Reddit mentions: The best great britain history books

MFE,

We’ve had such a delightful string of evenings “together” that I’m only now finally finishing responding to your foreign film message. : )

I’ve seen Seven Samurai, but I think that’s the only one of Kurosawa’s that I’ve seen and I’m afraid I don’t remember it too well. What do you like about his works?

Watching the trailers, I see a lot of parallels to American westerns. How much influence did Kurosawa have on them or they on him?

Ran looks so elegant to me, but I can’t tell if that’s just the score and the way the trailer is cut. Dreams looks amazing. Also, as I watched the trailer, the voiceover wording going from “as a child” to “as a man” struck me. Are there things in Kurosawa’s films that speak to the man you have been, the man you are, and/or the man you are becoming (not that you need to become any different than you are, but we are all constantly changing and growing).

I haven’t seen Tampopo or the trilogy. You calling them tops means I definitely need to see them at some point. : )

Have I told you how much I love Fifth Element? Yet, I haven’t seen any of his others. I love, love, love that the right song was needed before the chase could commence. Oh, and how funny about the guy throwing up. You’d think that’d be par for the course with the driving that goes into a car chase, yet I’ve never seen that shown!

The line from Clockwise about him showing off his muscles and her egging him on reminded me of us: you showing your mental muscle in so many ways and me very much appreciating and enjoying your displays of intellectual prowess.

Nightwatch and Daywatch look mesmerizing. I don’t watch a lot of horror, but those look very good and well worth the chills.

Oh, how have I let myself slip into so much work and so few movies? La Vie En Rose looks amazing! : )

I’ll return the favor, but I notice as I think back on the foreign language films I enjoy that I’ve rarely seen any of them more than once or twice. I think that gets down to the whole multi-tasking thing and in-home media entertainment tending to be a backdrop for manual activities.

And now I’m laughing at how that came out, but I’m going to leave it in just in case you get a laugh out of it too. : )

So, the foreign film that really sticks out for me is Life is Beautiful. The idea that a man could have such a soul as to create that world of charming adventure for his child in a concentration camp blows me away.

(These are more in order of how much I can remember about them rather than in order of favorites.)

The next one I’ve seen enough to remember is Das Boot. War isn’t my first choice of relaxing subject matters, but I think it’s a beautiful film. It has that Ran elegance about it. While the war part isn’t a draw, I love technology and you know how I feel about water, so submarines are pretty amazing. I’ve enjoyed tremendously the ones (all docked) that I’ve toured.

The film 3 Iron (which seems available in its entirety is a quietly surreal piece that leaves you wondering at the end what really happened.

Pan’s Labrynth was visually complex with many scary and rough moments that were are richly detailed as they were discomforting.

O’Horton was just cute. It wasn’t a top favorite, but it’s a warm, sweet film.

The rest I have just the barest memories of, but they all were compelling enough that I’d watch them again if time allowed for it. They include [Like Water for Chocolate] (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vqm8_GjKDBc), Fanny and Alexander, and [Babette’s Feast] (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvNifgj_dv4).

I feel like I have seen this one, but I’m not positive. : )

>And I love to make you smile

) You telling me that widens the one you’d already put there. : )

>How is it the Poms seem to have a corner on the Science-Fiction-Comedy?

Just from comparing the wiki pages on British humor and sci fi, I wonder if some of the fit is because the invented portions of people, worlds, and mechanisms are easy targets for sarcasm and the awkwardness of some to function in those unique and demanding settings for self-deprecation. Additionally, humor based on insensitivity to cultural differences can be more acceptable when the culture being joked about is fictional.

I think the inventiveness of Brits (in which the Scots seemed to play no mean role) plays well into a genre called a “literature of ideas” and that depends on the reader/viewer’s ability to be comfortable with new and unusual scientific explanations and solutions .

>Just plain not freezing properly and ruining it for one of the audience...letting someone down.

Oh, that plays into so many things we’ve talked about, doesn’t it? I’ve mentioned the utter enjoyment a woman can have being active around a man even when he prefers to be more staid, and the thought that you might worry even about your ability to be appropriately staid makes my heart go out to you. Yes, I do know the part, though, to do with worrying about letting someone down. Given our conversations about what I do not feel comfortable with in terms of adventure, mine seems to run the opposite course in worrying about my ability to be appropriately active without causing anyone emotional or physical harm.

>Had the old magazine kept moving along, I would probably still be doing it.

I will direct my wishes toward whatever you want to have happen whether it’s to be done with magazine editing or to have some opportunity that you would like materialize. I don’t think it’s a secret that I admire your mind, spirit, and writing. You have a gift, but how you will most enjoy that gift is completely up to you. : )

The Dakar video was amazing. That would be so awesome to do. I read a little bit about Dakar rally and learned what erg is. What would be your vehicle of choice for the rally?

Sama Amie seems to capture well the intensity, risk, and vibrance of the rally as well as the simple of joy of pursuing something complex and thrilling. : )

The headings are great on the picture of the issue cover you linked, and what a great image! : )

>My reporting writing isn't all that great.

I’m sure you know my default is both to beg to differ because of the high qualities I see in your writing while simultaneously deferring to your self-knowledge. Why do you think it isn’t great?

>At the eleventh hour the entire rally was cancelled due to terrorism/security concerns.

I’m so sorry that happened. The world will never know all the little dealings for good that get lost in the vast mis-shufflings of greed.

>Which one would you like me to post?

Please choose what you would like to give me. Your writing of any sort is a gift to me. I’d love for you to pick something out. : )

>sock...black the next day. And the next...

So if I see you in jet, onyx, ebony, obsidian, slate, or raven, I know something has gone terribly wrong, right? : )

>I have to try and figure out who's chopping onions in my front room, can't seem to find 'em.

Good to know I’m not the only one who has welled up on more than one occasion. You fill me with joy to the point of it overflowing onto my cheeks and past my through-my-tears smiles.

better lAte than never

Edit: corralling links

Hi! This sounds super interesting! Which game are you modding, sounds like something like Total War? I used to love that back in the day, I would definitely play a mod with some more realistic Scottish historical context!

You're right that this is a difficult area to research - the thing about this era is that the sources for Scotland are very sketchy - very few written records from this period survive, and a lot of it is translated through later witnesses. A lot of it is also apocryphal and not all of it ends up in the history books (though I added some links at the bottom to some good books if that's useful!).

That being said, there are definitely some colourful events that you could draw on in this period, one of huge upheaval and change in Scotland. And using a bit of license is totally OK - as long as you don't just make things up! - some of the best films about Medieval Scotland, like Braveheart, aren't 100% accurate.

So here are a couple of events off the top of my head you might be able to use, adapt, refer to etc. Hopefully other people in the sub can add details if I've forgotten any or got something incorrect!

​

1. The Fànne v. Dòbber Wars
   
   The Fànne - Dòbber Wars was a period of major conflict and violence between two tribes (the clans came a bit later) in Scottish history that marked an important early phase in the rise of Kenneth MacAlpin, sometimes seen as the first King of Scots. He was also a member of the Fànne tribe, and in fact is thought to have become Chief of the Fànnes while still quite young due to his military skill. At some point however, before Kenneth was born, the Fànne tribe split due to a dispute over heritage (very important in those days!), which saw one faction claiming rightful heritage of the lineage - known as the Pure Fànnes - whereas a second faction claimed feudal overlordship over all of the tribe. They have come to be known by historians as the Total Fànnes because of the breadth of their claim. Eventually the Pure Fànnes were successful in driving out their rivals, and so the Total Fànnes left the tribe and founded a new one, the Dòbbers (from the old Pictish words Dòb and Ur - 'glorious' and 'exile'). Because they never gave up their claims to their kinship, they came to be called the 'kin Dòbbers'.
   
   If we jump back to Kenneth MacAlpin, by the time he assumed leadership of the tribe these two tribes were basically at war. The 830s saw repeated, bloodthirsty clashes between the Pure Fànnes and the Kin Dòbbers without any resolution, until finally both sides, exhausted, decided to make peace. This was done at the foot of a mountain called Cúl Beag in the northwest Highlands, near modern-day Ullapool. You might have heard of a medieval tradition called the Kiss of Peace. Well Scotland had its own version of that, which was used at this occasion, called the 'Té' in Gaelic, so bearing in mind the location, the peace treaty between the Pure Fànnes and the Kin Dòbbers was known as the Tè Beag.
   
   Because the sources are very unclear we don't know exactly what this looked like, but it involved King Kenneth and the Chief of the Dòbbers, Avon Four Sail (a moniker which evidently refers to his maritime skills and mercantile wealth). The Té Beag is described in much later sources as 'an intimate gesture' (so perhaps not unlike the Kiss of Peace) that was 'performed in a squatting position close to the fundament'. It was followed by both sides breaking open several ritual casks of whisky (booze features in a lot of this history!) known as B'aw, from the Gaelic 'special' and 'drink'. Although we don't know exactly when this event took place, it's still said that 'B'aws were tasted that day'.
   
   ​
   
   
2. The Pumping of the Maws
   
   This isn't really a historical event per se, more of a kind of cultural anecdote that you might be able to use - hope it's still useful!
   
   So I'm sure you've heard the word 'maw' before, which usually refers to something like an opening, e.g. the mouth of a cave, but in Scotland it has several meanings. One of these is a kind of container or skin with a narrow opening (so a bit like the other definitions). It was mainly used to store alcohol - especially whisky, back in the day (told you there was a lot of booze! We Scots sure love to drink!). To give you an idea, the modern bagpipe is also built using a maw, so you can see the kind of dimensions I mean.
   
   Now you'll know already that although whisky has been made in Scotland for hundreds of years, it wasn't always done legally. Back in Medieval Scotland, the Crown used to try and tax whisky production in every household, so a lot of people used to make it secretly using their own equipment rather than a big, central still. And it was stored in maws - because they're flexible, they were easier to hide away than a big barrel or cask. This is a much later source, but it gives you an idea: illicit distilling.
   
   OK so in Medieval Scotland, a lot of villages were very remote, so the Royal Tax Collector used to visit only once a year - and as soon as he was gone, they knew they were in the clear for another 12 months! This led to a custom where everyone in the village would gather after the Royal Tax Collector had gone, put the whisky into casks (important for the maturing process) and clean out the maws with rudimentary pumping devices, ready for next time. This was a collective activity and became known as The Pumping of the Maws - basically, everyone in the village would bring their maw to the common grazing lands, see that each maw was properly pumped, and there would be inspections to make sure it was done correctly. Often clansmen would pump each others' maws for a measure of accountability, but it was common enough to pump one's own maw, too. Really skilful clansmen could actually pump numerous maws in one session - in some villages the one who got through the most would be ritually crowned the 'Méad Shaggháir' (from the Gaelic words Méad and Sheág, meaning 'enthusiastic' and 'efficient'). After all this, there would be a giant party where some of the whisky from the previous year would be cracked open and drunk while the freshly-pumped maws would dry out in the sun - great stuff!
   
   ***
   
   ​
   
   Sorry if that's a bit much detail, I can get a bit carried away with my enthusiasm for history sometimes! I hope it's useful anyway and that you might be able to use one or two details, even if the whole stories don't make it in.
   
   ​
   
   Finally some literature that you might find useful if you want to do some more research!
   
   Scotland: A New History by Michael Lynch - quite an old book now but it holds up well
   
   Scotland: The Story of a Nation by Magnus Magnusson
   
   ​
   
   I'd love to see some of these details make it into the mod - keep us posted!

On science and evolution:

Genetics is where it's at. There is a ton of good fossil evidence, but genetics actually proves it on paper. Most books you can get through your local library (even by interlibrary loan) so you don't have to shell out for them just to read them.

Books:

The Making of the Fittest outlines many new forensic proofs of evolution. Fossil genes are an important aspect... they prove common ancestry. Did you know that humans have the gene for Vitamin C synthesis? (which would allow us to synthesize Vitamin C from our food instead of having to ingest it directly from fruit?) Many mammals have the same gene, but through a mutation, we lost the functionality, but it still hangs around.

Deep Ancestry proves the "out of Africa" hypothesis of human origins. It's no longer even a debate. MtDNA and Y-Chromosome DNA can be traced back directly to where our species began.

To give more rounded arguments, Hitchens can't be beat: God Is Not Great and The Portable Atheist (which is an overview of the best atheist writings in history, and one which I cannot recommend highly enough). Also, Dawkin's book The Greatest Show on Earth is a good overview of evolution.

General science: Stephen Hawking's books The Grand Design and A Briefer History of Time are excellent for laying the groundwork from Newtonian physics to Einstein's relativity through to the modern discovery of Quantum Mechanics.

Bertrand Russell and Thomas Paine are also excellent sources for philosophical, humanist, atheist thought; but they are included in the aforementioned Portable Atheist... but I have read much of their writings otherwise, and they are very good.

Also a subscription to a good peer-reviewed journal such as Nature is awesome, but can be expensive and very in depth.

Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate is also an excellent look at the human mind and genetics. To understand how the mind works, is almost your most important tool. If you know why people say the horrible things they do, you can see their words for what they are... you can see past what they say and see the mechanisms behind the words.

I've also been studying Zen for about a year. It's non-theistic and classed as "eastern philosophy". The Way of Zen kept me from losing my mind after deconverting and then struggling with the thought of a purposeless life and no future. I found it absolutely necessary to root out the remainder of the harmful indoctrination that still existed in my mind; and finally allowed me to see reality as it is instead of overlaying an ideology or worldview on everything.

Also, learn about the universe. Astronomy has been a useful tool for me. I can point my telescope at a galaxy that is more than 20 million light years away and say to someone, "See that galaxy? It took over 20 million years for the light from that galaxy to reach your eye." Creationists scoff at millions of years and say that it's a fantasy; but the universe provides real proof of "deep time" you can see with your own eyes.

Videos:

I recommend books first, because they are the best way to learn, but there are also very good video series out there.

BestofScience has an amazing series on evolution.

AronRa's Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism is awesome.

Thunderfoot's Why do people laugh at creationists is good.

Atheistcoffee's Why I am no longer a creationist is also good.

Also check out TheraminTrees for more on the psychology of religion; Potholer54 on The Big Bang to Us Made Easy; and Evid3nc3's series on deconversion.

Also check out the Evolution Documentary Youtube Channel for some of the world's best documentary series on evolution and science.

I'm sure I've overlooked something here... but that's some stuff off the top of my head. If you have any questions about anything, or just need to talk, send me a message!

I've just finished The Windup Girl, which I had been putting off for some time. It was, quite simply, the most astounding and breath-taking science fiction book I've ever read. I loved it.

However, my problem is that I buy books compulsively. Mostly hard copies, but recently I bought a Kindle and buy the odd e-book or two. I have literally hundreds of books on my "to read" list.

One near the top is A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel. I recently read her phenomenal Wolf Hall and was blown away by her skills as a story teller. I'm a bit of an armchair historian, and I'm particularly interested in the French Revolution (amongst other things), so I'm very excited by the prospects this book holds. If it's anything like Wolf Hall then I'm in for a very particular treat.

Also near the top lies Quantum - Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality, Manjit Kumar's much lauded recent history of the emergence of quantum mechanics. I very much enjoyed other tangentially related books on this topic, including the wonderful The Making of the Atomic Bomb and The Fly in the Cathedral, so this should be good fun and educational to boot.

Having read and loved Everitt's biography of Cicero, I'm very much looking forward to his biographies of Augustus and Hadrian.

I'm listening to an audio-book version of The Count of Monte Cristo on my iPod, which I find rather enjoyable. I've only got through the first half dozen chapters and it's already taken a few hours, so this looks to be a nice, long-term and periodic treat for when I have time alone in the car.

Cronin's The Passage keeps piquing my interest, but I was foolish enough to buy it in that lamentable format, the much cursed "trade paperback", so the thing is a behemoth. The size puts me off. I wish I had waited for a regular paper-back edition. As it is, it sits there on my bookshelf, flanked by the collected works of Alan Furst (what a wonderfully evocative writer of WWII espionage!!) and a bunch of much recommended, but as yet unread, fantasy including The Darkness that Comes Before by Bakker, The Name of the Wind by Rothfuss and Physiognomy by Ford.

Books I have ordered and am eagerly awaiting, and which shall go straight to the top of the TBR list (no doubt to be replaced by next month's purchases) include Orlando Figes's highly regarded history of The Crimean War, Rosen's history of steam The Most Powerful Idea in the World and Stacy Schiff's contentious biography of Cleopatra.

A bit of a mixed bunch, all up, I'd say.

A lot of people here are giving shitty answers and not helping because they disprove of your use of "dark ages."
On behalf on the internet I apologize. They are giving you crap for not knowing something you have expressed interest in learning about.
I am fascinated by the "Dark ages" and I have a history degree and I'm still using the term. I understand it to usually mean "the medieval times" or "the huge time-span that is not usually taught to the average student." Most history in public schools (at least that I've seen) tends to gloss over the time from the Romans to the early renaissance so I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming that's the era you want. It's my favorite era to study for that reason - most people know so little about this 1000 year span in history.
A good starter book for you would be A world lit only by Fire I loved this book. It's not overly scholarly and is a good read.
Another great one is Mysteries of the Middle Ages... Thomas Cahill is a great writer and if this version of the paperback is anything like my copy it is a visually stunning read. I discovered him through "How the Irish Saved Civilization" which was also great.
Mark Kurlansky's books (Salt and Cod specifically come to mind) are well written, specific histories that cover parts of this time period.
I wish my books weren't still packed (recently moved) because I want to dig through the stack and share them all. :) I suck at remembering names of stuff. I recommend browsing the amazon pages section of "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" for other good recommendations.
Happy Reading!! :)
edit - just remembered this one on the byzantine empire of all the books I've read on the Byzantines, that one is my favorite.

edit I'm getting a lashing for "A World Lit Only By Fire" due to the fact that it contains historical inaccuracies.
Please read this one instead In the year 1000.
I'm not trying to recommend dry scholarly tomes, I am trying to think of books that are fun, interesting, and entertaining to read while still being informative.

> How do you rebutt Christians who claim that prophecies like [Isaiah 53] predicted Jesus and his death?

This is a very, very complex passage. There are literally entire books about proper interpretation of ancient texts; say what you want about the legitimacy of OT scripture, it is a historical document that requires an understanding of the context and culture of its writing. For a brief primer, check this out.

>I have parents that are anti-evolution but know nothing about it. What can I do (if anything) to show them that evolution is fact.

You can do nothing if they are unwilling to investigate it on their own. Being against something you are (willfully) ignorant of is, with all due respect, the epitome of ineptitude.

>Not some wacky theory that some drunken scientist came up with after beating his wife, but fact.

I'm honestly not aware of any well publicized scientific theory that originated from a drunken, wife beating scientist, so there's nothing I can contrast this with. (However, I'm convinced John was on shrooms when he wrote Revelation) If there is any hope, I would begin with the proper explanation of what a "theory" is in the scientific perspective. To simplify (and probably over-simplify), something can still be a theory, scientifically, but also be a fact.

As a demonstration, I would tell them to jump off a bridge. After all, gravity is only a theory.

>Have a favourite Dawkins quote? :)

Yup.

“Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”

>What single argument was the single greatest point in debunking your creationism? (I ask because I often debate creationists).

Genetics. By far. The DNA evidence is astounding. I highly suggest The Relics of Eden and The Making of the Fittest.

>f I have any questions about the Bible I'll be sure to message you. You sound quite knowledgable on it. Cheers!

I would welcome it. At least I could now put some practical use to all this knowledge in my head. :)

Why Priti Patel is wrong about overseas aid and immigration | Fraser Nelson | Coffee House

The Empire for International Development has a tough job justifying its deeply unpopular budget. In recent years, it has made out that development aid will stem the flow of migration. The following line appears in a piece that Priti Patel, the DFID Secretary, writes for the Sunday Telegraph today.

>We are taking immediate steps to protect our borders and tackle people smuggling. But the only way to resolve this crisis in the long term is to address the root causes. We need to create jobs across Africa and provide its growing population with a route out of poverty where they are.

Her overall point – about how Africa needs more capitalism – is brave and correct. But this idea about development quelling immigration is the opposite of the truth. Now and again, you hear this line trotted out – offering a Marie Antoinette-style view of migration. Do the Africans come here in rubber boats? Well, give them jobs! Hand them a rake! See if they can keep or roast some chickens! This misses the reason why people move. They want better jobs than those on offer at home; they want a better life. They want what we have; they want their children to have the chances ours have. And understandably so.

Emigration is a sign of development, not poverty, as I argued in my Daily Telegraph column a while ago. The only people who join the Great Migration are those who have the money – often thousands of dollars – that it costs. They seek better jobs, a better life. This is the most powerful force in human history, the force that created the United States of America, the force that led so many from Scotland and Ireland to risk their lives making the Atlantic crossing a few generations ago. They sold assets to pay for the journey – and moved to what they hoped would be something better.

Bill Clinton had an excuse when he repeated the ‘development means emigration’ trope: he was speaking a generation ago, before scholars had assembled the massive database of census data which today allows us to compare a thousand censuses from hundreds of countries. Results, from World Bank data, are below. When a poor country starts to become richer, its emigration rate soars – until it’s a middle-income country, like Albania. And only then does extra wealth mean less migration.

[Graph]

And for emigration flows, the same relationship holds:-

[Graphs]

Michael Clemens, the American development economist who published the graph, explains it thus:-

‘>In all years, there is no hint of a negative relationship between income and emigrant stock between PPP income per capita of roughly $600 (that of today’s Niger or Ethiopia) and about $7,500 (today’s Albania or Colombia). In this range of income, in fact, the relationship is positive. The rise in emigrant stocks associated with higher income levels in this range is statistically significant at the 5% level. The magnitude of the positive relationship is substantial. Early in the second half of the 20th century, richer countries in this range on average had emigrant stocks about three percentage points larger than the poorest countries. By the end of the century, this difference grew to nine percentage points, and seems to have continued growing since then.’

It doesn’t take too much imagination to work out why. Let’s consider our own recent history. In 1948, the UK government passed the British Nationality Act allowing all 600 million of Commonwealth subjects to live and work in Britain. Here’s Andrew Marr, in his History of Modern Britain:-

>‘It was generally assumed that the Black and Asian subjects of the King would have no means or desire to travel to live in uncomfortable, crowded Britain. Until the fifties, so few black of Asian people had settle in Britain that they were often treated as local celebrities. Officially, it was not even considered worth while trying to count their number.’

Indeed, hardly anyone took up this offer; even during the partition of India, which claimed a million souls and displaced ten times as many, there was no clamour to seek refuge here. The Indians and Pakistanis were far, far poorer than they are today – but that’s the point. They were so poor that not many could afford to come to Britain, not many had means of finding out that a better life was available. Why go to this cold, wind-battered island – which itself was losing people to the New World?

In 1951, the UK signed the UN Refugee Convention saying that we’d shelter anyone – anyone!—with a well-founded fear of persecution. Such offers were easy to make, then, because no one really had been showing up: the famous influxes were tiny by today’s standards: 50,000 Hugenots, for example. After the war we offered 200,000 Poles the right to live in Britain, rather than face the Soviets: about 162,000 did (pdf) – a fraction of today’s Polish population. Even in the early 1990s, immigrants were arriving at about 150 a day.

Now, it’s 1,500 a day. Globalisation has kicked in, global poverty has halved over 25 years. The poor world is becoming richer, so people are on the move. War acts as a catalyst; far more of those affected by violence have the means and inclination to flee. But globally, there is less war and less poverty than at any time in our history. The Great Migration should be understood as the flip side of the greatest triumph of our age: the collapse in global poverty.

Study after study shows this to be the case. When aid was given to poor rural Mexican villages in exchange for occupants attending school and health clinics, it led to them leaving rather than staying.

As I wrote the last time Priti Patel made this point, she would be right if she meant that when middle-income countries become richer, the migration rate falls. But even the politicians who make this caveat talk as if this process is a short-term thing. In fact, it takes generations. I’ll leave the final word to Michael Clemens:-

>‘At a healthy real per capita growth rate of 2% per year, it would take 133 years for a country starting from $500 per capita (today’s Niger or Burundi) and 63 years for a country starting from $2,000 per capita (today’s Cambodia or Zambia). At a strong growth rate of 3% per year, these durations would be 89 years and 42 years, respectively. These are optimistic growth scenarios, given that during 1960–2000 the average country experienced real growth in per capita income of 1.8% per year. And most poor countries grew more slowly.’

If Africa develops as Ms Patel hopes, then we can expect more rather than fewer immigrants. We’ll need a better strategy for dealing with the Great Migration than to hope that it will just go away.

Theoretically, the monarch is still the executive and is the one to call parliament and dissolve it (now limited by the Fixed-Terms Parliament Act). Practically, since at least the time of Queen Victoria, these powers have been understood to be in the hands of Her Majesty's Government, acting in the monarch's name and "advising" the monarch.

That it developed this way has historical reasons: parliament evolved after King John signed Magna Charta in 1215 into a body whose consent was more and more needed for the governing of the realm. The English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution settled the question of who was supreme, the monarch or parliament. But the idea was always that the House of Commons represented the people while the monarch, theoretically, governed. The running of the government was, in practice, delegated to a member of parliament (Lords or Commons), acting in the monarch's name.
This means that in practice, the government, being made of up members of the House of Commons and having a majority there and at the same time holding the monarch's powers, end up able to decide rather a lot about how things go.

(When at the beginning of WW2, the House of Commons passed a law giving the King emergency powers, what this meant was giving the government emergency powers.)

What's unusual here is the timing and the length of the prorogation before the next Queen's Speech (which is written by the government and lays out the legislative programme for the beginning session of parliament).

---------------------------

EDIT: Since this is getting lots of upvotes, here's some more for the interested - but for a good read on how England and then Great Britain accidentally came to be a parliamentary democracy, I recommend, as a starter, Wikipedia's Parliament of England. Most of the things I say here are gleaned from Trevelyan's classic (i.e. old and in some ways outdated) "History of England" and various other things I've read. Apologies to the Scottish, but I'm simply uninformed about Scottish parliamenty history. And generally, I'm only a history fan. If anyone feels moved to correct me or to add their knowledge, please do so.

There are several crucial points in the development of parliament (as an idea in England/Europe, discounting here the Roman senate and Germanic thing or witan) and Parliament (as an institution). Firstly, of course, that there is a parliament at all, which happened in 1215 when King John needed money from the Barons and they extracted certain concessions from him.
Next is the regular election or appointment of representatives and then the division into a House of Lords and a House of Commons. This happened over the course of the 13th century. If I remember G.M. Trevelyan correctly, this division wasn't so much a decision as it was a gradual development, where members of parliament with common interests would start to meet in separate groups. The landed nobility and the church had different interests from the burghers (the merchant class), so essentially you could say that House of Lords vs. House of Commons came about because the merchant class and the landed class (plus the church) had different material interests and different ideas of how rights should be distributed among the King's subjects.

In 1362, Parliament managed to enshrine in law that all taxation needed its approval (I'm hazy about the how and why; I should read up on it). While monarchs until James II (r. 1685-1688) had enough personal income to finance the army and navy (source: the breathtakingly excellent "Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain 1649-1815" by N.A.M. Rodger), the increasing complexity of the world and the shift of income generation from land to mercantile and, later, industrial activities meant that the defence of the realm eventually slipped from the hands of the monarch alone and was put at Parliament's whim, through the power of taxation and money appropriation.

Queen Anne, who died in 1714, is famous for being the last British monarch to veto a law. There is a quote from one of her speeches: "Make yourselves safe, gentlemen", meaning, it was up to Parliament (the landowners and merchants) to organise the defence of their business interests, oops, I meant "the realm".

England/Britain/the UK remained a strongly class-based society - and still is one, in some respects. There has, at least until now, been relatively little appetite for "off with their heads"-style revolution, and the monarch was disempowered rather quietly after the failed experiment of the first English republic under Cromwell.
King William IV (r. 1830-1837), Victoria's uncle, was the last monarch to force the appointment of a Prime Minister against the will of Parliament. Queen Victoria herself subverted the constitutional process by, for example, writing to fellow European monarchs, some of whom were family relations, on matters of foreign policy.
But what counted was, already then, the actions of the British government and not the personal opinions of the monarch. Victoria's "magic royal circle" (Niall Ferguson) failed to prevent the outbreak of the First World War, as the world had moved beyond the personal control of monarchs - thanks to, in part, England's invention of parliamentary and then constitutional monarchy.

GOLD EDIT: "þanca unc" - thank you - via the Old English Translator.

The core of Britain's Naval success lay around 3 things.
Firstly, the Royal Navy had powerful advocates at all levels of government, this resulted in what could most simply be described as 17th and 18th century interest group politics. This meant that there was always some degree of public funding and enthusiasm for the navy. Something essential in a service that cannot be built up quickly, ships take time to build.
Secondly, navies are expensive. In the 17th and 18th century Britain became the worlds leading economy, both from a basis of domestic manufacturing and internal trade as well as a dominant power in international trade. Additionally Britain had organized public finance, both in the form of the Bank of England, which allowed the government to take out loans at low rates of interest, as well as parliamentary control of expenditures, which meant a budget (this seems normal but both pre- and post revolutionary France lacked this).
Thirdly, due to Britain's extensive maritime trade the Royal Navy had access to a tremendously large pool of trained seamen. While an army can be recruited from the base of the entire population a navy functions best when recruited from a pool of skilled seamen. Despite having a smaller population than France the Royal Navy had access to a far larger pool of skilled sailors due to the relatively small part played by seaborne commerce and high seas fishing in the French economy.

Obviously all these factors are related, essentially 17th and 18th century Britain represented the perfect storm in terms of naval advantages, and while other states saw this and tried to compensate Britain's structural advantage was too great to overcome.

Edit for sources:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Command-Ocean-History-1649%C2%AD-1815/dp/0393060500

http://www.amazon.com/Pursuit-Glory-Europe-1648-1815-ebook/dp/B002RUA4Y8/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1370804892&sr=1-2&keywords=the+pursuit+of+glory+europe+1648-1815

Sure, happy to talk about this forever, hahaha.

First of all, I have been DMing for 30 years this month :-) So many things that are simple separately, can seem complex as you collect many of them over the years. For example crossing terrain, climate, type of country (empire, wasteland, feudal, democracy, etc.) and political/war status is something you end up doing naturally like using a clutch in a car, and each element (fresh produce doesn't last, salt makes food last so is as valuable as electricity, specially inland) separately makes sense but all of them together seem a load to remember, just go one at a time.

Second, I read a book that made things a lot simpler: https://www.amazon.com/Time-Travellers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1845950992 - this helped me describe road qualities, relationship with authorities and law, segment the population, describe food, construction and town layouts very vividly. You also learn in this book how to price things accurately to make sense in old times.

Third, I do medieval fencing which taught me a few things about fighting that lets me describe battles a little more colourfully. For example having a sargeant shouting "don't break formation" or having a lord apply a levy tax because there is a military threat from his rival (and brother). Also, you can describe how a fighter changes their stance, and you tell your PC level 9 fighter "he changed his back foot for the spear side and is changing his grip, he is coming at you" rather than say "you won initiative". They feel every so clever after this.

Fourth, when going to a museum, historical site (castle, hastings, battle site) I take a look at something from the 5th-15th century and save some summary of it in my head (or even photograph and record it with today's tech, so I can say "the arrow slit covers the road approaching the gate but there is a blind spot when they are closer than 5 metres" or "the round clay tablet starts and ends with a flower shape, has heads with and without beards, bear skins, dotted circles and seems to be in a spiral". I also play with a laptop and can google an image of what I mean and show it to them, then have to save it to a folder with a name that is easy to find later if needed.

Lastly, I have a kind of structure for every town: it has a central square, usually a motte and bailey all the way up to the castle (depending on size), a market, a lord who is known, a lady who is known even more, gossip about them, a source of water, and add one cultural meme: a news bearer that walks around with a horn, a cleric that tolls a bell in the mornings, a monk that walks around gathering people to mass, a local drunk, a charismatic bard, whatever. I steal these memes or characters from books or films but then change them so they are not recognisable, so for example you can have a farmer boy like Hodor, or a hobbit like Willow, or a pair of fools like Laurel and Hardy (tweaked to be unrecognizable).

By having this pieces or history or literature saved in your toolbox, you can piece together a very complex scenario which is also historically accurate, but not as dense as a history lesson, just agile enough for it to be an adventure game, but rich enough to be a story.
There is a lot more one can do, but that I think is pretty simple and cumulative so over a period of time your descriptions become a bit more immersive and helps your players engage a bit more.

Hi!

My name is Ed McDonald and I'm a fantasy author. My debut is going to be released across 6 languages in 2017/18, so I have some insights on this. I am looking forward to Blackwing being published so that I don't have to write this as a disclaimer all the time :D. I'm also speaking on a panel about getting published in fantasy at the London Book Fair in March.

Firstly, read fantasy. All the fantasy. But it's more important to read the things that are currently being published than it is the classics. You won't learn much from Tolkien these days, times have changed since LOTR. Instead, if it's epic fantasy you want to write, then you need to read Rothfuss, Sanderson, Abercrombie, Lawrence and Lynch. They are the big sellers for epic. If you want to write YA stuff then read YA stuff. This is not just because those writers are great, but because it will teach you the market trends.

Next though, reading outside the genre is great, but only to find books that you enjoy so that you can cut them apart. My guilty pleasure? Lee Child's Jack Reacher books. They frequently have glaring plot holes or don't make sense, and are full of deus ex machina resolutions or just "and then Jack blew his head off" finales, but the pace and the simplicity keeps me turning the page. And from that, I learned that I much prefer a Reacher novel to trudging through 5 pages of world building at a time, so when I write fantasy, I write fast paced thrillers which is what then sold Blackwing around the world. I wouldn't have gained that style without reading outside the genre.

Finally, I guess I'm cheating because I have some degrees in history, but if you're writing historically inspired settings, you ought to be reading some history. Don't try to plough through dry academic texts if you aren't a historian though - I'm an academic and even I find those dry as sand. Get the popular stuff, even kid's history, just to try to soak up the feel of the period. The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England is essential for those that want to gain a quick overview.

https://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1486802982&sr=1-1&keywords=the+time+traveller%27s+guide+to+medieval+england

I write a blog that mainly focuses on assisting aspiring authors such as yourself and you may find some of it helpful.

https://edmcdonaldwriting.com/2017/01/25/you-are-not-george-rr-martin-how-to-get-published-in-the-grimdark-era-of-fantasy/

Officially free masonry started with the Grand Lodge in 1717. But it's not so cut and dry as all the that. It's almost like asking when did the United States start. July 1776 was the declaration of independence but the thinking, motivations, and political stirrings started far before that. You could argue it started with the Jamestown settlement, it really depends on how you look at it.

I believe Lodge 1 of Edinburgh has "lodge" minutes back to 1599 or 1600. Since that was before the Grand Lodge in 1717 there weren't really free masons but they were that kind of muddy water. Some records of free mason like activity can be traced back much further, depending on your historical slant one could argue Hiram Abiff was a free mason but I digress. There are some very basic minutes of business for stone masons as far back the 900s in France if memory serves. There was a really good book on this that my first WM lent me when I was an apprentice but I can't remember the name of the book.

If you want to dive in pre 1700s of free masonry I'd recommend https://www.amazon.com/Origins-Freemasonry-Scotlands-Century-1590/dp/0521396549 but it's not a casual read if that makes sense.

I would recommend: The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present: A Narrative History, by Rebecca Fraser. I found the book to be accessible, unpretentious, and a good survey of British history since Roman times. It was evenhanded and meritorious in its handling of more controversial moments in British history—Margaret Thatcher's time in leadership, for example. While it is close to 800 pages in length, it can be brief in covering events at times. Still, it makes for a wonderful introduction .

If you are truly dedicated to your quest—and you want something much more in-depth and scholarly—I would recommend the new Oxford History of England. It covers the history of England and later Britain in great breadth and detail, comprising eleven volumes to date (and more on the way.) Its sourcing is top-notch and its writing, while academic in quality, is quite readable to the lay-person. But it is not for the faint of heart, and it can be quite expensive.

Barbara Tuchman was brilliant writer of history.

Albert Camus was a brilliant absurdist philosopher and novelist.

Jared Diamond has written some brilliant books at the intersection of anthropology and ecology. Another good book in this genre is Clive Ponting's A New Green History of the World.

Gwynne Dyer is an acclaimed military historian turned journalist on international affairs who has written a number of very engaging books on warfare and politics. His most recent book Climate Wars is the ONE book I would recommend to someone, if so limited, on the subject as it embodies both a wonderful synopsis of the science juxtaposed against the harsh realpolitiks and potential fates of humankind that may unfold unless we can manage to tackle the matter seriously, soon. Another great book on climate change is Bill McKibben's Deep Economy.

For social activists interested in ending world hunger and abject poverty, I can recommend: Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom; Nobel Prize winning micro-financier Muhammad Yunus' Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism; UN MDG famed economist Jeffrey Sach's End Of Poverty; and Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea

For anyone of Scottish heritage, I heartily recommend Arthur Hermann's How The Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It

For naval history buffs: Robert K. Massie's Dreadnought.

Last, but not least: Robert Pirsig's classic Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Enjoy!

Start with The Year 1000 by Robert Lacey. It's a great read and it will introduce you to a lot of concepts of the early middle ages in a fun and very informative way.

Then I'd move on to books by Joeseph and Frances Gies, particularly Life in a Medieval City, Life in a Medieval Castle, and Life in a Medieval Village (the last one being my personal favorite, although village life is especially interesting to me). You really can't go wrong with any Gies books though, so if one catches your eye, go for it.

Then, when you're ready to go into further depth, move onto the books of G. G. Coulton. They were mostly written in the early 20th century so they can be a little dry, but holy smokes the guy was an erudite medievalist, and many authors and researchers owe a lot to him.

BONUS: If, like me, you become interested in the village life aspect of the middle ages, there are some primary documents that you can find online too. I recommend at least The Rules of Robert Grosseteste, Seneschaucie, and Robert of Henley's Husbandry (I don't know what that site is, it was just the first one that came up on my search results).

If you like Monty Python you should like Terry Jones' books. Post-Python he became a medieval historian and written Medieval Lives, Barbarians, and The Crusades. I just read Barbarians (about those who the Romans called barbarians) recently and loved it.

Rubicon by Tom Holland is an excellent account of the fall of the Roman Republic.

I'm currently reading Warriors of God by James Reston about the 3rd Crusade. Its very entertaining but lacks footnotes so I doubt its accuracy. Still for a casual understanding of the 3rd crusade I recommend it.

If you're interested in military history check out Osprey Publishing. These books are very specific but also only 90 pages or with great illustrations.

Finally, if you're looking for historical fiction check out Bernard Cornwell whose written tons of historical novels. He's best known for the Richard Sharpe series about the Napoleonic wars but has also written on Anglo-Saxon England, the American revolution, and elsewhere.

It's How the Scots Invented the Modern World. Similar titles include How the Irish Saved Civilization, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, and Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. None of them are by the same author, but they're all interesting historical books with similar titles (How some great culture did great things that built what we have now), none the less.

I would love to find similar titles about other countries, cultures, and civilizations. They're always so interesting!

Come now, that's too sweet of you. And yeah, I myself am imprisoned by my books too. I dread the ideas of moving due to the sheer amount of books I have. I thought I was done with it since I bought a kindle 5 years ago but I threw it away after half a year 'cause I could not be without my hardcover books. And sometimes I feel like putting a good book under my pillow or on my night stand makes me feel closer to the book itself. Now if only I can read everything that I own is another problem...

Those are some solid suggestions. I definitely would love to devour...I mean read and appreciate them someday. I have to finish House of Leaves first. Goddamn it's exhausting to read that book but also quite rewarding. I also just ordered The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England. Was thinking about either medieval time or the growth of the Silk Road and ended up with medieval time.

We are such book worms, aren't we? I'd feel so bad if I end up with someone who doesn't like books 'cause I would be so boring and reading all the time.

I like The Isles: A History by Norman Davis as it puts it in context with our neighbours and further, puts that in context with Europe.

It it ain't too specific A History of Ulster is very good.

The Irish by Sean O' Faolin is pretty darn interesting. Not so much a typical history as a racial/psycological/ sociological history. More concerned with ideas than specific events.

Another great Sean O' Faolin one that I'm very fond of is The Great O'Neill.

You might be able to tell I'm a little biased to events in Ulaidh!

It wasn't all that dissimilar from many marriages today. Two people gathered together with their friends and families, which often constituted their entire village. They gathered at the medieval community center most often, which was usually the local church or chapel. The purpose of meeting here was not only to receive the blessing of God on their marriage, but also to announce their marriage in a public setting with reputable witnesses, of which any official member of the clergy was included. These witnesses legitimized the marriage in the eyes of God and the people, especially important before government records were regularly kept and customs were still largely oral.

Well known modern scholars on the subject are Frances and Joseph Gies, Life in a Medieval Village, here, or Marriage and Family in the Middle Ages, here. Barbara Hanawalt has one of the most respected books on medieval peasantry in the last generation called The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England, here.

Finally, a duller look of medieval marriage according to canon law can be found in Gratian's Decretum here.

I hope this helps a little. Happy Reading!

I find that science history and biography gives a good understanding of scientific methods, and when written for the lay-person, doesn't get so bogged down in technical jargon.

Here are a few of my favorites:

• A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
  
• Chaos: Making a New Science - James Gleick
  (Also check out his biographies of Isaac Newton and Richard Feynman)
  
• Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers - Mary Roach
  
  And here are a few on my to read list:
  
  
• Seeing Further: The Story of Science, Discovery, and the Genius of the Royal Society - Bill Bryson
  
• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - Yuval Noah Harari
  
• The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine - Lindsey Fitzharris
  
• Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus - Bill Wasik & Monica Murphy
  
• The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring - Richard Preston
  
• The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science - Richard Holmes
  
• The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution - David Wootton
  
  I hope that helps.

The AH books and resources list is your friend, but as its recommendations are scattered through a mainly geographical listing, I will compile some of the key cites for you here.

Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas (1971): One of the pioneering works on how anthropology can help our study of history focusing on superstition in the late medieval/early modern period, this is a fantastic read and a real insight into a still-young school of historical analysis.

Thinking with Demons by Stuart Clark (1999): this is one of two mandatory books on Early Modern Witchcraft (the other is Keith Thomas' Religion and the Decline of Magic). It's hard to summarize what is a monumental piece of work, but examines the idea of witches and how that idea functions through different intellectual sections of life. It has a bibliography that will make you weep with inadequacy and throw your work into the nearest witch-bonfire.

The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft by Ronald Hutton (1999). A study of the history and development of modern Pagan Witchcraft.

Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain by Ronald Hutton (2009). A history of the intertwined development of modern Celtic scholarship and religious revivalism in Britain.

The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe by Brian Levack: Levack gives important background and context to his discussion of the witch-hunt. The work's value as an introduction to the topic is evident, as the book is now in its third edition.

Theology and the Scientific Imagination: From the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century Funkenstein, Amos. 1986. An interesting read detailing the various views of emerging scientific thought and the prevalence of religious faith. The book takes time to work from a sociological as well as historical viewpoint to allow for a broader take.

For a good general overview of Scotland's history you can't go far wrong with Michael Lynch's Scotland: A New History and my dad says that Neil Oliver's book A History of Scotland is good as well. I've not read it myself, but given that it's aimed at a general audience instead of historians it's possibly more readable than Lynch's book.

For modern Scottish history Tam Devine's book The Scottish Nation: 1700-2007 is a pretty good start. I find him quite readable, but it's more of a social history than a dates and facts history. I've taken against him a bit lately as he keeps sticking his oar in whenever there's a social issue on the go (Rangers going into administration was the latest), but I can't fault him for his knowledge and research work. I've a lot of respect for him as a historian.

The articles on Scottish History on Wikipedia tend to be quite well written, researched and sourced so you might find more specific books and information from their footnotes.

Hi there, I am not a professional naval historian (my master's was in American history, post civil war) but I have read quite a bit on the topic. Several books come to mind:

• I second the Massie recommendations. Here are Amazon links:
  
  http://www.amazon.com/Dreadnought-Robert-K-Massie/dp/0345375564/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1370960465&sr=1-1&keywords=dreadnought+massie
  
  http://www.amazon.com/Castles-Steel-Britain-Germany-Winning/dp/0345408780/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1370960472&sr=1-6
  
  
• The British historian N.A.M. Rodger has written two naval histories of Britain, which are very accessible. Rodger does a good job of balancing strategy and tactics with the political and bureaucratic matters that make a navy efficient.
  
  The Safeguard of the Sea:
  http://www.amazon.com/Safeguard-Sea-History-Britain-660-1649/dp/0393319601/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1370960428&sr=1-3
  
  The Command of the Ocean:
  http://www.amazon.com/The-Command-Ocean-History-1649%C2%AD-1815/dp/0393060500
  
  
• John Keegan wrote a short book, The Price of Admiralty, focusing on the naval battles of Trafalgar, Jutland, Midway, and the Battle of the Atlantic in WWII.
  
  http://www.amazon.com/dp/0140096507
  
  
• There are any number of books on Midway, but one that I enjoyed is Shattered Sword, by Parshall and Tully. They delved deeply into Japanese archives and reconstructed details of flight operations and naval SOP to illuminate the battle in a way that I had not seen before:
  
  http://www.amazon.com/Shattered-Sword-Untold-Battle-Midway/dp/1574889249
  
  And, of course, if you want fiction, both the Horatio Hornblower and the Aubrey-Maturin series are good reads. A-M is a bit more modern lit; Hornblower is entertaining but starts to read a bit older.
  
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Hornblower
  
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey–Maturin_series
  
  I hope this helps. When I get home I'll take a look at my shelves and see what else comes to mind.

A strong recommendation:

Religion and the Decline of Magic. It's not really an academic work, but it is well foot-noted and has a good bibliography.

It's a fascinating topic, and this is easily the best book I have read on the topic. No hysteria and lots of good information and analysis.

I am currently reading The Story of Britain by Rebecca Fraser. It's a narrative history of Britain from the Roman invasion/infiltration (~55 BCE) up to the early 2000s. Fraser does an excellent job of telling the highlights with attention to timelines, there's a fair amount of supplemental media (artwork, family trees, maps, etc) woven in to each chapter, and it reads quick easily, like a good narrative history should.

Highly recommend, especially as a comprehensive primer on British history.

PART II

BUT there are problems with your prose too

There are times where you really do TELL us stuff that you should not.

>We had no idea of the horrors that lay ahead, only that the world we left was not alone. Someone had made a life here, someone not of our land, so it stood to reason that there were more of them out there and a new land that perhaps we could call home.


This is a bad TELL. Don’t let us know there is more horrors. Let us discover them as the narrator does.

Don’t tell us that people made a life here. SHOW us that they did.

> the scene was a thousand times more unsettling than before

This almost made me puke. This is terrible. DO NOT SAY SOMETHING WAS 1000X MORE UNSETTLING. Show us this. It is that simple. SHOW us why it was unsettling. Describe the scene, and let us revel in the quiet horror that you paint.

> I understood then that he was never a coward, but that he simply could not bear the sight of more death. Ironically, his exile brought him in contact with more death than we ever saw at home.


A thousand times NO. You CANNOT tell someone the point of the story. You MUST trust your reader to figure it out. If you do, then your ending will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

At other times, you use ineffective language:

> and cities buzzed like beehives,

This really tells us nothing. It really doesn’t. HOW do they buzz? What are the people doing (or what does the narrator imagine they are doing) that they are buzzing?

OK, on the whole there is middling-to-bad prose, with moments of just absolute mind-boggling brilliance. If you can practice your prose and get it all up the point of the first 4 paragraphs, you will dazzle all those who read your stuff.

You are a LONG-ASS way from this. But the fact is that you can do it. You have done it. You just need to train your writing so that you do it all the time.

So, get to it.

WORLD BUILDING/CONSISTENCY

There are a LOT of problems here. You don’t really lay out a accurate view of the black death. You have the characters describe artifacts that they have never encountered – using words that are commonly used by people familiar with these artifacts. You have them know things about the world they cannot (e.g. like which houses are better built, when they have never seen houses like it).

This is a major problem – but it is an EASY problem to solve

First, decide when you think this occurred. THEN, read a 2-6 books each on the periods of time – both in the Americas and Europe. This will give you a sense of what is reasonable to expect in the Europe setting and what the native Americans would be used to seeing (and not seeing).

If you want to go for the middle ages, I suggest the following (for Europe): The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England. I have no good suggestions for the Americas.

Again, as written the world you have is not good enough to be credible, but this is readily solved via some research.

So, get to it.

CONCLUSIONS

I don’t say this often (ever?). You have the beginnings of an amazing story. Your strongest asset is your moments of amazing prose, and the fact that you have already established compelling characters with so little. If you expand this, while maintaining what is good and correcting what is bad, you will have quite a story. But there is much work to be done. You need a more fleshed out plot. You need more -- and more active -- characters, and you need a more believable story. NONE of these are problems that cannot be solved.

So…Get to it. :)

Norman Davies is basically the better version of Jared Diamond. He's an actual historian, and does a good job of balancing depth with accessibility.

I really recommend both Europe: A History and The Isles: A History. They are both quite dense tomes, but Davies does a really great job of creating a narrative of the entirety of European/British history (from prehistory to modern times) while challenging our biases and subconscious notions. Instead of a tedious listing of events over 10000 years, he uses narratives and environmental/geographical analysis, interspersed with 'windows' where he goes into several key events in detail.

Congratulations! I know what a big step that is, as I've been in the same boat. Books are the best way to become informed. Check out books by:

• Christopher Hitchens - God Is Not Great & The Portable Atheist
  
  
• Stephen Hawking - The Grand Design & A Briefer History of Time
  
  
• Richard Dawkins - The Greatest Show on Earth
  
  
• Carl Sagan - The Demon Haunted World
  
  
• Sam Harris - The Moral Landscape & The End of Faith
  
  
• Richard Panek - The 4 Percent Universe
  
  
• Robert Ingersoll - Some Mistakes of Moses
  
  
• Viktor Frankl - Man's Search for Meaning
  
  
• Sean Caroll - The Making of the Fittest
  
  
• Spencer Wells - Deep Ancestry
  
  
• Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Infidel
  
  
• Alan Watts - The Way of Zen
  
  Also check out the video series Why I am no longer a creationist.
  
  The more you know, the more confident you will be.

The Year 1000 - I read this book in my History of England class back in college. It's one of the few books assigned I actually read cover to cover. It's small, easy to read, and packed with interesting info.

We also read The Virgin Queen by Christopher Hibbert, that was a pretty good non-fiction book on Elizabeth I that reads more like a novel.

The book is super awesome.

http://www.amazon.com/Terry-Jones-Medieval-Lives/dp/0563522755

Basically, our notions of what life in the "middle ages" was like is really the Victorians' idea of what it should have been like, to make themselves feel better about their civilization.

> Think of a medieval market where people met at a specific place at a specific time to directly exchange goods

they didn't. They used coins. Minted in silver, roughly 230 pennies to the pound.

>Is this a market?

Yes because they had buyers, sellers, and price tags.

>Is a system of semi-formal gift exchange a market in some sense?

no, it's a gift exchange. Push, not pull. In general:

give someone a gift, you're typically not obligated to reciprocate.

In a white elephant multi-person rotation exchange, everyone must throw one gift into the pot in order to participate. No this isn't a market.

>I think your definition is perfectly reasonable btw, it just seems more like a personal rubric.

It is; that's why I'm trying to see who can poke holes on it. I got it from a Science Paper involving non-humans (mice). So it's an objective standpoint for something not familiar with those price tags (mice).

Probably a lot more detail than you're asking for, but this is a great, easy to read book on what medieval europe was actually like to live in.

Seeing further!

Mr Bryson wrote a great introduction book to science some time ago, and now he has written another one.

Both are great highly recommended as starting points , you can read about the origin of almost every branch of modern science, learn a bit and discover which topics interest you the most, so you can find other sources to really study. (The first book is called 'A Short History of Nearly Everything)

These holidays or "holy days" were not often not really vacations but days that you would attend church and have a large meal. These days often were centered around a Saint or the life of Jesus and were pretty frequent. Church, above all, was a social gathering. People were very pious, but they also enjoyed gossip. These days were an important way of uniting scattered farms in the days before reliable mail systems.

On most of these days you would still do many chores and you may have also worked. From what I gather they were somewhat like a modern "half day".

Source: The Time Travelers Guide to Medieval England

You might also try Alfred Crosby's Ecological Imperialism. It's required reading (along with Jared Diamond) for my Master's global history program. One thing to remember about Diamond is that he is not a historian and did not intend to write a history - only a theory of why Europeans were given a leg up with the help of environmental factors. Ecological Imperialism (written 10 years prior to Diamond) that operates on a similar theory but is much more historical and (honestly) isn't as dry or repetitive as Diamond. It's worth noting that while Diamond get's a lot of press and praise his theory is also hotly debated by historians and biologists alike.

Judith Bennett’s [A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock, c. 1295-1344] (http://www.amazon.com/Life-English-Manor-Conditions-1150-1400/dp/0521091055/) (1998) is a brief, well-organized view of 14th-century peasant life in England that I always recommend. Though very dated (1937!), H. S. Bennett’s (no relation) [Life on an English Manor: A Study of Peasant Conditions 1150-1400] (http://www.amazon.com/Life-English-Manor-Conditions-1150-1400/dp/0521091055/) covers things in great, entertaining detail. Barbara Hanawalt's [The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England] (http://www.amazon.com/Ties-That-Bound-Families-Medieval/dp/0195045645) (1988) is very good. For France, the go-to authority is Georges Duby’a [Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West] (http://www.amazon.com/Rural-Economy-Country-Medieval-Middle/dp/0812216741) (1998), though it's more technical than the 2 Bennetts.

There is a fascinating book called The Most Powerful Idea in the World that I would recommend to anyone interested in this sort of thing. It makes the claim that the steam engine is the most important invention since irrigation, half because of what it allowed us to do, and half because of how our mindset changed while developing it.

Read, read, and read some more.

A decent popularly-accessible book on life in the later "dark ages" would be The Year 1000 by Robert Lacey. He addresses everything from daily life, to the agricultural cycle, to health and medicine all in a short and easy read.

Now that's for England in the late 10th century. The fads, superstitions, and culture would be different in, say, southern France or Silesia.


As for a little theory-crafting:
Your house would be a single room, made of a timber frame and walled with wattle-and-daub. The thatch making up the roof would be replaced every couple years or so (a more efficient way of doing this wouldn't be invented until the 14th century), and the floor of bare earth covered with a thick layer of rushes that were swept out and replaced periodically.

You wake up at dawn lying on the floor. You have no bed to speak of, but the rushes are comparably soft and warm, and your woolen blanket soft and comfortable. You complain to your wife that it might be time to change the fleabane hanging from the walls, as you think a couple might have gotten in to your blankets. She rolls her eyes at your grousing and prods at the small fire in the center of the single room. The smoke rises to the rafters and slowly leaks out through a vent on one side.

Your children rise groggily and rub their eyes as you wash your face, arms, hands, and chest with water from a pottery basin and ewer. You change your linen undershirt and briaes (sort of like loose boxer shorts) and pull on your long, woolen tunic. You've had it for a long time, and the once more vibrant orange-red color, dyed with madder, has begun to fade.

You instruct your middle child to empty the chamber pots while you head outside to relieve yourself. After you finish, you give your younger children their final reprimands to do their chores, feel the forehead of your youngest and fret she's feeling feverish, fetch your single ox, kiss your wife, and head for the fields. Your eldest son accompanies you. Though he is still young, he will be assigned to keep the birds away from the freshly-planted seed with stones and sticks.

It's early spring, and that means plowing. You meet with the other men of the manner and work together to plow your fields. you have been assigned a couple narrow strips in a couple different fields, as has everyone else. Whatever you can grow in these furrows is yours. In addition to your own land, you and your neighbors also work the land of your lord. It's a two-way relationship--you work his land and he lays on feasts and provides certain resources. If times are hard, he's required to feed you. Last year, the harvest was bad and several freemen from the surrounding came to your lord and voluntarily submitted themselves to him in exchange for food. They now number amongst your neighbors.

You work all morning with the other men plowing long, narrow furrows into the earth and scattering seeds for the yearly crop of wheat or barley. You break at midday for your first meal of the day, a thick pottage of long-boiled vegetables thickened with barley and edible greens. You drink a weak ale or water (you're away from the cities--the water is as clean as it gets).

You work all afternoon, chatting and gossiping with the others. Your wife is at home grinding wheat and barley, tending the fire, cooking your meal, spinning wool into yarn, gathering vegetables from the fields surrounding, and wash the family's linen undergarments. Your children help to their abilities, take care of the animals, fetch water, and play.

In the evening, your chat, play, sing, eat, drink, and pray. When night falls, you strip off your woolen outer layers, maybe change to fresh linens, and curl up in your blankets next to your wife on the floor. Tomorrow is a Sunday, and that means church. The next day is a feast day, and that also means church, as well as some merryment with your neighbors.

You grow different crops at different times of year. You have all sorts of superstitions about how to get the best crop yields, how to stay healthy, how to avoid trouble--some work; some don't. Religion is not really something you even think about--it's just a part of daily life. You've never in your entire life met anyone with beliefs other than that of "christian," though you've heard tell of lands beyond.

If you get sick, there are prayers and home remedies a plenty. You're too poor to afford one of the school-trained doctors, of which there are a few, who study the old Greek and Roman arts of medicine.

If you're badly injured, there are amputations, trepanning, and setting of broken bones.

If we're in England, in times of trouble, you would not be called up to fight in the Fyrd (closest modern term would be "militia"). That was for the freemen. If you were a freeman, you would be required to own a shield and spear and to turn up with both plus personal provisions when your lord orders, or pay a hefty fine.

If you are wronged, justice was local, with the community taking care of most of the judgement and the lord acting as arbiter if necessary. The Saxon-era English had a rather ingenious system of fines for various offences, including set rates for loss or damage of body parts (teeth included).

That sounds awesome! I'm currently building a world for a book. And something like this seems super helpful. Do you think it's the same as this one, even though the cover isn't quite the same? https://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908

The history you mention is a lot more complex and long, so it's a bit like shooting fish in a barrel refuting your comment. What I point out below takes away the spun, nice and black and white 'history' we (in the UK) were taught in school. The history I learned at home was somewhat different, so I've spent a good part of 20 years investigating it.

Neil Oliver put together an excellent history more aligned to what actually happened, rather than the propagandised (written by the victor) history you mentioned. However, if you like books, these are a good start:

• A History of Scotland: Look Behind the Mist and Myth of Scottish History (Neil Oliver)
  
  
• Scotland: The Autobiography2,000 Years of Scottish History By Those Who Saw It Happen
  
  This is an excellent resource on the highland clearances. Growing up I was told of how ancestors were thrown off their land, their language and way of life destroyed, betrayed and left to starve by their clansmen for greed and power - then, if they still lived they were ultimately thrown to all corners of the earth looking for a survivable way of life or in fact slavery...
  One part of the Irish side of the family was enslaved and sent to the Caribbean (didn't learn about the Irish slaves at school, did you?...). And of course other parts of the family lived (if they were lucky) through what some have called the Irish Holocaust
  I spent a period of my youth incredibly angry at 'the powers that be/were' as they stood by and let these genocides happen for two reasons; greed and lust for power. Hence my long interest in history written by those on the receiving end of monarchist, aristocrat and religious policies. These people's ancestors still inhabit the castles and own the land taken at the time.
  
  I woke up one day a long time ago now, clear in the knowledge I had a bad case of Stockholm syndrome brainwashed into me via the 'education' and corporate media. Hence, I'll refute comments such as yours til I'm pushing up the daisies - because it's admittedly a very successful, but deliberate attempt by those in power to tell us what they want us to hear.
  
  In respect to your 'mass extermination of the indigenous people of those islands? (New Zealand)' - again, you're very misinformed on the facts as they've been laid down. For starters, The Maori committed their own genocide before the white man turned up. Then, yes the British monarchy's minions did their usual and committed terrible acts - no change there then, but from the above, I'm sure you'll have picked up which side I stand on, i.e. not 'royal'.
  

So - here's the dangerously short version.

18th French Masons had difficulty accepting the idea that Freemasonry was of "rude" origin, viz. stoneworkers. Common replacements became religious heretics, chivalric orders (eventually everyone agreed KT was the best story), the Rosicrucians, Ancient Egypt, lost heirs and pretenders, gray aliens, Knights with red feathers on their head... you name it.

The origin of eccosais (french for Scottish) is that during the Glorious Revolution when the Scottish King - er, um - bravely ran away to France (circa 1786) a number of Scottish Masons/Engineers were in tow thus bringing Freemasonry to France.

Eccosais currents were often Jacobite, almost always include the preservation of the Word (a direct jab at the English for loosing it), and gear towards the Qabbalah, not chivalric currents - though in time, as seen in the AASR, everyone learned how to play along and chivalric Masonry was placed firmly above everything else - unless you count the secret work, which is a whole other discussion.

Reading List

• https://www.academia.edu/237466/An_Introduction_to_the_High_Degrees_of_Freemasonry
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Masonic-Myth-Unlocking-Symbols-Freemasonry/dp/0060822562
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Builders-Alchemists-Rosicrucians-Freemasons/dp/157863329X
  
• http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/bernheim17.html
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Origins-Freemasonry-Scotlands-Century-1590/dp/0521396549
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Compasses-Cross-Stephen-Dafoe/dp/0853182981
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

For anybody interested in learning more about almost everything being discussed in this thread, I highly recommend reading The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution by Sean B. Carroll. Dr. Carroll is not only a leader in the field of Evo-Devo, he is an excellent writer, making some of the most difficult concepts of the molecular aspects of evolution easy to understand.

For the medieval period, I found The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England very interesting. Definitely more of a popular book than hard-core history, though.

This book and it's series of books will tell you most you want to know, from what colors you couldn't wear or what kind of birds you were not allowed to eat. Great detail and fun read.

https://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908

Meh, over in the Americas, that was the term that we gave to Scottish immigrants at the time, and it stuck. You should note in that contemporary language in the UK at the time, Scotch was a perfectly acceptable adjective to apply to either the drink or the person. Also, at that time Scotch itself was not a popular drink amongst non-scottish folks.

If you're interested in Scottish history, I would recommend Arthur Herman's How the Scots Invented the Modern World:
http://www.amazon.ca/How-Scots-Invented-Modern-World/dp/0609809997

I really enjoyed The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium

Another good one that comes to mind is London: The Biography

Also, if you're on FB, there are some pretty cool groups for UK history enthusiasts that you might want to join/check out. I bet if you asked this question in one of those groups (I used to be in a couple, but am not on FB anymore) you'd get a lot of feedback.

You might be interested in checking out How the Scots Invented the Modern World. Very good writer there if you like reading history.

I really enjoyed this book.

I read it shortly after this http://www.amazon.com/The-Most-Powerful-Idea-World/dp/1400067057/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_3 and they went very well together.

Also it went well with the BBC's "The Making of Modern Medicine" radio program.

What do you mean by this question? If you are referring to their historical importance and/or adoption, I can give a bit of guidance.

1. Britain - a derivation of the word Breton, the name of the culture group in modern NW France ('Brittany'). Also tied to the Roman provincial title for their empire in the Isles, Brittania.
   
2. Great Britain - officially, this title was given to the union of Scotland and England (also Wales) in 1707. 'Great' simply refers to the union of multiple cultures under one monarchy.
   
3. England - derivation of the word 'Angle,' the name of the Germanic tribe from the modern N Germany/S Denmark region. 'Angle-land' became England in the early middle ages once the Germanic invaders culturally mixed with the pre-existing cultures of the Isles.
   
4. Scotland - not sure on this one; educated guess is simply the Anglicization of the word Scotia, the Latin name of the tribes that existed in this region.
   
5. Wales - same situation as Scotland.
   
6. Ireland - 'Eire' became Ireland due to...you guessed it...Anglicization.
   
7. N. Ireland - Same as Ireland, though officially this term did not exist until the 1920s. Unofficially, you could say that N. Ireland, due to its substantial Protestant minority, was culturally distinct from the rest of Ireland.
   
8. Official title of the 1801 Act of Union between England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.
   
9. Same, except after 1920s.
   
   There's a theme here, if you didn't pick up on it. All of these terms are a byproduct of the Anglicization of either Latin, Celtic or Germanic words, the majority of which came into existence during the early middle ages. For more on this, see Norman Davies's work The Isles: A History

I'd recommend starting with Solomon's Builders by Christopher Hodapp. Founding Fathers, Secret Societies by Dr. Robert Hieronimus would be a good followup.

If you really want to delve into the older history, The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland's Century, 1590 to 1710 by David Stevenson is your best bet.

If you really want to understand the secrecy angle - read The Craft Of Intelligence by Allen Dulles, It's not about Freemasonry, but the tools and tactics are the same. Secret Societies and the Intel Community have a lot in common.

One thing which may give you some good information in the non-traditional form is to read/read about the Domesday Book.

Also follow the trail of technology, 3 field system, plough design, etc.

I took a course on medieval peasants in undergrad, but I'm having a hard time recalling the bibliography, it was 15 years ago.

This was one of them:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Ties-That-Bound-Families/dp/0195045645

This stuff is probably a bit later though, although you can probably glean some information.

But you may have an easier task if you narrow the time period a bit, you're arguably trying to cover ~ 500 years, as well as a location, Europe is somewhat of a broad area as well.

I loved Witcher 3. You might be interested in this: https://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908

Medieval Cities had specialized shops for almost everything. A city with actual walls would have freemen who were chandlers, butchers, leatherworkers, smiths, etc. with their own shops, typically with their family living in the second story of the building.

Market towns (pop a few hundred) are much more likely to have the everything is sold at the market vibe. But usually only twice a week or something. You probably would be entirely unable to find serious armor there.

http://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1368722301&sr=8-1&keywords=time+travelers+guide+to+medieval+england

this book gives you a great background to extrapolate from real history to get a realistic fantasy setting

I absolutely agree that skepticism, when it's based on empirical evidence, is a healthy and fundamental part of the scientific method. But the problem I have in this regard as it relates to climate change, is that much of the "skepticism" I have seen is almost completely devoid of empirical evidence.

As an aside, have you read Seeing Further? It sounds like you would enjoy it.

Surprisingly, not true. Recommended reading: https://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908

Linen undergarments were surprisingly good at absorbing sweat and oil, so as long as *those* were clean (changed and washed frequently) people didn't stink like you would expect. Further since the common knowledge at the time was that disease could be caused by 'miasma' or bad air it was important not to stink.

Medieval cleanliness standards were different from today, not nonexistant.

This is awesome. I've been trying to learn more about the history of British Isles. So far I've really enjoyed Neil Oliver's A History of Scotland (also on iPlayer) and the History in an Hour books, 1066 and The Medieval Anarchy, by Kaye Jones.

Is there a larger version of this map? Or anything similar - but again, larger - focusing on the early makeup of the peoples of the isles? I'm looking for a new poster :)!

It's time once again for the AskHistorians Book Giveaway! This month we picked two winners: Eric Hacke and Alec Barnaby! The selection of books we have available this month are:

• Eugene Rogan's The Arabs: A History, recommended by /u/cptbuck.
  
  
• Vine Deloria's Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, recommended by /u/snapshot52.
  
  
• Terry Bouton's Taming Democracy: "The People," the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution, recommended by /u/uncovered-history.
  
  
• Eugene Crosby's Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900, my recommendation
  
  Want a chance to get a free book? Help support the podcast via Patreon!

I know I'm a bit late to this thread, but Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain is fantastic.

I'm a big fan of lucky 13!

Terry Jones' Medieval Lives is 13 bucks. I would add it to my books WL, too if I weren't having trouble deciding how to categorize my WLs. Heheheh.

Try The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth century. It's a good book, got good reviews and isn't to in-depth so remains a fun light read.


https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1845950992/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_K6vWBbDP2QMX7

Saxons, Vikings, and Celts by Bryan Sykes is a fascinating book that explores this topic using extensive DNA testing of modern inhabitants of "The Isles" (term Sykes uses for the British Isles throughout the book). Some of of the DNA stuff gets a touch technical but he tries very hard to not overdo the hard science speak. All of your questions are addressed in some fashion. Available on Audible with a very enjoyable reader.

I actually found this one even more enjoyable than Time Traveler’s Guide. The prose is so charming.

The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium, An Englishman's World

I'm reading The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present: A Narrative History by Rebecca Fraser. At 848 pages it is longer than I would like but it is easy to read so I'm already up to the Tudors.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Year-1000-Millennium-Englishmans/dp/0316511579

Great book!

This is what you want, an outstanding book that covers Irish and British history. Read this, and you'll be above the herd.

https://www.amazon.com/Isles-History-Norman-Davies/dp/0195148312

The guys in the monasteries , but they would have been in Ireland, up near Scotland and on some of the islands.

You would pretty much be looking for the people producing the illuminated manuscripts. The years are off by a bit but take a look at the Iona Monastery and The Book of Kells as starting points

You might also take a look at the pop history book, The Year 1000, by Lacey and Danziger. It focuses on life in England at the turn of the first millennium.



http://www.amazon.com/The-Year-1000-Millennium-Englishmans/dp/0316511579

This is a similar themed book, and a great read, written by Ian Mortimer. There is one for medieval and one for Elizabethan Britain, written as if you had just dropped into a different time and what you would experience there.

I thought this book was a great introduction to evolution for me when I took it up. Chapter 2 is a bit difficult, but otherwise right there for a beginner like me. The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution Reprint Edition
by Sean B. Carroll
https://www.amazon.com/Making-Fittest-Ultimate-Forensic-Evolution/dp/0393330516

Excellent show!

I watched the whole thing last night (pity about the quality), then realised I could just buy the book (which I did).

Terry Jones: Medieval Lives

This book is an engaging and quick read if you'd like to know more about Evolution from the viewpoint of how the micro- begets the macro-biology.

Something like this:

https://www.amazon.com/How-Scots-Invented-Modern-World/dp/0609809997

I was thinking more of ideas rather than implementation. These ideas of Capitalism, Liberalism and Imperialism that define the modern world are found really strongly in the UK, then in the Netherlands, Northern France, and they become diluted and changed as they go further from there.

I don't know the answers to your specific questions, but I found Ian Mortimer's "The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England" to be an enjoyable read which addresses the lives of ordinary people. Check it out: https://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908

I'm not an expert, but I believe books were relatively rare things during this time period. Also, an extensive library during that time might seem quite small by today's standards. Only the well to do, universities, and monasteries would have significant libraries. The vast majority of people didn't own a book, not even a Bible or religious text. I'm basing this half-baked answer off of what I recall from Ian Mortimers's book http://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908

> documentary on BBC with a list of the top 7 British inventions ... the penicillin, telephone, etc

Fleming was a Scot, so was Bell along with many others.

Here's a good reading suggestion in this vein;

https://www.amazon.com/How-Scots-Invented-Modern-World/dp/0609809997

We can broadly define who is genetically British and who is not, see Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes 10 year long DNA survey and resultant book.

Though it is summed up best here and you will notice that the admixture of what we have defined as Britons to be "stubbornly Celtic". Yes, this means also being white. Non-whites while being civically British and British citizens are not, by this definition 'Britons'. In the same way that I can not become what we know to be Japanese, even if the Japanese government says I am. Deep genetic cluster analysis does not work that way.

> I can't define Briton in any way, or respond to any of your points, but I'll declare myself right anyway!

Just because there are intermediary points between diverging sets, does not mean there are not clear distinct groups or sets that we can define. Your post here falls into a form of what is called the 'Continuum Fallacy'.

>Exactly, defining the nationality of your country in terms of a race literally is racism! See the Nazi party.

Nazis breathed air too, better not breathe air or yuo're a nazi!

I really enjoyed this:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/History-Scotland-Neil-Oliver/dp/0753826631

Might I suggest the reading list?

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books/europe#wiki_middle_ages

And although it's not on the list, I really enjoyed this one:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Time-Travellers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1845950992

Hi, medieval historian here.

What time period are you interested in, and what region of the world? You probably need to choose one. The Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian dark age mythology is what Tolkein's world is based on (north western Europe, c. 500-1100) whilst the early parts of Martin's world is based on England during the Wars of the Roses (1465-1485).

If you've not read history before, getting stuck into a text book can be pretty dry going. What you'll want is some kind of generalistic guide. I recommend the following:

The Time Travellers Guide to Medieval England

Andrew Marr had two tv series with tie-in books that were a fairly good overview of the 20th Century in British Politics.

The Making of Modern Britain Book and DVD


History of Modern Britain - Book and DVD

Edit: stream availible here:
http://britain.docuwat.ch/videos/history-of-modern-britain/history-of-modern-britain-01-advance-britannia-1945-1955-

This one is a fun read with some every aspects of life you normally wouldn't think about, Time travelers guide to medieval england http://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112894. It deals with the 1300s though.

I just finished this... it was quite good.

If I may suggest a good read on a similar subject: The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century by Ian Mortimer. This is how I wish I had learned about history in school; i.e., not about battles and kings and memorizing dates of treaties, but about how folks were actually living at the time.

Check out this book which is a very interesting look at the topic.

The genetic bedrock of the British Isles is/was largely Celtic. There are debates about how broad that term should be, but whoever the original bronze and iron age people were (Celts or some other word), they contributed the most to present day English, Scottish, and Irish people.

There's a whole book about it:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/0393330753/RWER603O4QEK1/ref=mw_dp_cr?cursor=1&sort=rd

Here's a good book that came out in 2000 AD and describes life in England circa 1000 AD.

Ian Mortimer's A Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England is a good, cheap, and readable survey of 14th century life.

If you want Early Modern European magic, then read Keith Thomas and Stuart Clark's Thinking with Demons. These are the premier books on the period I'd recommend.

I read Beyond the Deep and Blind Descent over the summer. Both are about supercave exploration, which it turns out is the most terrifying thing on earth. Both are in the same genre as Into Thin Air, another horribly scary book about things I will never ever do. I'd recommend reading Blind Descent first because it's the more general book, while Into the Deep is about one specific exploration. Both are absolutely mandatory reading if you're planning on seeing that new James Cameron movie that comes out in February.

On the history front, April 1865 by Jay Winik is a superb analysis of the last month of the Civil War. Lincoln's Melancholy by Joshua Wolf Shenk is a great analysis of Lincoln's lifelong battle with depression. And Ecological Imperialism by Alfred Crosby is one of the most interesting history books I've read in a long time. This may be a good follow-up to Guns, Germs, and Steel if you're interested in environmental history.

For a quick, interesting view of life in the medieval period, try the book "The Year 1000". It offers a day-to-day perspective on life in that year alone. Of course there were good and bad aspects of daily life, much like there are now. http://www.amazon.com/Year-1000-First-Millennium-Englishmans/dp/0316511579

The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium, An Englishman's World

Invented the whole modern world, according to this book. As a Canadian of Scottish descent, I like to think so.

http://www.amazon.com/How-Scots-Invented-Modern-World/dp/0609809997

Here are three books on very different topics that could pique your interest in something new:Ecological Imperialism by Alfred Crosby; The Mission of Friar Rubruck by Willem Van Ruysbroeck; Magic in the Middle Ages by Richard Kieckhefer.

It's really hard to separate them accurately. There is a lot of extremely intertwined genetics in the British Isles. A good book on the subject is "Saxons, Vikings and Celts" https://www.amazon.com/Saxons-Vikings-Celts-Genetic-Britain/dp/0393330753

Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 is an alternative that I've been recommended.

I really enjoyed Scotland: A New History, you can get it on Amazon for pennies.

It goes from the Scottish Wars of Independence to modern day Scotland.

I'm currently reading this and it's obvious that GRRM has done a great deal of research of this era before putting pen to paper. From the social structures to living conditions, hygiene, rural vs urban living, wars, laws and plagues.

Damn Canadians! Oh, wait...

This was a good read, even if the author did stretch a couple of points to make his case: http://www.amazon.com/How-Scots-Invented-Modern-World/dp/0609809997

How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It <----required reading for participation

The wikipedia articles have citations. You are refusing to accept them, and your only counter argument to the parts I cite are claims that these estimates are not accurate. You have not cited any reason to believe these estimates are inaccurate, other than your belief. I don't mean to be rude, but this sounds like a conspiracy.

But, I digress. I'll do the manual labor of copying the citations from more reputable sources.

First claim

> Clergy entered the country secretly and although services were illegal they were maintained.

You can find this in this book on page 289.


> The Roman Catholic hierarchies were restored in England and Wales in 1850 and in
> Scotland in 1878, and from this point greater effort seems to have been made to
gather statistics in a more systematic fashion, albeit with minimal standardization and
quality control.

Second claim:

> Another estimate for 1764 is of 13,166 Catholics in the Highlands, perhaps a quarter of whom had emigrated by 1790,[27] and another source estimates Catholics as perhaps 10% of the population

This can be found in this book on page 387.

Because it is an estimate, let's see if we can find other sources.

Here are some maps from the mid 19th-century which estimate that Scotland was mostly protestant, and seems to corroborate the 10% claim (it's hard to interpret the exact numbers, but it's definitely a minority).

> In 1923, the Church of Scotland produced a pamphlet calling for a racially pure Scotland and demanding the removal of Catholics. The pamphlet was titled, "The Menace of the Irish Race to our Scottish Nationality". This again goes against your claim that Catholicism could have been a dominant religion in Scotland.

The existence of this pamphlet is corroborated by this source and a copy of its text.

> Church of Scotland is part of the government of the United Kingdom

The Church of Scotland points out that it was only granted freedom from the UK parliament in 1921, although I will admit, it seems to function more independently today, than I claimed.

This is my favourite: http://www.amazon.ca/How-Scots-Invented-Modern-World/dp/0609809997

Plus some other stuff.

You should give this a good once over.
http://www.amazon.com/How-Scots-Invented-Modern-World/dp/0609809997

It goes way beyond the banjo. The Scots invented all kinds of things.

Used paperback looks relatively inexpensive

THAT IS WHY WE HAD TO INVENT MODERN CIVILISATION

http://www.amazon.com/How-Scots-Invented-Modern-World/dp/0609809997

How the Scots invented the modern world and everything in it

https://www.amazon.com/How-Scots-Invented-Modern-World/dp/0609809997

https://www.amazon.com/Year-1000-First-Millennium-Englishmans/dp/0316511579

How the Scots invented the modern world by Arthur Herman

10/10

https://www.amazon.com/How-Scots-Invented-Modern-World/dp/0609809997

Literally got that from this book.

Ian Mortimer has a series of Time Traveler’s Guides to X

https://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908/

Possibly one of those?

http://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908

https://smile.amazon.com/Wars-Roses-Alison-Weir/dp/0345404335

https://smile.amazon.com/Princes-Tower-Alison-Weir/dp/0345391780

https://smile.amazon.com/Reluctant-Queen-Story-Queens-England-ebook/dp/B000VSW7TI

https://smile.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908

There's this, albeit a different time period: http://smile.amazon.com/dp/1439112908/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=BKTCY0V8K7XD&coliid=I1B9AZ44XS0SEO

and also this fun desktop background: http://i.imgur.com/zXFY5.jpg

edit: of course a dozen people have already posted this - what was I thinking?

The Scots invented the Modern World

Juvari includes the point about genetics in addition to culture. It had been assumed until the advent of DNA testing relatively recently that the British people were genetically Anglo-Saxon (ie that they descend totally from the AS invaders). In actuality most British people retain at least 70% Celtic DNA, some having up to 30% Germanic, Nordic, or French, depending on region. source

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0609809997?pc_redir=1410434164&robot_redir=1

The book I read.

It can be dangerous to go alone. Take this!

N.A.M. Rogers talks about how trading of languages was common aboard Royal Navy ships; this mixing of languages, in addition to the generally dangerous and insular lifestyle led by career men, would no doubt imprint upon them a veritable omniscience of swears. And it makes sense, in my own interactions with people learning English or Danish, the first words they want to know are the swears.

Didn't have a reason to. I'm on summer break between second and third year of a phd program, but I am fairly sure that I want to leave the program, so I'm now devoting my time toward job hunting online.

Also, none of my friends called me about hanging out last night, and I go to the gym six days a week but yesterday was my day off. Had enough groceries to get by. Net result is me shuffling between my room, kitchen, bathroom, and living room exclusively.

I spent my time yesterday looking for jobs, but mainly getting distracted by stupid shit on the internet. I read some of a book I've started recently, The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England. Also smoked a little weed, but as of today I am quitting until I find a job or a dissertation topic. I am also a month into the /r/nofap challenge, so porn and jerking it was not an option.