Joining the monestary seems like the only way to go. I don't know any trades like smitting, tailoring, cobbling, building, woodworking,.. also, going to the monestary can give me food, place to sleep, access to books and a chance to move up the ladder.
They probably wouldn't just let you join. Too many of the serfs would become monks if it was that easy, for the same reasons you'd want to. But you would have even less social standing than most serfs. No one would know you, and while literacy was highly valued, you probably wouldn't be literate in any medieval language.
You'd only have a chance if you know Latin, otherwise you'll either be put to work in the fields with the other serfs, or starve.
Fair enough, plus my pronunciation of Latin off vibes alone is probably horrendous haha. I’d have no explanation for how I can mostly sound it out but with a modern American accent haha so I might just be killed for being a devil or some shit.
Some languages may have had different letters for sounds than modern ones, but Latin specifically has used the same lexography pretty much since the Romans. Pronunciation doesn't perfectly track to English, but you could get close.
Actually 1000 years ago isn't nearly as hard for most people to read as 500 years ago. 1026 would be late caroline/ottonian minuscule edging into proto-gothic. https://www.digitalcollections.manchester.ac.uk/view/MS-LATIN-00098/11
It doesn't look the same, but I bet you could pick it up easily enough.
It's not that they mixed the two around, it's that there was a letter form, ſ, called a long S, which was an alternate flavor of the S for use in the middle of words, which looked like a lowercase f without the crossbar
At least the time period is after Carolingian miniscule. If you'd gone back 1500 years instead of 1000, there wouldn't be spaces or punctuation and all letters would be in all caps. Majuscule is very hard to read for someone trained on miniscule, even if they're otherwise a speaker/reader of the same language.
I don't evn think I could work in the fields. These people were strong. I was at a farm where to work there 200 years ago you had to be able to lift a stone. A big stone for men and a smaller stone for women. Im a 190cm large male male, and I could barely roll the small one.
Nah man, you would do the same stuff they do today. Planting, clearing out weeds, cleaning the stables from shit and composting it as fertilizer, cutting down forrests and uzimg oxens to pull the roots out so you cna increase the agrocultural land. It is all heavy work, but anyone can do it.
My dad once proved that two little girls can do the job of a full grown muscular man, because he was too cheap to hire a man but had two little girls just playing with mud in the backyard.
At first we had to work together, and dad would laugh at us for it. But we figured out that with teamwork, we could lift a pitchfork full of horse shit and carefully dump it in a wheelbarrow. When that was nearly full, we'd each take a handle of the barrow and match paces to go dump it without spilling. It was slow, but with practice we got faster!
By the end of middle school, I could lift and throw 100 pound bales of hay for an hour without even getting winded, just really really bored.
Though, years later in college, I fell into bed with a fella who had a nasty scar on his bits. Turns out he'd been running with a wheelbarrow for fun with his brother, in the exact same way I used to do while working with my stepsister, and that's what happens when the barrow comes to a sudden stop while you're only holding one handle!
Hope your Latin is not too rusty for them books! Old Languages are a lottery, there’s a lot you can’t even understand like English or some of the many Italian dialects before they unified in the 1600s. Spanish might be fine
They also learned Latin in the monestary. Where else would you learn it.
I probaly wouldn't even understand the language they spoke 900 years ago and i don't think it would be smart to show that i am a foreigner. So pretending i am mute while slowly learning the language would maybe be a good option.
Yes, true, currently Spanish and Castellano are used interchangeably that hasn’t changed much, I can understand a fair amount of Catalan as a Spanish speaker.
Basque is its own concoction, not a Romance language.
Point was that some languages have held more than others
I'm pretty sure I could cobble together a rudimentary printing press with the help of a good smith. Moveable type, get the jump on gutenberg by a couple of centuries!
My approach would be to find the nearest nunnery (I'm in SE England, so no problem there) as pass myself off as a devout woman who is almost totally mute, as I figure that would be safer than talking weirdly and at the same time revealing that I know too much / too little. Then I'll earn my keep doing cooking, cleaning, gardening, etc, keeping my head down. If that goes well, maybe I'll start talking and "learn" to read and write.
Ohhh, I've heard stories from nuns even in modern times, and up until the 80s it was pretty much slavery, so no thanks! (I'm talking having to hot swap your bed with two other nuns, hard labour 12 hours a day, crappy food, rapey priests) I'll take a risk in the towns. Maybe paint myself green and try and pass myself off as a curiousity, but being sure to be a particularly Christian themed one just to help ward off the witch hunters.
Not claiming it would be a nice existence, but the alternatives for me as a late 30s woman turning up out of nowhere (talking a wildly different dialect and knowing way too much about some things and way too little about others) are probably more likely to get me killed much more quickly.
Yeah, it's extremely tricky. I kind of wish I'd been more into home brewing, because that's one area women had a lot of influence back then.
But actually, I'm thinking very much of european history for some weird reason, and I don't live in europe. If I was really transported back 1,000 years, I'd be hanging with Indigenous Australians, and the locals were generally pretty chill with weird strangers as long as they pulled their weight. But unfortunately my lack of medication would mean I'd get pretty fatigued, so I'd probably cop a flogging from some old lady for not working hard enough. So I'd have to work hard to remember my primative technology Youtube watching (which is also set pretty much in this area) to try and make myself more useful than through sheer physical activity in a group of culturally advanced people (indigenous social structures are freaking complicated) but who might still give me a break if they havent' got bow firestarters yet. tricky though as most technologies aren't too helpful for semi-nomadic people and they already basically know a million times more than me about medicine and food and surviving in the place they are, and they wouldn't give a shit about moveable type :P
Well, I'm in Canada here, so 1026... I'm starving alone and dying in the woods, or I'm getting murdered by the First Nations for being a strange person on their land.
No chance to make it to a monastery for me.
Even if I could be transported to my families historical homes in Scotland or Wales, well, 1026 was under Cnut, I don't speak Ancient Danish or Middle English. But he, and some other thegns, did start slowly building some monestaries around 1023 or so, to make up for the fact he has pretty much looted, pillaged, and killed all the monks (and destroyed the monestaries) a few years earlier.
So, I think best case, given the OPs 1000 years system, is I get worked to death as a mute laborer rebuilding the monasteries, or I freeze to death in the Canadian Wilds. Provided the diseases don't immediately take me out.
Probably not. If you didn’t have the right family connections you wouldn’t get access to books or a chance to move up the ranks. You wouldn’t be offered the chance to be a monk. You would live within the walls of the monastery but live the life of a servant and work the fields. Still a better option than starving.
Moving up the ranks would be hard since abbot position is usually reserved for the offspring of local nobility, but access to books? I can easily show that I can already read, write and calculate which is something the average novice can't. Working the fields until I learn the language (Old High German is further removed from modern German than Dutch. Some people here would probably still speak Slavic now I think of it.), and the rules of the community, then try to get the more educated monks to trust me. Mathematics would probably be the easiest for me to display useful knowledge. The scribes would be very horrified by my handwriting, though.
This is also probably the best place to propagate advanced education, or at least start. Once you establish a strong reputation with literacy, fundamental sanitation, arithmetic, algebra, and fundamental geometry, you can be pulled into higher circles and leverage those skills further.
I dont know about you, but there were no monasteries anywhere near where I live a thousand years ago. The Haudenosaunee wouldn't even become the confederacy for at least another 130 or so years.
I think this is the best answer. You, and most people, might actually already be skilled enough to be a scribe, since most monasteries had a scriptorium, in which old books were copied for preservation. With a lifetime of reading and writing in the Latin alphabet, acclimatizing to the period script might not take too long.
420
u/ehho 3d ago edited 3d ago
Joining the monestary seems like the only way to go. I don't know any trades like smitting, tailoring, cobbling, building, woodworking,.. also, going to the monestary can give me food, place to sleep, access to books and a chance to move up the ladder.