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What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

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Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

#51

Post by zkmon »

verisimi wrote: post #38
zkmon wrote: post #34

>> 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…

But were they happy without the internet and online banking apps?

There were happy with the "on-the-line" walking by the acrobats.

Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

#52

Post by kamaal »

_yy01 wrote: post #35
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 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) This was literally where I grew up before I got education and become software engineer. Its not a good thing and we should not glorify it. Villagers in India are malnourished, the education is not upto par with cities, and the life is stagnant there. There's no op…

Large metropolitan cities in India are purely for job reasons.

I do believe buying expensive real estate in a city like Bangalore is pointless. You can put the same money in a good mutual fund, and buy a home in a Tier 2 city around Bangalore. You can reach Bangalore in an hour for most of things.

The pollution, population density and pace are all a lot lower. Plus if the idea is to retire early, this is like the best plan you can come up with.

Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

#53

Post by vintermann »

somenameforme wrote: post #41
vintermann wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The farm 200 years ago would have been unlikely to make its own critical tools... Yes they would have! There's a huge slew of great YouTube shows basically recreating how people did things in the past and it's rather stupidly amazing. For instance you probably think iron mining is some complex process where you need to go dig into a mountain in some specific place or whatever, which naturally leads to your worldvie…

I know about bog iron, of course. It's an example of a technology which just couldn't compete at all. It was insignificant 200 years ago, at least where I live. It's too much work for too little iron in too low quality.

Even 2000 years ago: I read an article about trying to find archaeological traces accompanying the spread of Sami languages into Scandinavia. They've only found one, tenative one: it seems there was a stop in making bog iron around the same time. And that's not because they didn't need iron, or forgot how to make it: it's just because they had good enough trade networks that they didn't need to.

Those YouTube shows you mention: many of them are outright fakes, you know.

I didn't really say anything about the agrarian urban divide. I just pointed out the problems of going out trying to live in your own in an agrarian commune. If enough people did it, of course it could be viable in theory, if everyone were really committed to it and bloody determined to not dip into the modern economic context.

Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

#54

Post by somenameforme »

vintermann wrote: post #53
somenameforme wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The farm 200 years ago would have been unlikely to make its own critical tools... Yes they would have! There's a huge slew of great YouTube shows basically recreating how people did things in the past and it's rather stupidly amazing. For instance you probably think iron mining is some complex process where you need to go dig into a mountain in some specific place or whatever, which naturally leads to your worldvie…

I know about bog iron, of course. It's an example of a technology which just couldn't compete at all. It was insignificant 200 years ago, at least where I live. It's too much work for too little iron in too low quality. Even 2000 years ago: I read an article about trying to find archaeological traces accompanying the spread of Sami languages into Scandinavia. They've only found one, tenative one: it seems there was a…

Bog iron most certainly isn't low quality. There's some variability, but it's generally rather pure with relatively low rates of undesirable impurities, trivial to reduce, and it's a renewable resource. The main issue is in immediate quantity. Bog iron is 'decentralized' and not appropriate for setting up a massive scale centralized iron production facility, but is more than appropriate for village to town level production, maintenance, and even weaponry needs.

And none of this stuff is faked, there is nothing to fake. The Townsends (and other similar groups) are just historical reenactors who happen to have some amazing skillsets. Watching the Brandon guy from that channel work with a wood lathe, blacksmithing, or pretty much anything you can do with your hands is part of the reason I won't be teaching my children to code, but will be nudging them towards wood and metal working. What you can do in the real world is just so much more inspiring than anything in the digital world.

These sort of little sub-cultures generally make revenue from these videos and by selling merch, either produced by their group, or by providing relevant stuff that's otherwise difficult to find, like historically accurate 18th century costumes, gear, etc for the Townsends group.

Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

#55

Post by RGamma »

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.

Depends 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!

Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

#56

Post by IAmBroom »

Vera_Wilde wrote: post #43

Medieval 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.

You 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.

Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

#57

Post by IAmBroom »

sandspar wrote: post #30

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!

There'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.

Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

#58

Post by intalentive »

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.

It’s the same as nostalgia for the 1950s. People don’t want to live in an economic zone, they want to live in a stable community.

Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

#59

Post by darthcircuit »

kamaal wrote: post #18
darthcircuit wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I love this perspective. Thank you.

Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

#60

Post by somenameforme »

adastra22 wrote: post #32
somenameforme wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

A median modern person, no question. What’s the argument that you are implying but not stating?

I replied here [2] to an essentially identical question. Basically, it comes down to a question - what do you want out of life? And are you going to be more able to achieve that as e.g. a king, or as somebody earning $45k a year in the US (the current median personal income)?

[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45951385

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