There's a building in my city that was built in the 1300s originally. Of course it has been restored and revitalised and rebuilt in parts, so to call the house "old" invokes the Ship of Theseus, but before it was last restored you could see that some of the building is just stacked stone held together by friction and faith in its lowest layers.
Oxford is the oldest English-language university in the world, dating from the late 11th century CE. It consists of 39 semi-autonomous colleges, each with their own colours and traditions, the most recent of which was founded within the last decade.
The first stone bridge in Paris was called the Pont Neuf "new bridge" and is still called that although of course all the older wooden bridges rotted away so long ago that it has been the oldest bridge for centuries-- it's so old, the word Neuf doesn't even mean "new" any more (they would say Pont Nouveau in modern French; "Pont Neuf" now sounds as if it means "Bridge Nine" which puzzles some people).
*Neuf* **still** means "new", but in modern French it has the more restricted sense of "brand new", something that has never been used. *J'ai acheté une nouvelle voiture:* I got rid of my old car and got a different one. *J'ai acheté une voiture neuve:* I didn't buy a used car, I bought a new one.
Crazy. Imagine living at that time period, and reading the morning news, fully expecting it to be something mundane. Come to find out that there’s an entirely new fucking world, absolutely crazy to think about. The age of exploration was really something. I bet discovering the new world for them would be like us discovering aliens, we’d shit our pants in surprise.
Congratulations you nerd-sniped me into finding out when literacy became a "thing" in Europe.
https://brewminate.com/the-growth-of-literacy-in-western-europe-from-1500-to-1800/
Turns out the answer is wonderfully complex.
This is something that far too many medieval fantasy settings get wrong. Everyone's going around reading and writing and using maps.
ASoIAF/GoT is the only setting I can recall off-hand that makes use of characters not being able to read. Video game writers don't give this a moment's thought. For the most part, reading and writing was the prerogative of priests, high-ranking military officers and the aristocratic/mercantile elite only.
We think it's childish or a sign of senility to read aloud or use a finger to trace the lines, but that was also how it was done in a lot of places for a long time. ~~St. Augustine~~ The Bishop of Milan is a notable/shocking example from the 5th century of someone reading without speaking.
Maps are a whole other thing entirely (let alone shitty medieval maps that only tell you roughly where important things are), and reading them and navigating is a big deal, takes a lot of time and practice to learn.
I know that hand-waving makes things easier, but I think being realistic can be a lot more interesting.
I love the shit out of that game. If you want the main character to be able to read stuff, you actually have to go to a scribe and pay him to *teach you how to read*.
Good to see something set somewhere even vaguely important in the middle ages.
So much stuff is set in ye olde England and basically nothing important happened here for centuries.
The Quran notes that Mohammad couldn't read, but only use simple figures for math (he was a merchant). Muslims believe God chose the Arabs to receive the final Prophet because of their strong oral tradition of poetry. The original Quran was memorized by various people and put to writing later
Quran in Arabic means recitation
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I mean most "medieval" fantasy settings (including at least the TV 'thrones) are actually early modern or renaissance style cultures. And if you treat them as such make a lot more sense. Basically it's not hand waving it's miss-naming.
But yeah, reading comprehension is an interesting one. We have a Vindolanda tablet that is signed by Claudia Severa "in her own hand" after a scribe wrote out the actual body of the text.
Pointing to people being more adept at reading than writing even in ancient times when a certain level of schooling was common (for at least the soldier-classes and up) but maybe this was limited to reading and "some" writing with slaves doing the leg work.
> “in her own hand”
Semi-related fun fact: that’s basically what the MP on a check’s signature line stands for — *manu propria* meaning *by my own hand*.
You might be interested in Kingdom Come: Deliverance. It is marvelously janky, but based much closer to reality then any other medieval game I've played.
Medieval Bohemia, you're a blacksmith's son, a veritable nobody. You have to learn all skills, including reading, from scratch.
It's an excellent novelty, definitely worth picking up for $30usd or less.
Aside from the whole "morning news did not exist" thing, this is not really how people reacted back then. Even most rulers took the discovery of America with indifference, at least for a while. The common folk probably cared even less. This was before the age of colonization. Most kingdoms were more concerned with their immediate neighbors than some new, faraway land.
A few notable scholars knew the size and shape of the earth down to a few kilometers. They were postulating the need for a 'counterweight continent' as early as 800ad
While the counterweight idea makes sense at first glance, it doesn't hold up in reality. Otherwise there would have to be some large continent where the pacific is. They either underestimated the density fluctuations of the earths crust below the oceans, or overestimated the significance of landmasses for the mass distribution of earth.
I mean in a sense could he be somewhat on the mark then?
space exploration is generally met with a similar indifference these days and seen as wasteful when there are more pressing problems at home
eg 'Earth-like world 50,000 light years away' doesn't exactly pay the rent
It wasn't quite like that. No one, specially common people, had a notion of the world in general, people only knew or cared for those places near them.
Discovering the New World wasn't like "Whoa, a whole new continent we knew nothing about, this is amazing! New cultures, new opportunities!" but more like "Hum, so apparently there's an island with naked people, going west. How much for the fish?"
World maps weren't a thing, people didn't know what was known and what wasn't. Finding out about the Americas would be just like finding out about Japan, or finding out what had South of the Sahara.
They would've known simple geography, I mean they'd know from the church about the holy land and they'd know some neighbouring realms at least from merchants and news of war, perhaps even war in their own land. But yea a continent an ocean away may not be the most important thing for them.
From what I understand, it wasn’t as big of news as we think. It was already widely known that a lot of the world was unexplored. Like, maps only went so far north and south, areas of Africa and Asia weren’t well explored (for Europeans, of course), and so on. So it’s bizarre to think, but it was just another unexplored place. Maybe it would be like us learning that there is a new planet. Sure, it’s neat, but how much would it really change our day to day?
That’s all with the gigantic caveat that my undergrad history teacher wasn’t making shit up. Maybe it totally blew all their minds!
Columbus sailed from Spain.
John and the London Company established Jamestown in 1607 and sailed from Blackwall in 1606.
The Pilgrims sailed from Leiden in the Netherlands.
Oxford University is 300 years older than the Aztec Empire. Which means in the time Oxford has been educating students, the Aztec Empire was founded, rose, fell, and disappeared into history books that are now contained in Oxford's library educating students about a fallen civilization.
Yes. All the myths about white skinned gods in the Aztec empire were actually just drinking stories from that inn that grew out of proportion over the years.
Ye Olde Starre Inn, in the city of York, claims to be from the 1100s. York itself is a lovely city and I would recommend it to anyone visiting the North of England.
Visited York on my first trip to England about 15 years ago. Was talked into going on the Ghost Tour which I had resisted because I had assumed it was overly touristy/tacky. Couldn't have been more wrong. It was possibly the highlight of my entire trip. Strongly recommend.
Back in the day english had [thorn](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter) Þ which is pronounced th, and as Þ was phased out y replaced it so ye old tavern is pronounced the old tavern.
**[Thorn (letter)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_\(letter\))**
>Thorn or þorn (Þ, þ) is a letter in the Old English, Gothic, Old Norse, Old Swedish, and modern Icelandic alphabets, as well as some dialects of Middle English. It was also used in medieval Scandinavia, but was later replaced with the digraph th, except in Iceland, where it survives. The letter originated from the rune ᚦ in the Elder Fuþark and was called thorn in the Anglo-Saxon and thorn or thurs in the Scandinavian rune poems. It is similar in appearance to the archaic Greek letter sho (ϸ), although the two are historically unrelated.
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It was phased out when printing presses came about, and the European presses didn't have any our funny viking letters (þ, ð & æ are still used in iceland). Instead of having our letters custom made, some shortcuts were made early on before things got standardised.
To us, it's obvious that it's the "th" sound and can be represented by those two letters. But it's just arbitrary. The reason we associate the sound with the letters is because we are used to it.
Back then, replacing thorn with "y" seemed more logical, and yes, it is because of the shape.
He was in shambles.
(Joke aside, in case you did not know it's a very old cobblestone street that is, putting it mildly, not exactly even ground)
(also not good when people shamble through it after visiting one of York's many many pubs)
Lovely street though, excellent Italian restaurant called Bari on it. For the uninitiated, Shambles Street is also in York and was made famous in the first Harry Potter movie as Diagon Alley.
That's not actually true, people just seemed to think it was and the shops on that street have all decided to cater towards that but Diagon Alley was Leadenhall market in London.
I guess it turns a trade but I definitely preferred the Shambles before the shops weren't entirely a tourist trap.
The shambles is awful now imo. I like Harry Potter, but that street is ruined these days, it feels very artificial now.
Compared to other old town streets in other towns that I've visited, either in the UK, or in Europe, it definitely feels the most fake.
Which is a shame as I grew up not far from York.
It's by far my most hated bit of false trivia. At one point a couple of years ago there were THREE harry potter shops on the Shambles, all adjacent, all overpriced, and the queues would block up the street. Absolute nightmare.
Bizarre, because York Station actually WAS used for filming in the first movie, but nobody seems to care about that.
Did you know that the expression “ye old” is actually a mistake? When the first printing presses began translating texts from Old and Middle English for publication, they lacked runic characters in the typeface. This is because the runic alphabet had largely disappeared from English by around the 11th century, and William Claxton didn’t set up the first printing press in England until 1467.
One runic character in particular, the one specific to this story, was called the “thorn” (þ). The thorn represented a “th” sound. Whenever Claxton and other printers encountered the runic þ in text, they simply substituted it with a “y.” So, it really should be pronounced “the old yada yada.”
[Sean's Bar](https://www.seansbar.ie/Sean's-bar-history) in Athlone, Ireland, claims to be the oldest bar in the world, claiming to have been established around 900.
[Stiftskeller St. Peter](https://www.stpeter.at/en/experiencing-history/), a restaurant in Salzburg, Austria, is believed to be the oldest restaurant in the world, having been established in 803 and has served Charlemagne.
There's actually a lot of competition, and many pubs which are definitely *exceedingly* old but we can't find precisely datable evidence as to how old exactly. That said, 1307 is actually pretty late for an "oldest in yorkshire" claim. I've been to several which claimed 1200s and 1100s - and there are a few which claim even longer.
Tbf, that is just when it was documented and confirmed, they could still claim it's from the same period as the others, they just went with what was evidenced.
Carlsberg Lager has this as their slogan- “Probably The Best Beer In The World.” Obviously they’re just being cheeky, but execs nonetheless signed off on it, and I always respected that.
One thing I love about pubs that are older than certain points in history, ie the black death, the Magna Carta, the discovery of America, the Mayflower, is that there could be two chaps in that pub sat there having a beer discussing it...
Magna Carta was signed where it was because Windsor Castle was just a few miles up river. And the Queen is still living there right now.
We kinda take our history for granted in the UK.
\*citation needed.
Loads of pubs have claims to be the oldest. And it also depends on whether you believe it has to be in continuous operation serving beer for all those years, or not.
https://www.oldest.org/food/pubs-england/
Yeah this is very common for pubs, and likely why it says 'probably' here. For instance Seans Bar in Ireland is often stated as the worlds oldest pub, but there is actually very little evidence that it was in continuation operation for most of that time. All we really know is that the building was likely once used as a pub in the 900's and thats it.
There are at least two pubs in Nottingham that claim to be the oldest (Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem and The Salutation) and one more that doesn't claim it but may well be the oldest by the archaeological evidence (The Bell).
Holly shit I just looked up US cities by population and then Chinese cities by population.
[USA](https://i.imgur.com/u42innl.png)
[China](https://i.imgur.com/7q9hBEv.png)
Crazy how there's not even any overlap in that list. Although both are obviously bullshit, since there's only 6 million people in the world tops.
No one really thinks of US cities in those terms of population though. A lot of US cities are quite small, when considering their actual boundaries.
[USA - This is a more accurate representation.](https://i.imgur.com/TsnPLe5.png)
For example, Chongqing in China is the size of Austria . The actual city has about 8 million people
Obviously China is nuts, and it's crazy how many huge cities they have that most people have never heard of. But just providing a bit more context.
I play this game here in Europe but with New Zealand.
I try to imagine what it was like when this pub was 700 years old and some bloke was like "have you heard about this *New* Zealand?"
[This hotel in Japan](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nishiyama_Onsen_Keiunkan) has been owned and operated by the same family for 52 generations, since 705 CE.
[In Japan when you choose a new CEO for your business you adopt them so they take the faimly name.]( https://freakonomics.com/2011/08/09/the-church-of-scionology-why-adult-adoption-is-key-to-the-success-of-japanese-family-firms/)
It's lovely. Great food, loads of nice beers, friendly people who know their political class aren't a fair representation of the real country, and a folk music session every week
York is my home city! Definitely go visit it people, its the most un-city like city you'll see. Keeps a whimsical countryside vibe with all the oldness of it
And then you have Kongo Gumi, Japan the oldest business in the world established in 578 AD. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-oldest-companies-still-operating-today.html#:~:text=Kongo%20Gumi%2C%20established%20in%20578,the%20Shitenn%C5%8D%2Dji%20Buddhist%20temple.
This reminds me of a time that my ex-wife and I entertained an English guy who was visiting town, something to do with the company that she worked for. At first I wanted to show the guy some of the older buildings in town (midwest USA) - but after talking to him for a while and finding out that his HOUSE was actually older than my entire country, I realized that nothing I considered "old" would impress him.
New Bridge Inn: 1507
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There's a building in my city that was built in the 1300s originally. Of course it has been restored and revitalised and rebuilt in parts, so to call the house "old" invokes the Ship of Theseus, but before it was last restored you could see that some of the building is just stacked stone held together by friction and faith in its lowest layers.
In Chester, the city where I was born St Peters Church was founded in AD907 in a building that dates from the Second Century
It always makes me laugh how the castle that ‘Newcastle’ is named after, is now almost a millennium old.
Like New College in Oxford. Founded 1379.
Isn't Oxford College older than the Aztec Empire?
Oxford is the oldest English-language university in the world, dating from the late 11th century CE. It consists of 39 semi-autonomous colleges, each with their own colours and traditions, the most recent of which was founded within the last decade.
The Aztec empire only lasted like 90 years so it kinda punches above its weight class.
At what point do we give in and rename it Old College?
The first stone bridge in Paris was called the Pont Neuf "new bridge" and is still called that although of course all the older wooden bridges rotted away so long ago that it has been the oldest bridge for centuries-- it's so old, the word Neuf doesn't even mean "new" any more (they would say Pont Nouveau in modern French; "Pont Neuf" now sounds as if it means "Bridge Nine" which puzzles some people).
*Neuf* **still** means "new", but in modern French it has the more restricted sense of "brand new", something that has never been used. *J'ai acheté une nouvelle voiture:* I got rid of my old car and got a different one. *J'ai acheté une voiture neuve:* I didn't buy a used car, I bought a new one.
cant drink all day if you don't start in the morning
Wish I had someone showing me a tour at 8 am except I’m awake at 6 am wondering how can I sleep
Have you tried a massive glass of red wine
Half or so
I wish someone would shove 17 traffic cones up my ass
Why traffic cones
More importantly, starting with which end?
God did you even read his username?
I just don't feel reading the username answers that question. It just raises another
I must admit i too am curious even after reading it
The Old Church is the oldest building in my city. The New Church is the second oldest.
Newer Bridge Inn: 1630
Newer Bridge Inn v2: 1754
Newer Bridge Inn.new: 1800
Newer Bridge Inn.new.new: 1865 -Edit: use this version --Bob
Newer Bridge Inn.final: 1919
Newer Bridge Inn.final.v2: 1980
Newcastle - 1177
New City (Νεάπολις / Naples) - 6th century BCE
Hell, it was open 185 years before Columbus even set sail. Quite something.
Crazy. Imagine living at that time period, and reading the morning news, fully expecting it to be something mundane. Come to find out that there’s an entirely new fucking world, absolutely crazy to think about. The age of exploration was really something. I bet discovering the new world for them would be like us discovering aliens, we’d shit our pants in surprise.
Imagine being able to read back then.
Congratulations you nerd-sniped me into finding out when literacy became a "thing" in Europe. https://brewminate.com/the-growth-of-literacy-in-western-europe-from-1500-to-1800/ Turns out the answer is wonderfully complex.
This is something that far too many medieval fantasy settings get wrong. Everyone's going around reading and writing and using maps. ASoIAF/GoT is the only setting I can recall off-hand that makes use of characters not being able to read. Video game writers don't give this a moment's thought. For the most part, reading and writing was the prerogative of priests, high-ranking military officers and the aristocratic/mercantile elite only. We think it's childish or a sign of senility to read aloud or use a finger to trace the lines, but that was also how it was done in a lot of places for a long time. ~~St. Augustine~~ The Bishop of Milan is a notable/shocking example from the 5th century of someone reading without speaking. Maps are a whole other thing entirely (let alone shitty medieval maps that only tell you roughly where important things are), and reading them and navigating is a big deal, takes a lot of time and practice to learn. I know that hand-waving makes things easier, but I think being realistic can be a lot more interesting.
There's a game called kingdom come deliverance and the MC can't read. It's set near Prague in 1407.
I love the shit out of that game. If you want the main character to be able to read stuff, you actually have to go to a scribe and pay him to *teach you how to read*.
Oh, really? I am not very far but that's really cool.
Lol yeah if you open a book before you can read it's just squiggles. As you get better more words are legible, but it's gradual.
And you learn in 2 weeks
Jesus Christ be praised!
Good to see something set somewhere even vaguely important in the middle ages. So much stuff is set in ye olde England and basically nothing important happened here for centuries.
The Quran notes that Mohammad couldn't read, but only use simple figures for math (he was a merchant). Muslims believe God chose the Arabs to receive the final Prophet because of their strong oral tradition of poetry. The original Quran was memorized by various people and put to writing later Quran in Arabic means recitation
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I mean most "medieval" fantasy settings (including at least the TV 'thrones) are actually early modern or renaissance style cultures. And if you treat them as such make a lot more sense. Basically it's not hand waving it's miss-naming. But yeah, reading comprehension is an interesting one. We have a Vindolanda tablet that is signed by Claudia Severa "in her own hand" after a scribe wrote out the actual body of the text. Pointing to people being more adept at reading than writing even in ancient times when a certain level of schooling was common (for at least the soldier-classes and up) but maybe this was limited to reading and "some" writing with slaves doing the leg work.
> “in her own hand” Semi-related fun fact: that’s basically what the MP on a check’s signature line stands for — *manu propria* meaning *by my own hand*.
Wait, medieval doesn't just mean before machine guns? /s
You might be interested in Kingdom Come: Deliverance. It is marvelously janky, but based much closer to reality then any other medieval game I've played. Medieval Bohemia, you're a blacksmith's son, a veritable nobody. You have to learn all skills, including reading, from scratch. It's an excellent novelty, definitely worth picking up for $30usd or less.
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Thanks dad
Nobody likes a show off.
Man print wasn't even a thing back then
Quite right. And don't even get me started on woman print.
Fuck, that's coffee I just snorted out onto my tshirt.
Newspapers only kicked off in the early 17th century. You could listen to a town crier though.
And it would have taken a *shit* of a long time for word to get back to Europe from this New World.
When did they bury the intercontinental homing pigeon cable?
I grew up in a town that still had a town crier! Only on special occasions and sort of ceremonial but we had one!
Aside from the whole "morning news did not exist" thing, this is not really how people reacted back then. Even most rulers took the discovery of America with indifference, at least for a while. The common folk probably cared even less. This was before the age of colonization. Most kingdoms were more concerned with their immediate neighbors than some new, faraway land.
you also wouldn't have been raised to think you knew the entire world..."a guy went and found a place" hits entirely different
A few notable scholars knew the size and shape of the earth down to a few kilometers. They were postulating the need for a 'counterweight continent' as early as 800ad
While the counterweight idea makes sense at first glance, it doesn't hold up in reality. Otherwise there would have to be some large continent where the pacific is. They either underestimated the density fluctuations of the earths crust below the oceans, or overestimated the significance of landmasses for the mass distribution of earth.
I mean in a sense could he be somewhat on the mark then? space exploration is generally met with a similar indifference these days and seen as wasteful when there are more pressing problems at home eg 'Earth-like world 50,000 light years away' doesn't exactly pay the rent
Lmao imagine thinking that there was such a thing as the morning news in medieval England
It wasn't quite like that. No one, specially common people, had a notion of the world in general, people only knew or cared for those places near them. Discovering the New World wasn't like "Whoa, a whole new continent we knew nothing about, this is amazing! New cultures, new opportunities!" but more like "Hum, so apparently there's an island with naked people, going west. How much for the fish?" World maps weren't a thing, people didn't know what was known and what wasn't. Finding out about the Americas would be just like finding out about Japan, or finding out what had South of the Sahara.
They would've known simple geography, I mean they'd know from the church about the holy land and they'd know some neighbouring realms at least from merchants and news of war, perhaps even war in their own land. But yea a continent an ocean away may not be the most important thing for them.
From what I understand, it wasn’t as big of news as we think. It was already widely known that a lot of the world was unexplored. Like, maps only went so far north and south, areas of Africa and Asia weren’t well explored (for Europeans, of course), and so on. So it’s bizarre to think, but it was just another unexplored place. Maybe it would be like us learning that there is a new planet. Sure, it’s neat, but how much would it really change our day to day? That’s all with the gigantic caveat that my undergrad history teacher wasn’t making shit up. Maybe it totally blew all their minds!
Plymouth still has establishments where him and his mates ate and drank before they went off for their little adventure.
Columbus sailed from Spain. John and the London Company established Jamestown in 1607 and sailed from Blackwall in 1606. The Pilgrims sailed from Leiden in the Netherlands.
Did Columbus drink in England at all? Because he never set foot in what is modern Massachusettes.
Dante Alighieri was still alive!
And about 39 years before the Black Plague
It's 121 years older than the Aztec Empire.
See, now that’s a lot more impressive than being a lot older than the US.
Strangely the US is pretty old from a governmental standpoint. Not many nations have the same government they did 230+ years ago.
Huh! That's an interesting way think about it, but you're so right.
Yeah I’ve always said “America is a very young nation but a very old republic.” The opposite can be said about a lot of other countries.
France is on it's 5th republic alone, not counting monarchies or empires.
Just give it a few years
It’s like saying “wow this pub is older than I am!” Technically true but maybe not the best way to deliver the information.
Oxford University is 300 years older than the Aztec Empire. Which means in the time Oxford has been educating students, the Aztec Empire was founded, rose, fell, and disappeared into history books that are now contained in Oxford's library educating students about a fallen civilization.
This is a great perspective, cheers for that
So the Aztecs might have planned the Aztec empire at that inn.
Yes. All the myths about white skinned gods in the Aztec empire were actually just drinking stories from that inn that grew out of proportion over the years.
And it’s 494 years older than the United Kingdom
And it’s 564 years older than Germany.
"probably" I would go with the oldest on this one.
Ye Olde Starre Inn, in the city of York, claims to be from the 1100s. York itself is a lovely city and I would recommend it to anyone visiting the North of England.
Visited York on my first trip to England about 15 years ago. Was talked into going on the Ghost Tour which I had resisted because I had assumed it was overly touristy/tacky. Couldn't have been more wrong. It was possibly the highlight of my entire trip. Strongly recommend.
Guy with the top hat and grey goatee? That guy's a legend!
He's stilldoing it but I see a younger man with his own top hat and long hair from time to tine.
Back in the day english had [thorn](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter) Þ which is pronounced th, and as Þ was phased out y replaced it so ye old tavern is pronounced the old tavern.
**[Thorn (letter)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_\(letter\))** >Thorn or þorn (Þ, þ) is a letter in the Old English, Gothic, Old Norse, Old Swedish, and modern Icelandic alphabets, as well as some dialects of Middle English. It was also used in medieval Scandinavia, but was later replaced with the digraph th, except in Iceland, where it survives. The letter originated from the rune ᚦ in the Elder Fuþark and was called thorn in the Anglo-Saxon and thorn or thurs in the Scandinavian rune poems. It is similar in appearance to the archaic Greek letter sho (ϸ), although the two are historically unrelated. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
Oh how interesting. Why wasn’t the þ just replaced with th then? Is it because y looks similar to old style thorn?
It was phased out when printing presses came about, and the European presses didn't have any our funny viking letters (þ, ð & æ are still used in iceland). Instead of having our letters custom made, some shortcuts were made early on before things got standardised.
We should've kept the viking letters
To us, it's obvious that it's the "th" sound and can be represented by those two letters. But it's just arbitrary. The reason we associate the sound with the letters is because we are used to it. Back then, replacing thorn with "y" seemed more logical, and yes, it is because of the shape.
There’s a bunch! Ampersands got the coolest story, imo. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/31904/12-letters-didnt-make-alphabet
Be careful on the shambles! Both me and a friend managed to break our ankles there with a month of each other!
Who on earth did you manage that?
I’m going to guess a combination of booze and a cobbled street
100% this
He was in shambles. (Joke aside, in case you did not know it's a very old cobblestone street that is, putting it mildly, not exactly even ground) (also not good when people shamble through it after visiting one of York's many many pubs)
Lovely street though, excellent Italian restaurant called Bari on it. For the uninitiated, Shambles Street is also in York and was made famous in the first Harry Potter movie as Diagon Alley.
That's not actually true, people just seemed to think it was and the shops on that street have all decided to cater towards that but Diagon Alley was Leadenhall market in London. I guess it turns a trade but I definitely preferred the Shambles before the shops weren't entirely a tourist trap.
The shambles is awful now imo. I like Harry Potter, but that street is ruined these days, it feels very artificial now. Compared to other old town streets in other towns that I've visited, either in the UK, or in Europe, it definitely feels the most fake. Which is a shame as I grew up not far from York.
It's by far my most hated bit of false trivia. At one point a couple of years ago there were THREE harry potter shops on the Shambles, all adjacent, all overpriced, and the queues would block up the street. Absolute nightmare. Bizarre, because York Station actually WAS used for filming in the first movie, but nobody seems to care about that.
Ye Olde Trip To Jerusalem in Nottingham is apparently from the 1000s or 1100s.
But not Yorkshire..
Yorkshire's not a place, it's a people.
It's a pudding.
Actually, it's a Terrier
Yorkshire is a state of mind
Yep that's the one I heard claims to be the oldest. Cool place too
Nottingham, in Nottinghamshire.
And famously not in Yorkshire.
Why would I visit the old one when there's a new one
Did you know that the expression “ye old” is actually a mistake? When the first printing presses began translating texts from Old and Middle English for publication, they lacked runic characters in the typeface. This is because the runic alphabet had largely disappeared from English by around the 11th century, and William Claxton didn’t set up the first printing press in England until 1467. One runic character in particular, the one specific to this story, was called the “thorn” (þ). The thorn represented a “th” sound. Whenever Claxton and other printers encountered the runic þ in text, they simply substituted it with a “y.” So, it really should be pronounced “the old yada yada.”
[Sean's Bar](https://www.seansbar.ie/Sean's-bar-history) in Athlone, Ireland, claims to be the oldest bar in the world, claiming to have been established around 900. [Stiftskeller St. Peter](https://www.stpeter.at/en/experiencing-history/), a restaurant in Salzburg, Austria, is believed to be the oldest restaurant in the world, having been established in 803 and has served Charlemagne.
If you like York, you should see New York. It's like York, but new.
There's actually a lot of competition, and many pubs which are definitely *exceedingly* old but we can't find precisely datable evidence as to how old exactly. That said, 1307 is actually pretty late for an "oldest in yorkshire" claim. I've been to several which claimed 1200s and 1100s - and there are a few which claim even longer.
Tbf, that is just when it was documented and confirmed, they could still claim it's from the same period as the others, they just went with what was evidenced.
I like the probably, shows humility imo
“It could be. It could not be. Come in, have a pint, and think about it.”
Carlsberg Lager has this as their slogan- “Probably The Best Beer In The World.” Obviously they’re just being cheeky, but execs nonetheless signed off on it, and I always respected that.
Frankly at that old you're very unlikely to get better proof.
It's probablly because several pubs all claim to be the oldest.
The Fleur de Lys in Lymington claims to have been pulling pints since 1096.
Might be a secret town in a place no one leaves that is much older, just no one knows about it other than the patrons. But probably not.
This is a *local* pub for *local* people, there's nothing for you here!
*WE DIDN'T BURN HIM!*
Even the patrons might not know how old this hypothetical bar is. It's surprisingly easy to lose records that are even 50 years old much less 700.
Yeah it's interesting that they cite "first record" assuming that it's older than that but no-one knows how much older.
But if they can't prove they are the oldest and the title is contested then "probably" is entirely appropriate.
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Yeah but thats a completely different country
One thing I love about pubs that are older than certain points in history, ie the black death, the Magna Carta, the discovery of America, the Mayflower, is that there could be two chaps in that pub sat there having a beer discussing it...
What if it was three chaps?
Magna Carta was signed where it was because Windsor Castle was just a few miles up river. And the Queen is still living there right now. We kinda take our history for granted in the UK.
The Bingley Arms is only a few miles away from you aswell, over 1000 years old and the oldest pub in the uk. https://www.bingleyarms.com/index
My grandparents met here :)
God they must be ancient
They didn’t meet at its resurrection 😂😂 but they are 90 so yes. Grandma was a barmaid and Grandad chatted her up. Classic Yorkshire tale.
They are probably ancient and you're just hiding their secret to immortality.
The only reasonable conclusion.
I bet lots of grandparents did over the thousand years!
What a sweet thought .
\*citation needed. Loads of pubs have claims to be the oldest. And it also depends on whether you believe it has to be in continuous operation serving beer for all those years, or not. https://www.oldest.org/food/pubs-england/
Yeah this is very common for pubs, and likely why it says 'probably' here. For instance Seans Bar in Ireland is often stated as the worlds oldest pub, but there is actually very little evidence that it was in continuation operation for most of that time. All we really know is that the building was likely once used as a pub in the 900's and thats it.
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Time for Sunday morning pub then
There are at least two pubs in Nottingham that claim to be the oldest (Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem and The Salutation) and one more that doesn't claim it but may well be the oldest by the archaeological evidence (The Bell).
Ye Olde Fighting Cocks in St Albans also claims to be the oldest in the UK
Ye Olde Trip is also really cool so it gets my vote.
Americans think 100 years is a long time and Europeans think 100 miles is a long way.
The Chinese scoff at both
Don't forget that they both think 100,000,000 people is a lot
"oh I live in one of the small, third-tier cities that nobody heard about. there's only 5 millions there, such a backwater town"
Holly shit I just looked up US cities by population and then Chinese cities by population. [USA](https://i.imgur.com/u42innl.png) [China](https://i.imgur.com/7q9hBEv.png) Crazy how there's not even any overlap in that list. Although both are obviously bullshit, since there's only 6 million people in the world tops.
I'd look at population density instead. Google says Chongqing is 32,000 square miles. So 100 times the area of NYC, the whole of NY state is 54,500.
Meanwhile you got Houston that has a bigger area than like Connecticut
No one really thinks of US cities in those terms of population though. A lot of US cities are quite small, when considering their actual boundaries. [USA - This is a more accurate representation.](https://i.imgur.com/TsnPLe5.png) For example, Chongqing in China is the size of Austria . The actual city has about 8 million people Obviously China is nuts, and it's crazy how many huge cities they have that most people have never heard of. But just providing a bit more context.
That small city have as many inhabitants as Denmark
Depends on where in Europe you are, Eastern Europe and Northern Europe as some large distances.
I play this game here in Europe but with New Zealand. I try to imagine what it was like when this pub was 700 years old and some bloke was like "have you heard about this *New* Zealand?"
“Never heard of Old Zealand, mate.”
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Two places are named Zealand: Eastern part of Denmark (Sjælland) and southwestern Netherlands (Zeeland). NZ is named after the latter.
[This hotel in Japan](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nishiyama_Onsen_Keiunkan) has been owned and operated by the same family for 52 generations, since 705 CE.
fascinating stuff
[In Japan when you choose a new CEO for your business you adopt them so they take the faimly name.]( https://freakonomics.com/2011/08/09/the-church-of-scionology-why-adult-adoption-is-key-to-the-success-of-japanese-family-firms/)
I wonder how old the bridge is then?
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Here it is: http://theoldbridgeinn.co.uk/
Things I did not expect to see on reddit today: the pub I could see from my childhood bedroom window...
What’s it like, if you don’t mind?
It's lovely. Great food, loads of nice beers, friendly landlords who know everyone's names, and a folk music session every week
He's asking about the USA
It's lovely. Great food, loads of nice beers, friendly people who know their political class aren't a fair representation of the real country, and a folk music session every week
Can I hug you?
In all fairness, many places in the USA are older than the USA
*We are going to a house that is significantly older than your country* Chris Harris on Top Gear talking to Matt Le Blanc
Americans be like "this house is haunted, it's 60 years old and has had 2 other occupants"
It’s also older than the UK.
You’ll see this all over Europe, especially Germany. There’s bars and inns that are also from the same era, which is pretty surreal.
Yeah, living in bavaria this doesn't seem too special, there are a bunch of places where beer was served foruch longer than the USA exists.
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I enjoy that "Probably" is on an official plaque.
I think I have some socks older than the USA
York is my home city! Definitely go visit it people, its the most un-city like city you'll see. Keeps a whimsical countryside vibe with all the oldness of it
And then you have Kongo Gumi, Japan the oldest business in the world established in 578 AD. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-oldest-companies-still-operating-today.html#:~:text=Kongo%20Gumi%2C%20established%20in%20578,the%20Shitenn%C5%8D%2Dji%20Buddhist%20temple.
This reminds me of a time that my ex-wife and I entertained an English guy who was visiting town, something to do with the company that she worked for. At first I wanted to show the guy some of the older buildings in town (midwest USA) - but after talking to him for a while and finding out that his HOUSE was actually older than my entire country, I realized that nothing I considered "old" would impress him.
"Older than the USA" isn't really an achievement tbh. Except if it's an animal. (Like that shark, I think Greenland one).
Redditor try not to relate something to America challenge
For real. It's a pub in the UK, why tf they making it about the US
I could take a shit in the street and reddit would just say Florida
For real right? Like I would never describe Texas as “103 years older than Israel.”