Quotes About Medieval

In big fourteenth-century houses the kitchen was sometimes in a separate building, to lessen the risk of fire. Otherwise it might be next to the main dining hall, on the first floor. Its windows were unlikely to be glazed. The wooden shutters and louvres kept the worst of the winter weather out and let out some of the smoke, but hardly helped with the light level. When daylight faded, candlelight and firelight had to suffice.

Bread was the staple of a medieval diet. In lordly English households a standard daily food ration for every individual was between two and three pounds of wheat bread, and about a gallon of ale.

Spices were an important part of medieval cookery. We take them for granted, and often taste them ready-mixed in our commercially produced food. The Middle Ages saw them as mysterious and precious.

There were four 'humours', choler, sanguine, black bile and yellow bile, which in the ideal man were perfectly balanced. It was the task of the expert physician to adjust any imbalance. This may explain the fondness of medieval doctors, and their successors for generations to come, for blood-letting: ridding the body of an excess of blood could do nothing but good. 'Purging' by laxatives could be useful too, and drugs to induce vomiting.

You've never been a peasant in medieval France, Harry," Bob said. "Life was hard for those people. Never enough food, shelter, medicine. If you could give yourself a fur coat and the ability to go out and hunt your own meat, you would have jumped at the chance, too.

If you scrunch up your eyes a little, you can almost imagine its features as medieval ramparts and towers and crenellation, standing like some ancient mountain bastion, determined to defend the citizens of Chicago against the plagues and evils of the world. Provided they have enough medical coverage, of course.

The philosophers of the Middle Ages demonstrated both that the Earth did not exist and also that it was flat. Today they are still arguing about whether the world exists, but they no longer dispute about whether it is flat.

if Saint Bruce doesn't like your poem, he chops your head off.

I reject completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare's work) and its bitter little embryos spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents.

Some mediæval straw-splitting about the nature of the Trinity, which is only useful to-day to show how many things are unimportant to us, which once shook the world

his squire Melehan, Mordred's oldest son, had to help him off his palfrey.

Talk. I'll just wait' shall I? Because my mission to save this town is of no importance whatsoever next to your girl talk.- Myrnin Oh, shut up, you medieval drama queen - Claire

a trusted knight deliver a guerdon, a bag of gold coins.

A certain Roland le Fartère was given a small manor in Suffolk by the king on condition that every Christmas he gave a jump, a whistle and a fart before Henry and his courtiers. (Unum saltum et siffletum et unum bumbulum.)

with thick stone walls and high, slitted

inquisidor le interrumpió y le ofreció la mano, lacia, para que hiciera la pertinente genuflexión.

The fires that medieval peasants huddled around in order to keep warm affect our climate today. Our CO2 emissions, caused by such apparently innocent actions as driving to the farmer's market or the recycling center, will affect the lives of people in the next millennium.

The first commercial banks appeared in the late 13th century in Italian towns like Siena. The word comes from banco – Italian for bench – since at first banking services were provided on benches at the town's centre. But banking does not begin with the Italian merchants – its origins lie with the Knights Templar, an order of warrior monks founded in 1096 to ensure the safe passage of European pilgrims heading to Jerusalem in the aftermath of the First Crusade.

I don't know if I have any particular views about women in positions of power, though I do think it's more difficult for women, particularly in a Medieval setting. They have the additional problem that they're a woman and people don't want them in a position of power in an essentially patriarchal society.

Lewis was no fan of war, but he was unashamed to champion the beauty of the knight, of the medieval Crusader, of the "Christian in arms for the defense of a good cause.

Abbots and priors and monks, oh my.

Rebuilt in Victorian times, it retained the modesty of its medieval origins. Small and neat, its spire indicated the direction of heaven without trying to pierce a hole in it.

Baseball's oh so simple. You tag a man, he's out. How different from being it. What spectral genius in the term, that curious part of childhood that sees through the rhymes and nonsense words, past the hidings and seekings and pretendings to something old and dank, some medieval awe, he thought, or earlier, even, that crawls beneath the midnight skin.

Every bad smell is about us. We make our way through the world and come upon a scene that is medieval-modern, a city of high-rise garbage, the hell reek of every perishable object ever thrown together, and it seems like something we've been carrying all our lives.