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What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)
https://archive.ph/LpZuj https://archive.ph/LpZuj
- quxfoobarbaz 11mo agohttps://archive.ph/LpZuj https://archive.ph/LpZuj
- rkovashikawa 11mo agothank you
- davidw 11mo agoNot much, but they do have "a cunning plan".
- JuniperMesos 11mo agoEdmund Blackadder was never a peasant in any incarnation of the show, and only the first series took place in what was arguably the medieval period anyway.
- bigmattystyles 11mo agoThat was Baldrick's line though - he was definitely lower class.
- cleansingfire 11mo agoThe medieval period was called the dark ages largely because of our ignorance of it. The Medieval spans about 1,000 years. There were plagues which made labor immensely more valuable, & wars that lasted generations. Any blanket statement about it is bound to be somewhere between false and meaningless. Including this one.
- addaon 11mo agoThe Middle Ages, for all of the holes in our documentation, is the best understood extended period where people looked back on a well-remembered past that was more organized, in many ways more advanced, and more “civilized” than the age in which they found themselves. It led to a generational mental model of inevitable decline, or of cycles. Everyone with live with today grew up in a world where the default state of humankind is progress, and has been for centuries — this difference, and its impact on society, is absolutely fascinating to me and is part of the draw of learning about the Middle Ages (or, for that matter, reading about Middle Earth).
- majormajor 11mo ago> Everyone with live with today grew up in a world where the default state of humankind is progress I don't think this is true of the under-20s in western countries. Technologically, yes. Socially? Culturally? Mental-health-wise? Prospects of doing better than their parents? Not from the kids I talk to. I think that's fairly unique in the last couple of centuries outside of certain religious groups with occasional end-times/moral-panic phases.
- addaon 11mo agoPerhaps. But the narratives we as a society build our culture around are a serious low pass filter — time constant of centuries, not years. The pain around short-term regressions is because there’s such a strong narrative against which to contrast them — the same steps backward, against a backdrop of inevitability, would hit differently, no?
- jcranmer 11mo ago> It led to a generational mental model of inevitable decline, or of cycles. No, it didn't. That model of decline or cycle describes essentially every cultural viewpoint--the view of an inevitably inclining state of humanity is quite rare, and I'm not aware of anyone advancing that before the rise of humanism. It predates not only the fall of the Roman Empire, but the rise of the Roman Republic before it, probably predating even the Greek and other civilizations that arose out of the Bronze Age collapse. Medieval civilization did live amongst the ruins of the earlier Roman civilization, but their experience did not originate the idea that humanity lives after the end of a golden age.
- ericmay 11mo agoEnjoyable read. People as a whole aren’t typically nostalgic for the Middle Ages specifically, but because of what they feel like they are losing because of modernity - culture, civic pride, sense of belonging, time, and place, and a sense of purpose.
- daxfohl 11mo agoYeah if anything I'd say people imagine things to be worse than they were. At least in the American education system, there's Rome, then 1000 years of plagues and misery, then the Renaissance. I was shocked the first time I went to a preserved middle ages village in Europe, and it was a moment of realization that the middle ages weren't just dead people carted around on wheelbarrows.
- phist_mcgee 11mo agoAlthough a westerner transplated back 1000 years would be utterly shocked by the level of disease, childhood death, and complete lack of modern medical care or basic germ theory.
- vintermann 11mo agoNo, I don't think they would, because we already know that. I think they'd be more surprised at what hygiene there was, e.g. the extensive bathing customs.
- weregiraffe 11mo agoYou can know something and still be shocked when you encounter it in real life.
- RGamma 11mo agoDepends where and when exactly as well as who you were, I guess. I've been to two LWL open air museums near my region. They gather original buildings in their respective area (not a particularly rich one) from the ~15th to ~18th century, as well as tools, legal documents or weapons and while that doesn't represent an entire village community, I wouldn't want to live in any of them. Nideggen Castle also didn't look very comfortable, to put it mildly, but apparently it was luxury accommodations for the aristocrats. Hygiene, food security, personal safety, the justice system all pretty much sucked back then. Not saying everything was bad all the time, but many more things were bad much more often. Let's never go back. P.S.: Highly recommend these open air museums!
- jameslk 11mo ago> Our ancestors of the distant past can be invoked in conversations about nearly anything: They supposedly worked less, relaxed more, slept better, had better sex, and enjoyed better diets, among other things. That’s just an artifact of modern life. Pool enough money between family and friends and you can buy yourself a cheap plot of land in the middle of nowhere and wild out on your own agrarian commune
- kamaal 11mo agoThis keeps coming up in the context of India as well. The Urban centers are so people dense you yearn to escape this life and live somewhere you can enjoy Mountain perspectives, lakes and tall trees. But here is the catch, I go motorcycling often. While you do feel nice riding out in the Sun, see stunning things. You begin to realise why it might not work. There are no schools, hospitals, shopping centers or everything that makes modern life possible. Plus there is the additional fatigue of getting bored of the same things. Honestly how long are you going to enjoy the Mountain view? I do have relatives who live in far villages and have not travelled and seen the world(In fact not travelled more than 100 km radius from place of birth), they also know very little of the world, except for latest insta reels and whatsapp forwards. To be frank they do seem more happy. They might not be rich, but there is a slow and peaceful cadence to their lives which honestly feels attractive.
- darthcircuit 11mo agoI’ve lived in the mountains most of my life and only a couple years in a city. I’d take the mountains any day. The view doesn’t get old (at least to me). The air quality and noise alone are enough for me to not want to go back to a city. I’m still working at simplifying my life a lot, and I still am on the internet more than I want to be, but If you’re really finding yourself getting bored by not constantly interacting with the shiny new thing, then maybe the impediment of modern life is the problem. I’m finding the more time I choose to break away from the screen, my self esteem improves, I care more about my health (physical and mental), I spend more time with my family, and the world doesn’t seem to be as heavy.
- kitesay 11mo agoThis seems relevant to the topic: Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part V: Life In Cycles – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry https://acoup.blog/2025/10/17/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-v-life-in-cycles/ https://acoup.blog/2025/10/17/collections-life-work-death-an...? Five parts. This, the last gives a sense of what life was like. I guess most people imagining those days think they'd be amongst the rich nobility, not in the peasant class. There'd be few today that would want to go back to life at that time.
- jcranmer 11mo agoDevereaux wrote that series in large part in response to all the people going "gosh, modern life is just so much worse than medieval peasants!" But honestly, even if you're comparing to the richest kings of the time, your median modern person has a better life. People seriously underestimate just how much of our modern life would be unattainable luxury in the Medieval period.
- somenameforme 11mo ago> even if you're comparing to the richest kings of the time, your median modern person has a better life And the question I always ask when people make this claim - now would you rather be a median modern person or one of the richest kings of the medieval era? It emphasizes that there's far more unquantifiables to having a good life than there are quantifiables, yet we almost entirely socially neglect them.
- chistev 11mo agoWhy would you not want to be a median modern person?
- somenameforme 11mo agoWhat do you want out of life? Personally I am striving to have a large family, plenty of social relations, and would really like to have some ability to play a role in shaping the future of society. As a medieval king you have these to the point of absurdity. In modern times? The median personal income (US only) is $45k. [1] That's something that's very easy to forget, especially on a forum like this. And at that income, doing anything, besides accumulating meaningless gadgets, will be a challenge. Even having children, the most fundamentally critical responsibility for a society to sustain itself, is a challenge. I don't think the skyrocketing rates of psychological, mental, and other disorders is simply a coincidence. We've created a dysfunctional and unsustainable society. This can still be quite a nice place when you're way above the median, but the median lifestyle is going to be quite unpleasant. It's certainly not a lifestyle I would ever even consider preferring over that of a medieval king. [1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
- hbarka 11mo ago>> The internet has become strangely nostalgic for life in the Middle Ages. There’s a flood of AI-generated slop around this nostalgic content and many of them are generated as documentaries but with ridiculous claims, fictitious characters, and timelines that never happened. It’s the enshittification of YouTube and the new rickroll.
- vintermann 11mo agoThat's true of anything that's been identified by the ensloppifiers as a trend. It doesn't necessarily mean anyone is pushing these narratives for political reasons (although I'm sure that happens too).
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- sandspar 11mo agoApropos, from a book I read long ago and have forgotten, except for this passage: "Prior to the twentieth century, when life spans were shorter, a shepherd might have known hundreds of songs, poems, and stories and several languages, how to play several musical instruments, tan leather, make butter, dry and preserve meat, build a shelter, and prepare the dead for burial." There is so much potential in all of us!
- adastra22 11mo agoThat doesn’t seem like a lot though when you really dig into it and understand the context.
- IAmBroom 11mo agoThere's a lot of bucolic bullshit in that claim. Shepherds were lucky to speak their own mother tongue. Making butter was women's work. Tanning leather was a specialist profession. Playing several musical instruments presupposes owning them.
- zkmon 11mo ago>> There wasn’t any running water or electricity Why middle ages? Most people born in villages of many countries during 50's or 60's would not have seen electricity, running water, toilets, roads, radios, candy, plastic toys, shoes etc until decades later. Just like how the writings from ancient times were mostly about royal and religious figures, historians of modern times mostly looked at the history of the western world, Europe specifically. By projecting what I saw in the remote parts of India in the 70's, I can say the following about peasants of old times: * they didn't care about recording their lives or their appearances in any form except as folklores that were passed on through generations. The lores were sung by a special class of society telling children of higher classes, about their ancestors. * they didn't care about having distinct names for family members * they didn't like being portrayed (as in photographed) * they didn't like outsiders * they don't record their birthdays * they didn't try to avoid risk and demography stayed young, with about 10 children per woman. * if there is any pandemic or famine, they deserted villages and moved to new places * there is no money involved in transactions. Grain, jewels, land, water, bride and livestock were the stores of value
- Vera_Wilde 11mo agoMedieval life lacked precision measurement: no clocks, no KPIs, no micro-evaluation. Much of modern stress isn't workload but being quantified. That shift from 'work until the task is done' to 'work until the metric is satisfied' changes everything.
- IAmBroom 11mo agoYou seem to be saying medieval life also lacked stress. At any moment: an army could invade and feed itself off of your livestock and grain stores; a drought could guarantee mass starvation in the winter (or sooner); disease could strike down someone you love, and progress infecting others; your own livestock could trample and kill your smaller children (thus city laws against letting hogs forage in-town); you could only put by 99% of the food you will need this winter; etc. Oh, and a devil might jump out of the shadows, or a witch might kidnap your child, or a fairy, or... I guess maybe we replaced outright fear with stress.