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Setting aside the problem (mentioned in the article) that these images were produced for an aristocratic class, and possibly don’t accurately describe the reali

Setting aside the problem (mentioned in the article) that these images were produced for an aristocratic class, and possibly don’t accurately describe the reality of a peasant’s home, then what’s most striking is how decorative the interiors are: patterned floors, painted walls, and neat carpentry. I’ve read the theory that the life of peasants in the Middle Ages was demonized and made to sound dystopian to encourage the working class of the Industrial Revolution (including ‘forgetting’ all the traditional festivals and days free from labor), and this sort of article makes me wonder whether this is additional evidence. Or possibly just the sanitized version for the entertainment of the upper class? PS: a sidenote - strange to see spelling mistakes like a “pain of glass” in an academic paper.

rippercushions 4y ago
There's this common trope that medieval peasant clothing was all drab sackcloth. It was actually usually vibrantly dyed, and ACOUP goes into this in considerable detail: https://acoup.blog/2021/03/05/collections-clothing-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-high-fiber/ https://acoup.blog/2021/03/05/collections-clothing-how-did-t... Likewise, medieval houses were often painted with local dyes, like Falu red in the Nordics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falu_red https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falu_red
manderso 4y ago
> PS: a sidenote - strange to see spelling mistakes like a “pain of glass” in an academic paper. Presumably transcription errors; that example appears as "pane of glass" in the original paper visible at <https://books.google.com/books?id=AQDtAAAAMAAJ&lpg=PP7&pg=PA306 https://books.google.com/books?id=AQDtAAAAMAAJ&lpg=PP7&pg=PA...>
automatic6131 4y ago
>strange to see spelling mistakes like a “pain of glass” in an academic paper. I did a double take when I read that a "white car warms itself by the fire". Good to know that medieval peasants had motorized transport!
guntherhermann 4y ago
The life of a peasant was one of serfdom, watching too many of your children die before their 4th birthday. The wheat you grew you had to mill in a landlord's mill and they collected a tax from it. There was no light in the evenings because tallow or other wax was far too expensive so when it got dark there were limited things to do. Floors were covered in rushes instead of carpet and were host to bugs. True medicine was not there, surgery unheard of for the peasant class. The days "free from labour" weren't really free from labour, those "free" days are days spent doing menial boring work that we have industrialised away. days spent butchering animals, repairing clothes and tools, teasing wool. You'd be lucky to own more than 2 sets of clothes. Work was backbreaking and if you couldn't work, you were a pauper. Yeah, if you only look at the "good" (only 150 "work" days a year!) and ignore the bad (all of the above), yeah it sounds great. The reality was not so rosy. For my ancestors, it would undoubtedly have been fucking awful. They'd have loved to this in this world we now have.
- null_object 4y ago
  I think you gravely misunderstood my comment, I’m certainly not harking back to some romantic ideal of pre-industrial Arcadia. If you were an under-nourished worker, living in the rat-like polluted conditions of an Industrial Revolution town in Northern England (for instance), constantly breathing sulfurous fumes, suffering cholera epidemics, seeing the whole town and all the countryside around it blackened by the ash from the local factories, while still seeing children die prematurely from all the same diseases and accidents that were common in the Middle Ages, but with less access to fresh air and your own vegetables and (to some extent) your own livestock, then making the life of a peasant seem less attractive than it maybe was in reality, is not such a far-fetched possibility. > watching too many of your children die before their 4th birthday As for children dying - maybe the children of peasants would die in greater numbers than the aristocracy, but nothing stopped their children from dying of an infected scratch or a bacterial infection, any more than anyone else, before the invention of antibiotics. I think your comment falls into the “it was unadulterated hell being a peasant”-trap that I was referring to, instead of evaluating whether the life was actually more nuanced (especially in relative terms to those richer than themselves at the time).
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HEmanZ 4y ago
I think you’re right, peasant life wasn’t so dystopian through the Middle Ages, and it seems to get a bad rap. Peasants didn’t have modern freedoms but they were not chattel slaves. They had a lot of free time and for much of history had a lot of land-per-person. Humans with free time and space, even if they are economically poor, carve out interesting and non-dystopian lives for themselves. I know explicit propaganda was used to try to convince Russian peasants their lives were miserable to spur the communist revolution. I’m not sure about explicit propaganda elsewhere. I think our collective consciences have merged together images of “old poverty” and we have an image of surfs that are closer to chattel slaves thanks to colonialism and industrialization. I also suspect quality of life among peasants was volatile over time, with famines and political turmoil hitting them extremely hard. By the industrial revolution it may really have been dystopian in much of Europe.
- qwytw 4y ago
  > Russian peasants their lives were miserable They were miserable though. The conditions of Russian peasants were much closer to chattel slavery than many of those who lived during the late middle ages in Western Europe. In fact the relative conditions of serfs in Russia (and Eastern Europe in general) got progressively worse during the 15-18th centuries as the conditions at the same time as they were gradually improving in the west. > By the industrial revolution it may really have been dystopian in much of Europe. I think the lives of people living in the country side who owned some lands (or tenancy) at least improved during the industrial revolution. Farmers in western Europe were increasingly focused on less labor intense cash crops or husbandry (as grain imports from Eastern Europe increased) which meant that there was demand for labor (forcing many to move into the crowded cities). Those who remained to a large degree were left with a bigger slice of the 'pie' compared to their ancestors.
Aunche 4y ago
You're assuming that factory workers are stupid and incapable of judging living conditions on their own. The fact is that millions of people voluntarily moved thousands of miles away from their families and hometowns to a country where they can't even speak the language, just so that they can work in a factory. That is not a decision that they make lightly. The fact that they had to work for long hours and shitty conditions is evidence not evidence that they made poor decisions, but that their supposedly idyllic country life was that much worse.
Spooky23 4y ago
It depends what you’re trying to say. Showing the home of a typical HN poster would be very different than many working poor in the United States. The transition from craft work to industrial production and assembly changed many aspects of life. My home is an urban single family detached house built in 1924 as a partially finished home that could be adapted by the owner to be a two family or you could finish the bedrooms upstairs. We did some research and the first owners of the home worked for the phone company. So not a super expensive home then, but there is still custom craftwork masonry, good trim carpentry (custom built-ins, custom millwork, etc). Today those tradespeople don’t exist. To a 1920s middle class person, a modern high end home would look unfinished in comparison.

rippercushions 4y ago

There's this common trope that medieval peasant clothing was all drab sackcloth. It was actually usually vibrantly dyed, and ACOUP goes into this in considerable detail: https://acoup.blog/2021/03/05/collections-clothing-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-high-fiber/ https://acoup.blog/2021/03/05/collections-clothing-how-did-t... Likewise, medieval houses were often painted with local dyes, like Falu red in the Nordics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falu_red https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falu_red

manderso 4y ago

> PS: a sidenote - strange to see spelling mistakes like a “pain of glass” in an academic paper. Presumably transcription errors; that example appears as "pane of glass" in the original paper visible at <https://books.google.com/books?id=AQDtAAAAMAAJ&lpg=PP7&pg=PA306 https://books.google.com/books?id=AQDtAAAAMAAJ&lpg=PP7&pg=PA...>

automatic6131 4y ago

>strange to see spelling mistakes like a “pain of glass” in an academic paper. I did a double take when I read that a "white car warms itself by the fire". Good to know that medieval peasants had motorized transport!

guntherhermann 4y ago

The life of a peasant was one of serfdom, watching too many of your children die before their 4th birthday. The wheat you grew you had to mill in a landlord's mill and they collected a tax from it. There was no light in the evenings because tallow or other wax was far too expensive so when it got dark there were limited things to do. Floors were covered in rushes instead of carpet and were host to bugs. True medicine was not there, surgery unheard of for the peasant class. The days "free from labour" weren't really free from labour, those "free" days are days spent doing menial boring work that we have industrialised away. days spent butchering animals, repairing clothes and tools, teasing wool. You'd be lucky to own more than 2 sets of clothes. Work was backbreaking and if you couldn't work, you were a pauper. Yeah, if you only look at the "good" (only 150 "work" days a year!) and ignore the bad (all of the above), yeah it sounds great. The reality was not so rosy. For my ancestors, it would undoubtedly have been fucking awful. They'd have loved to this in this world we now have.

null_object 4y ago
I think you gravely misunderstood my comment, I’m certainly not harking back to some romantic ideal of pre-industrial Arcadia. If you were an under-nourished worker, living in the rat-like polluted conditions of an Industrial Revolution town in Northern England (for instance), constantly breathing sulfurous fumes, suffering cholera epidemics, seeing the whole town and all the countryside around it blackened by the ash from the local factories, while still seeing children die prematurely from all the same diseases and accidents that were common in the Middle Ages, but with less access to fresh air and your own vegetables and (to some extent) your own livestock, then making the life of a peasant seem less attractive than it maybe was in reality, is not such a far-fetched possibility. > watching too many of your children die before their 4th birthday As for children dying - maybe the children of peasants would die in greater numbers than the aristocracy, but nothing stopped their children from dying of an infected scratch or a bacterial infection, any more than anyone else, before the invention of antibiotics. I think your comment falls into the “it was unadulterated hell being a peasant”-trap that I was referring to, instead of evaluating whether the life was actually more nuanced (especially in relative terms to those richer than themselves at the time).

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HEmanZ 4y ago

I think you’re right, peasant life wasn’t so dystopian through the Middle Ages, and it seems to get a bad rap. Peasants didn’t have modern freedoms but they were not chattel slaves. They had a lot of free time and for much of history had a lot of land-per-person. Humans with free time and space, even if they are economically poor, carve out interesting and non-dystopian lives for themselves. I know explicit propaganda was used to try to convince Russian peasants their lives were miserable to spur the communist revolution. I’m not sure about explicit propaganda elsewhere. I think our collective consciences have merged together images of “old poverty” and we have an image of surfs that are closer to chattel slaves thanks to colonialism and industrialization. I also suspect quality of life among peasants was volatile over time, with famines and political turmoil hitting them extremely hard. By the industrial revolution it may really have been dystopian in much of Europe.

qwytw 4y ago
> Russian peasants their lives were miserable They were miserable though. The conditions of Russian peasants were much closer to chattel slavery than many of those who lived during the late middle ages in Western Europe. In fact the relative conditions of serfs in Russia (and Eastern Europe in general) got progressively worse during the 15-18th centuries as the conditions at the same time as they were gradually improving in the west. > By the industrial revolution it may really have been dystopian in much of Europe. I think the lives of people living in the country side who owned some lands (or tenancy) at least improved during the industrial revolution. Farmers in western Europe were increasingly focused on less labor intense cash crops or husbandry (as grain imports from Eastern Europe increased) which meant that there was demand for labor (forcing many to move into the crowded cities). Those who remained to a large degree were left with a bigger slice of the 'pie' compared to their ancestors.

Aunche 4y ago

You're assuming that factory workers are stupid and incapable of judging living conditions on their own. The fact is that millions of people voluntarily moved thousands of miles away from their families and hometowns to a country where they can't even speak the language, just so that they can work in a factory. That is not a decision that they make lightly. The fact that they had to work for long hours and shitty conditions is evidence not evidence that they made poor decisions, but that their supposedly idyllic country life was that much worse.

Spooky23 4y ago

It depends what you’re trying to say. Showing the home of a typical HN poster would be very different than many working poor in the United States. The transition from craft work to industrial production and assembly changed many aspects of life. My home is an urban single family detached house built in 1924 as a partially finished home that could be adapted by the owner to be a two family or you could finish the bedrooms upstairs. We did some research and the first owners of the home worked for the phone company. So not a super expensive home then, but there is still custom craftwork masonry, good trim carpentry (custom built-ins, custom millwork, etc). Today those tradespeople don’t exist. To a 1920s middle class person, a modern high end home would look unfinished in comparison.