A Look into Medieval Homes
medievalists.net
medievalists.net
The adjustable pot hanger would be familiar to any cook for the next 400 years: it provides for variable sizes of pot, and distance from the fire: it's heat adjustable cooking for a slow summer or fast boil. I checked in Google images, Victorian examples abound, substantively the same.
You'd be as much in control of cooking temperature as in an aga cooker.
Of course, most folks also have a modern kitchen, but for high days and holidays they cook the old way still. Not unusual to see an old lady cranking a kid goat on a turnspit, either.
Thing is, some of these “old” houses were built as recently as the 70’s, using techniques which hadn’t changed since the medieval era - stone and timber, lath and plaster, packed earth floors - such are the privations of nearly a century of stunted development, particularly in rural areas.
People like looking at other people, and people especially like looking at themselves
I have an ex-colleague who lives with his wife in Oslo in a 45 sq. m. flat but that does include a bathroom, kitchen, and a bedroom.
That would feel claustrophobic to me having lived for the last 34 years in a house with three times the floor area, 800 sq. m. of garden, and a cellar. Nonetheless the demand for apartments where he lives is such that his 45 sq. m. apartment is worth almost double what my 130 sq. m. house and garden are worth.
We might not need much but many of us feel much more comfortable and happier with more!
While I live in Sweden (about 4 hours away from Oslo by train), I think the two countries are sufficiently similar that I can mention some of my experiences moving here from the US.
Many apartments here have a shared laundry room/area, with washer and dryer, or drying cabinet/room, and place to iron/fold.
I think just about every apartment also has a storage area, either in the basement or the attic. For us this is about 10 sq. m.
Many apartments have access to a common area that can be booked for parties or other larger events. Two rooms with kitchen is pretty common. Some have a bookable sauna, that isn't common. I've also seen places with a bookable guest rooms, which reduces the need for everyone to have a guest bedroom.
Many have some sort of green space with a play area for the kids. Some have an enclosed courtyard where residents can have their own garden. Some have a gazebo, or grill area, and one new construction here has a freestanding shared conservatory (labeled "orangery", but without any orange trees).
We don't have this, but we are a block from a small park and four blocks from a couple good play areas.
Even with these, the result is certainly not as spacious as the house you describe. Rather, I wanted highlight there might be some additional aspects of the Oslo flat which aren't reflected in your summary.
While researching what I wrote I found https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arealberegning_av_bygninger with a chart showing "Size in relation to primary area and number of people in the household - Area standards" ("Størrelse i forhold til primærareal og antall personer i husholdning - Arealnormer"). It puts 45 sq. m. for 2 people as "cramped", with the lower range for "normal" being 55 sq. m. Above 100 sq.m. for 2 people is "spacious" and above 150 sq. m. is "very spacious."
You are right too about kitchen and toilet. In the late 1800s there would have been one shared well, for the apartment building, with a shared toilet. I've read that people would have kept a pig or other animals in the courtyard. And one of the buildings here was the first worker-owned apartment building in town. The historical sign on it says it had a shared kitchen for all the residents.
I would make one point though:
> the two countries are sufficiently similar
That's true for most of this discussion but Norwegians until quite recently almost overwhelmingly wanted to own their own their home (over 80% do) and prefer a detached house, most still do. In 2010 according to SSB half of the just over two million dwellings in Norway were detached houses (enebolig). My impression of Sweden when visiting places like Gothenburg, Västerås, Linköping, Ludvika, etc., on business and holiday is that Swedes are noticeably more likely to live in flats. My house is pretty much in the middle of the size distribution for detached houses (see https://www.ssb.no/bygg-bolig-og-eiendom/faktaside/bolig)
https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/sverige-i-siffror/mannisk... says that in 2021, of the over 4.8 million Swedish households (which may be multiple people):
Småhus, äganderätt / detached house, owner - 1 909 024 = 41.2%
Småhus, bostadsrätt / detacted house, co-op owner - 93 678 = 2.02%
Småhus, hyresrätt / detached house, rent - 73 654 = 1.59%
Flerbostadshus, bostadsrätt / multi-family building, co-op - 1 006 560 = 21.7%
Flerbostadshus, hyresrätt / multi-family building, rent - 1 379 720 = 29.8 %
Specialbostad / special (student, old-age, etc) - 165 510 = 3.6%
48.1% / 1,198,659 households live in single family houses ("Enebolig"). The Swedish "småhus" total is 44.9%.
47% / 1,170,000 or so live in multi-family housing ("Tomannsbolig" / "Rekkehus, kjedehus, andre småhus" / "Boligblokk"), compared to 51.6% in Sweden.
4.9% / 121,486 live in "other", which I'll map to the 3.6% "specialbostad" in Sweden.
This matches your observation that more Swedes tend to live in multi-family homes compared to Norwegians, though I don't think it's a substantial difference. (I hope I did my numbers correct!)
FWIW, my impression of visiting Oslo is that they mostly live in flats too. grin
I’ve read the theory that the life of peasants in the Middle Ages was demonized and made to sound dystopian to encourage the working class of the Industrial Revolution (including ‘forgetting’ all the traditional festivals and days free from labor), and this sort of article makes me wonder whether this is additional evidence. Or possibly just the sanitized version for the entertainment of the upper class?
PS: a sidenote - strange to see spelling mistakes like a “pain of glass” in an academic paper.
The days "free from labour" weren't really free from labour, those "free" days are days spent doing menial boring work that we have industrialised away. days spent butchering animals, repairing clothes and tools, teasing wool.
You'd be lucky to own more than 2 sets of clothes. Work was backbreaking and if you couldn't work, you were a pauper.
Yeah, if you only look at the "good" (only 150 "work" days a year!) and ignore the bad (all of the above), yeah it sounds great. The reality was not so rosy.
For my ancestors, it would undoubtedly have been fucking awful. They'd have loved to this in this world we now have.
The major cost was you could also eat the fat, but an hour of light every night would cost you something like 1% of the calories you needed to survive. Making them viable outside of true starvation situations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rushlight
Similarly, work was intense during planting and harvest, but slowed down the rest of the year. So people would do things like take pilgrimages surprisingly often. Rather than long days of backbreaking labor the major issue was they lacked productive work most of the year.
I am not saying life was good, but rather it was very different than we imagine.
I'm surprised. Do you have a good source for this?
To be clear work never ended and got really intense for part of the year, but productive labor was limited by raw materials, transportation issues etc.
Or take this:
> t stretched from dawn to dusk (sixteen hours in summer and eight in winter), but, as the Bishop Pilkington has noted, work was intermittent - called to a halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and dinner. Depending on time and place, there were also midmorning and midafternoon refreshment breaks. These rest periods were the traditional rights of laborers, which they enjoyed even during peak harvest times.
This literally describes full day of work, but tries to make it sound like it is less then that. It is made to sound like it is somehow less, because there is time for lunch, dinner and a break once in two to three hours.
That 90+ minute break is a little more than a smoke break in the middle of a long shift. Similarly people didn’t have stop watches to time the other two breaks which lasted significant periods on top of the normal short breaks required for any significant physical labor.
Also in reference to “work that need to be done” we don’t include washing our clothes or shopping in labor statistics. If you define works as any productive activity then modern labor statistics also need no be dramatically increased.
> Also in reference to “work that need to be done” we don’t include washing our clothes or shopping in labor statistics. If you define works as any productive activity then modern labor statistics also need no be dramatically increased.
Now, washing cloth was actually massive work in the medieval setup. Unlike now, it was not question of loading and unloading machine. It was done rarely for obvious reasons, but was absolutely work that counts. They were not shopping as much as we do, given transportation issues a lot more was created in house or within small area.
But go on, count both wood chopping as work and setting temperature in your house as work too. That would be fair.
Making those cloth, fabric and bedsheets and what not DOES count as labor now. Making soap does count as labor now. Caring about animals in the winter also does count as labor now.
The number of hours the average American spends working, traveling to or from productive locations, shopping, exercise, medical care, cleaning, doing bills/taxes/DMV etc and you quickly get 100+ hour weeks for the people working a nominal 40 hour week but often far more year round. We even sacrificed the traditional breaks by eating in our cars to be more efficient.
Meanwhile a peasant may be working long days in the summer subtracting ~4 hours of food, break, nap but they also cut back when days became shorter. Meanwhile today people just turn on the lights and keep working even chronically sacrificing sleep to work more.
PS: People are better off today in so many ways, but don’t forget not everyone was a peasant back then.
The child mortality rate was equally high among the upper classes, which is why motherhood was a outsourced occupation. The likelihood of death was conceived as such a stressor it might ruin a woman. There are counter examples (parents rearing their own) that we know about precisely because it, being extraordinary, was a topic of conversation.
Your description of daily life is striking. It's also why I like reflecting on our folklore: it is usually very dark, full of fear, sickness and death. I live in Norway, and there are specific supernatural explanations for almost anything: death, malformed babies, rape, incest, abortion, suicide, insanity etc. "hidden" in what is usually presented as rosy fairytales and omens.
> watching too many of your children die before their 4th birthday
> There was no light in the evenings because tallow or other wax was far too expensive so when it got dark there were limited things to do.
(Not even rich people could afford much light!)
> Floors […] were host to bugs.
> True medicine was not there
But just think about the work days and hours. Most people (even the poor ones) were not working the most time of the year. Only in summer it was possible to work the whole day. That's why industrialization needed to "teach" the "lazy people" to "actually work".
It was that much better for aristocracy/middle class. Obviously access to better nutrition and conditions improved the chances of survival. However mortality was still huge and not really that distinguishable between social classes from a modern perspective.
> True medicine was not there, surgery unheard of for the peasant class
Which might have been a good thing in some cases. For many illnesses and diseases the methods used by highly paid 'doctors' might have as well done more harm than good.
I agree with the general sentiment however. Yet in many ways life for upper classes wasn't that great either.
In earlier times a farming community of e.g. 20 farmer families simply did not produce enough surplus to feed 20 other families; if someone would tax them half of their harvest, then they would starve, eat their seed grain and breeding animals, and there would be nothing to tax next year. A 10% tax was probably the limit of what could be sustained long-term.
On the other hand, as people become more productive, it became possible to devote a larger share of that production to goals beyond the survival needs of the household.
Using the US as an example, most people pay an effective tax rate of 20%. This is equivalent to a peasant getting a 10% tax and their 10% tithe to the church, so it’s not far off.
Basically we’ve moved redistribution/welfare from the control of the church to the state. In medieval times these were effectively the same thing anyways.
Once you include other taxes, the overall figure climbs rapidly. It's already almost 30% counting just federal income tax, social security, and medicare, and none of the other taxes mentioned above.
https://www.thebalancemoney.com/what-the-average-american-pa....
"The OECD reported that the U.S. "tax wedge" for the average single worker was 28.4% in 2021." ... "The OECD tax wedge only includes these three taxes: income, Social Security, and Medicare. It doesn’t include sales, property, vehicle, or state income taxes."
It's generally common, these days, to blame everything that isn't perfect on the state. Pandemic? State must sort it out. Bad parents? State. Interpersonal violence? State. Crime? State. Infrastructure needed? State. Children are hungry? State.
For better or ill (and I'd say better) 40% taxation is here to stay, since we have all become left wing, now.
> For better or ill (and I'd say better) 40% taxation is here to stay, since we have all become left wing, now.
I think it's largely better, because people who are impacted by those incidents in an outsized way often become revolutionaries, or radicals, and they tear down the state that has failed to support them. I'd rather pay 30-40% tax and have a stable government and a low-crime society than a 15-20% one and have to pay for my own personal security and to worry if the next government is going to decide that my property is to be seized.
What do you think the carpets owned by rich people were made out of? It certainly wasn't synthetic fibers. I don't see any reason to believe their carpets weren't host to pests as well. The rich class were doubtlessly covered in lice and other parasites.
If you were an under-nourished worker, living in the rat-like polluted conditions of an Industrial Revolution town in Northern England (for instance), constantly breathing sulfurous fumes, suffering cholera epidemics, seeing the whole town and all the countryside around it blackened by the ash from the local factories, while still seeing children die prematurely from all the same diseases and accidents that were common in the Middle Ages, but with less access to fresh air and your own vegetables and (to some extent) your own livestock, then making the life of a peasant seem less attractive than it maybe was in reality, is not such a far-fetched possibility.
> watching too many of your children die before their 4th birthday
As for children dying - maybe the children of peasants would die in greater numbers than the aristocracy, but nothing stopped their children from dying of an infected scratch or a bacterial infection, any more than anyone else, before the invention of antibiotics.
I think your comment falls into the “it was unadulterated hell being a peasant”-trap that I was referring to, instead of evaluating whether the life was actually more nuanced (especially in relative terms to those richer than themselves at the time).
So, notwithstanding all the negative points mentioned in this thread, I agree there are still many aspects of medieval peasant life that I wish we would aim for in today's world. There are even quite a few so-called modern "conveniences" that I would happily give up for them. I wish the things around me in my life were made of stone and wood and clay and durable textiles, rather than synthetic, disposable materials, shoddily assembled for a quick buck.
I think, just as you claim this false medieval story was told to industrial society, there is absolutely a concerted effort today to paint our current world as so much rosier than it is in comparison to other past living conditions. The idea in Better Angels of Our Nature and other such revisionist and cherry picked arguments seem like they could only be made to keep us pacified.
[1]: https://medium.com/@olivialimone/mapping-food-deserts-and-sw...
You might be reading my comment as if that were the case, but I assure you that my thoughts are not that.
Humans adapt to any situation, that's why we are the superior species, we are the world's greatest adapters. Peasant life wasn't misery all the time, but there was FAR MORE misery on a FAR GREATER scale than there is for the average Brit. That's my point.
I think it's important to understand how many things we have that most of us take for granted (refridgeration, essentially infinite light, the world's information at your fingertips, I could go on).
I have read a few articles over the past few days about people waxing lyrical about how great medieval peasants had it, and my comment is merely counterpointing those arguments.
> As for children dying - maybe the children of peasants would die in greater numbers than the aristocracy, but nothing stopped their children from dying of an infected scratch or a bacterial infection, any more than anyone else, before the invention of antibiotics.
I think picking one bit of all of my examples, countering it, and then treating the rest of my argument as if it is worthless is a really bad way to engage with people. It's why I stopped commenting on HN, it's full of pedantic tripe like that.
Take care.
Life expectancy dropped with the industrial revolution, and the condition of your average working class Brit was so abject that it literally inspired Communism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Condition_of_the_Working_C...
For that matter, medieval times had uprisings and discontents. Feudalism itself had also periodic uprisings, both during medieval times and after. French revolution did not exactly started when everything was fine and dandy.
Ah here was me thinking this was an uncontroversial and enjoyable discussion on HN.
Anyways. Once again, just to underline what I wrote before - my comment wasn’t supposed to suggest that there was a golden age of Elysian harmony in the pastoral landscape of Europe, somehow superior to the ‘terrible’ existence we have now, with our hospitals, antibiotics, electronic gadgets, space travel etc.
Over the last few years there’ve been quite a few studies linked on HN that have begun to give a nuanced image of life in the ‘Dark Ages’ - albeit one that was ravaged by conflict and disease.
I thought these interiors gave another dimension to this new perspective. That’s all my post was about.
If we agree that the first phase of the industrial revolution began in the mid 18th century and lasted until the 1840s. The material well being for most people did not really start improving until the middle if not the end of that period.
For instance: - average height of men in England peaked around 1740 and continued decreasing until at-least the 1830s or 40s or even later. Similar trends are noticeable in France and Holland. In the United Stated it was even worse, the trend didn't reverse until the late 19th century (of course this was mostly driven by immigrants from Europe, since the 18th century Americans were considerably taller than average Europeans).
- similar things could be said about real income. According to estimates real wages in England peaked around 1600 and then collapsed during the civil wars and other calamities in the 17th century. Then returned to similar levels just on the eve of the industrial revolution (1740s) when they crashed again and didn't surpass their past height until around 1820.
You live in an age of excess, where you can always fall back on the welfare of others, so you can't imagine working 12 hour days in shitty conditions, but this is not the case for people who moved from hundreds, if not thousands of miles away to work in a factory. For them, an extra hour of work is an extra hour of security. The fact that billions of people made this move is evidence that rural life was that bad. Dismissing these incredibly thoughtful decisions as the result of capitalist propaganda completely dismisses their agency.
https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-...
I’d suggesting googling the term “enclosure”, specifically with regard to England. Similar issues and conflicts happened in other places.
The progression/transformation was not quick, cheap or without significant conflict.
Yes. I've heard this argument before. That doesn't change my argument though. Without industrialization, peasant life would be just not bad, if not worse because more people would be completing for the same resources.
https://acoup.blog/2021/03/05/collections-clothing-how-did-t...
Likewise, medieval houses were often painted with local dyes, like Falu red in the Nordics.
Presumably transcription errors; that example appears as "pane of glass" in the original paper visible at <https://books.google.com/books?id=AQDtAAAAMAAJ&lpg=PP7&pg=PA...>
Showing the home of a typical HN poster would be very different than many working poor in the United States.
The transition from craft work to industrial production and assembly changed many aspects of life. My home is an urban single family detached house built in 1924 as a partially finished home that could be adapted by the owner to be a two family or you could finish the bedrooms upstairs. We did some research and the first owners of the home worked for the phone company. So not a super expensive home then, but there is still custom craftwork masonry, good trim carpentry (custom built-ins, custom millwork, etc). Today those tradespeople don’t exist. To a 1920s middle class person, a modern high end home would look unfinished in comparison.
I did a double take when I read that a "white car warms itself by the fire". Good to know that medieval peasants had motorized transport!
I know explicit propaganda was used to try to convince Russian peasants their lives were miserable to spur the communist revolution. I’m not sure about explicit propaganda elsewhere. I think our collective consciences have merged together images of “old poverty” and we have an image of surfs that are closer to chattel slaves thanks to colonialism and industrialization. I also suspect quality of life among peasants was volatile over time, with famines and political turmoil hitting them extremely hard. By the industrial revolution it may really have been dystopian in much of Europe.
They were miserable though. The conditions of Russian peasants were much closer to chattel slavery than many of those who lived during the late middle ages in Western Europe. In fact the relative conditions of serfs in Russia (and Eastern Europe in general) got progressively worse during the 15-18th centuries as the conditions at the same time as they were gradually improving in the west.
> By the industrial revolution it may really have been dystopian in much of Europe.
I think the lives of people living in the country side who owned some lands (or tenancy) at least improved during the industrial revolution. Farmers in western Europe were increasingly focused on less labor intense cash crops or husbandry (as grain imports from Eastern Europe increased) which meant that there was demand for labor (forcing many to move into the crowded cities). Those who remained to a large degree were left with a bigger slice of the 'pie' compared to their ancestors.