Hacker News Reader

Comment by benterix | Hacker News Reader

> It sucked then and it sucks now.

Yes and no. It did suck in many ways, the ones you describe plus many others, including lack of anonymity and little privacy as everybody in the village knows everything about you, your family, your neighbors. Worse access to doctors (even worse in the mountains in the winter). Occasional crazy person could wreak havoc. The list could go on.

However, you had space. Your own space, a lot of it. Internal and external. No walls everywhere - fields and meadows instead. And, depending on your situation, you might have quite a lot of time (and at times very little).

For me the ideal is in between these two worlds.

View on HN

Mate you can just go outside, it’s free.

How is any of this balance for being a _peasant_?!

If one happens to live in a big city, outside is not much better, and god forbid if you want to have a hobby like gardening. Just more concrete, traffic noise and people everywhere, no land that is your own. There's a reason why countryside villas remain popular among city dwellers who can afford it.

> However, you had space. Your own space

No. By definition, if you were a serf, you didn't have your own space. You had a space in your lord's space, which you weren't allowed to leave, and you had a lot of work. The idea that medieval peasants had more time off than moderns is bullshit, by the way: People did hard work mainly for the privilege of probably not being killed in the immediate future. And if a war rolled in, if you weren't conscripted to die in an army you'd be starved and raided by armies that "foraged" primarily by stealing from peasants.

And that's assuming you somehow avoided disease. Don't step on any sharp rocks, kids, sepsis is a slow and lingering death.

It did suck though. Remember that serfdom (or mandatory military service) in Europe was formally abolished only at the break of the XVIII/XIX century. But even without it, we are talking about generational periods of a moderate poverty (by prices going occasionally down, not by better pays or surplus economy) or just the regular poverty where 90% of time/energy is spent on earning on food only (sometimes, rarely, clothing).

You are right about "no walls everywhere". At the time there were also no concept of a country border as it's today. If only a free peasant, you could walk from France to Russia, start settling some land there and no one was any wiser. It would be a local administration problem at best (if any was present), but not an international one like today.

>(sometimes, rarely, clothing)

As it turns out, the various aspect of making cloth and clothing took a massive amount of the Peasant's labor.[0]

[0]https://acoup.blog/2021/03/05/collections-clothing-how-did-t...

> Occasional crazy person could wreak havoc.

I don't understand what you mean by that. We have school shootings and crazy people acting violently today, not things I generally associate with peasants, but in any case, something we witness elsewhere.

My perception is that the parent commenter is referring at least partly to "subcriminal" or nearly subcriminal behaviour. There is/was nowhere to "put" this kind of individual when they come from these settings, for a whole host of reasons, ranging from: something like "it's your neighbour's mentally ill kid, you really gonna call the cops for THAT?" to "what cops?".

School shooters and "crazy people acting violently" are probably incredibly rare by comparison. Sub/urban environments probably reduce the impact of the mentally ill on their surrounding neighbours in a whole host of ways, in fact -- in no small part because treatment is much less available in rural areas. (There's more of them in a smaller area and they're more visible and increasingly less criminalized, so people get the idea that poverty and health issues of that variety are modern, urban problems.)

Keywords in the literature around this include "community impact" or "community health", but it's not my area.

Because most of us humans have so thoroughly damaged the land and shifted baselines, I wouldn't want to be a peasant, either. I would be down for a semi-nomadic lifestyle with a Dunbar's Number group of people on healthy land and water.

From the recent book by Jessica Carew Kraft[0], community in survival situations is the most important thing. None of this Alone[1] nonsense.

[0] Why We Need to be Wild. No commercial link because I prefer pushing public libraries.

[1] National Geographic show about solo, maybe duo, survival in remote areas

Reply on news.ycombinator.com