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In July of 1316, a priest with a hankering for fresh apples sneaked into a walled garden in the Cripplegate area of London to help himself to the fruits therein. The gardener caught him in the act, and the priest brutally stabbed him to death with a knife—hardly godly behavior, but this was the Middle Ages. A religious occupation was no guarantee of moral standing.
That's just one of the true-crime gems to be found in a new interactive digital "murder map" of London compiled by University of Cambridge criminologist Manuel Eisner. Drawing on data catalogued in the city Coroners' Rolls, the map shows the approximate location of 142 homicide cases in late medieval London. The map launched to the public in late November on the website for the university's Violence Research Center, and be forewarned—it's extremely addictive. You could easily lose yourself down the rabbit hole of medieval murder for hours, filtering the killings by year, choice of weapon, and location. (It works best with Google Chrome.)
"The events described in the Coroners' Rolls show weapons were never very far away, male honor had to be protected, and conflicts easily got out of hand," said Eisner, who embarked on the project to create an accessible resource for the public to explore the historical records. "They give us a detailed picture of how homicide was embedded in the rhythms of urban medieval life."
[...] The greatest risk of violent death in London was on weekends (especially Sundays), between early evening and the first few hours after curfew.
[...] As Eisner notes, "Sunday was the day when people had the time to engage in social activities—drinking and playing games that would occasionally trigger frictions leading to assault." Mondays were the second most likely day for homicides, perhaps because frictions spilled over from the weekend.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @10:07PM (1 child)
No I didnt. Those are the start dates of the three most notable periods of societal upheaval that have been linked to climate:
I didn't know about yours, but yea that should be included. Of course, the further back in time you go the less certain the dates, so all these dates should have error bars.
Also, these climate change won't noticeably (to us, millennia later) affect the societies of every region at the same time, so to go further we would have to account for that. The earlier data is mostly from Mesopotamia and north Africa, wile the later is more from Europe.
But I would say put +/- 300 years on all those dates for the true "start" is ok as a rough estimate.
Yes, but this is just the first step of science. We are organizing the data to look for a pattern that may require explanation. I think it looks interesting enough at this point to put more effort into cleaning the data up, estimating uncertainty around the dates, looking for something that may be relevant ~300BC, playing with the cycle period (perhaps the best fit is not constant but is monotonically getting longer each time), etc. Not yet ready to go to the next step.
Next step would be guessing at what could have caused it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning), after that is deducing predictions from our guess about what should happen in the future, then finally we collect the new data and compare to our predictions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @11:15PM
Wow:
~ 2700 BC
Possible date associated with worldwide flood myths and world's oldest known organism is born:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_environmental_history [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methuselah_(tree) [wikipedia.org]