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What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

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Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

#11

Post by kamaal »

jameslk wrote: post #6

> 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

This 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.

Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

#12

Post by addaon »

majormajor wrote: post #10
addaon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 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…

> 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 en…

Perhaps. 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?

Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

#13

Post by daxfohl »

ericmay wrote: post #5

Enjoyable 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.

Yeah 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.

Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

#14

Post by darthcircuit »

kamaal wrote: post #11
jameslk wrote: post #6

> 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

This 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 everythi…

I’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.

Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

#15

Post by phist_mcgee »

daxfohl wrote: post #13
ericmay wrote: post #5

Enjoyable 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.

Yeah 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.

Although 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.

Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

#16

Post by kitesay »

This 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-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.

Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

#17

Post by School-Cotton »

cleansingfire wrote: post #4

The 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.

Western Europe did not recover the same level of civilizational development that it had under the Roman Empire until hundreds of years later, maybe 1000. That is a fact. The Napoleonic code of laws promulgated in 1804 was based on Roman law of the sixth century because they didn’t have anything better. The Roman Empire was synonymous with civilization in Western Europe for centuries — people were publishing scientific books in Latin in 1900 (!)

“Dark ages” is an oversimplification, but it contains a quite large grain of truth.

Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

#18

Post by kamaal »

darthcircuit wrote: post #14
kamaal wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This 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 everythi…

I’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 interacti…

>>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.

The real question of modern life, or may be all life. How much wasted effort goes into acquiring things which one doesn't need? That includes need to be entertained by the minute.

In the context of a motorcycle, I realise how different riding a motorcycle is compared to say driving a car. When you are driving a motorcycle. You feel the sun, the air, the cold, the heat, the drizzle, you enjoy the perspectives and feelings of all kinds(mountains, sun, oceans, lakes, rivers, trees) now you don't feel the need for music as this is entertainment enough. Heck even stopping for food and restroom breaks feels enjoyable.

Compare this to say a car, where you need to play something like music or a podcast to act as fillers to replace all that feeling. Taking a break feels like stepping out of some boredom and tiresome activity.

I have come to realise the need for these constant background entertainment needs largely stem from being in a largely non-interactive, non-responsive, non-natural environments(equivalent of sensory deprivation) where engagement with things around is either 0, or not something that your instinct naturally enjoys.

Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

#19

Post by jcranmer »

kitesay wrote: post #16

This 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-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…

Devereaux 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.

Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

#20

Post by jcranmer »

addaon wrote: post #7
cleansingfire wrote: post #4

The 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.

The 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…

> 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.

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