Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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judgement)”. 720 Still other comparisons can be drawn between the medieval miners and
the modern-day foundry workers, as Ward points out:
The fourteenth century saw the beginning of the emancipation of working
people in general. This was caused by the Black Death, because it brought
labour shortages, which in turn meant that people had more bargaining power.
So in the film there is a link between the common working people then and now,
the medieval miners being at the forefront of the change in working-class
conditions.
In many respects, however, the medieval miners occupied a stronger position in society
than their modern counterparts: “Medieval miners had a position that other feudal
peasants did not have, and by and large, they were called free miners. They had
effectively “union” rights, they had mining rights on virtually any land, and they were
better paid, and the reason was war was at such a peak. For armaments metal was
essential, and for metal you needed miners. So they had a privileged position in
society”. 721
Some writers on the Middle Ages, such as Umberto Eco, Barbara Tuchman and Jean
Gimpel in The Medieval Machine (one of the source books used to research the film),
regard the modern industrial age as actually beginning in the Middle Ages. 722 Eco
argues that: “The Middle Ages are the root of all our contemporary ‘hot’ problems, and
it is not surprising that we go back to the period every time we ask ourselves about our
origin […]. Thus looking at the Middle Ages means looking at our infancy […]. Our
return to the Middle Ages is a quest for our roots”. 723 According to Tuckman, the
beginnings of modern thinking also originated in the Middle Ages:
Survivors of the plague, finding themselves neither destroyed nor improved,
could discover no Divine purpose in the pain they had suffered […]. If a
disaster of such magnitude, the most lethal ever known, was a mere wanton act
of God or perhaps not God’s work at all, then the absolutes of a fixed order were
720 Rayner, "Paradise and Pandemonium," 46.
721 Ward quoted in Campbell and Bilbrough, "A Dialogue with Discrepancy: Vincent Ward Discusses the
Navigator," 11.
722 Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (London:
Gollanz, 1977).
723 Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1973) 65.