Update, December 5

[Kris@WLP]

[Happygun]

[K-MacK]

Congrats! You did it!.

Sad fact is that in the Arthurian stories, the villans are mostly female; from Morgain le Fey to Guenivere. I suspect that the prevailing attitude to women in general had something to do with it.
And yeah, I said Guenivere; who was responsible for the unraveling of Arthur's round table band of knights...and Lancelot was already married!

[RBrigham]

[Kris@WLP]

[RBrigham]

[PHDrillSergeant]

[Kris@WLP]

[llearch]

[Kris@WLP]

[K-MacK]

[bar1scorpio]

[llearch]

Making a straw that can bend in the right places isn't as easy as it seems, I guess.

Plastics really are a -huge- change from earlier construction methods, or so I understand. You could probably create the sort of straw you're thinking of in metal, but it wouldn't bend, and would be relatively fragile - not really a good idea in sword-type combat, I'd think. Getting a chunk of, say, marsh grass or something would do a reasonable straw, but wouldn't be bent, so the ease of use isn't so much.

Of course, this is all armchair theory, so anyone with experience is welcome to enlighten me. ;-]

Either that or ideas of what one would make such an item out of...

[bar1scorpio]

or just rinsed out gut, I was thinking...

[llearch]

Wouldn't work.

AIUI, the suction generates pressure inside the straw, so the straw body has to be solid enough to withstand that pressure - otherwise the suction force goes into pressing the straw flat, and not sucking the water up from the end.

... which is why plastic is so useful in this particular instance.

Hmm. Unless you folded it into shape and then let it dry - but then, you've still got the "can't bend" issue. Plus, getting it wet will incite mold...

[LoupGarou]

They could have used malleable copper tubing (which they did know how to make) for the main part of the tubing, and had the wineskin strapped to the inside of the back of the armor. Then, once the tubing made it's way over the shoulder, changed it to a short stub of something else to make the run into the helmet. Maybe something along the lines of reed or "animal internals". Heck, they could even have just used a few coils of the malleable copper in a larger coil around the neckline so that it would allow for head turning.

Loup

[Kris@WLP]

You wouldn't want to use copper for wine; the acid in wine corrodes the copper, and the corrosion taints the wine.

Also, bear in mind the medieval period. Copper wasn't as valuable as silver or gold, but it was still a precious metal... indeed, ALL metal was precious, in the sense that it was very expensive to get.

A copper drinking straw would be a plaything for the EXTREMELY wealthy.

[K-MacK]

[Dark Jay]

[Fionn the Otaku]

[K-MacK]

[quote="Fionn the Otaku" There Sewer and bath tech was certionaly impressive as was there construction tech.[/quote]

I saw a Teevee show recently that highlighted Roman plumbing & such...there are several British towns that are still using the Roman-installed sewers today, and "Watling Street" ( a highway, really) is built on the old Roman road across Britannia. You can still see the Roman construction today, in places where the road wasn't built exactly over it.
Anybody think that our highway system will last over 1900 years?

That would make Sir Marrok's armor as Roman Steel, reworked into chain- and-splint, with plates. Good stuff, and about as protective as you could get, short of dressing up like a water heater (Full Plate armor).

[Kris@WLP]

There's something much more important you're missing: most of the Arthurian legends that were -written down- were written by priests and monks, the most notable being Geoffrey of Monmouth.

At the time monks didn't write anything without tacking on morality lessons, whether or not they fit. It wasn't just Germanic peoples that subjugated women- and let's recall that the English who adopted the Arthur legends as their own were Germanic themselves, Angles, Saxons, Danes and Normans. The Catholic Church was also extremely hot on keeping women in their place. Any and all stories that involved strong women had to be converted to show that being a strong, independent woman was sinful- or else that those women were sinful for other reasons.

Hence Morgan and Morgause became witches, and Guinevere an adultress. Mordred was pretty much invented by the monks to signify how Arthur's reign collapsed due to his own sins- Mordred, remember, is both Arthur's son and nephew, by either Morgan or Morgause depending on the source. Even the Ladies of the Lake- first Vivian and then Nimue- became wicked enchantresses, each with their own agenda. Femininity itself was regarded as innately sinful, to be controlled, mistrusted, and guarded against.

The Grail Quests, Tristram and Isolde, and numerous other legends- including possibly Marrok himself, since there's an identical legend of a werewolf knight in southern France- were slapped into the Arthurian mythos in an ongoing attempt to make Arthur an example of how an attempt at noble goals and holy ideals collapsed due to the sinful nature of man.

Remember: virtually all history from the medieval period was written not by the victor, but by the priest- who was even more biased than the victor would have been.

[Happygun]

It wasn't just portraying woman as weak or evil. The indigenous religious practices we're also targeted by the priests and monks because they posed a threat to the church's expansion. In fact, the figure of the "mother-goddess" - a re-occurring archetype in many "pagan" religions and female counterpart to the "father-god" of the Christian religion - often went hand-in-hand with the idea of strong, independent women. Thus missionaries would condemn such beliefs and practices as witchcraft or Bowdlerize them and incorporate them into Catholic dogma.

[K-MacK]

There's a classic example of that across the Irish sea. Brigit, Protectress of the Hearth, the threshhold, children and goldsmiths, an ancient deity of the Irish people, became St. Brigit Patroness of the Hearth, the threshhold, children, and Goldsmiths... all in one stroke of a frustrated monk's pen. They couldn't overcome Her, so they made Her a saint.
How clever...