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What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

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Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

#21

Post by ggm »

mightyham wrote: post #9
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.

I get you are probably being purposefully derisive to make a point by saying the name of the dark ages is because of our ignorance, but that's also just not correct. The general consensus of historians is that Europe suffered from widespread material simplification during the early middle ages, compared to classical antiquity. The name was coined by earlier historians, generally less concerned about mixing moral judg…

Thats one version of why. The other version is that it ran counter to a historical narrative about the (alleged, believed) moral superiority of antiquity and so was coined to further a somewhat political goal.

Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

#22

Post by ggm »

School-Cotton wrote: post #17
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 scientifi…

"thats a fact" is a very odd thing to say about a matter of opinion. I think you are at best a Historian in training, I would suggest historians don't make that kind of assertion as fact, it's opinion.

Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

#23

Post by hbarka »

>> 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.

Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

#24

Post by somenameforme »

jcranmer wrote: post #19
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.

> 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.

Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

#26

Post by vintermann »

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

No, that won't work. The dynamics have changed completely: although your agrarian commune has a ton of advantages compared to a farm 200 years ago, neither you or them could get by without their outer societies. The farm 200 years ago would have been unlikely to make its own critical tools, for instance, and certainly not, say, extracted the iron for those tools. And the economy between the farm/agrarian commune and wider society has changed dramatically. The agrarian commune has far less to offer its surrounding society. It will have to get by on charity and endowments (both ultimately based on outer society work).

Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

#28

Post by chistev »

somenameforme wrote: post #24
jcranmer wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Why would you not want to be a median modern person?

Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

#29

Post by somenameforme »

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…

> Honestly how long are you going to enjoy the Mountain view?

Speaking as somebody who's been living with mountain views for many years now - pretty much forever. There's something intrinsic about nature that just makes you feel good and refreshed. And it seemingly never changes.

And I don't think its the slower cadence to rural life that makes it so much more pleasant, but more of the social aspects. There's this weird phenomena in the city that you might live in a square mile with thousands of other people, yet on average you probably have exactly 0 people you have a relationship beyond regular casual greetings with. By contrast in a rural area there might only be tens of people within a square mile, maybe even less, yet you probably have a very good relationship with a sizable chunk of them all.

In some way I think we can even see this online. You've been posting here for over a decade, made thousands of posts, and I've never once noticed your name. I'm sure the same is true of me for you. Why? Because there's so many friggin people and posts that we never even stop to look at names, unless there's some freak occurrence where we just keep constantly bumping into each other, and notice that.

And I think the same is true in real life. The more people there are, the less likely you are to repeatedly bump into somebody else, and notice it. And vice versa for the fewer people there are. So I think this goes some way to explaining the seemingly paradoxical fact that there are substantially lower rates of loneliness in areas where there's far fewer people. We didn't evolve living stuffed like sardines in a can, and I don't think it's an overall healthy lifestyle.

Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

#30

Post by sandspar »

Apropos, 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!

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