My England

some info

So I desided to put down some info for those who may be confused and also if you have any questions this is a good place to ask them.

The Highlands refers to the area of Scotland and Ireland which at this time was completely separate nations from most of England and that's why they assumed that the boy was a slave most likely taken from the highlands as a trophy of war mostly do to his red hair.

However as you can tell from reading the story the boy speaks a language that none of the others are familiar with that's because he's not English at all in fact he's Norman.

Normandy was the predecessor to what we now know as France and Normandy conquered England after the fall of the Roman Empire which were the first to colonize England.

During this time most of England was still wild so to say! Normandy before the official conquering didn't really have a lot of control in fact most of England was free rein and even after Normandy took control there were still several parts of England that still held on to much of their freedom however Normandy had considerable power over most of England at this time especially since they were a Christian Nation and in many ways they were quite authoritarian.

However what a French boy is doing all the way in England it's something you'll just have to find out while reading the story!

We know very little actually about the social structures and the religious beliefs of the ancient English people's we know the most about the Irish and the Celts but there were many more people's and even then the people's that we do have knowledge of most of their beliefs and writings were destroyed.

So I might take some liberties with some things!

You should also leave your Marvel based assumptions of the Norse gods behind!

You should also leave many of your assumptions about ancient paganism in this time period behind as well because I'm a lot of the movies I've seen that usually shows a bunch of people dancing around a fire when what we do know of the English religious beliefs painted a very different picture that again varied from the different tribes that still had many core foundations.

A lot of these core foundations were actually very similar to the shamanic religions of Native Americans being that they believed in animal spirits and they worshipped in lots of ancestors as well as the spirits of the Earth they were also a more feminine based religion they valued feminine properties over masculine ones which may sound very hard to believe coming from the people that run into battle naked hitting things with swords but the religion was solely based on a balance between the opposites of each other.

They held a very high reverence for war and death but they also held a very high reverence for life and the idea of birth and it was this balance death and darkness between life and light that made up most of their beliefs and was the strong point for most of their cultural ideals.

One should also keep in mind that the story takes place far in the past so there are plenty of things that people did in the past that wouldn't be okay to do now! Or would not make much sense nowadays for example to the Kæl young men become adults at 15 and young women become adults at 12 which was pretty standard amongst most people at this time.

However a lot of the practices for marriage varied amongst people and especially very between the English and the people of Normandy.

For example in much of the English and Norse people women had a lot of equal opportunities they could become Warriors Chieftains and queens or priestesses and sometimes have full Liberty to live their life as they choose without a man well in most of Christian Normandy this was a completely different story.

In the early Christian days it wasn't entirely unheard of for Lourdes to pick the daughter of a family that they favored usually the girl would be around seven or eight years old and she would be taken to live with him in his Palace and according to the laws at the time which again varied he could technically be allowed to marry her when she was 10 as you can imagine this resulted in a lot of girls dying in childbirth and a lot of problems.

Also in the early Christian days it was more acceptable for men to have Mistresses on the side especially if the need for an heir was presented however when women had extramarital affairs they were usually ostracize and sometimes even put to death by their husbands (go figure)

One of the only ways that women would escape this fate was denounced everything in order to become nuns in fact after the Conquering of most of England it wasn't entirely unheard of for princesses to become nuns before they got married so that they would not be made to do anything by their husbands.

People have been taking slaves from all over the world for centuries at least! For example in ancient England they would take slaves from other tribes however it was the Romans that started taking slaves initially from Africa normally from places like Egypt but eventually moving farther south at the fall of the Roman Empire it was the Normans and do the Italians that carried on the tradition.

People didn't really understand disease during this time period and they didn't have a lot of the technology that we do now so there were very simple things that often meant death like asthma which killed hundreds of children when was feared almost more than any other illness or injury sense asthma primarily affected young children and because they had no way to treat it as money usually killed very small children.

And now back to England! In the ancient days people spoke to each other very differently and they expressed their affections to each other very differently for example if we were to see two men holding hands walking down the street today we would probably assume that there a couple however in ancient England especially Pagan ruled England this was an entirely different story while we don't know much about them again we do know that they were very accepting of very many things due to their spiritual beliefs and that they also expressed affection for each other very vehemently compared to how we express our affection now especially between males.

Similarly to how female friends typically greet each other and are very physically affectionate in the ancient times male friends were often the same and we even have poems from this time of men sending each other greetings and calling each other beautiful (aww!)

In fact a lot of the poems that we do have and even some of the letters from this time can often be misconstrued as lovers sometimes from our own mindset so I decided to just tell you guys this to prevent any confusion! It ain't gay till it's gay!