CHALLENGES THAT LEAVE AN IMPRINT

1 Briefly explain the structure of a fiefdom. The image below may be of help to you.

3 Write a text consisting of ten lines that comments on the information presented in this image.

4 Compare the everyday life of the nobility and the peasantry.

5 Write down in your notebook some of the consequences of the use of stone in Romanesque vaults.

2 Answer these questions: a) What did vassalage relationships consist of? b) Between who were they carried out? What did each party agree to do? c) What other personal relationships were conducted in the feudal era?

Reflect And Assess

We will continue with our study of the High Middle Ages anWd the beginning of feudalism. Reflect individually and share in a group the assessment of the activities involved. To do this, download the corresponding rubric at anayaeducacion.es

Test Your Skills

Carry out the competence self-assessment included at anayaeducacion.es

IN THE PAST GudridnardóttirThorbjarBasic information

Name: Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir

Period: 980-1050

Nationality: Icelandic

Occupation: Explorer, navigator and farmer

I only have a few years left to live, but since my retirement in Iceland I have been remembering important moments in my life. I feel, as if I was living it again, the cold wind on my adolescent face when I travelled with my family from Iceland to Greenland. I also remember the feelings of nerves, the frustrated hopes and

NOW Ann Bancroft

Basic information

Name: Ann Bancroft

Epoch: 1955

Nationality: American

Occupation: Explorer, writer, and teacher the loss of my husband, Thorir, in my first shipwreck. Thinking back to those years, I believe a desire to explore and discover lands and to found Viking settlements was forged in me. With my second husband, Thorsteinn, the youngest son of Erik the Red, I shared an adventurous spirit and a desire to reach the lands on the other side of the ocean. The goal was to get to Vinland. We decided to travel in the summer, but even at that time the force of the winds, the fogs and the storms pushed us away from our destination and an epidemic wiped out almost the entire crew, including my husband.

A little over nine hundred years separate Gudrid’s arrival in Vinland with the birth of Ann Bancroft. Those American lands to which the Vikings arrived today coincide with the Canadian territory off the coast of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and the island of Newfoundland.

Ann Bancroft is from Minnesota, but she knows some of the major Viking settlements well, as she was the first woman to ski in Greenland and the first to reach the North Pole on foot, after 56 days of travel, in 1986.

Perhaps I should have settled with my third partner, Karlsefni, in some fertile part of Scandinavia, but around the year 1010, I managed to finally step foot on that territory on the other side of the ocean. It was a place of forests, green meadows, and rivers teeming with salmon. There my son Snorri was born, the first Scandinavian of that prosperous and distant place inhabited by strong and warrior peoples like ours. After three years we returned to Iceland where, after being widowed again, I ran the family farm until I started a very different journey, a pilgrimage to Rome and then back to my native Iceland, where I now live as a hermit.

Like Gudrid, Ann is a tireless explorer, and her early conquests did not quell her desire for new challenges, she still had another pole to reach. In 1993 she led an expedition of four women to reach the southern tip of our planet. In those latitudes, in Antarctica, she skied with Liv Arnesen, with whom she would later found “Bancroft Arnesen Explore” and with whom years later, in 2007, she would participate in a tough incursion through the Arctic Ocean in order to study the environmental deterioration of this highly sensitive

Questions

1 The discovery of America is taken as the starting point of the Modern Age, however, there were Europeans in America long before this celebrated date. How many years of difference are there approximately? What route would Gudrid and her companions take to make the journey? What other historical fact is taken as the beginning of the Modern Age?

2 Ann Bancroft has shared different projects with Liv Arnessen. Find information about this woman and write a short biographical note.

ecosystem. She also chairs a foundation that bears her name, the Ann Bancroft Foundation, to encourage women to develop their dreams and projects.