People of the past are not well recorded in history. We don't know much about miserable medieval peasants, because they as a whole didn't know how to write, an

People of the past are not well recorded in history. We don't know much about miserable medieval peasants, because they as a whole didn't know how to write, and the little the rare educated one wrote is unlikely to have been preserved. We know mostly what the rich or at least decently well off of the times have left, a lot of it biased or self-aggrandizing. Some of those wrote on things that they themselves didn't experience. When you imagine happy peasants you should question who wrote on them and why, and if in those times there was any likelihood of anybody caring about the plight of suffering people, being allowed to write about it, and it being preserved to this day. But besides that, even with the luck of having a life with a comfortable existence with work you enjoy, you still could one day die from something like an accident with a farm animal, a bad tooth, or childbirth.