51–60 of 77 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> was they lacked productive work most of the year. I'm surprised. Do you have a good source for this?
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2589850 To be clear work never ended and got really intense for part of the year, but productive labor was limited by raw materials, transportation issues etc.
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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 as…
I live in NYC, "greatest city in the world," and I encounter rats almost daily. Almost every apartment here will have a cockroach problem at some point. And since most of the city is a food desert, it takes pretty serious determination to eat a balanced diet, and usually at quite a cost. So, notwithstanding all the negative points mentioned in this thread, I agree there are still many aspects of medieval peasant life…
[1]: https://medium.com/@olivialimone/mapping-food-deserts-and-sw...
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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…
> watching too many of your children die before their 4th birthday It was that much better for aristocracy/middle class. Obviously access to better nutrition and conditions improved the chances of survival. However mortality was still huge and not really that distinguishable between social classes from a modern perspective. > True medicine was not there, surgery unheard of for the peasant class Which might have been…
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 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 as…
Life as a peasant was fine until it was not. If a flood or drought wiped out your crops, you were completely screwed. You might be able to get by with rationing or foraging, but you'd have to start over the next year weaker and demoralized. As populations grew, it becoming increasingly riskier to live off the land, which is why they moved to the cities where they can earn money that you can save in the case of an eme…
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 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…
> watching too many of your children die before their 4th birthday
> 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.
(Not even rich people could afford much light!)
> Floors […] were host to bugs.
> True medicine was not there
But just think about the work days and hours. Most people (even the poor ones) were not working the most time of the year. Only in summer it was possible to work the whole day. That's why industrialization needed to "teach" the "lazy people" to "actually work".
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 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 as…
> I think your comment falls into the “it was unadulterated hell being a peasant”-trap that I was referring to You might be reading my comment as if that were the case, but I assure you that my thoughts are not that. Humans adapt to any situation, that's why we are the superior species, we are the world's greatest adapters. Peasant life wasn't misery all the time, but there was FAR MORE misery on a FAR GREATER scale…
Life expectancy dropped with the industrial revolution, and the condition of your average working class Brit was so abject that it literally inspired Communism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Condition_of_the_Working_C...
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> full of pedantic tripe like that. Ah here was me thinking this was an uncontroversial and enjoyable discussion on HN. Anyways. Once again, just to underline what I wrote before - my comment wasn’t supposed to suggest that there was a golden age of Elysian harmony in the pastoral landscape of Europe, somehow superior to the ‘terrible’ existence we have now, with our hospitals, antibiotics, electronic gadgets, space…
Perhaps we should all be required to live for some period of time in the cold, hungry, dark pre-modern world such that we can return to modernity and be appropriately enthused.
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 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…