The proclaimed purpose of the Crusades, which were often requested and encouraged by papal policy, was to recover the city of Jerusalem as well as other eastern locations of religious pilgrimage all located in an area referred to as the Holy Land by Christians from the control of the Muslims. During the mid-eleventh century, Muslim Turks conquered Syria and Palestine, causing concern among Western Christians. The year marks the beginning of the Crusades.
Lawrence THE HANDLE, which varies in length according to the height of its user, and in some cases is made by that user to his or her specifications, is like most of the other parts of the tool in that it has a name and thus a character of its own. I call it the snath, as do most of us in the UK, though variations include the snathe, the snaithe, the snead, and the sned.
Onto the snath are attached two hand grips, adjusted for the height of the user. On the bottom of the snath is a small hole, a rubberized protector, and a metal D-ring with two hex sockets.
Into this little assemblage slides the tang of the blade. This thin crescent of steel is the fulcrum of the whole tool. From the genus blade fans out a number of ever-evolving species, each seeking out and colonizing new niches. I also have a couple of ditch blades which, despite the name, are not used for mowing ditches in particular, but are all-purpose cutting tools that can manage anything from fine grass to tousled brambles and a bush blade, which is as thick as a billhook and can take down small trees.
These are the big mammals you can see and hear. Beneath and around them scuttle any number of harder-to-spot competitors for the summer grass, all finding their place in the ecosystem of the tool.
None of them, of course, is any use at all unless it is kept sharp, really sharp: You need to take a couple of stones out into the field with you and use them regularly—every five minutes or so—to keep the edge honed.
And you need to know how to use your peening anvil, and when. When the edge of your blade thickens with overuse and oversharpening, you need to draw the edge out by peening it—cold-forging the blade with hammer and small anvil.
Probably you never master it, just as you never really master anything. That lack of mastery, and the promise of one day reaching it, is part of the complex beauty of the tool. Etymology can be interesting. Scythe, originally rendered sithe, is an Old English word, indicating that the tool has been in use in these islands for at least a thousand years.
But archaeology pushes that date much further out; Roman scythes have been found with blades nearly two meters long. Basic, curved cutting tools for use on grass date back at least ten thousand years, to the dawn of agriculture and thus to the dawn of civilizations.
Like the tool, the word, too, has older origins. The Proto-Indo-European root of scythe is the word sek, meaning to cut, or to divide. Sek is also the root word of sickle, saw, schism, sex, and science. Some books do that, from time to time, and this is beginning to shape up as one of them.
By his own admission, his arguments are not new. But the clarity with which he makes them, and his refusal to obfuscate, are refreshing. I seem to be at a point in my life where I am open to hearing this again.
Here are the four premises with which he begins the book: Technological progress is carrying us to inevitable disaster. Only the collapse of modern technological civilization can avert disaster.
What is needed is a new revolutionary movement, dedicated to the elimination of technological society. I have a tendency toward sentimentality around these issues, so I appreciate his discipline.
There are two reasons for this.
Firstly, if I do end up agreeing with him—and with other such critics I have been exploring recently, such as Jacques Ellul and D. Lewis and Ivan Illich—I am going to have to change my life in quite profound ways.
It has a broadband connection and all sorts of fancy capabilities I have never tried or wanted to use. I mainly use it for typing. You might think this makes me a hypocrite, and you might be right, but there is a more interesting observation you could make.This essay examines the background of the crusades to offer a better understanding as to why they occurred.
It also examines the effects that the crusades had on the world. It is easy to look at the crusades as a violent meaningless act, but one must understand the type of setting this movement occurred during. Essay: The Crusades As I started to read different articles; I wondered what the difference was between a crusade and a crusader.
I found out that the medieval crusade was a holy war, and for it to be an officially crusade, it had to be ordered by the pope against groups of people that hated Christendom. The crusades had a large affect on the medieval lives of Christians, Muslims and every other person who lived in Europe in that time.
The first one, the one that started the rest was to believe to be in the Conclusion. As you have learned, the Crusades changed both the Christian and Muslim worlds.
New trade routes and markets became available to both sides. Information and trade goods began to flow between the two worlds. The rulers who participated in the Crusades became larger than life. The Crusades Essay Sample. The Crusades took place in the Middle East between and They were used to gain a leg up on trading, have more land to show hegemony, and to please the gods.
Title: A Room of One's Own Author: Virginia Woolf * A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook * eBook No.: txt Edition: 1 Language: English Character set encoding: ASCII Date first posted: October Date most recently updated: July This eBook was produced by: Col Choat Production notes: Italics in the book have been converted to upper case.