Do you consider the Tudors medieval?

[bryceQ]

I've never thought of them in this period, I always consider them the early modern period (well Henry VII perhaps the last medieval monarch) but I hear people describe them as medieval?

It doesn't really matter, I'm just curious to other opinions.

Am enjoying the debate (not an argument ) - for the record I’m suggesting that the Tudors weren’t either medieval or early modern but that the shift from one to the other took place around the middle of the dynasty (but over a period of time).
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned (I don’t think) is the trend in history to talk about “the long eighteenth century” or “the long nineteenth century” or whatever (recognising that no change in period happens suddenly) - we could perhaps talk about the long Middle Ages potentially taking us into the late 16th (or 17th according to some people here!) century or the long early modern period beginning with Chaucer in the late 1300s. Or both?!

Here in Sweden the middle ages are considered to be around 1050 - 1520. 1050 being the end of the viking era and 1520 being the end of the Kalmar Union (Scandinavian version of the UK).

I'm enjoying it too. Historians do talk about the 'long Middle Ages'. Though, perhaps lets not give the job advert writers yet more reasons to ask people to teach across a millennium as if it were comparable to specialising in one century!

I’m used to going to medieval conferences where people look at me like when I start talking about the late 15th century so I definitely don’t think the Middle Ages need to get any longer… Loving getting the Swedish angle as well!

Nobody’s mentioned the huge changes in the English language that seem to map quite nicely with the definitions of medieval and modern. The Conquest and its resulting linguistic apartheid up till about the mid 14c transformed English beyond recognition from a tribal dialect closer to modern day Icelandic; religious dissent, Thomas Caxton’s big invention and the propagation of Renaissance ideas 14-17c which led to a ton of classical vocabulary among other things; and something called the Great Vowel Shift (which sounds like an earthquake or the effects of too much fibre 🤣 but is in fact a steady change in pronunciation) all the way up to the 18c - if you’ve ever wondered why our spelling’s such a dog’s breakfast, this latter will explain a lot of it.

I certainly find the 16th century to be the earliest stage at which English is noticeably (if challengingly) our form of English, rather than the peculiar looking 14th century dialects that have a lot of us buried in the glossary.

The Conquest and its resulting linguistic apartheid up till about the mid 14c

What do you mean by this? If it's the idea that the clergy spoke Latin, the posh people French and the ordinary folks English, I think that's not really tenable - there's been a ton of research looking at the language on documents and court cases and all sorts of contexts where ordinary people's linguistic usage is mapped, and most everyone is polyglot to some degree.

I also think that the editors' habit of silently modernising spellings in Chaucer onwards - which is a slightly polemical move, and related to the construction of Chaucer as 'father of English - has a lot to answer for.

There were different languages for different purposes though, post-Conquest. Yes, it may be overly simplistic to say that the peasants only spoke English and the aristocracy only spoke French. And I don’t think the clergy ever really spoke Latin outside the wording of their services and prayers. But court and legal documents IIRC were Norman French and it took a couple of hundred years (and a fair few skirmishes with France) for English to work its way back up through the system so that it became influential as a written language again. There was definitely a status difference between the three languages.

Mmm, not really.

Many people, including clergy, spoke and read Latin as a matter of course, for all sorts of purposes including recreation and legal documentation. That's why we have, say, stories about King Arthur written in Latin, and legal documents written in Latin (as well as medical texts, works of natural history, scientific documents, and so on). Sometimes court and legal documents are written in French - but so too are all sorts of other things. English never ceased to be a written language; there are written texts in English surviving across the period from pre-conquest onwards.

And of course many, many, many texts are macaronic. If you look at court records - which are a nice example, because they record what the people involved were reported to have said, so they sometimes record peasants' voices - they are very often mixtures of all three languages.

There was a status difference between the three languages (and also within variations of each language - see the snobbery about northern versions of English or Chaucer's Prioress's 'French of Stratford-atte-Bowe'). But very often, authors who write about status difference are doing so for rhetorical purposes, so we have to take them with a pinch of salt. For example, an author who says 'I'm writing in English so the poorest fools can understand me' may well be making a posture of humility.

Yes the Magna Carta was written in Latin. Probably because they didn’t want peasants to understand it! As in these rights are not for you…

“there's been a ton of research looking at the language on documents and court cases and all sorts of contexts where ordinary people's linguistic usage is mapped, and most everyone is polyglot to some degree.”

I find myself agreeing with you yet again. This is very true most people were polyglot to ann extent even the English peasant had to know a bit of Norman French to understand how many pigs the lord of the manor wanted and vice versa the Norman lord would want to learn a bit to ensure the castle bailiff wouldn’t be mistranslating the complaints of the peasant serfs appealing to him.

That is even before we get into the marcher lords who had to know some Welsh or Scots or Irish to communicate with their neighbours/frenemies as well as knowing Norman French and a bit of English.

There was no point in writing it in any other language. Not many people could read.
The Magna Carta only applied to Freeborn people Barons and knights. Not the rest of the population as I understand it. The peasantry were not 'free' but subject to their master.

One could argue that the changes in Forest Laws as set out would have benefitted everyone had they been enacted.

[Happy to be corrected] I'm only an amateur.

More people could read than you might think; but also, people were quite in the habit of asking or expecting others to read to them. To put it in perspective, there are only four surviving copies of the Magna Carta. By contrast, a French text designed to teach lay people how to be devout, at almost the same time, survives in 28 copies. At least one of those was made for a woman.

I find myself agreeing with you yet again. Yay! And you're so right to draw attention to the Welsh/Scots/Irish (and Cornish!) languages that add into it all.

Yes, the Charter of the Forest that was supposed to apply to freeborn commoners but all the lords and barons were like, nah that’s just like an extra attachment to the Magna Carta mate, you have no rights. You are right most of the peasants were serfs as by the Magna Carta all slaves had sort of merged in with serfs.

I realise that early on, not all newly minted Norman lords and barons could read or write and depended on clerics- household priests to read/write for them which only added to the confusion and corruption. Once they’d had their titles and had clerics tutor the next generations, there was more literacy. But for decades there were many illiterate men at arms that won titles and lands on the battlefield as the Normans hacked their way across the British isles and seized lands.

The last Plantagenet/Angevin was Dickie3.
The cunning Margaret Beaufort changed the dynasty and Blood line with her scheming and managing I think.
Their Buildings were still medieval, their timber beams and stonework does not look different. Still some fortifications. But we move on we see more brick and less massive stonework. Layer Marney tower and Hampton Court. Both brick from early 1500s. Not sure about earlier large brick buildings.