This is one of those things that makes me feel really connected to people of the past. We are more similar than we are different. It's funny to know that children in twelfth century London were playing dress up and pretending to be knights when I did the same thing with other children in elementary school. The text says that the older boys had real weapons while the younger ones had altered, less-dangerous ones. It reminds me of kids pretending large sticks were swords. The more things change the more they stay the same. Some things do change for the better though, like the end of deadly "gladiatorial combat and wild animal hunts" (Milliman 588). When I was young, a lot of kids would pretend to be knights, soldiers, cops, cowboys, pirates, you name it...so it's kind of funny to think about kids pretending to be knights in front of actual real life knights. Of course their games and costume were probably a lost more accurate to real knights than kids of the 21st century. I'm sure people back in the twelfth century had a problem with kids playing "violently" just as people do nowadays. How much have we heard about video games making kids violent, or that Nerf shouldn't make guns, and so on and so forth. Regardless if you agree or disagree with these sentiments, it's clear this train of thought is not new. I also like how the younger boys had spears with no tips. Even though one day they may have grown up to be real knights or gone off to fight in a war, their parents still made sure to keep them safe as they possibly could which I find adorable. Nowadays parents put a helmet or knee pads on their young athletes. I hate when people spout the rhetoric that no one loved their kids back then, because they often died of disease so they had a bunch just in case. This idea couldn't be further from the truth. People back then were so much like people today.