What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/05/medieval-history-peasant-life-work/629783/

by thinkingemote • 9 months ago

45 61 9 months ago

theatlantic.com

https://archive.ph/LpZuj

quxfoobarbaz• 8 months ago

https://archive.ph/LpZuj

rkovashikawa• 8 months ago

thank you

davidw• 8 months ago

Not much, but they do have "a cunning plan".

JuniperMesos• 8 months ago

Edmund Blackadder was never a peasant in any incarnation of the show, and only the first series took place in what was arguably the medieval period anyway.

bigmattystyles• 8 months ago

That was Baldrick's line though - he was definitely lower class.

cleansingfire• 8 months ago

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.

addaon2• 8 months ago

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 humankind is progress, and has been for centuries — this difference, and its impact on society, is absolutely fascinating to me and is part of the draw of learning about the Middle Ages (or, for that matter, reading about Middle Earth).

majormajor• 8 months ago

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 end-times/moral-panic phases.

jcranmer2• 8 months ago

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.

mightyham• 8 months ago

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 judgements with scholarship, that viewed the period as less enlightened than those surrounding it.

ggm3• 8 months ago

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.

umanwizard• 8 months ago

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.

ggm3• 8 months ago

"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.

ericmay• 8 months ago

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.

daxfohl• 8 months ago

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.

phist_mcgee• 8 months ago

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.

RGamma• 8 months ago

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!

intalentive• 8 months ago

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.

jameslk• 8 months ago

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

kamaal3• 8 months ago

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.

darthcircuit2• 8 months ago

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.

somenameforme9• 8 months ago

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.

never_inline2• 8 months ago

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 opportunity to carve out your own niche or achieve glory in life.

oTOH, The metropolitons like Bengaluru or Delhi are highly populated and make life difficult unless you live inside a posh gated society. The competition there to get highest TC job and grind till you break down just to own a house is also not healthy. Not to even mention pollution and health hazards.

We should focus on developing tier-2 and tier-3 cities. They can be developed on par with western cities in cleanliness and infrastructure as long as we can keep the population density low.

vintermann5• 8 months ago

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).

somenameforme9• 8 months ago

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 worldview.

In reality? Let me introduce you to bog iron. [1] It's stupidly common, and naturally recycles. Depending on where you live, and how often you step outside, you've probably even seen it! That orange gunk in boggy type waters? Maybe a shining shimmer on the surface? That's not pollution as many think, at least not usually - it's iron hydroxide - good by itself and often a clue of bigger deposits just below it.

Gather it all up, smelt it down, and you now have iron. And now here [2] is a video of a guy making a homemade bellows capable of iron working. A bit of skill and you can build basically whatever you want. You can even make steel. The big gap from the stone age to the iron age and beyond was mostly one of knowledge rather than requiring any sort of large scale industrialization or associated technologies.

I also strongly disagree on the agrarian:urban divide. If urban outputs disappeared, society would change a lot but still continue along just fine for the most part. If agrarian outputs disappeared, everybody would die. The fact that socially worthless, if not harmful, work is economically rewarded more than socially critical work is mostly because we swapped to economic systems that no longer value anything except money, and the closer somebody is to the flow of money, the easier it is to take a bit more for themselves - and farmers are about as far away from the flow of money as you can get.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/UuwGukUavW0

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wVNOEU_-Es

kitesay• 8 months ago

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.

jcranmer2• 8 months ago

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.

somenameforme9• 8 months ago

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.

hbarka• 8 months ago

> 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.

vintermann5• 8 months ago

That's true of anything that's been identified by the ensloppifiers as a trend. It doesn't necessarily mean anyone is pushing these narratives for political reasons (although I'm sure that happens too).

sandspar• 8 months ago

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!

adastra224• 8 months ago

That doesn’t seem like a lot though when you really dig into it and understand the context.

IAmBroom2• 8 months ago

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.

zkmon2• 8 months ago

> 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 world, Europe specifically.

By projecting what I saw in the remote parts of India in the 70's, I can say the following about peasants of old times:

* they didn't care about recording their lives or their appearances in any form except as folklores that were passed on through generations. The lores were sung by a special class of society telling children of higher classes, about their ancestors.

* they didn't care about having distinct names for family members

* they didn't like being portrayed (as in photographed)

* they didn't like outsiders

* they don't record their birthdays

* they didn't try to avoid risk and demography stayed young, with about 10 children per woman.

* if there is any pandemic or famine, they deserted villages and moved to new places

* there is no money involved in transactions. Grain, jewels, land, water, bride and livestock were the stores of value

verisimi• 8 months ago

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

zkmon2• 8 months ago

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

Vera_Wilde• 8 months ago

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.

IAmBroom2• 8 months ago

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.

What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

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