Preindustrial Army Travel – Camp Followers and Sexuality [Part 3]

Hey there folks, here’s the third part of my “Preindustrial travel” series! Most of the text is copied from the link on my writing Tumblr, with mild formatting/word edits.

Series links:

-Part 1: Preindustrial travel times.

-Part 2a: Preindustrial travel times – Armies.

-Part 2b: Preindustrial travel tangent – Warhorses.

Note: While a lot of my setting and character advice avoids the topic of sexual assault, and only skims over homophobia in regions/time-settings, that is very much a conscious decision. Assault and intolerance are constantly exaggerated by modern authors to hammer home how “brutish/terrifying” medieval life was, to the distress of many women and LBGT folks.

Moreover, our particular type of “intolerance” is not necessarily how historical people would be intolerant, and I’ve seen a couple of medieval historians begging people to just TONE IT DOWN ALREADY. If you want edginess, go watch or read Game of Thrones / A Song of Ice and Fire again.

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Camp Followers and Sexuality

I didn’t have a chance to cover this while talking about all these finicky details regarding food and wagons, but thesiat rightly pointed out that for adult readers and writers, camp followers absolutely provide an additional service: Sex-work! It was anywhere from “frowned upon but tolerated as long as you kept it quiet” to an explicitly known trade, like carpentry or baking.

The medieval era was not nearly as prudish and hypocritical about sex as we thought it was–that was most likely a misconception from the Victorians, who WERE prudish in public and could be downright nasty in private. (When in doubt about historical misconceptions, I blame the Victorians. They fucked up a LOT of stuff.)

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Continue reading “Preindustrial Army Travel – Camp Followers and Sexuality [Part 3]”

Preindustrial travel tangent – Warhorses [Part 2b]

Part 2b of my Preindustrial travel series, with much of the text copied from this link. I also added some notes for clarity.

-Part 1: Preindustrial travel times.

-Part 2a: Preindustrial travel times – Armies.

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First of all: DESTRIERS WERE NOT DRAFT HORSES. Horse/military historians are begging people to stop putting their fantasy knights on Shires, Belgians, and other massive, chunky farm-horses! The best known instance of “a knight needs to get lifted onto their 18-hand draft horse” is a SATIRE (A Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, if I remember right), but somehow laymen decided to take it seriously.

Hell, I think the film’s historians knew that this was extremely inaccurate and begged the director not to do it.

For the purposes of this post, I will not get into the different TYPES OF WARHORSES. That is a hyper-fixation for another day, lol.

Continue reading “Preindustrial travel tangent – Warhorses [Part 2b]”

Preindustrial travel times – Armies [Part 2a]

Hello folks, this is Part 2a of my preindustrial traveling series! As with my first post, it’s been copied and pasted from the Tumblr link.

Series links:

-Part 1: Preindustrial travel times.

-Part 2b: Preindustrial travel tangent – Warhorses.

Now for a key aspect that many people often ask about: Preindustrial ARMY travel times!

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Much of this information was explained by Bret Devereaux’s article “How fast do armies move?” (https://acoup.blog/2019/10/06/new-acquisitions-how-fast-do-armies-move/)

A given preindustrial force will usually move at 8-12 miles per day (with the usual caveats of “fair weather and good roads”). Caveat: Exclude the Mongols and other extreme outliers.

Why are armies only covering half the distance of civilian travelers?

Captain Obvious’ answer: BECAUSE A SOLDIER’S KIT IS HEAVY, MOTHERFUCKER. AND BARRING EMERGENCIES, EVERY COMMANDER WHO HAS MORE THAN TEN FIGHTERS AND MORE THAN TWO BRAIN-CELLS WILL HAVE A SHITTON MORE STUFF AND MORE PEOPLE TO DEAL WITH THAN THE SOLDIERS.

No, that’s not an exaggeration. A preindustrial force larger than 10-20 foot soldiers, or any force who expects to travel for more than a couple of days in VERY nice weather, will need 1) AT LEAST ONE CART OR WAGON to carry tents, firewood, food, and cookware, and 2) AT LEAST A FEW CAMP FOLLOWERS to actually set up camp.

Continue reading “Preindustrial travel times – Armies [Part 2a]”

Preindustrial travel times [Part 1]

Hey there folks, I have an unexpected hit post on Tumblr regarding preindustrial travel times, so I decided to post the current text on my blog in case anyone wants to read the thread.

Series links:

-Part 2a: Preindustrial travel times – Armies.

-Part 2b: Preindustrial travel tangent – Warhorses.

-Part 3: Preindustrial Army Travel – Camp Followers and Sexuality.

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Here’s the link to the updated Tumblr post as of Jan 30, 2024 (https://www.tumblr.com/jadevine/738801850678116352/preindustrial-travel-and-long-explanations-on-why?source=share)

Preindustrial travel, and long explanations on why different distances are like that.

Update Jan 30, 2024: I should get the posts about army travel times and camp followers reformatted and posted to my blog around the end of the week, so I’ll filter through my extremely tangled thread for them.

Part 2 – Preindustrial ARMY travel times: https://www.tumblr.com/jadevine/739342239113871360/now-for-a-key-aspect-that-many-people-often-ask

Part 2a – How realistic warhorses look and act, because the myth of “all knights were mounted on huge clunky draft horses” just refuses to die: https://www.tumblr.com/jadevine/732043691180605440/helpful-things-for-action-writers-to-remember

Part 3 – Additional note about camp followers being regular workers AND sex-workers: https://www.tumblr.com/jadevine/740604203134828544/reblogging-the-time-looped-version-of-my

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I saw a post on my main blog about how hiking groups need to keep pace with their slowest member, but many hikers mistakenly think that the point of hiking is “get from Point A to Point B as fast as possible” instead of “spending time outdoors in nature with friends,” and then they complain that a new/less-experienced/sick/disabled hiker is spoiling their time-frame by constantly needing breaks, or huffing and puffing to catch up.

I run into a related question of “how long does it take to travel from Point A to Point B on horseback?” a lot, as a fantasy writer who wants to be SEMI-realistic; in the Western world at least, our post-industrial minds have largely forgotten what it’s like to travel, both on our own feet and in groups.

People ask the new writer, “well, who in your cast is traveling? Is getting to Point B an emergency or not? What time of year is it?”, and the newbies often get confused as to why they need so much information for “travel times.” Maybe new writers see lists of “preindustrial travel times” like a primitive version of Google Maps, where all you need to do is plug in Point A and Point B.

But see, Google Maps DOES account for traveling delays, like different routes, constructions, accidents, and weather; you as the person will also need to figure in whether you’re driving a car versus taking a bus/train, and so you’ll need to figure out parking time or waiting time for the bus/train to actually GET THERE.

The difference between us and preindustrial travelers is that 1) we can outsource the calculations now, 2) we often travel for FUN instead of necessity.

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Continue reading “Preindustrial travel times [Part 1]”

Short story – Whale Fall (or, Lolo Tandayag)

What’s up folks, it has been a while since I updated! Today I have a short-story draft. I was originally planning to submit this to Apex Magazine, but my writing coach at the time mentioned that it seemed “too long for a short story” with several characters appearing, and I should probably expand it to a novella so everyone has time to breathe. So here’s the germ of another project!

I have short stories all over the place, but whenever I try to write them, they just keep growing. Lol.

The main story is behind the cut! Also: For the whale-spirit speech in all-capital letters, my original document uses a different font that is also adjusted to be VERY BIG, but I can’t do that in WordPress, so it’s just bolded/italicized, and now I’m annoyed.

Continue reading “Short story – Whale Fall (or, Lolo Tandayag)”

Good news!

Followers may know my constant issues with trying to get folks to read my prose writing, but I am also a struggling SCRIPT WRITER! So recently, I sent a theater script prologue and my concept art to one of my theater friends. 1) He loves it, especially the concept art! My constant problem of getting […]

Fanfiction updates!

Hello, readers! After finishing “The Crocodile God,” I have clearly not learned my lesson with “focusing on one project at a time,” so if anyone’s watched “Black Panther 2: Wakanda Forever,” I have a fanfiction about the underwater city, Talokan! It’s called “The Lightning-Axe,” and I go into heavy worldbuilding about how the rain-god Chaac […]

Extremely late notes about my drafts!

Hey folks, I hope this week was a good one. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been transferring my two main novel drafts to Wattpad since that site is more established than Inkitt and Inkshares. If anyone has an account there or wants to check the new links out, The Crocodile God is here and […]