Sarah Weinman Quotes

In the tenth century the old Batavian and later Roman forms have faded away.

No student of history can fail to see the moral interest of the Middle Ages, any more than an artist can fail to see their aesthetic interest.

The crusades made great improvement in the condition of the serfs.

I'd like to do a story about the medieval ages where in every scene you'd sort of feel that you were in the 12th century. That would be great to get that feeling.

Medieval learning was really advanced.

We think of medieval England as being a place of unbelievable cruelty and darkness and superstition. We think of it as all being about fair maidens in castles, and witch-burning, and a belief that the world was flat. Yet all these things are wrong.

Thank goodness we don't live in medieval times, when people fought wars over ideas.

When fiefs inspired military service, it is easily discerned why females could not inherit them; but the reason is at an end.

I'm really enamored with the idea of a reformed society, and I've always been fascinated with the Dark Ages as well as the power vacuum that followed the fall of the Roman Empire.

With the advance of feudalism came the growth of iron armor, until, at last, a fighting-man resembled an armadillo.

So many of the fantasy stories I encountered growing up were set in worlds that were largely modelled on medieval Europe in one way or another. Lots of white folks in feudal societies, castles and kings, that kind of thing.

The First World War, and especially the latest one, largely swept away what was left in Europe of feudalism and of feudal landlords, especially in Poland, Hungary, and the South East generally.

For years, the place I really lived - the world I watched, the one I thought and wrote about - was 15th-century France.

The age of chivalry has gone; the age of humanity has come.

We forget how bawdy and brutal the Middle Ages were.

The first two crusades brought the flower of European chivalry to Constantinople and restored that spiritual union between Eastern and Western Christendom that had been interrupted by the great schism of the Greek and Roman Churches.

I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.

When William the Conqueror commissioned a great survey of his English realm at Gloucester in 1085, the result was a work so thorough, fair, dispassionate, and wide-ranging that it seemed to the succeeding generations to have come from another world.

ON the decline of the Roman power, about five centuries after Christ, the countries of Northern Europe were left almost destitute of a national government.

Thus the castle of each feudal chieftain became a school of chivalry, into which any noble youth, whose parents were from poverty unable to educate him to the art of war, was readily received.

At the Norman Invasion, the Saxon thanes were themselves humbled in turn; the manors were given a more legal character and transferred to favourites of William the Conqueror.

In the Middle Ages when the feudal lords … to enlarge their domains, to increase their power, their prestige and their wealth … declared war upon one another. But they themselves did not go to war any more than the modern feudal lords, the barons of Wall Street go to war.

The serfs of princes, nobles, ministerials, and churches shall no be admitted to our cities

The stability of medieval society depended on the fixity of all of its parts, as that of modern society is on their mobility.

it would be impossible to liberate the serf otherwise than by endowing him with land.