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Turning point ??


tonymaillman

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The economic consequences of the Black Death, tying in with Mary's point about the plague. It speeded up the development of capitalism, which in turn was based on the textile industry, such as wool in England and also cloth manufacture in the Low Countries, not least Ghent and Antwerp.

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Ah, you see what happened is that there was more land for everyone to till from, and so the peasants got better off, and ended up owning an awful lot more land, gained greater economic power, and moved up the social ladder, but the hobnobs resented this and so artificially bumped the prices up to knock them down, leading to you-know-what in 1381. :wink:

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  • 11 months later...

Seems to sustain the idea that it was the capitalist revolution; one could argue that similarly (at different periods) it occured in the French Revolution and the American War of Independence. :? However, in the case of Russia, they seem to have jumped straight from feudalism to communism, and now back to capitalism?! :wink:

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  • 2 weeks later...

Very much a turning point Mary :wink: largely discovered by Chinese alchemists in the 1st century AD for medicinal purposes i.e. the mixing of saltpetre and sulphur.

 

The fact that it ignited with a 'purple flame' being discover a few centuries later with the military use of it spreading to the Islamic world by the 11th/12th centuries.

 

Didn't really hit the shores of Europe until around the mid 13th century when there are references to 'flying fire' from hollow tubes in 1265 ~ 1285 ish in certain manuscripts. First European battlefield use comes around 1325 with well known use of it at Crecy also in 1346. There is evidence of 'powder' stored at the Tower of London also in 1346 ........ by 1461 there is records of a 'powderhouse' there.

 

Its use saw the demise of archers as a form of front line attack by the year 1598 when Elizabeth I deemed it inappropriate that men should not turn up for military service armed with just a bow and sheaves of arrows ............ good discovery or bad ?? :?

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  • 6 months later...

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