Toughness.

This is coolbert:

In my last blog entry I mentioned the program of mental conditioning and mental toughening currently being undergone by selected 101st Airborne troops destined for deployment to Iraq.

This sort of "thing" would not have been needed for the medieval soldier, or even, for a matter of act, by the American soldier of the Civil War era.

Death, dismemberment, and traumatic injury was a common fact of life. Folks were more accustomed to these sorts of "life events" than are moderns.

Death was considered to be a norm of life. In a family of say twelve children, maybe only three would grow to adulthood. And of those three, maybe only ONE would reach old age. Such was the effect primarily of disease. Even up to the year 1900, the average life expectancy of an American was only fifty years!!

Butchering of livestock was a skill most adults could perform without much trepidation. Blood, guts, animal parts, and cutting of a freshly killed carcass was almost a NECESSITY for survival. People were accustomed to this!!

Dismemberment and traumatic injury were much more common among people that lived and worked with large draft animals or toiled in occupations that involved heavy manual labor, often using tools that were and are dangerous in themselves [saws, axes, etc.].

[there was an article in the National Geographic magazine some time ago about the type of injuries suffered by Neanderthal Man. There are about forty skeletal remains of Neanderthals that have been thoroughly studied as to injuries suffered during adult life. It was found that these Neanderthals had injuries that correspond to the injuries suffered by persons in only one particular type of modern profession, that of the rodeo cowboy. Rodeo cowboys and Neanderthals suffer injuries in a manner statistically almost never found in the real world. Persons who hunted and worked around dangerous big animals. Big enormous critters can hurt you easily and without even provocation!!]

Hard physical labor, and a life often of much privation was the norm for the medieval person, and was so until quite recently too!! Persons were accustomed to walking long distances bearing load, and doing so without a murmur for the most part. This was expected of you. The soldier of yore for the most part DID NOT need a period of physical conditioning to bring him up to snuff. He ALREADY WAS!!

[a recent study demonstrates that an Amish man in America walks three times as far each day than does his civilized, technological counter-part. It is also known that over 100 years ago, when cutting blocks of ice from a pond for storage, the average person of the time could handle 150 pound blocks without problem. Modern man can average only 70 to 80 pound blocks, in comparison. Modern man HAS become a wuss!!]

Violence and killing, often of a bloody and close-up nature, was the rule of the day. People in say medieval times were NOT a whole lot more peaceful than what modern man is. According to the British military historian John Keegan:

"Warfare in the age of edged weapons required yet another vanished military quality . . . a physical brazenness which would allow a man to look a stranger in the face and strike to fell him without provocation and compunction [even to cutting your adversary into two pieces!!] . . . For direct, face-to-face knock-down and drag-out violence is something which modern, middle- class Western man encounters rarely if at all in his everyday life."



And.

"But in violent and technically primitive societies, the facts of battle come as less of a shock to those who first face them, and leave presumably less of a scar, than they do in ordered, technically developed states."

Training for mental toughening would have been not even required for the medieval soldier. He was already there!!

coolbert.