Skills and facts average Englishman of today could teach to Englishman of 1015 AD?

Factual Questions
61

How good were [del]Dung Ages[/del] eleventh-century Britons at predicting eclipses? I know the Classical Astronomers back in the Mists Of … uh … Well, Actually, Written And Fairly Well-Attested History could do the trick, but there was this little political irregularity circa 410 AD in that region, and some Germans moved in, and the plumbing went to Hell… So, could a time-traveler have impressed the locals by virtue of fortuitous timing and a few sheets of formulae and tables?

(We’ll save the currency reform and shot towers for later, eh?)

62

I think that demonstrating your ability to write, even in an unknown language, would establish you as a high-status person whose advice carries some weight.

63

I went way back and taught them about the solar system, but didn’t stay long as the smell was incredible. They built Stonehenge but that was about it.

64

You wouldn’t accomplish much. Hubris to think otherwise.

Ever live in a foreign country, and don’t speak the language?

Ever live in vile, dire long term poverty?

Ever live in a small, inbred, suspicious town?

You’d be tired, cold, and hungry ekeing out a meager subsistence surrounded by suspicious, ignorant peasants every.single.day. These peasants, like their modern day descendants, are reluctant to change, lazy, and not altogether curious. We live in an era and country where curiosity and inventiveness is taught at every level and encouraged, and STILL It’s an uphill fucking battle. We, as modern day westerners, can be taught a new idea, see the value, and embrace it. To assume this would be the case 1000 years ago is erroneous.

In my head, I imagine the scene of me introducing the wheelbarrow to the local labor. I’m filthy. I live on the edge of town, barely tolerated, and have only been raped twice so far. I haven’t eaten any kind of decent meal in six months, and I’m chronically damp and seem to be developing a cough. My language is still rudimentary, but I figure I don’t need much for this. Did I mention how exhausting the 1100’s are? How depressing the reality of never going back to friends, family or a hot shower is?

I build the best damn wheelbarrow ever. I demonstrate, I talk about efficiency, and ease. I have people try it.

We’ve always done it this way. Shut up missy, women need to know their place. It’ll break soon enough. My back makes me money. That’s not honest labor, it’s trickery. Foreigners can’t be trusted. The devil is shaped like a wheelbarrow. Etc, etc.

I’m an optimist, a fighter, stubborn as a mule, halfway smart, know how to work, in good physical shape, can demonstrate and teach in an effective manner, have lived in not optimal environments, and have personally faced and experienced some shit.

I’d throw myself off a cliff eventually.

Ignorance is a daunting opponent. You guys are underestimating it.

65

That period of time would be ripe for an agrarian revolution.

Only 50-100 years later medieval monks were spreading a revolution of farming and estate knowledge through Europe - partly brought by orders of monks who could import their skills across the continent.

If you could get in on things such as taking cuttings, pollarding of trees, grafting on to vigorous root stock I think you would have something - after all it made the monasteries so wealthy that Henry seemed to think it a useful idea to seize their assets.

Then you also have animal husbandry, if you could smuggle a few Merino sheep in you might well be rich. How about knowing how to make silk?

I think you have to look at what the people were doing at the time, where they already had an understanding, and extend it.

So I would be looking at farming, textile technology, water powered wood mills, maybe the mining and refining of metals.

Many of these things are interdependent, with one advance reliant upon another - which in turn feeds back and changes the way the whole is carried out.

66

I think setting himself up as a doctor would be a very good plan. He wouldn’t even need to be that good at medicine from a modern standpoint - even just applying basic first aid principles (e.g. wash hands, put alcohol on wounds, don’t use leeches for everything) and knowing a few pieces of pharmacological trivia (like that one can make a pain reliever very close to aspirin out of willow bark) would make him significantly more effective than most doctors of his time.

67

And therein lies the crux of the problem. Who know what the results will be from even the tiniest change, let alone stopping the big plagues or major conquests. You could hypothesise, as some fiction writers do, that history is somehow ‘sticky’ and whatever you do, the end result will not be affected. On the other hand - if you change history - how could we know?

68

I’m a teacher, I never underestimate ignorance. But you’d be in the same boat as every innovator ever. Edison didn’t stick a coiled tungsten filament in an evacuated glass envelope and wait for the world to beat a path to his door. Columbus didn’t attract mass sponsorship for his expedition to China. The terms of the question were “what could you teach…” not “how could you guarantee being hailed as the saviour of mankind”.

Like everyone else, you’d have to spend a mighty long time at the job, and actually be “an optimist, a fighter, stubborn as a mule” and not just talk about it. Eight men out of nine on Magellan’s expedition, including the man himself (and it may be significant that we’re using the words “men” and “man” here), died on the way. If you’re not willing to buck odds like that, you don’t get to be the first to sail around the world.

69

:dubious:

Wash hands? How effective is it going to be to do that when you don’t have running water and the water supply that is present is probably just as contaminated? And how are you going to boil water reliably, when coal is not yet available and firewood is expensive?

Willow bark is going to do a number on the person’s stomach.

What alcohol are you going to use? To make some you need to know how to distill it. If you use alcoholic drinks, well they are expensive, and the kind that are available,such as beer don’t usually have sufficient concentration to kill, or make things worse (like wine).

Really, our modern suggestions require modern infrastructure.

70

But they were also men of their times, culture. You’d be a foreigner in every sense of the word, and would have to develop a support system, let alone deal with the grief of losing the life you knew. Plus your future is still squalid, brutish and short, despite your best efforts. Knowing that would be disheartening. Don’t underestimate your own issues. Long term hunger is exhausting.

I’m not trying to save mankind, I’m just trying to introduce the wheelbarrow, remember?

As far as being a woman-I own a construction company, and I’m very successful at it. I’ve done just about every trade in residential there is. I get shit done, and I lead other guys to get shit done. I have had extensive experience trying to teach new ideas, technology, ways of thinking, with mixed success.

I’ve also tried to build in third world countries. None of my experience, skill, or knowledge matters. I’m lucky to get allowed to push a shovel at best, and even then a woman is an aberration on the job site.

Granted, I’m a foreigner, a woman, and I wasn’t there for years and years. But many of the same dynamics were in play that would be in time travel.

The optimist, rationalist inside thinks that if you build a functional, labor saving device that makes complete sense, of course people would see the value and adapt it.

That would be wrong. And that’s my experience in my own time, my own culture. The culture that’s inventing new things every single day, that has gone from horses to landing on the moon. Where change is faster and faster every day, and we’re trained to embrace it, to travel, to experience new things. People still love to wallow in ignorance.

In 1100AD, on an inbred island, where change is to be regarded with suspicion, if not outright fear? Perhaps you could influence a town of 30 to 50, or a generation or two, but innovation is never linear, and the odds are all of your 21st century knowledge that was passed on dies in a plague or a war.

I figure my best chance would be to find the highest ranking male I could, marry him, and hope he doesn’t beat me too often.

71

The town where I live was, a hundred years ago, the world’s largest manufacturer of needles. There were dozens of small businesses performing the various tasks that go to make, pack and market them. The toughest, in terms of being the one where workers had the shortest life expectancy, was grinding the points. The reason for the problem was simply the dust it created which was then breathed in.

When someone came up with a simple extractor fan, the men refused to have anything to do with it. They were pretty much the highest paid workers in the trade, and they could see that as soon as the job became more attractive, the rates would drop. They preferred to breath the dust and die young if that kept their standard of living up. This was innovation from within the industry and not from some outsider.

72

No, you don’t try to get other people to accept it; you just find someone who needs some bulk (dirt, rocks, etc.) moved, and negotiate to be payed by the amount moved, not by the day. :wink:
While the other haulers are carrying baskets and sacks back and forth, you wheel your wheelbarrow and end up getting payed twice as much for half the effort. :smiley:

I think even the most moronic peasant would quickly get the idea.

73

Yes, they would “get the idea” and not being moronic, would soon realise that if they take up your idea, the rate for shifting earth will go down. You would likely end up under whatever construction they were building.

74

And that’s why the wheelbarrow was never adopted in the Western world.

Or, people not being moronic (and while at the same time conceding that Luddism and sabotage are real things), they get that while they’re only getting paid twopence for what used to be a threepenny job, they can do it in half the time and so still end up making fourpence where they used to make three.

You might have to work a little to sell the idea, but see above concerning Edison, Columbus and all the others. It’s probably a better bet than trying to marry yourself off when you have no family, are already known to be spoiled goods, don’t have any of the basic householding equipment that women are supposed to have, and don’t know how to perform common household tasks anyway.

75

Yes, I knew the use of Arabic numeral system had been patchy in Europe quite some time after first arriving on the continent. Even as late as the 1580’s Elizabeth I’s Sec. of State William Cecil, an otherwise intelligent man, found using Arabic numerals too difficult when adding and subtracting. He relied upon Roman numerals for such purposes.

76

I can always invent the golf ball, then the garden hose, then demonstrate.

77

England before the Norman invasion was not as primitive as you may imagine. There were wealthy nobles, learned monks, and skilled artisans who made very fine goods. You would have to attach yourself as a servant to one of these sources of power, offering your knowledge in exchange for protection.

78

You could probably build a workable hang glider with a little know how. Not terribly useful, but probably pretty damn impressive to the locals.

79

Firewood expensive? Nearly every home had a fire burning all the time. It’s how homes were heated in the winter and how meals were cooked each day. Fire is probably the easiest thing to get a hold of in any sort of settlement. The alcohol too would have been fine. The sterilizing properties of alcohol were one of its benefits at the time over the ground water which could carry typhoid or other harmful pathogens.

80

Anglo Saxon Britain had the type of high level woodland management which makes firewood easy to get?:dubious:

Norman,Platagenet and Tudor/Stuart England, certainly, but for most people of that era collecting green wood from the surrounding forest and water from the well or stream. Its going to be quite challenging to get enough water and get it hot enough to reliably kill pathogens.

The second part of your reply is a a myth and beer and the wines of the time did not have the concentration required to kill bacteria and other pathogens.