> It's probably because whilst in the real dark
>ages, the vast majority of people were peasants and
>spent their time growing crops and weaving things
>and so forth, the vast majority of people in
>fantasy novels spend their time struggling with the
>forces of darkness or whacking dragons with swords
>or living as slaves of Dark Lord Evilmore or
>something, and progress doesn't happen as fast
>under those circumstances.

Actually, there's hardly anything better than a good war to jumpstart technological innovation. The pressure to come up with new and inventive ways of killing each other often produces technologies that have applications in other areas of life (the Saturn V rocket that took the first men to the moon was the technological decendent of the German V-2 missile developed in WWII--and was developed by the same man, I might add.)

And the vast majority of people in *any* pseudo-medieval society are going to be peasants. But peasants aren't the ones driving technological advance, anyway. The landed aristocracy and the middle class (merchants, bankers, traders) are the people who will have the free time and the inclination to develop new technologies and new ways of doing things. In fact, the rise of the middle class was one of the driving forces behind the Renaissance.

There's certainly reasons you can come up with to keep your civilization artificially stagnated at some technological point. My point is, however, that if you're going to do this, at least put some thought into *why* it is this way. Why has the society in your world been stuck at the equivalent of 11th century Europe for thousands of years? The explanation doesn't even have to be in your story, overtly. In fact, it's probably better if it's not directly explained unless it's important to the plot. But it's something *you* need to have thought of, and not just taken for granted--otherwise, people like me are going to ask questions like this. :-)

-- Dave