Today is about Europe's long-lost
medieval number system.
[Renaissance Music]
So, for the first thousand years, the
first millennium,
there was one game in town and that was
Roman numerals. Everyone knows what roman
numerals are:
one, two, three, four,
five etc. Then from the 13th century,
thereabouts, there was a new guy in town
and that was
Arabic numerals. Which as we know: zero,
one, two, three, four, five;
and for the next hundred years, there was
a couple of centuries actually, there's a
kind of battle between
who's gonna win. Which is gonna be the
dominant number system and, as we know,
the one that won; the notation that we
use all over the world is the Arabic
number system. It's like
much much better, it's kind of place
value, it's got the zero - et cetera.
What almost no one knows is that
in the late middle ages, so between the
13th and the 15th century,
there was a third guy in town.
This was the notation that was devised
and developed and used
by the Cistercian order. So this is a
group of monks, it's actually the most
influential religious order
of the late middle ages. They're actually
an offshoot, you know if you wanted a bit
of ecclesiastical history; they're an
offshoot of the Benedictines
who didn't think the Benedictines were
ascetic enough. It has a kind of
minimalist lifestyle where it's just you
and like the Earth. So what the
Cistercians did
is that they were really into sort of
manual labour, and as a result of that
they actually developed
lots of techniques and agriculture and
architecture.
And they built up from, beginning in
the 11th century,
two three centuries later they had about
more than 500 monasteries
all across Europe; from the north of the
British isles down
to the Mediterranean. From Poland on one side
to Portugal the other. And they used,
amongst themselves,
a secret number notation. And
I want to show it to you. It is like
magical looking; it's kind of mysterious also.
Here it is. So I'm going to write down
four numbers
in Cistercian notation.
[Music]
(Brady: It's like you're playing hangman) - It is!
[Music]
So these are four numbers; what can you
make out of that? And in fact
this is a puzzle, I call it- it's a monkey
puzzle.
I love that pun, I hope you did as much.
It's a monkey puzzle,
um, in my new puzzle book about languages;
and- because this is a kind of scientific
language- - (Brady: what you mean that-)
(you mean that book there?) - That one there.
Very good, especially for Christmas gifts
and during lockdown for spending all
your evening doing all these
wonderful language and number puzzles.
(Brady: But you didn't make this up, this is like)
This is totally true, this is totally
true. Umm, there-
in fact no one really knows about it
until
about 20 years ago, a historian
of science called David A King wrote a
book about it;
because he had realised and discovered;
he did his sort of
kind of life's research on this number
system.
And the book is accepted as true and you
can see these in some of the ancient
texts.
And this kind of secret number system,
obviously it didn't catch on,
but it was used by various different
groups for kind of medieval ciphers and
secret number systems.
So it was used even once the Cistercians
stopped using it.
Anyway can I tell you something more
about the Cistercians? The Cistercians were
brilliant. So
they wanted a very ascetic type of life and
so they banned speaking,
okay? So about a thousand years ago they-
a vow of silence, you weren't allowed
to speak;
so they developed their own sign
language. So one of the first people
to develop their own sign language and
they used this sign language for a
thousand years.
And I called up the British Cistercian
abbey, there's only one left in in
England, and says 'do you still use this vow of
silence sign language?' and they said
[Silence]
'...no we don't but some of our elder monks
still understand it'. And
it's so great because what they do is
that they get these words
and they have to piece the meaning of
the words into smaller
bits. So, for example - and also each bit
is a kind of mime of what the word
represents. So what do you think this
might mean?
And don't be rude - (Brady: Hole?) - Milk!
This is milk, it's milking the udder! Okay,
this is brown so-
it's chocolate milk. Okay another one.
this- - (Brady: Hang on, why was that brown?)
I don't know why that
is brown. - (Okay)
There's a great book there's written in
the 70s where um
a researcher went into one of these
abbeys where they were still speaking it
and took loads of pictures and wrote
it all down;
in fact there's a great puzzle about
this in my language book.
Anyway so I know all about the Cistercians,
they're absolutely fascinating. Another
one just very quickly;
this means land, or country - what country
is this?
(Brady: Drink-tea-land - England!) - Yes!
Isn't that brilliant? Okay another one,
are you liking this so much?
What is this?
(Finger, ring?)
(Knuckle?) - E! - (Oh E)
E-tall-E-land.
(Tall land...) - Italy! - (That's harder!)
Okay let's get back to here. So it is
true, it does look a bit like hangman;
or it looks a little bit like stick men,
could put a little sort of head there.
I'm going to give you more of a clue now,
I'm going to say what the numbers are.
This is actually 1410, this one
is 4173, this one
is 5750, and this one is
1368. Now do you have any
more of a clue about how this might work?
(Brady: Uh, I mean obviously where things come)
(off the main)
(stem is important-) - Yeah very good, very good.
You might want to freeze it now and
people can have a think, because I'm
about to give the game away.
(Okay, little bit of elevator music!)
[Renaissance Music]
Here - this is 1410, I'm going
to tell you already
that it's expressed as a decimal, so the system
is decimal. We've got two 1s here,
and these two bits look quite the same.
And we've got two 5s here
and these two bits look the same. So
actually
that's something - like that is gonna be
like a 5, that's gonna be a 1; and
also if that's like a 1 we've got 1
going out there.
So but you're beginning to piece
together this idea that
these elements that are coming off,
rather than the sides, the ends
are the digits expressed in some way. It
is a system
that can only write every number from
zero
to 9999. It can't do
any other numbers. So this, in fact, is how
you count.
Zero is just the stem. So every number
has a stem.
That is 1, this is 2, this is 3,
this is 4.
Now we get fun - so that's a 4, so I can
say 0, 1, 2,
3 4. This is 4. 5 is 4 and 1
so put the 4 and 1 together,
that's 5; this is 6. To get to 7,
which is 6 and 1,
is that. 8, which is 6 and 2, and 9
which is 6 and 3, is that. That is
0 to 9,
but what you see is that if you divide
it into four quarters:
the units go here, this is tens, this is
hundreds,
and this is thousands. So that is a one
thousand, that's a 400. Then we get this
one here and
0. So, Brady: choose any four digit number
and let's write the number.
Day you were born or- - (Brady: 6666.)
6666? Well that's gonna be easy. So
you go to 6,
666 - it's going gonna be 6, 6,
6, 6. It looks quite good, It looks
like a
um, a quad bike seen from above. - (Brady: Nice, okay I'll give you that.)
Or how about 2020? 2020 would be
2, so it's that, then 0
and then 2, and then there's that. But
how about say 1969? That's the year I was born.
(Brady: Best year of your life!) - Best years. Okay so 19, so it would be a
1 here,
then there'll be a 9 and then there'll
be a 6,
and then a 9. - (Nice!)
It's quite fun isn't it?
(It wouldn't be very useful for things)
(like mathematics. Like if I said add)
(3472 to whatever, like, wouldn't be a good way.)
No, but what would be really
cool, and really easy; and where it was
used by the Cistercians is for dates;
because dates have four digits. So it's
like brilliant - in fact
for my puzzle book, where I put this in, I
wanted the publisher
to actually put the date in the opening
page written in Cistercian notation but
I was told they weren't allowed to.
But another thing where it is good and it is
often used - or was used by the Cistercians;
was for page numbers of books.
Roman numerals are still used, widely
in modern culture, but they're only used
at times when you use
numbers not for mathematics. So
dates, page numbers, chapter numbers;
super bowls - things like that. So you
could quite easily do the super bowl
in um Cistercian numbers. Maybe you could
do some - I don't know is there any kind of
the Catholic olympic games or something?
They could use that.
(Brady: Yeah, that's a cool system.) - Isn't it
really cool?
[Laughter]
This is house or room and...
...is toilet because it's the shame
house. A barn is
cow-house.
(Brady: Shame-house?) - Shame-house, yeah.
(Imagine going, excuse me can I ask where the shame-house is?)