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The daily life of a medieval king

medievalists.net

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Re: The daily life of a medieval king

#101

Post by gjm11 »

fmbb wrote: post #45
dan-robertson wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume someone in the 5th percentile of wealth is going to have very negative wealth which is only really possible in developed countries, eg an American medical student or a doctor who is part-way through paying off their loans, or someone suffering from massive credit card debt / car loans. (I think this isn’t really what you were thinking of though. I think the poorest people in the world still live, in many way…

https://www.who.int/news/item/24-07-2024-hunger-numbers-stub... Hunger worldwide has been getting worse for the last quarter century or so. 733 million people don’t have food security. I think about 5-10 million die every year from starvation. In medieval times there were famines, but they were caused by there not being enough food to go around due to disease or bad harvests. Today millions of people starve even if t…

> Hunger worldwide has been getting worse for the last quarter century or so.

That doesn't appear to be true. E.g., following links from the WHO page you cite gets me to https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/39d... ...

where Figure 1 shows hunger consistently decreasing from the start of the graph in 2005 to somewhere around 2014, at which point it plateaus for a while and then starts increasing somewhere around 2019-2020.

My recollection is that by 2005 where that graph begins, hunger had been consistently decreasing for quite some time, but a bit of googling hasn't found anything that quite answers that question. I did find https://www.jstor.org/stable/40572886 (looking at data from 1930 to 1990) whose publicly-accessible abstract says that "the proportion undernourished has been in decline since the 1960s and that the absolute number has also declined in recent years".

So I think the truth is not "hunger has been getting worse for the last quarter century or so" but something more like "10 years ago, hunger had been improving for about half a century; the improvement stalled for about 5 years and over about the last five years it has been getting worse".

(Which is still bad news, as far as the present state of things is concerned, but a rather different sort of bad news.)

Re: The daily life of a medieval king

#102

Post by thesuitonym »

braza wrote: post #10

> His meal was not long, for he did not favour elaborate food, saying that such food bothered his stomach and disturbed his memory. He drank clear and simple wine, light in colour, well cut, and not much quantity nor great variety. Like David, to rejoice his spirits, he listened willingly at the end of his meal to stringed instruments playing the sweetest possible music. For me, the most curious thing here would be t…

Couple of points on life expectancy: If you made it to age 15, it was likely you'd live to be 60-80. Life expectancy wasn't lower in the past because people died earlier, they just died as children at a much higher rate, but there are some important caveats. In King Charles V's day, a simple cut that today we would not even think twice about could prove fatal from infection. Add to that the common plight of royal families being extremely inbred (I'm not sure if this was the case for Charles V) and it is actually likely that most people alive today, regardless of wealth, would likely live longer than him.

Now, when you compare a low wealth person today to a peasant from the medieval era, if you remove child mortality, they likely had a similar life expectancy, although again, the modern human is more likely to have access to antibiotics, regardless of wealth--as others have mentioned, they just didn't exist back then.

Re: The daily life of a medieval king

#103

Post by KineticLensman »

pjc50 wrote: post #29
braza wrote: post #10

> His meal was not long, for he did not favour elaborate food, saying that such food bothered his stomach and disturbed his memory. He drank clear and simple wine, light in colour, well cut, and not much quantity nor great variety. Like David, to rejoice his spirits, he listened willingly at the end of his meal to stringed instruments playing the sweetest possible music. For me, the most curious thing here would be t…

I remember many years ago the Economist pointed out one of the Rothschilds died young of something that would have been readily solvable with penicillin, but no amount of money could get you something that didn't exist yet. I'm going to go with a cautious "yes" to the first: the ages at death of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_monarchs are not great. "No" on the second (king is never going to have to wo…

> Doing so worked for Henry VIII

Apart from his painful, smelly leg ulcers that he had to tolerate for years

Re: The daily life of a medieval king

#105

Post by reillyse »

This is less historical record than medieval propaganda piece. I get that it was written as such but even the article at the beginning pretends it’s an accurate representation of what the king got up to and then towards the end tacitly admits it’s an idealized representation of how a king should behave. This basically brings into question all of the actual details. Did he go to church every morning ? Maybe it was deemed proper that he did but as the king he just skipped it - we’ll never know.

Likewise listening to commoners- maybe this was done for show with some well cleaned up subjects every so often , or maybe it was a genuine practice , we don’t really know.

Re: The daily life of a medieval king

#106

Post by mistrial9 »

thesuitonym wrote: post #102
braza wrote: post #10

> His meal was not long, for he did not favour elaborate food, saying that such food bothered his stomach and disturbed his memory. He drank clear and simple wine, light in colour, well cut, and not much quantity nor great variety. Like David, to rejoice his spirits, he listened willingly at the end of his meal to stringed instruments playing the sweetest possible music. For me, the most curious thing here would be t…

Couple of points on life expectancy: If you made it to age 15, it was likely you'd live to be 60-80. Life expectancy wasn't lower in the past because people died earlier, they just died as children at a much higher rate, but there are some important caveats. In King Charles V's day, a simple cut that today we would not even think twice about could prove fatal from infection. Add to that the common plight of royal fam…

> a simple cut that today we would not even think twice about could prove fatal from infection

maybe .. most mammals do not get infections from an ordinary cut.. it is humans that are uniquely weak that way

source: retired medical surgeon

Re: The daily life of a medieval king

#107

Post by jajko »

fmbb wrote: post #45
dan-robertson wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume someone in the 5th percentile of wealth is going to have very negative wealth which is only really possible in developed countries, eg an American medical student or a doctor who is part-way through paying off their loans, or someone suffering from massive credit card debt / car loans. (I think this isn’t really what you were thinking of though. I think the poorest people in the world still live, in many way…

https://www.who.int/news/item/24-07-2024-hunger-numbers-stub... Hunger worldwide has been getting worse for the last quarter century or so. 733 million people don’t have food security. I think about 5-10 million die every year from starvation. In medieval times there were famines, but they were caused by there not being enough food to go around due to disease or bad harvests. Today millions of people starve even if t…

> I think about 5-10 million die every year from starvation.

That's an outrageous claim you need to back with some hard facts, otherwise patently untrue.

Re: The daily life of a medieval king

#109

Post by dang »

doctor_blood wrote: post #27
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Little has changed, except it's coffee and Spotify for me. Keep in mind that back then, wine / beer were an important source of clean drinking water, and it would often be low alcohol.

https://leslefts.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-great-medieval-wat...

Discussed once here:

The great Medieval water myth (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9031856 - Feb 2015 (71 comments)

Re: The daily life of a medieval king

#110

Post by cgannett »

ben_w wrote: post #58
antonvs wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No refrigeration either, so you're limited to seasonal availability. Well, except for food preserved via pickling, salting, drying, smoking, fermenting, sugaring, and confit. Which makes for quite a long list. Plus, various foods like grains, root vegetables, onions, and even apples could be stored for months using proper techniques. They didn't have the luxury we have of not paying much attention to how we store t…

> pickling, salting Yes, but also my understanding is that the preservation technique of that name involves much more salt than modern palettes are willing to tolerate, and also salt itself was much more limited in supply. Despite this, salt as a preservative was indeed critical to civilisation. > fermenting True, and also I want to say "blessed are the cheesemakers" etc. here. :)

Also because salt itself was much more valuable back then you wouldn't have as much or even any salt in your fresh food so you use the "preserved in an intolerable amount of salt" food products with the unsalted food products to get a quite tolerable middle ground at consumption time. Mash potatoes and pickle bits mmm
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