abbeys

And if you play the Cities & Knights expansion, it should be clear that the setting is squarely pre-Renaissance medieval Europe - with abbeys and guilds and viking invaders.

Or, confiscating monasteries and abbeys, then gifting them to favored nobles is a form of land reform.

Many medivalists suspect that monasteries and abbeys drove scientific agriculture in medieval Europe because they had capital, literacy, and education.

This caused many already established abbeys, of the Benedictine order, to associate themselves as Cluniac houses.

Those abbeys and monasteries would've (as part of their endowments) owned large chunks of the agricultural land outside the city as well.

However that might just be because I've been to endless cathedrals/abbeys in the UK and so ND was just more of the same.

I can't imagine churches or abbeys were particularly well heated either.

Yeah Ed Abbeys probably a better example.

Looking at the Tudor map, one thing that really stands out is how many abbeys and monasteries there were (shown in pink), and how much of London was taken up by them.

And we had more focus and success in the past (abbeys, Venice etc.) than in the present, where the matter of electoral systems is kept like a theoretical branch of political science.

Wealth and splendour characterized the monasteries, so that by 1300, the standard of living in most abbeys was comparable, if not higher, than the standards middling nobles enjoyed.[59] [59] Jaritz, Gerhard (1985).

) From the book:...within fifty years of 1066 every English cathedral church and most major abbeys had been razed to the ground, and rebuilt in a new continental style, known to architects as 'Romanesque'.

My sense of backstory here is that the Anla-shok moved in and started little "abbeys" all over the place, using the church as cover, but rarely actually a part of it, which was why they had not gotten their recognition, and would never get it.

As a British person who was involuntarily dragged around countless ruined Abbeys, castles, and monestaries for hours as a sprog by my parents, I can assure you that there exist plenty of British folk with an active disinterest in "old stuff", as you put it.