Children's crusade

[styopa]

I found the answer to the question about a Children’s Crusade to be rather lacking, unfortunately.

“Were they actually children, though? Doubtful. Scholars argue that in medieval Latin the word puer, child or boy, could also be applied to a young man, especially if he was landless or otherwise of low standing–and folks with nothing to lose are always up for a little adventure.”

Or Puer could mean “child”, exactly as the popular version goes. Sometimes a spade IS a spade. The medieval conception of a child was radically different from that of our modern concepts of the preciousness, individuality, and vulnerability of childhood. Medieval children were really treated as small adults, and very early in life handed responsibilities and jobs that we wouldn’t consider safe for children anymore. In many cases, I daresay that they were little more than a regenerable labor force. If you had 16 children and couldn’t feed them all, to send one or two off to do God’s will might both score you some Heaven points, as well as making survival for the rest a little more possible. In this case too, it would be logical to send the YOUNGEST, unable to contribute meaningful amounts of labor to the running of the household. Odds are, this wasn’t “ALL CHILDREN” or “ALL LANDLESS YOUNG MEN” but a mix of both.

Further, you state "The distances traveled (roughly 35 kilometers a day) strongly suggest this wasn’t the T-ball crowd. " You’re more right than you know. I suspect that even young kids in the middle ages were FAR sturdier and inured to hardship, as well as being far, far more used to walking long distances to get somewhere. They weren’t the lazy nintendo-playing corpulent children of 2004 - they were the hardy survivors of a rather nasty Darwinian environment in which half of their siblings died before they were 2. 20 miles a day, over the well-travelled roads of Germany doesn’t sound like that tough a proposition for kids of that era.

[prefect]

Two things, both of them barely on-topic. (Sorry.)

As for the distances walked, I remember reading that J.S. Bach walked something like 200 miles in 1700 (he was seventeen years old) to Luneberg, in order to study under an organist named Buxtehude. Sure, that’s well after the Middle Ages, but it gives me the impression that in the years BC (before cars), people really would hike like crazy to get somewhere.

And does anybody know of any history books that resemble Cecil’s columns? I’d have a much easier time reading about the past if the person writing it had a good sense of humor and let that show. Not that I want them making stuff up, but pointing out their reactions to some events could definitely help with the understanding.

Thank you.

[styopa]

Well, there are a few that I’d recommend. They’re not necessarily precisely what you’re looking for, but they’re a darned sight more interesting than the usual somewhat-dry history books:

Simplicissimus - a contemporary story about a guy during the 30 years war 1618-1648; story is so-so, but the interesting bit is the generally rich description of life during the early 17th century during a war. The offhand and unremarkable attitude toward some toe-curling brutality is interesting, if not an easy read. (Not because of gore, I mean this WAS written in the 17th century; it just doesn’t follow modern literary conventions)

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales of course.

Boccacio’s Decameron is excellent. Be sure you get a modern translation, many older translations and their reprints are missing a story of how the Hermit showed the maiden how to put the devil back in hell - yes, use your imagination on that one.

John Julius Norwich’s Byzantium series is a lot to read, but his light tone makes reading about the eastern Roman empire entertaining, despite the subject being…well… Byzantine.

Bede’s History of the Christian Church and People is interesting, but pretty dry.

Helle Haase’s “Through a Dark Wood Wandering” is modern fiction written about the Renaissance, and is excellent.

Frankly, there haven’t found a lot on the ‘dark ages’. Beowulf is great, of course; and some of the current translations of the Icelandic sagas could be the plotline to a modern miniseries. But not a lot of modern works on the subject that aren’t pure scholarship of narrow (sometimes VERY narrow) focus. Maybe the period is just too dismal?

I prefer to try to read contemporary texts, and they are no doubt hard to get through. I know this wasn’t exactly what you asked, but those are the period books that spring immediately to mind.

[paperbackwriter]

Welcome to the Boards, styopa. It helps to include a link to the article you are discussing, just to keep everyone on the same page. In this case, I believe that you are discussing The Children’s Crusade: Fact or fable?

[sebastiang]

As longtime fans of Cecil, the writers at my history magazine were a bit shocked to see this week’s Children’s Crusade article pop up in their native Austin Chronicle. It may be just me, but the article looks like a simple rip-off of our article at http://www.historyhouse.com/in_history/childrens_crusade/. We say “won the tyke a suitable gaggle of followers”, Cecil says “prepubescent tykes”. We say “Sort of Like Touring with the Dead”, Cecil says “the 13th-century equivalent of touring with the Grateful Dead”. We bring up a relatively technical discussion of the original latin word (‘puer’), Cecil … but I digress.

My immediate reaction was to fire off something much nastier, but I thought I would give the folks here a chance to weigh in. What’s the word, guys? Does Cecil deserve a nasty letter. We figure he ought to at least cut us our share of this weeks’ syndication fees.

[Tenar]

Sebastiang, may I assume that you, unlike the writers at your history magazine, are not a longstanding reader of The Straight Dope? If so, I can certainly understand your concern. Actually, I can understand their concern, as well. It must certainly have been jarring to spot something so similar to their own work. My take on it, however, is that Cecil’s way of describing the Children’s Crusaders is pretty typical of his sense of humor. Regarding the comparison of the crusade to a Grateful Dead tour, I don’t think that is a suspicious as it may appear, either. It’s a natural enough analogy to make: throngs of young people with a spiritual or pseudo-spiritual urge that conveniently provides them with an excuse) to get out of the house in order to pursue a goal that may actually be secondary to the experience itself. (I liked going to Dead shows as often as possible, too, even though I found the lengthy improvisations more tedious than inspiring when I wasn’t totally screwed up.) Touring with The Grateful Dead is not a particularly obscure cultural reference.

Anyway, sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence. And considering how long Cecil has been writing, I would have expected the question of plagiarism to have come up a lot sooner than this if The Perfect Master were in the habit of swiping verbiage.

In any event, I want to say that I am Grateful (no pun intended) to have been made aware of your site. Consider it bookmarked.

Prefect: I don’t know any history books similar to what you request, but may I suggest that if you want an unintentionally funny look at the mindset of the medieval pilgrim, you take a look at The Book of Margery Kempe? It’s a dictated autobiography by an ordinary woman who began having hysterical (as in “hysteria,” not as in “funny”) religious experiences after a bout with postpartum psychosis. She declared herself celibate, to the frustration of her husband, and began making a major pest of herself to clergy and fellow penitents alike in her pursuit of holiness. You might enjoy it.

Sorry this is so long.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

sebastiang, you had me worried with your accusation. Until I read the article.

The laws of copyright dictate that while the expression of facts is copyrightable, the underlying facts themselves are not. Even if Cecil used your column as his primary - or even only - source of information, the similarities of expression are limited to a few wording choices.

Given the paucity of primary sources on the Children’s Crusade, later discussions of them are bound to have many commonalities, and so are later debunkings. Cecil could have looked at the same sources you did.

Or he could have ripped you off and converted it, unethically but quite completely legally.

You’re well within your rights to send a nasty letter - or better, a stern but polite one asking for sources - but I wouldn’t waste any money on lawyers.

BTW, your “Discuss this article in our forums” link goes to a page of code.

[friedo]

@Exapno Mapcase

sebastiang, you had me worried with your accusation. Until I read the article.

The laws of copyright dictate that while the expression of facts is copyrightable, the underlying facts themselves are not. Even if Cecil used your column as his primary - or even only - source of information, the similarities of expression are limited to a few wording choices.

Given the paucity of primary sources on the Children’s Crusade, later discussions of them are bound to have many commonalities, and so are later debunkings. Cecil could have looked at the same sources you did.

Or he could have ripped you off and converted it, unethically but quite completely legally.

It isn’t a copyright violation, but it could still be plagiarism. Contrary to popular belief (especially among college students) merely restating a primary source in one’s own words is not good enough.

Not that I would accuse Cecil of such a heinous act, of course.

[C_K_Dexter_Haven]

Cecil is very careful to attribute sources, and to give credit where due. In fact, more than “very careful,” I’d say he’s somewhat compulsive about it. He doesn’t want people quoting HIM without appropriate credit, and thus he doesn’t do unto others.

On the other hand, he’s not trying to write an academic dissertation, with every noun footnoted with a source. He’s only got a certain amount of room, and what he writes has to fit there, and so there’s usually no space for extensive footnoting of sources… especially when those sources are primary, several centuries old, and when attribution doesn’t add anything for the casual reader.

[Measure_for_Measure]

Interesting. I first learned of this story a few years ago and was so appalled that I actually photocopied some articles about it.

The Cross and the Crescent (BBC: 1987) reveals 2 puzzles:

From the Cross and the Crescent, page 140-41

[Following a discussion of Stephen the shepherd, 1212]
In the East of France and in the Rhineland there were contemporary reports of children leaving their villages for the Mediterranean coast where they expected the sea to roll back and reveal a path marked “Jerusalem this way”.

   From Cologne, **in what appears to be a separate movement**, the sources tell of thousands of children ranging from six years to teenage moving south along the Alps in groups of twenty to a hundred, led by a boy preacher called Nicholas; many perished...

Emphasis added. I don’t know the quality of this source, but it appears that there may have been more than 2 collectives of Children roving around Europe in 1212. Stephen was one. Nicolas was another. And there was a third group between the two headed towards the Mediterranean.

Puzzle #2, regarding the voyage from Marseilles (p. 142):

Aubrey of Trois Fontaines tells us that some sea captains provided seven large ships and that two of them were lost… [yada, yada, 2 ships run aground, kids sold into slavery]. Eighteen years later one of the clergy with them escaped and, if Aubrey of Trois Fontaines is to be believed, this priest was able to report that 700 of the children were living as slaves in Alexandria.

I can’t tell when Aubrey penned his claims. However, even if they were written 20 years after 1212, the account from the escaped priest may be valid. Or not. Antony Bridge’s The Crusades (1980, p. 236), fixes the appearance of the priest cum Child Crusader in 1230. The quality of that particular piece of reportage remains unclear to me.

[Eve]

. . . and I thought he was going to catch holy hell (literally!) for his crack about, “The key difference arises from the intense religiosity of the Middle Ages—all we’ve got now, in the States anyway, are the Wiccans and Pat Robertson.”

Comparing Wiccans to Pat Robertson—whu-huh?

[wevets]

[QUOTE=C K Dexter Haven]
Cecil is very careful to attribute sources, and to give credit where due. In fact, more than “very careful,” I’d say he’s somewhat compulsive about it.

[QUOTE]

Actually, Cecil didn’t cite any sources in this column. I rather wish he were better about including a source or two in each column so we could look these things up for ourselves sometimes.

Perhaps the issue was that the sources were primary and there was insufficient space, but in general I wish he were able to provide his sources more often.
On the letter issue, I’m with Exapno Mapcase, a polite letter asking for the sources used is appropriate. “Tyke” is definitely a word Cecil characteristically uses, but I’m more concerned about the Grateful Dead comparison.

[Cforn]

Hello All,
Rather than a direct comment on
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/040409.html

This in response to Prefect, and to add to styopa’s comments:
I recommend: “A World Lit Only by Fire” by William Manchester.

This book focuses on life and events of mediaeval Europe, in a way that is both informative and entertaining.
It is by no means “dumbed down”, it is simply an easy entre into reading about the period.
It communicates a great deal of information, often in a humorous fashion about a period we simply don’t know all that much about. (At least for sure.)

I know several people in whom it has ecouraged an interest in more scholarly reads. Try it on for size.

Best Regards

[Cforn]

In my previous post, I commented that the book I recommended ("A World Lit Only by Fire, William Manchester) covered a period that “we simply don’t know that much about. (For sure, anyway.)”.

I was refering to the portion of the book that deals with the “Dark Ages” in Europe.
We actually know quite a lot about the period that follows (if I had only bothered to SAY so!).

My apologies for careless posting!

[Cecil_Adams]

@sebastiang

As longtime fans of Cecil, the writers at my history magazine were a bit shocked to see this week’s Children’s Crusade article pop up in their native Austin Chronicle. It may be just me, but the article looks like a simple rip-off of our article at History House Online. We say “won the tyke a suitable gaggle of followers”, Cecil says “prepubescent tykes”. We say “Sort of Like Touring with the Dead”, Cecil says “the 13th-century equivalent of touring with the Grateful Dead”. We bring up a relatively technical discussion of the original latin word (‘puer’), Cecil … but I digress.

I’m mortified.

I did, in fact, see the History House article - it’s one of the first things that pop up when you google Children’s Crusade - and sent Little Ed to get a copy of a journal article cited in it, by Raedts. Raedts goes on at length about puer. Once you tumble to the idea that the Children’s Crusade probably involved adolescents, crusaders-as-teen-rebels is an obvous riff, but I cheerfully concede the HH article first got me thinking along those lines. That said, Ed collected a sheaf of scholarly articles on the CC at the library, the Raedts article included, and it was from them, and not the HH article, that the facts cited in my column chiefly derived.

Now, about the Grateful Dead. The version of the column that left my desk said nothing about the Dead. The line in question originally read, “It wasn’t the Children’s Crusade, it was the Adolescent Spring Break Crusade.” I thought that wasn’t bad. However, the copy desk objected. You may ask: ‘What copy desk? I thought Little Ed was your editor.’ He is. However, the Chicago Reader employs a vast editorial apparatus. Little Ed, as initial gatekeeper, inserts the baseline screwups, while the copy editors add the final crowning mistakes.

The copy desk, to get back to my story, objected to the spring break joke because what became known as the Children’s Crusade, though it began around Easter, took place primarily in the summer. I rolled my eyes too. However, I was mindful that I had used another season line later - “Some summer vacation this turned out to be” - thus basically using one joke twice. The proffered alternative, “the 13th-century equivalent of touring with the Grateful Dead,” was decent - I hadn’t seen it in the HH article, having merely skimmed the first half before jumping to the cites at the end. So I said OK.

Silly me. After the column appeared, my attention was called to the above post. I queried the desk. Turns out they’d been fact-checking - these guys would fact-check Moses. They had read the HH article, had seen the Grateful Dead line, and then, in the course of another hour of fact checking, forgot where they saw it. You know the rest.

The copy desk is very sorry. Aren’t you, lads? Nod your heads. This won’t happen again, will it? Shake your heads. Shake your head sideways, Leroy. What’s that? I’ll take off the wires when we’re frigging done here, Leroy. My apologies to the Teeming Millions, and I assure you it won’t happen again.

[Chronos]

Shake your heads. Shake your head sideways, Leroy. What’s that? I’ll take off the wires when we’re frigging done here, Leroy.

I’m not just posting because Cecil just posted. A line like that from anybody, I would have to post to say I appreciated it.