Hello, and welcome back to We're Not So Different, a podcast about how I've always been idiots. My name is Luke, and as always I am joined by doctor Eleanor. And yeah, we are here today. We've entered a strange new world, and we also.
Have a guest.
So yeah, we have a couple of questions from patrons that we'll get to later on during the interview.
So yeah, let's get to it, folks.
It's very rare that we cover a topic on this show for which there is no real medieval analog.
We hear it.
We're Not So Different Incorporated pride ourselves on finding the connections to the paths, both major and minor, and extrapolating them to our current day. But in this case, we just can't do it. There was no medieval version of wide public opinion polling outside of the peasant showing up with torches and pitchforks.
And while we do.
Appreciate those outbursts of justifiable anger, they lack the sample size and rigor we expect from good polling. No one ever stopped to ask these angry peasants about their demographic factors so we could get appropriate cross tabs. For God's sakes. Opinion polling was a much later in vision that came about after the expansion of the franchise and the rise of the post French Revolution liberal world order, and it very rarely directly concerns the Middle Ages, let alone specifically
catering to them. Thus, in the more than two hundred episodes we've done, we never really had a cause to talk about opinion polling of any kind until now. In early twenty twenty five, the British market research group YouGov performed an opinion poll focusing on American views of the Middle Ages, and the results were pleasantly surprising a listener, I know what you're thinking, your old co host Luke is being a bit too hyperbolic again, but I'm really not.
The Dark Age is myth that has long haunted medieval studies and conceptions, is now below fifty percent in America, which might luck not sound like much, but it's a vast, vast improvement from a decade ago. At least Anecdotally speaking, thirty percent find the Middle Ages interesting, while only fifteen percent described it as backwards, which is great.
And in something of a coup.
More Americans think about the Middle Ages on a weekly basis than think about the Roman Empire on the weekly basis suck at antiquity. Now, of course, there are some define areas improvement, especially that thirty two percent of a positive view of the Crusades and Saladin's criminally low favorability, but overall, thumbs up. Why am I telling you all this Why because we have a guest here to talk
about these results with us. David Montgomery is a senior data journalist with you gov, and he also runs an interesting and informative podcast, The Siekla, which covers French history from the fall of Napoleon to World War One.
David wrote the article.
Summarizing these poll results on American views of the Middle Ages and has a lot to share about them. So we're glad he's joined us. First up, David, how the hell are you?
Well, I'm getting the opportunity to talk about both history and polling, so I think it's a pretty good morning for me.
Nice.
Yeah, okay, real quick before we start, Well, actually two things. One, Eleanor has been delayed, so actually it's just being David for the moment. Eleanor will be along shortly. But yeah, you're just hanging out on boys chat for the moment. Actually, I probably shouldn't have said that without asking first. I'll probably edit that part out anyway. I'm sorry about that if I assume something incorrectly regardless. Okay, real quick, before
we start, here's a friendly note to listeners. We're going to start out with a quick discussion of the poll methodology, so those of you who aren't terribly familiar with how poles are conducted can get a better sense for the process. Also, for those of you who are hostile to numbers in math, there will be some talk of that during the show, but we will contextualize them, we swear. Also a post links to the articles in the show notes, so you could check out the full thing and the poll and
graphics we mentioned. Just don't do it while you're driving, please, for the love of God. Anyway, David, we had two patrons, Shiloh and Evelyn, who requested more info on how this poll was conducted. So what was the sample size and how were the possible participants selected?
Yeah, so this was a poll of two and thirty US adult citizens conducted this past month. Sorry, it was conducted in February. I've written that published this past month after a unplanned introduction from a after an unplanned delay from printal leave when a baby decided to come a few weeks early.
But yeah, so.
Like just to just start at really basics. I mean, you reader are probably familiar with the idea of you can just conduct a poll on your social media site or stand at the street corner ask people questions, and that's great, but that will only be representative of the people you talk to, the people who respond to the poll. What YOUGA does and as well as many of our competitors,
is a scientific polling. And the key insight there, nearly a century old now is that instead of just talking to walking up to people and talking to them, if you contact people in some form of randomness, you can get a sample that you talk to that is representative of the broader population more or less. And pollsters have spent the past century trying to refine techniques to account for sources of error and get more and more accurate.
But polls have been able to regularly test themselves against provable things like election results and things like that, and in general the methodology is fairly reliable. Certainly the best we have right now, The most standard way is pure randomization. You might randomly dial numbers from the phone book, or get a full list of say every voter in the
country and dial random numbers from that. You GOV is slightly different, and I won't go into the technical details, but you have basically has a panel of many, many people who've signed up to take polls, and then we randomly select from them. And I am assured by people smarter than me that the math works out, and we have a pretty good track record with elections and other
things like that. But because this is a scientific poll, this is representative of the US adult citizen population and not just of the people who happen to take the pole.
Yeah, yeah, so you know, just for people who you know might have a question about it. How is a sample size of twenty two hundred and thirty people representative of a country of three hundred and fifty million.
Again, this is the math.
Year gets pretty complicated, and I I'll go into that for anyone, but two hundred people is actually more than you need to be representative of the roughly two hundred and sixty million US adult citizens in the in the country. You know, if all you care about is the top line results, you can get by with a national poll of maybe eight hundred people and still be reasonably accurate.
The bigger sample size is mostly they do two things. One, they get you smaller margin of error, so you can be have more precision and confidence that you're your answers
are the actually reflective of the population. And the other thing that lets you do is slice and dice your numbers what are called cross tabs, So rather than just looking at, you know, the percent of people who agree with the question, you can look at the percent of men and women who agree with the question, or the percent of people eighteen to twenty nine and thirty to thirty four, various different demographic slices that are often we're
the most interesting parts of a poll. Lie, and well, I'll be sharing some of those as we get on into this discussion.
Yeah, thank you very much for that. Yeah, we don't want the math here, but just so people know that a sample size of that number is still representative for a big country.
And I will post some.
Links to how sample sizes can be calculated if you want to, if listeners want to look more into that.
It is a lot of math, though, So just saying this.
Poll had a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points on the top line numbers, which.
Is it's pretty good for poles.
A lot of a lot of the big national ones you see might have plus or minus five percent if they're using a smaller sample.
Nice.
Yeah, So how are these questions and possible responses formulated?
Uh?
Mostly I wrote the poll.
I had some input from the historian U Matt Gabriel, co author of the recent book The Bright Ages, which some of you may have heard of about sort of a polemic defending the idea of defending the Middle Ages and opposing the idea of the Dark Ages, another topic we'll we'll talk about shortly.
And all.
You know, I'd run a separate poll about people's conceptions of the Roman Empire last year. So in many cases I was simply mirroring the structure of that, which sort of made it simpler. But you know, there are a couple of questions I wanted to get at the Dark Ages question there, you know, I asked about a selection of medieval people to see how many people had heard of and whether they had positive or negative opinions of them. I asked about some concepts like how many people have
a positive opinion of castles. We'll get into that as well. And then you just tried to, you know, get it in a range of things. I ask people how much they thought they knew about the Middle Ages, which then let us split up the responses by people who thought they knew a lot, and people who thought they knew a little, and people who thought they knew nothing at all. And yeah, And finally did an experiment where I gave people a list of years and events and asked them is this medieval?
I like that? Yeah.
Rather than just saying, like, hey, which is close to your opinion? Did the Middle Ages end in fourteen fifty three or sixteen hundred or which people have no context for, I tried to do sort of build a more organic sample. Like you know, some people think the Middle Ages go back all the way to the Roman most people don't. Some people think they go all the way forward to
the French Revolution, but most people don't. But pretty much everyone says that, like you know, fourteen hundred is medieval, and so you can sort of get a probabilistic representation of how that works.
Yeah, And you know, lastly, you were talking about knowledge of the Middle Ages and stuff, So how would you write your own knowledge of the Middle Ages. Is it something you studied or is it an interest or you know, how would you write that for yourself?
I'd say I'm a competent amateur in terms of my knowledge of the Middle Ages, nice probably, which the term means that I probably know more about it than anyone I meet on the street and a daily basis, but also less than any specialist that I meet on a daily basis.
There we go.
Yeah, I got.
Into I've been into it interests in the Middle Ages I was a kid. Obviously, Fantasy novels a big jumping off point for I think interest in the Middle Ages. David mcaulay's book Castle that illustrated sort of the history of the construction and Cejmcastle was a uh help radicalize me on this topic. Uh uh you know, I've tried to read interesting pop history books about the topic as the years have gone by, Like I read The Distant Mirror in high school and uh generally kept reading that
and then podcasts of course excellent source of information. Blogs like the historian Brett Devereaux a few other places have been sort of helped build a general baseline knowledge of the Middle Ages. That is, as I said, more than the average lay person, but less than the average specialist.
Sounds good. Yeah, well, thank you again for coming on this show. So you know what, uh what what were some of the big surprises in this that that you saw when you had it? So I guess if I if I was going to describe kind of what we see here for people who haven't already looked at.
It, they.
Basically there there are people who still call it dark, you know, the Dark Ages, and you know that seems to be about forty eight percent.
But like.
You know, when when they're at Americans are asked to describe the Middle Ages, uh, the first word is violent, which was which which was fifty four percent, which you know I can't argue with that. Dark came in at forty eight percent, which is not what we want to see. But religious is forty one percent dirty you know, there are a lot of connotations to that, but you know, poor,
But then interesting is it thirty percent? So like you you kind of get a mix of it, but it is I do think very heartening that.
The question.
Which is closer to your understanding of the European Middle Ages. First it was a dark gage that things were objectively worse in this period than what came before or after, or it was complicated, messy period, neither better nor worse than any other. Obviously, listeners know how we hear, we know it's a different feel. But actually fifty two of Americans said that it was complicated, as compared to forty eight percent saying it's a dark age, And that to me is a big deal. So like, what? What are
these responses? Kind of surprised you either good or bad?
Yeah, I mean, I have an asset pole in the past, so I can't speak to how views are changing on this topic.
This was a closer split.
On that second question, of which come closer to understanding than I was expecting. I probably would expected more people saying that it was a dark age than did that, certainly, and even split was was very interesting. There's some when you dive into it, there's some interesting breakdowns. For example, younger people were more like to say that it was a complicated, messy period, and older people were more likely
to call the Middle Ages the dark age. And I don't know, you know, it's always hard to tell them. Polling like does it is this a lifestyle or effect? Is this to like older people just by being old, you're more likely to think of something. Or is this maybe more of a structural effect that the education system fifty years ago taught one thing, in the education today teaches something new that makes sense.
But I can't prove.
Anything one way or the other about why this is happening. Also not super surprising, but the more someone thought they knew about the Middle Ages, the more likely they were to call it a complicated, messy period rather than a dark age, which I mean make sense that if you care enough about the Middle Ages to learn about it, I think it's it's likely that something about the period interests you, and you're maybe less likely to view it
with pejorative approaches. Certainly there could be exceptions, I suppose, But and then you also mentioned other question I have where I sort of gave this long list of adjectives and asked people to say, pick as many as you think describe the Middle Ages to you. And I think unsurprising that, as you said, the top adjectives were tended to be pretty negative, violent, dark, dirty, poor, Depending on how you your view on faith, religious could be seen
as neutral or positive or negative. We had there are other options on there that were chosen interesting. Thirty percent of people describe the Middle Ages as interesting, love to see it, thirteen percent said heroic, ten percent said innovative, ten percent said romantic.
That was lower than I.
Expected, given sort of the the views of castles and knights and chivalry and all that. Only five percent said they were boring. Yeah, and only three percent said they were bright, So.
Uh, well, we got to get number.
But yeah, David Perry and Matt Gabriel have some work to do the their but clearly not resonating fully yet.
But yeah, I mean getting people to recognize that it's bright is going to take a lot longer, I think. But you know, violent, I mean I do necessarily think it's more violent than any other era, especially not now, given you know, how the percentages of people, the number of people killed in you know, the last few centuries and all that sort of stuff. But I can't really say that it wasn't violent. It was definitely religious, and I mean it was dirty compared to what we have
now and you know, poor. But I think interesting at thirty percent is really good and it and back only fifteen percent on backwards, which is you know, as we get the thing down, like if if we eleanor Eleanor speaks about this a lot, but like it is technically a dark age in the sense that we have fewer records. So like if some of the people who mean a dark age are talking about it in that respect, you know,
then that's not necessarily wrong. It's it's going to be hard to like find that in any kind of polling
because that's a very granular question. But the fact that only fit that forty eight percent suggested dark well, only fifteen percent suggested backwards, and then only five percent say boring is very is a very good conclusion to me, at least from like our perspective of trying to uh get gen up more interest in the Middle Agesn't just you know, a proper understanding of history more generally, So I think, yeah, we.
See, we see a lot of that here. I was.
I got to say, I was kind of when you talked about, you know, favorable views of these concepts. You know, you had castles and chivalry and monasteries, and then the Gregorian chant only got thirty six percent favorability, and I was like.
A lot a lot of people have commented that probably would have been hired to ask us in the late nineties.
That's a good point.
Yeah, you asked this when the video game Halo came out and everybody and that that bad boys like eighty seven percent. They're like, yeah, I love playing that game with my friends.
Yeah, uh so.
Yeah.
So I mean for this question, I sort of tried to pick a range of topics, some that I thought most people would like, like castles and chivalry both have sort of fairly positive connotations. Seventy five percent of Americans have a favorable view of castles. Yeah, which don't I assume those those are step archers.
Yes, yeah, the remnants of the Mongols and the Seljic Turks, or at the gates baying ah, what is wrong with you?
Very unfavorable, very unfavorable.
They're just slamming. Yeah, they're slamming the Uh this is a button there.
I will pause to make a point here that, you know, as we talk about some of these favorable and unfavorable ratings, I think a common move that a lot of people make when interpreting polls, especially polls of you know, maybe less salient topics like the Middle Ages that are maybe not central to most people's daily lives Present Company accepted as they look at a number like, you know, seven percent of people of an unfavorable opinion of Castle's or
nine percent of people have say they have a favorable opinion of the Black Plague. And you know, I'm sure some of those people may be long Duray historians, like the fact that it contributed to a rising standards of living and things like that.
But.
More in polling, Polling is not quite as precise as I think a lot of people would like it to be, especially sort of these extremes, and there's a tendency to get higher numbers of these really rare views in a poll, then you'd ordinarily get compared to like if you're pulling something that everybody thinks about, like you know, what's your do you like or just like the.
President or something like that.
So I think if you see like nine percent of people have a favorite opinion of the Black Plague, the right answer response is not to say why is that number not lower? It's to say, oh, that's a really low number. That's lower than anything else in the survey. This is the least popular topic. But yeah, you know, one thing I didn't do was I did not like test how much people knew about these topics. I didn't say, like, you know, you said you had a favorale opinion of
one hundred years War? Can you describe what the one hundred Year's War is? Just to prove I didn't do any of that. I'm testing vibes, impressions. Yeah, yeah, broad broad feelings, and I'm sure some people don't have deep knowledges. We're like, oh, war, that sounds bad. I have an unfavorable opinion of the one hundred Years War.
Yep.
You know, monasteries and vikings.
Both had were more favorable than unfavorable, despite the fact that monasteries and vikings traditionally historical enemies. Yeah, it is funny how both at the same time.
It is funny how we just kind of dissolve a lot of the time, just dissolves all those barriers between things, and now we're like, vikings are cool. I like vikings. Monasteries are pretty I like one. And you know, it's just like, yeah, you know, it's like, you know, the the the the sacking of Linda's farm is Linda's farm is completely lost on the people of today.
Yeah, it's I guess.
I guess a question that I might should have asked at the beginning. So you've done a lot of you you you you do polling uh for a living, and you've seen a lot of these, you've been involved with them, like and the American populace has let's just say, ah reputation for being uh difficult to uh get like a just to pull out of because you'll be like, you know, should we should we ship everyone who doesn't like the TV show Reacher off to an island where they fight
each other for our amusement? And like sixty percent of Americans will be like yes, And then you'll be like, should we institute communism across the world tomorrow? And sixty percent will be like yes? And you're like, okay, So, but like, as someone who does this, what is your you know, what is your view of like how opinion polling, like how Americans do with opinion polling, and why we kind of end.
Up with those really uh let's say odd results.
Sometimes it goes back to what I was saying earlier that a lot of times people aren't are giving answers that reflect a gut judgment rather than a deeply considered analysis. A phrase that gels used a lot for some different circumstances, but I think it's applicable here as well. I think it's important to take polling, especially of topics like the
Middle Ages, seriously but not literally. That you know, is it the case that exactly sixty one percent of Americans have a very firm considered approval of positive opinion of Gothic architecture. No, Like that's not that that number is not precise and like super scientific, but like this poll does give us a sense. Yeah, people have a like Gothic architecture more than they like the Inquisition. Yeah, like
the good has much more negative vibes than the other. Yeah, you can get lots of really detailed and helpful information out of it, as long as you don't get too fixed on precise details. Yeah, and as long as you sort of approach this with sort of this let loose mindset, taking it seriously but not literally. I think there's a lot of really interesting things you can learn about, you know,
the impressions that people have in their mind. Uh, Like, you know, people encounter the medieval things or vaguely pseudo medieval things, not a fair amount when TV shows, in movies, books, Uh, that you know you have like artists and uh uh, musicians will like adopt the imagery of nights or castles for music videos. Like this, stuff's all over and people have a vague sense of what they think about it.
Uh And I what I was trying to do is sort of measure that in as many different ways as I could, try to build sort of a holistic picture from a bunch of different questions.
Yeah, and and I mean I think I think you did a really good job of that. Like, I mean, and we can I think we can glean from this that like education about the Middle Ages, like in schools and stuff is is better than it, especially better than when I was in school, which you know was like uh, you know around the around the turn of the last century, literally but like we barely talked about the Middle Ages at all. When I was in you know, middle and
high school. It was like kind of mentioned, you know, the term Dark Ages was definitely thrown around and everything.
But now, like.
Most of the people in this study still learned about the Middle Ages from school, you know, the.
The at least something about the Middle Ages, Yes.
Yes, yes, sorry, yeah, school school is a vague term.
Like, yeah, we did get some open ends where we have to beep, like what do you mean by this? Some people were saying, like I took a class in college. Other people might be thinking like, oh, yeah, we uh uh spent a day talking about castles in fourth grade.
Uh like better than what I got.
The word school can incorporate all of that.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, And that's why I'm glad you're here to talk about it, because I, uh, you know, I to you know, I just kind of ramble and uh, you know, the hyperbole.
Comes out and there we are.
But yeah, you get you get enthusiasts.
You know, with learning from school.
Non fiction books and articles and stuff like that, and you know, you that whether they learned about castles in the fourth grade or took a class on it in college and stuff like that, Like the fact that a lot of these people seem to have heard about it in school and then a majority or you know, a slight majority of them, you know, have kind of turned off to the Dark Ages myth to some extent I think is a very positive indicator about at least the
state of recent EDU history education efforts to that degree, and also stuff like the Inquisition having a very low favorability and honestly, I can't believe I'm saying this, but the Crusades only having thirty two percent, given how like loud and vitriolic, the online like push for that like deis vult kind of idea is you know, I don't that seems that would seem to me at least to be a good indicator that that some of these things are getting taught the right way, at least for some people.
Well, one thing I think is about having done opinion polling is a better context of some of these online movements. Like you you mentioned there's about two hundred and sixty million US adult citizens more or less in the country. And what that means is if you get two and a half million people who believe something, which is an objectively huge number.
Yeah, that's one percent of the population.
Yeah, that is you cannot register that a group of that size on a national opinion poll. You get ten million people, you're still inside the margin of error of most opinion polls. So you can have movements of all stripes across the political spectrum that are genuinely huge or even non political, like you know, interest in a particular topic. You can have movements that are genuine, genuinely huge that at the same time are not meaningful shares of the entire US adult population.
Right.
Yeah, So like a lot and a lot of.
The stuff that's online a small community feels very intensely about just does not penetrate out to the broader the broader population, or at least not in detail. Maybe little bits of information, uh.
Carry through, et cetera.
But anyway, that's that's part of why I'm doing this, Like this try to measure, like, you know, what are what are the ideas that have penetrated to the broader population, and what ones are still mostly limited to this small group or relatively small group of people with very intense opinions on one side.
Or the other.
Yeah, and another thing I think that you can if you look at it. So there is a chart at the very end of this that's very interesting, which vince do Americans say were and we're not during the Middle Ages? And you know, some of these are kind of funny. Julius Sasser sass or good gracious Julius Caesar is assassinated, which is forty four pc. Obviously not during the Middle Ages, but nineteen percent said it was so uh, you know, we got it.
Gotta work on back what I said before. I take this seriously but not literally. Yeah, yeah, you know, by more than two to one margin, Americans said Julius Caesar is not medieval, and I think that's the big take. You know, obviously some people, if it can be hard to imagine. I think for people who think about history as much as we do, and I think most of
your listeners do. To get into the mindset of someone whose idea of Julius Caesar is just someone who lived a long time ago and there were swords and stuff.
Yeah, no, you're exactly right. Yeah, time compresses that he Julius Caesar like to a lot of people, like he lived a long time ago. Uh, there was a Rome still around during the Middle Ages, so sure Middle Ages. Yeah, you know, yeah, sure, like a guy who you know, just goes to his job and isn't the stereotypical thinking about the Roman Empire all the time.
It's like, you know, yeah, sure.
So I assumed that, like you know, that most people would say Julius Caesar's death was not medieval. But I put in another question. Christianity becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire because that's still very Roman, very antique. But Christianity is something I think people associate the Middle Ages and not with the Roman Empire, even though obviously
the the the details are much more complicated there. And that was split basically people were sort of I mean, lots of people didn't have opinions in each of these, I should clarify, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I only broke out sort of the people who had a view here, but those who did have a view were basically evenly divided about whether the three a ce adoption of Christianity is the official version of the Roman Empire was medieval or not.
Yeah, And something I did find interesting in this is that the higher percentage for not during the Middle Ages, so it's Julius Caesar's assassination, Christianity becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire, the Visigoth sach Rome, So those three are all say a higher percentage say it's not during the Middle Ages, which we would all agree with here.
But when you get to four seventy six, the last Western Roman emperor is deposed, which you know is the typical starting date for the Middle Ages, and the moment we kind of use here on the show that's the first time you have more people say a higher percentage saying it is during the Middle Ages, then it's not.
And if you go down to the very bottom, the last thing that they have here where a higher percentage, well except for one, but we can talk about that in the last one they have here is the Gutenberg Bible. The Gutenberg Bible is printed on a printing press in fourteen fifty five. Higher percentage, say, thirty percent say it was during the Middle Ages, which you know is really close to that fourteen fifty three fall of Constantinople thing.
So I think it's interesting that they basically come down on the exact same scale as we do about what the movies A.
Very legible Yeah, that maps really legibly onto popular like a more scholarly understanding what might be considered the Middle Ages, and within that, like you've had sort of a it also split where the sort of stuff from the fifth to the tenth century people were more likely to say it was medieval than wasn't, But there are lots of people who didn't know, and that the numbers were smaller for things like the Battle of Tours, Muslim armies conquering
Palestine from the Byzantines, Alfred the Great. But once you got past the tenth century, sort of the tenth the fifteenth century period, you got very high shares of people saying like this, This resonated almost universally as a medieval to people. Things like the Magna Carta, Notre Dame Cathedral, the knights Templar, the Black Plague, the as in court. Those are things that there's very little disagreement.
About. And I forget that reflects on.
You've got sort of this thousand year period that is often seen as medieval, and then it seems like a subset of people are focusing more in the Middle and High Middle Ages, the sort of the set the back half of that, and are hiving off that first half of that as something else. Whether they view that, I don't know. I can't speak with precision about what they Whether people view that as late antiquity or the Dark Ages, like as Darkated as a separate concept from the Middle Ages,
or something that came before. Really, people are less confident about that earlier period as being medieval than they are about that later period.
I mean, they're just like me, for real, I'm like, you know, my specialism's kicking at like the eleventh century, like like let's go absolutely. But having said that, I also kind of get it because when are you presented literally with anything before then, right, you know, like I do think that people can be like, oh yeah, like a Magna carta twelve fifteen, right, like Lisa sings that song in the Simpsons at like at twelve fifteen and
runny me dud uh dude uh, et cetera. Like you know, so these are things where people can go, oh yeah, like I kind of understand those dates, but you know, maybe you can do some phantom time theory there. Maybe they all just believe like this couple centuries just didn't exist or something like that.
Yeah, yeah, I mean it makes a lot of things simpler as long as you don't pay attention to any of the things.
That makes way more complicated.
But yeah, you know, I'm ovo Sayer spinning in his grave, et cetera, et cetera. But I mean I do kind of get it because if people are presented with any kind of medieval history at all, it's usually like those big headlines like I don't know, the Norman conquest or something like I think if you said ten sixty sixty people. They'd go, oh, yeah, word like that, that that's definitely medieval. But I don't know if they could really pin on
a graph where it is. And yeah, to be fair, I guess that they do, is what.
Yeah, I also asked about I give them people years in said like, it's nine hundred eighty medieval.
Yeah, yeah, it's.
Sixteen hundred eighty medieval. And it was more or less the same picture as the event question, you know, like you know you have with every single year from one hundred to seventeen hundred, you have some people saying yes and some people saying no. But I've tried, and I said before, I was trying to capture sort of probabilistic uh look at like you know, when do the when do the mass of people say no? When do the
mass of people say yes? The preponderance of people, And again you had this sort of consensus that eleven hundred, fourteen hundred and fifteen hundred lots of people said yes, that's medieval, and then more dispute about seven hundred, eight hundred, nine hundred whether that was medieval or not, and then it really dropping off at the ends as you get both back into the Romans, and the head into the Renaissance for early modern periods.
See this is where I'm disagreeing with them though, because I don't think the fifteen hundreds are medieval. I'm like, I'm like, absolutely not. Get out of here. We've invented whose sites, We've begun the Colombian Exchange, like Martin Luther is here ruining everything that is the modern period.
No, to me, clearly this is fifteen hundred, not the fifteen hundreds.
Okay, right, okay, fine, fine, By sixteen hundred things had dropped off.
Oh I well, I will say that it was very interesting at the events. More or less things moved in order that like, especially like as you went from the Black Plague to Agincourt to the Gutenberg Bible to Columbus to Martin Luther, generally saw the sharf saying this is medieval going down. But there was one big exception, which was hen the know link his marriage to Catherine of Aragon.
That is the most modern thing that there is.
That is like I knew.
That happened chronologically, Like Martin Luther the ninety five Theats was before that, and Shakespeare writing Hamlet was after that, and both of those had people more likely to say that wasn't medieval. But in between Henry the Eighth, oh yeah, that was medieval. I can't speak with more knowledge about what led people to to say that, but it was.
That's exactly the kind of.
Weird result that I was hoping i'd get at least some of U when giving people this song.
Lest I read this whole thing, and I knew the one.
Thing you were gonna get you were.
Going to be really annoying about. I knew it the second I saw it.
I was like, Ellen was gonna be so mad.
I'm sorry, go ahead, you were gonna have modern one.
Thing you can do, right. The entire, the entire fucking point is that like if you if you say, I don't have to be Catholic anymore so that I can have sex with someone other than my wife, like that
is that is the most modern possible thing. Literally, he invents a special kind of Protestant to do that, And it's like, it's wild because it's like, so when Martin Luther invented Protestantism, that's modern, everyone goes yeah, And then I'm like, and then when Henry the Eighth, the Special divorced Protestantism that and they're like, oh, that's medieval, Like how does that work? I just need you, I need you to call like square this circle for me, Bay, because I can't fucking do it.
I cannot provide you any more specificity about what lay behind that. My only guess is that may have something to do with like what people have know a lot about yea, and like maybe people who maybe have been on the sidelines for some of the earlier questions, like who maybe don't have it, people who aren't Lutherans and don't have a strong opinion about Martin Luther or something like that. I think, Oh, Henry the Eighth, I know that I'm gonna I'm gonna vote on this one.
I mean, I guess there are knights and stuff, like I guess that the dude did Yeah, yeah, he really did joust a lot for sure.
I mean we we had we earlier, just before you were to hop on. We were talking about the nineteen percent who said Julius Caesar's assassination was the Middle Ages, and you know kind of conjection.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Maybe it's just kind of like you know, time distance, and like Henry the Eighth, I.
Don't really know.
That anything presents him as medieval. But I mean, I don't know, Like I wonder if both.
These things, though, are a function of seeing the Middle Ages as uniquely violent, you know, which is the thing that people do so like not necessarily like Henry the Eighth's divorced from Catherine of Arragon, but then everyone goes, oh, yeah, Henry the Eighth, isn't that the guy who killed a couple of wives?
Like a he's also a king? I think I think we can't get past made associate kings.
Yeah.
That's even though obviously the institution of monarchy still around today and was in full force and throughout the early modern period in nineteenth century. But that made just me that nothing more than that that people have this rough association.
Oh he's a king, that's medieval.
I mean, I guess, like, with with all due respect to our fellow countrymen, I suppose that also, you know, saying that Julius Caesar's assassination is medieval, Well I was about to say, well, you know, if what you if what starts the medieval period is the fall of Rome, maybe they think Julius is Caesar. Do Caesarious assassination is the fall of Rome. But then I'm like, I bet they don't know that, So.
I think I don't think it's anything more than this was a long time ago and they use swords and daggers for some people.
Hell yeah.
See, I'm kind of like though to a certain extent, I guess because of what I have to do for my own work, I'm kind of like a like long deray medieval person where it's like I'm kind of like, I will take the Lake late antique period. I think that belongs to me. Like I think I've got I have to spend all of this time like reading Jerome and Saint Augustine, So like, I know, I know technically it's late antique, but also is it I think?
I mean, again, this is this is not coming from the pole. I'm just speaking purely for myself here. But to the degree that these impressions are formed sort of absorbed by asthmosis through pop culture, I think it's worth noting that there is sort of, at least how they're presented.
There's a qualitatively different esthetic for the sort of five hundred to one thousand period of like the Last Kingdom, you know, Harry Guys and with shield forming shield walls, et cetera, versus like knights and castles of the high Medieval and then like you know, roughy, roughy collars and muskets for the on the on the other end, like obviously the real history is much more of a smooth continuum and there's lots of continuity and lots more gradations
than people non specialists understand in there. But I think, you know, I don't think people are necessarily wrong to see that, like, at least in terms of the aesthetics, that there are some similarities in some of these broad periods that have more in common than they have separate, at least when you're looking at the looks as opposed to things like your social structure and things like that.
You know, I think I think you're bang on there, because like I think a really big way that people, especially in America might relate to the medieval period is like say you go on holiday to New York and you go to the met right, and you'll go see the arms and armory. Or if you're at the Art Institute in Chicago, you can go see the arms in
armory exhibit, and half the armor in there is early modern. Yeah, right, you know, like you're you're gonna see armor that is from the seventeenth century, that is from the sixteenth century.
And it's just like, how many of the castles of people recognize were actually built in my period, the nineteenth century.
Exactly, Like an initial swen is probably like the most recognizable castle in the world, and people tend to just say, oh, well, it's a castle, so therefore it's been evil. And I get it. I absolutely feel that, but I think that that is kind of part of where we go straight. So like, say, you're you see a really boss ass suit of armor, and the really boss ones are early modern.
Let's be let's be honest and real. Like when you see like the really cool pageant stuff that's got all the inlaying and you see a label there that says, oh yeah, like fifteen eighty two, you're just gonna go hell yeah. You know, dudes will just see a suit of armor and say hell yeah. And I think that's true.
I do it all the time.
I do for sure.
I mean, and if you're not a special like you know Game of Thrones for example, I think a lot of people touched on that went heavy in on the medieval esthetics, but if you pay atten, if you're have read books about this period, you pay attention, Like it's a lot of what you're seeing is very early modern in terms of the social organization that's being portrayed. The kings that live stay mostly in one spot rather than
traveling parapateetically around their kingdom. Soldiers wearing matching uniforms and with matching equipment, like all that stuff, except for the absence of guns. Codes early modern. But if you don't, if you're not an expert, what you see codes is high medieval instead.
Yeah, and to be fair, like that's good stuff, right, I do think that there isn't necessarily a problem with that, and like, yeah, I mean, I guess I'm also thinking that probably the other big American touchstone, like obviously you've got Disney movies, which, again those are early modern, but people think, you know, like the aesthetics are early modern, but people think it's medieval.
That's fine, that's cool.
And also like let us not forget medieval times.
Right, that's true, Like.
I try to never get medieval times, and like that is kind of positing the medieval period as like jousting question mark, And there's a lot of jousting in the early modern period.
So that's fine, Yeah, yeah, I mean, just go ahead, David.
Speaking more broadly again, and this is my personal opinion and not speaking on behalf of the poll that I conducted for you, gov. As we sort of wrap up here,
I think sort of saving this. One of the things that I've always been struck by is the way in which the medieval period is a mirror for people for the for the present, whether people are writing, are Italians writing in the fourteenth century, or Frenchmen in the eighteenth the nineteenth century, or people today who were worried about politics. This idea of the medieval is this this other period, capital o other that is has everything they dislike about
what's going on right now. Is as for the better part of a millennium and a powerful tool in rhetoric.
And you know my podcast the Cyacklists covering nineteenth century France, and a lot of the liberals there are launching these big polemics against the Middle Ages because their enemies are the traditionalist Catholics of the nineteenth century, and they're trying to tie their enemies to this distant pass to paint them as backwards and and all that, and so you know historians like Michel who are doing a lot to shape the understanding of the Middle Ages in a way
that has echoed down a lot to the to the present, even though they were writing in not just history but also with an eye on the politics of their time. I think you can sort of see that happening today as well, when people accuse their political enemies of trying
to bring back the Medieval Ages, bring back the Dark Ages. Yes, people are commenting somewhat on an understanding of history, but there is an understanding of history that is interpreted through their critique of what's happening right now.
I couldn't agree more. And you know, I face this all the time in my own historiography that I have to work with with check people from the nineteenth century, because like during the the world in the abdor Jenny, when they're like really trying to advocate for the idea of well Czechoslovakian this at the time, God bless them, you know, like and they're saying like this is kind of like unique and different and special, and so they
associate Catholicism and medievalisms with Germans and imperialism in this bad way, and it becomes incredibly funny when you get them to Charles the Fourth because they love Charles the Fourth and they and they want Charles the Fourth, but they're like, oh, but he was a Catholic. Oh god, oh no, what.
Do we do?
You know, Whereas they have this ongoing obsession with trying to pick out the figures that they like and saying, oh, this guy's a kind of Hoosite and it's like, honey, he lived like two hundred years before the Hosites, and they're like, mmm, he was a Hoosite, Like all right, and like, to be fair to them, there are rather a lot of Czech medieval figures that you can find who hate Germans, so like it's kind of like, okay,
like knock yourself out. But I am constantly having to control for that just within my own scholarship, so I'm kind of familiar with it. And I guess that, you know, maybe to like end us on kind of a more positive note, I suppose one of the things I was really happy to see was actually young people are really good at identifying the Middle Ages. I was like, we did it, fam, We've done it. Like younger people kind of have their dates really right and so I do
kind of think maybe pedagogy is changing around this. I mean, what is your takeaway from that?
I mean I didn't don't deeply enough to get an understanding of exactly what was going on here. So like, whether like education in schools, the way that the Middle Ages are mentioned has changed from the nineteen sixties to today, or whether you know, the Internet and movies have given people a more layered and nuanced understanding, or it's made it easier for people who have a vague interest to learn more about it, or just the explosion of fantasy
as a genre over the past fifty years. There could be I can't say from this poll what is causing it, but it was certainly very striking that there seems to be more negative views about the Middle Ages from older Americans than from younger Americans.
I'm like, I think my booty shorts did it. You guys like I've done it. I've changed hearts and minds.
It's fine, your ass has changed heart to minds. It's so true.
It's so true.
You know.
Oh, it's genuinely good though, That's genuinely a good thing. And I do think that it is interesting, and I honestly don't care what it is. I don't care how it is that younger people have a better understanding. But I'm just kind of glad that we've all got here. And I mean, certainly, I will probably never stop beefing with people online for using the term dark ages at all,
let alone incorrectly. Like you know, the number of times I've had people say to me, oh, the Black Death sounds pretty dark to me, and I'm like, dude, you're off by like eight hundred years, but absolutely go off, you know, like it's a definitely you know, I think it's a change in the right direction. I guess overall, what I felt about the survey was that there's still a lot of work to be done, but we were heading in the right direction. So I was actually really heartened.
I was really expecting to be more angry than I was.
So I was like, well, we got we got to inflict more damage on this crusade, on this thirty favorable of the Crusades, unless unless a lot of those people are like, yeah, the Muslims won the Crusades in the end, so they were good, and we're like, okay, well, okay, I guess you got us there. Uh you know I.
Want to bring down Richard Lionheart's favorability rating. I'm gonna tank that ship. I'm just gonna spend all of like we need to really spend some time I think for a while talking about how queer he was, like we need we need to we need to focus on the dick sucking, and it'll tank his favorability for the wrong reasons. But as long as people don't like him, I kind.
Of don't care.
From a polling methodology standpoint. I think one reason, a couple of reasons Richard the Lion are such a high favor ability. One, he's just gotten very good press over the years.
Yeah, it's just Robinhood.
It's just it is just Disney specifically.
Yeah, but he's often sort of a heroic figure in the robin Hood. But the other part of is just he's got a really good epithet if you don't know a lot about the period and you're sort of going on vibes, like I think, if I had asked about Richard the first you would have much lower favorability than asking about Richard the Lionheart, because Lionheart sounds cool. Yeah, And that's what as I was saying, earlier, like pulling like this, especially about a topic that's not of deep
relevance to most people's day to day lives. You need to take it seriously but not literally, like understand that there are all these little nuances and wording that can lead people to, you know, give more favorable ratings to someone with a cool name like Lionheart and more negative ratings to something with a violent name like the One Hundred Years War without really having a deep understanding of
what's going on there. But all that said, there's still really valid information you can take away as long as you understand that some of these numbers can be a little bit fuzzy, and it's more it's the it's the relative rate comparisons of these numbers to each other that you can sort of derive a broader, holistic picture from.
I thought it was really funny how there were people who negatively rated Hildegard van Bingen. You could just say, you don't have an opinion, guys, like I mean, like, why are you mad right now?
You're people don't like Germans. I don't know, I don't know. Yeah, Like I was kind of I didn't delve into it, and you know, there's there's a termin polling called lizard Man's constant, basically observation that you can ask people to shape shifting lizards because you really control of the world, and four or five percent will say yes, oh yeah, And most of those four or five percent probably don't deeply believe that lizard people are running the world.
Some do.
There are certainly some people who do believe that, but other people, uh, you know, maybe they misride the question, or they were in a hurry, or they just guessed randomly. And in the big picture, a lot of these sort
of stuff that's sort of stuff sort of balances out. Uh, but on the extremes of really rare views, like opinions of Hildegard of Bingen, uh bless her heart, not a very well known person in the US today, Uh, you know, you're you're gonna get extreme figures like people with the negative opinion of Hilligard of Bingen higher than maybe you would if you did a more focused if you'd like read a paragraph description of her life and ask people if they had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of her
or something like that.
Yeah, Like I'm wondering if it's just kind of like I was like, maybe there's some kind of like trad cath out there, like I broke out, for example, favored village of Thomas Aquinas by people's religion and Catholics much higher as to expect views.
Of Moses my monodies much higher among Jewish respondents. So the margin of air much larger there because the group of smaller, Like some of this stuff did play a role like other routes, like you know where people have learned about Thomas Aquinas well, for a lot of people,
it's through church if if you're a Catholic. Uh, so, like there are lots of these other various INDs that sort of can explain some of these findings that you know, you can't get into every single nitty gritty in the poll, but uh.
There's there's lots of these little nuggets in there.
Yeah, I suppose that I'm like really partial to our man Thomas Quinas me as medieval as obviously I am, but I would I would say that you're also like so for example, as someone who attended Catholic undergrad like, I'll tell you what they make you do aquinas As in your philosophy classes, Like you gon't be reading some acquitas and whether or not you come out with a positive favorability of him as a result of that is, you know, up to God, I suppose, but yeah, yeah, for sure.
Well we gotta we gotta took the methodology. We got to check the numbers on this poll, because I don't know that having eight percent, the eight percent unfavorable view of Joan of Arc, having eight percent of hardcore English nationalists who are still as with the Pale of Calais is a bit much in your poll, David, I gotta say.
Maybe they're Burgundians. And I was like, I'm like, I like, how But so, for example, I do think it's correct to have a negative view of the hundred Years War h right, Like I am like one hundred percent. I think that was bad and it shouldn't have happened, and it was stupid, right like the on the whole, complete waste of life and resources and you know anything else. But in order to have that, you then also have to have a positive view of Jon of Arc, I feel, right.
So I'm like, maybe there's someone who's like, hell, yeah, I love the hundred Years of War and also I hate Jon of Arc, and maybe they're just like really big, you know, Plantagenet fans or something.
I don't know.
One thing to keep in mind, Atheists twice as likely to have a negative opinion of Joan of Arc as Protestants and Catholics.
Oh they strike it.
I'm I'm an ath I think agnostics had loved Joan of Arc. It's the only people who said they were atheists.
Oh, come on, we can't count. We can't count agnostics. The cowards atheist we can't love.
No.
I don't know, maybe there is more of like a bad opinion of her amongst some atheists. I'm just like, I don't know. I think she's neat, Like it's cool that a that a that a girl got to do that like go to the King of France and be like, hey, you're being dumb and that it's.
Illegal for girls to have hallucinations about oh Saint Michael.
Okay, wow, oh yeah, real mature guys. But I do I do think we have to we have to positively say that, uh salad. And even at the eighteen percent favorability still has a higher favorability than unfavorable. Suck it, uh, you Christian nationalist freaks.
I mean, and that actually like made me laugh because I just was thinking about how much medieval Europeans fucking love Saladin, and I was like, they would be so pissed about this.
I mean, this may just reflect people's views on his particular boss in the Civilization game series.
That is true.
Really he was. Really, he's a really good one. In Siev's six, it was a it was a scientific sieve.
Uh yeah, it was good stuff.
Surely you could do. And I haven't whoa like, I'm just I'm letting it show. I haven't played a Crusader Kings where I like, do they like start as the levant? Maybe I should do. That's just so that I could be salad in one time.
That'd be fun.
I'd like Norman's have appeared and I'll be like, god, damn it, they're like ants.
You know, how did they keep doing this? How do they keep getting here? Yeah? You know, Other than that, Uh, I'm tired of people ragging. I'm tired of I'm tired of the nine percent who have a favorable favorable view of the Black Plague being shamed, like you guys trying, you guys try living near Europe. Okay, Like, come on, nobody wants that and I'm just kidding.
I have no idea.
I do assume it's like Dave was saying earlier, it's probably people who have taken to the idea that the Black Plague caused like a greater you know, greater social mobility and advances in that later on, is my guess at that. Either that or again there's like nine percent who are like, uh, you know, step archers and they're like, fuck it, fuck you, Yeah, it was good, you got it. Well.
I think that it's an interesting one because I am obsessed with the Black Death, but I think you should have a bad view of it. Oh yeah, where we're not going to get and also we're not going to get into.
People dying is generally bad.
Yeah, and you know I've talked about it before. We don't have to do it again. I don't necessarily like the whole Oh it improves wages, yeah, because I'm like only kinda like that's.
A real doubt.
That's a way downstream consequence from like I don't know, uh, like I can't even remember how many it was, like one hundred and twenty million people dying.
Like I'd rather the lower wages, but you know, hey, who am I Ah, but David, I know that we got to let you go. So is there any concluding thought you want us to all have about this excellent survey? Which also, I just got to thank you for your service as medievalist because it's kept us all busy in thinking and people talking about this so like you're braver than the troops. Thank you so much. But anything else you want us to think.
About, Yeah, I'll just put on two different hats for a second. You know, this is latest in the series of sort of polls I've done about understanding that history. I did one of the Roman Empire last year. I will surely browbeat my bosses and letting me do more in the future. And if you want to be the kind of person who gets to answer questions on a poll about history, you can go to today at ugov dot com and you can sew up to join our panel.
Uh.
I can't guarantee which poles you'll get, but uh you do earn points you can catch in for gift cards by uh filling out poles. So my I bossitive to appreciate me uh pointing out that opportunity at today dot you dot com. And also, you know, if people want
to learn a little bit about what happens after your podcast. Uh, you should check out the Ciecla, which is my history podcast about narrative history about France after Napoleon, uh, which uh which you know, route views of the Middle Ages are a really important lingering thing in the nineteenth century and uh you can find that probably in the show notes and at the CICHLA dot com that's t h E s I E c l E dot com.
Well, fantastic, David. We'll have to find a way to somehow shoehorn ourselves onto your podcast someday. I don't know how we're gonna do it, but you know we will.
I've been talking about uh, Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Pariva pretty soon.
So oh oh yeah, okay, like what's up, what's up? We're into it. Yeah, fantastic.
Yeah, all right, Well, thank you so much for having me on.
Yeah, David, an absolute pleasure.
Yeah, thank you for coming on, David. Yeah, and you guys know where to find me and eleanor check out the social media. We'll update you on any of the stuff we've been doing. But yeah, David, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you everyone, so much for listening, and we'll see you next time.
Bye.