checking out the library book / Love

[Barry Arrowsmith]

--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, "pippin_999" <foxmoth at q...> wrote:
> Um, souls are what dementors eat. Lupin makes the first mention, I
> think, in PoA, and is careful to state that one can lose one's 
> soul and go on living. The cathedrals are in GoF ch 8 "Though Harry 
> could see only a fraction of the immense gold walls surrounding
> the pitch, he could tell that ten cathedrals would fit comfortably
> inside it." The nuns are guests at NHN's deathday party. 
>

OK.  Souls I'll give you though since wizards don't seem to practice
any religion I'll need to write to  Edinburgh to get the spelling confirmed.
Has  anyone checked their boots?
Cathedrals - oh, no. Not going to allow that. It's a metaphorical 
statement made  by a boy  brought up as a Muggle. 
Nuns. They were considered worse  than the monks. A Nunnery was a 
dumping ground for unwanted female relatives that couldn't be married 
off, and nunneries were reluctant to admit any without a sweetner in cash
or land. Religion was quite often considered optional. Read Christopher 
Hibbert "The English - a social history" - a visiting bishop complained 
bitterly because the nuns brought their packs of hunting dogs into the 
services, wouldn't stop talking and complaining about how long he was
delaying them from the hunting field.

> 
> Pippin:
> Ghosts and prophecies are generally associated with the religion
> of whatever culture they belong to. Those who believe in them
> obviously do not consider them fantasy.
>

I'll dispute the religious connection as a generality, though there
are individual cases. 
Most 'ghosts' seem to be comparable to NHN. Victims of violence
or neglect or those who died having left something undone.

> Pippin:
> Medieval knights were specifically the product of a Christian
> culture. They were vowed to serve Christ. The romances, far 
> from glossing over, were often driven by the conflict  between 
> earthly desires and the ideals of Christian service. That some 
> people of those times considered piling  up infidel  corpses as
> one of those ideals does not mean they were less than sincere
> about it, I'm afraid. 
> 

Medieval knights were soldiers. That was their raison d'etre. The
knight was the basic unit of the feudal system - how many knights
and supporters could your tenants-in-chief bring in time of war.
They could fulfill their obligations by paying for a knight and 
supporters instead of turning up themselves - a primitive taxation,
but for a century or two after the Conquest if you held land then you 
were expected/obligated to maintain or employ a certain number of 
knights commensurate with your supposed income. With no standing
army it was the only way to have a decent-sized trained force at the 
king's disposal. Any religious connection was purely incidental. 

In fact there were massive rows with the monastries  because they 
were often sitting on land that the king would otherwise spread around
and increase his military and economic power in one stroke. Monastries 
had exemptions from taxation and were quite often endowed as a sort
of tax avoidance scheme. It did not make them popular. A would-be
knight often had to travel abroad because there was no chance of lands
or a post in England.

'Chivalry' has the same derivation as cavalry. It's a man on a horse, 
i.e. someone of status. This 'all night in the chapel' stuff was quite 
rare and mostly limited to religious orders - Templars, Hospitallers 
(again, no common scum, please). All other knights won their spurs
in battle, real or the jousts - at least until they started making
knighthood a bestowed honour - Garter, etc.

Once you start digging into it, the social structures in this period
of history are fascinating.