Comment by throw23748923
9 hours ago
What's the chance this event happened as recorded in popular memory? The inscription dates to 1284, but the earliest mention according to the article is 1384, 100 years later. On a symbolic day no less. The plaque, where 1284 is inscribed, is on a house dating to the 1500s.
It seems much more plausible that e.g. children emigrated as adults to another region (as mentioned in the article) and the old-timers who stayed behind lamented the 'loss of their children' so to speak; when the history was recorded in town records, it's unlikely that any of these old-timers or children were around. Hundreds of years of historical layering, where the most interesting version of the story is the one that is reinforced likely explains the mythological nature of the tale.
But what do I know? I suppose it is curious.
Combining all the elements, a foreigner-led emigration of adult / young adults en masse because of a rat/disease/sanitation problem seems just fine as an explanation.
While the mystery of the story has always been attractive the maybe more obvious moral truth within the tale is part of its enduring nature.
In short the town screws the piper for his work with the rats, in what looks to be an act of greed and arrogance by the town leaders, likley even having done this before (tales of exploited contractors are easy to find even to this day).
But the moral was in the way the piper responded, shockingly and surprisingly taking off with (per the plaque) some 130 children at midsommer no less.
It’s a little abstracted here as the article doesn’t start with the legend (of course cause it’s so famous); but I think the historical reframe to draw from this is that after not being paid for his work removing rats he “takes payment” by recruiting 130 children and taking them to settle new lands (being paid then for the provision of the children to the settlors).
I think for those interested in the histories, it somewhat solves the mystery and clarifies how the piper was paid in the end. The beauty of the narrative and the core moral of the story remain. And likely this story is still relevant for us today.
Make good on your promises especially around payment lest the other party takes payment in other ways, with possible costs that you never first considered.
As the involvement of a magic flute is unlikely in the extreme, this devolves to kidnapping.
As to why, the article asserts the scenarios of forced migration for settling new areas, or perhaps a "childrens' crusade" to the war in the Middle East.
> On a symbolic day no less.
Meh, the feast day of two saints. Pretty much any day of the year. Today is the feast day for Saints Bertille, Zechariah, and Elizabeth.
People in medieval times had more time off not working than today. Feast days were actual feast days, they often didn't work during them. Feast days were not something written on a calendar that only a few people could consult and say "hmm, oh look today is the feast day of such and such... meh, what's for supper?" :-)
They had to a greater or lesser extent, fairs, games, dances - they were literally festivals. People looked forward to and prepared in advance for feast days. There are at least 2 things that I think are relevant: firstly feast days punctuated and delimited the calendar and people's lives and secondly feast days were very memorable shared whole-community events.
This doesn't necessarily make the story more believable but it can make it more memorable. Think of a story where it says "it happened at Halloween and again at Christmas" and it could just help fix that story in a specific time making it more memorable in our brains.
Sorry, you think early-modern indentured sharecropping subsidence farmers without dishwashers, laundry machines, sewing machines, or industrialized clothing production worked less than 2080 hours a year?
Subsidence farming is a brutally demanding, painful way to scrape a living. Even with modern technology, it can't be overstated the sheer amount of labor it takes to grow enough food just to feed yourself, and that's without owing an obscene portion of your product to your "landlord" (who's also your employer and your local government, and can forbid you freedom of movement and dictate your personal life).
Laundry was an immense amount of labor. Keeping the home intact took labor. Maintaining your clothes took labor.
Look up the the BBC historic farm series if you want an idea of the amount of work it takes to actually run a farm, without any of the extra problems actually living in that period would bring, such as not understanding germ theory and sanitation, unreliable access to clean water, no real medical care, no real birth control, and no defense against a bad season just breaking your back.
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100 years isn't that long though. Enough to transmit an exact date to multiple people. Also, the oldest surviving record isn't necessarily the earliest record there ever was.
Go play a game of telephone with 20 people and see how well information travels. Now multiply that by 100 years.
If that game of telephone includes the sentence "I'm going to kidnap your child", I'll bet it travels faster and more accurately than you think it will.
100 years doesn't require a game of telephone with 20 people. It requires maybe 2 or 3. And for a event known to a whole town, you have multiple independent narrators which can help stabilize information.
My family has far more trivial information passed down orally that is way older than 100 years.
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That calculation doesn't make sense.
The telephone game lacks features in the telling that are common in oral storytelling that help reinforce the content and reduces the number of errors. Repeated telling, repetition in the structure, rhyming and alliteration (which is used, or even if they're used, depends on the language), being made into a song (seems to stick better than just straight speaking), etc. If you played the telephone game with a deliberately constructed story using those elements and taught that story to the next "generation" by repetition over a period of time before they, in turn, repeated it to the next generation it would be much more reliable. It also wouldn't be the telephone game.
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Except oral histories seemed to have been very important to people and passing them down accurately has been noted throughout history
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Yeah it is. It's a full generation.
The Spanish flu is a great example of that phenomena. It's hardly mentioned in history books yet we had a flu season where people were dying in the streets. Very shortly after it happened, people stopped talking about it or mentioning it.
COVID is looking like it will very much turn into the same thing.
These are massive global events that may only get small blubs 100 years later. Now imagine an event that happens in a localized area. How much of that event will get carried on or reported?
You also have to remember that in the 1200s, things like paper and ink were a lot more expensive than modern paper. That's part of the reason literacy rates were a lot lower.
> It's a full generation.
This is wrong. It is 4 generations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation
« the average period, generally considered to be about 20–30 years, during which children are born and grow up, become adults, and begin to have children. »
> a great example of that phenomena
This is wrong. "Phenomena" is plural. The singular is "phenomenon."
> It's hardly mentioned in history books
Because it is living memory for a small number of people.
"Spanish flu" is widely remembered, and just 4-5 years ago thousands of articles were published comparing the measures taken a century before against a pandemic.
> small blubs
I think you meant "blurbs", as in "short informal pieces of writing", and it's a poor choice of words anyway. "To blub" means to cry.
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/blub
These repeated errors strongly weaken your argument, and suggest that despite your confident tone you don't know as much as you think.
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I mean looking at the attested record, interpreting it, weighing evidence and motive and audience in this way, that's what historians do that is the practice of the discipline of history.
100 years later is actually pretty damn close all things considered! For comparison we have contemporaneous inscriptions and epigraphs attesting the existence of alexander the great but the earliest surviving accounts of his actions are from 200-300 years later. It can be the dedicated work of a scholar's lifetime to pry a handful of verifiable facts from these second- and third-hand, biased, incomplete accounts. But the lifetimes stack up and the guesses come into focus as knowledge.
> For comparison we have contemporaneous inscriptions and epigraphs attesting the existence of alexander the great but the earliest surviving accounts of his actions are from 200-300 years later.
This is true, but those surviving accounts quote or paraphrase contemporaneous accounts from his generals like Ptolemy and others that have since been lost.
Sure but now we're doing history in the comment section where I only intended to point out that this is exactly how history is done.