fantasy novels never seem to really get their heads around that part. It's like they can only imagine those one or two giant places, and not grok the ordinary sized world.
Norwich was one end of the trading routes of the Hanseatic League.
... the Hansa are some good reading indeed. Now there's a whole slice of history I've not yet understood. Traders being biggest most political with many plenty violence available.
... sounds most best for an RPG supplement. Have I just not remembered reading about them? Or is there a gap?
All the all everything went in, like timber and resin and fur, and went to buying, mostly, cloth.
It's the Strangers again, a few centuries earlier. The economic importance of really good cloth cannot be overstated.
I wonder if all them fantasy works going :eyeroll: at princesses and their fibrecrafts really understand that. Spinning (flax maybe) straw into gold was a bit literal. Fancy tapestry was one way to turn time into big money, for sure.
Norwich also had 'relief for the poor' pretty early, and had poor people represented in politics, and a whole history of politics shouting. Apparently it was 'contentious' for so long they'd got an infrastructure going to keep it just shouty and not fighty. This involved pubs and churches and a very early history of literacy and local printing presses, because then you can go out have a drink raise a toast to the wrong dude, get told off about it on Sunday, and then turn your argue into pamphlets, which get answered in kind. Especially since 'church' didn't just mean the one sort of church, partly because of the Strangers, there was room for more sorts. And therefore more argues. Now that's a model of civic engagement I can get my head around.
The printing bit is more from our end of history. Back nearer the start of Norwich there was printing money - a mint, with Norvic on the coins. Which is how you can tell it was a pretty successful place even back then.
And then all the work that went in to building the cathedral...
... I've got to be honest, sometimes I wonder what we could have been doing instead of building cathedrals. It's an awful lot of effort to make a really impressive meeting hall for your invisible and, importantly, omnipresent friend.
But cathedrals do push the limits on the technology, and draw a lot of show off together in one place, and then on the whole keep it there for everyone to stare at later. So they do accumulate neatness.
All of this is mostly a couple afternoons wiki wandering.
Now I want to get some proper books with sources and further reading and so forth.