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Comment by braza | Hacker News Reader

> His meal was not long, for he did not favour elaborate food, saying that such food bothered his stomach and disturbed his memory. He drank clear and simple wine, light in colour, well cut, and not much quantity nor great variety. Like David, to rejoice his spirits, he listened willingly at the end of his meal to stringed instruments playing the sweetest possible music.

For me, the most curious thing here would be to know if a person in today's world in 5th percentile in wealth (i) would have (i) a larger life expectancy than a king in the 15th century, (ii) more food security, and (iii) more life opportunities.

Every time that I hear those stories from medieval times, as soon as I become fascinated by their tales and so on, I imagine how hard it would be to live there, even as a king.

Does someone know any reliable sources about that kind of comparison?

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I remember many years ago the Economist pointed out one of the Rothschilds died young of something that would have been readily solvable with penicillin, but no amount of money could get you something that didn't exist yet.

I'm going to go with a cautious "yes" to the first: the ages at death of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_monarchs are not great.

"No" on the second (king is never going to have to worry about food security, that's for the peasants)

And "life opportunties" .. bit of a divide by zero situation. As king, you technically have all the opportunities. But you can only do things which actually exist at the time. And you're bound by the social and religious conventions of the time, which you mess with at your peril. Doing so worked for Henry VIII but not for the various Georges. See, for example, the controversy over whether James 6 might have been gay.

Addendum: food security was assured, food choice was very restricted by modern standards. Remember the medieval period is pre-Colombian exchange, so no potatoes, no tomatoes, no peppers. Some spices, but a different range to what modern palates are used to. No refrigeration either, so you're limited to seasonal availability. In the winter that means you're eating a lot of root vegetables and bread, even if as king you're guaranteed a supply of fresh meat and fish (from the royal holdings dedicated to producing it).

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forme_of_Cury

This is where you get the memes about shocking medieval Europeans with a time travelling bag of Doritos: both the bag and its contents are completely impossible items for them.

Worth noting that durable items could be shipped long distance - precious metals, gems, textiles - but foodstuff shipping was more limited to high value density stuff like spices and the European wine trade.

Speaking of wine: no modern stimulants. No coffee, no tobacco, no weed, no cocaine, no opiates. No painkillers, no anasthesia. For all those situations, you have one option: alcohol.

A huge number of critical historical decisions were taken by people who would fail a brethalyser.

Quite a few precursors to modern stimulants though, there were many Solanaceae (nightshade) variations in Europe, from harmless through high to deadly. Papaver somniferum (opium poppy) got about the place quite a bit (according to archaeologists at least.

Hemlock and henbane were both used as painkillers and dulling agents .. up to unconsciousness and death, depending on dosage.

Added: Monastery herb gardens often had quite the range, eg: https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/inspire-me/blog/ar...

Also willow bark was chewed as a painkiller because of the acetylsalicylic acid it contains.

Quite powerful, BTW. I've used it while hiking for a headache. Damn thing tastes like it's half-aspirin, bleh... but the headache went away.

> No refrigeration either, so you're limited to seasonal availability.

Well, except for food preserved via pickling, salting, drying, smoking, fermenting, sugaring, and confit. Which makes for quite a long list.

Plus, various foods like grains, root vegetables, onions, and even apples could be stored for months using proper techniques. They didn't have the luxury we have of not paying much attention to how we store things and just replacing them when they go bad, so they became quite good at this.

> pickling, salting

Yes, but also my understanding is that the preservation technique of that name involves much more salt than modern palettes are willing to tolerate, and also salt itself was much more limited in supply.

Despite this, salt as a preservative was indeed critical to civilisation.

> fermenting

True, and also I want to say "blessed are the cheesemakers" etc. here. :)

There's nothing intolerable about pickled vegetables. I eat them all the time

Properly picked, as in preserved and can be stored ambient for extended periods, or "pickled" as sold in a supermarket where the small print says "keep refrigerated after opening"?

I have been told there is a huge difference between the two.

Qualify it as three types.

There are the fermented pickles

There are the pickles that get mixed with prefermented preservative (usually vinegar/salt) and pressure-canned

And then there are the pickles that get flash cooked or not cooked, mixed with preservative, and refrigerated for a limited time

Traditional "properly picked" also had to ve consumed after being open or stored cold. Once you open it, backterias can get in and spread.

There is some difference in taste, due to modern additiomal conservants and minor changes in receipta, but not all that much.

That is why some salt-preserved foods are traditionally soaked before consumption: to remove the excess salt.

Also because salt itself was much more valuable back then you wouldn't have as much or even any salt in your fresh food so you use the "preserved in an intolerable amount of salt" food products with the unsalted food products to get a quite tolerable middle ground at consumption time. Mash potatoes and pickle bits mmm

> Mash potatoes and pickle bits mmm

And thus potatoes and sauerkraut was born.

While sauerkraut fermentation uses salt, the main technique preserving the cabbage is the fermentation and sauerkraut is thus not super salty (about 1% of the weight is salt)

Without the potatoes, they hadn't arrived from the Americas by this point.

Clearly, they meant rutabegas, turnips, and cabbages.

> pickling, salting, drying, smoking, fermenting, sugaring, and confit. Which makes for quite a long list

None of which preserves the taste/nutrition well for a wide range of foods like greens/fruits/vegetables, you the limits in seasonal availability don't get resolved

There's a difference of being a bougie bitch expecting to have fresh greens in the dead of winter with a meter of snow on the ground and being thankful you stored the fall's harvest in such a way that you have food to last until that meter of snow has melted. Maybe they could have utilized green houses earlier, but when did it become practical to make clear sheets of glass?

The point is they had many workarounds for being "limited to seasonal availability." That doesn't mean everything was available or as nutritious.

Plus the excellent point that dylan604 made, they weren't bougie bitches.

>Plus, various foods like grains, root vegetables, onions, and even apples could be stored for months using proper techniques. They didn't have the luxury we have of not paying much attention to how we store things and just replacing them when they go bad, so they became quite good at this.

I would also expect them to have various special variaties of apples/pears that actually improved their taste with storage. For example a variety that was best with 2 months of storage, another one that was best after 6 months.

Then you have cheeses, yoghurts, milk. Those things could be available year round. One would expect the king of France to have quite a variety of cheeses at his disposal. Then we have meats prepared in a hundred different ways. From simple roasting, to gelling, pickling like modern hams. And so on.

Then we have various types of wild mushrooms. I wonder if the king ate wild mushrooms and who picked these mushrooms for him... Poisoning would be so easy to get away with if he did.

It would be tough without potatoes, tomatoes and peppers, but I think food-wise I'd be just fine (assuming money and power).

Exactly. People today seem to forget why fermentation was discovered in the first place.

> Addendum: food security was assured, food choice was very restricted by modern standards.

Not by the standards of the world 5th percentile, as in the question posed. The 5th percentile today is mostly subsistence farming and doesn't have access to imported foods or own a refrigerator (though there probably is one in their local village, and they may well own a mobile phone).

It doesn't work for everything but clove act as a decent local painkiller. I once broke a tooth and cloves in my mouth made me go through the day until my appointment to the dentist.

The taste wasn't so fun though.

And I would hazard a guess that the dentist was also only mildly impressed by the smell

I don't know where the "no painkillers" meme comes from, but opium's been around forever and is among the easiest drugs to harvest: just lightly score the poppy seed pod and collect the latex. It was as known and available in the middle ages as in the ancient Greek world.

https://www.neurology.org/doi/10.1212/WNL.92.15_supplement.P...

Alcohol, though, is great for dissolving opium into an easily ingestible potion, whence one gets dwale or laudanum.

Dwale is technically a nightshade preparation, not opium-based. Laudanum is opium.

> A huge number of critical historical decisions were taken by people who would fail a breathalyzer.

[citation needed]

The idea that historically people went around hammered because the water supply was poor is a myth.

See the consumption records for the 18th-century American colonists. The rates are astounding.

The water myth is not the cause.

Controversy... yeah... Historians have seen the mountain of evidence think one thing, and people ignorant of history who think he had something to do with their favorite version of the Bible know The Lord wouldn't have chosen a gay "author".

He wasn't gay, but his many male lovers might have been. :D

> Doing so worked for Henry VIII

Apart from his painful, smelly leg ulcers that he had to tolerate for years

I've made it a hobby to compare my current standards of living to "When would this be kingly?" We've traded down so much on quality of products (and sometimes: quality of life) but making a conscious decision to "live like a king" in a lot of cases isn't that hard.

Simplest example? Indoor plumbing: Boom, 15th century king.

Silly example? I got my wife seven silk pillow cases one year as a Christmas gift. A bit spendy, but instantly "living like a king".

We don't have "the royal kitchens", but do have Door-Dash. We took a tour of a castle somewhere in Canada (probably Craigdarroch) and they had a bunch of sitting rooms and reading nooks with extra lights and stuff... Steal Those Ideas! You too can live like a king, you just have to rewind a century or two, and be strategic about the luxuries you pick.

I love this! It's really a mindset of taking seemingly common things that we take for granted, and reconsider them under a fresh look to appreciate how amazing they actually are.

I don't know how common it is, but having consommable water delivered at home, being able to take daily shower and just having to push a button to get rid of my shit, always leave me in amazed state. I wish every human could enjoy all these "commodities" and more.

Child mortality is the best example of what we take for granted.

"The child mortality rate in the United States, for children under the age of five, was 462.9 deaths per thousand births in 1800. This means that for every thousand babies born in 1800, over 46 percent did not make it to their fifth birthday"

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-states-al...

It is so horrendous that I don't think we are really able to process the difference in 2025.

https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/43292/what-was-t...

> For England, including the Kings of Wessex from Æthelberht on (the first I could find a birthdate for), and the Kings of England up to Edward IV, whose reigns extends to 1483 (and consequently into Modern Ages, if we take the usual date of 1453 - the fall of Constantinople - as the end of the Middle Ages), I found the average age of death of monarchs to be 44 years. (http://ideias.wikidot.com/reis-da-inglaterra-na-idade-media)

Life expectancy is longer than that in even the poorest countries today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...

And very very importantly, this is taking the death ages of kings (i.e. people who lived long enough to actually become monarchs) compared to life expectancy at birth (i.e. people who lived long enough to be born).

Given that until roughly the 1700s infant mortality was brutal (according to [1] fully 50% of children died before reaching adulthood), this comparison becomes even starker, since average life expectancy of a crown prince at birth would be far lower (somewhere in their 20s).

[1] https://acoup.blog/2025/07/18/collections-life-work-death-an...

how much of that early death was poison or in war?

Given their position, kings and other members of a warrior elite generally would likely have downwards pressure on their life expectancy from that.

This "average life expectancy in the ancient world" thing is nothing more than an illustration of when to pick the median over the mean because the data is skewed by outliers.

Quite the opposite in this case—the median is single-digit; adults are the outliers.

Except kings very frequently died for "good" reasons: being killed in battle, or by political opponents, or during hunting accidents, or victims of coups, or beheaded. As a leader, you lead your subjects into all kinds of battles and take all kinds of risks and today's politicians don't do that anymore.

Richard II starved to death. Voluntarily. After signing over his crown to someone he had previously banished. While in prison.

Not that I have any direct knowledge, but I think a real king (either medieval or modern day) has a huge number of constraints on life opportunities. They have a lot of nominal wealth, but probably also too many obligations and duties (real or perceived) to just say, the heck with it, I'm going to be a full time traveling musician or rock climber or some such.

We've seen this recently in British and Japanese royal families. Some people just don't want it, and to get a normal life they have to leave the monarchy.

This is reminding me of folk tales where the king, prince or princess disguises themselves and goes among the commoners, but I can't name a definite example of the trope at the moment.

Kangxi emperor being disguised as a commoner in some kind of undercover boss scenario is a common trope.

https://allthetropes.org/wiki/King_Incognito

The Prince and the Pauper is the classic Western version.

Clark Kent.

I think there are multiple versions of this. One example is Gråkappan.[1] It was mentioned in the Severence series, funnily enough.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_XI_of_Sweden#Greycoat

Aladdin

I assume someone in the 5th percentile of wealth is going to have very negative wealth which is only really possible in developed countries, eg an American medical student or a doctor who is part-way through paying off their loans, or someone suffering from massive credit card debt / car loans. (I think this isn’t really what you were thinking of though. I think the poorest people in the world still live, in many ways like medieval peasants except with much lower infant mortality and somewhat net food security)

The correct metric is probably something like Actual Individual Consumption.

> someone in the 5th percentile of wealth

I find the percentile measure terrible to technically mean 95% of the population, but is often colloquially understood the other way around. It's like German numbers, when people say five and forty to mean 45. The general population rejects needless complexity.

The general population cultivate disagreement on every matter it can afford to.

https://www.who.int/news/item/24-07-2024-hunger-numbers-stub...

Hunger worldwide has been getting worse for the last quarter century or so.

733 million people don’t have food security. I think about 5-10 million die every year from starvation.

In medieval times there were famines, but they were caused by there not being enough food to go around due to disease or bad harvests.

Today millions of people starve even if there is no bad harvest or animal pandemics.

And malnutrition isn't only about lack of food, it's also about mediocre quality of food:

> Similarly, new estimates of adult obesity show a steady increase over the last decade, from 12.1 percent (2012) to 15.8 percent (2022). Projections indicate that by 2030, the world will have more than 1.2 billion obese adults. The double burden of malnutrition – the co-existence of undernutrition together with overweight and obesity – has also surged globally across all age groups.

Obesity will soon, if not already, become a major public health disaster in poor countries.

Well giving people food doesn't solve hunger problems because those people just breed.

Why doesn't Africa have more farms and infrastructure?

Short answer: Climate (even without climate change) and war.

Long answer: Western colonialism.

> Long answer: Western colonialism.

How do you explain lack of farming / infrastructure prior to colonialism? More or less all environments populated by sub saharans struggle with infrastructure. This is true before, during, and after colonialism.

> Hunger worldwide has been getting worse for the last quarter century or so.

That doesn't appear to be true. E.g., following links from the WHO page you cite gets me to https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/39d... ...

where Figure 1 shows hunger consistently decreasing from the start of the graph in 2005 to somewhere around 2014, at which point it plateaus for a while and then starts increasing somewhere around 2019-2020.

My recollection is that by 2005 where that graph begins, hunger had been consistently decreasing for quite some time, but a bit of googling hasn't found anything that quite answers that question. I did find https://www.jstor.org/stable/40572886 (looking at data from 1930 to 1990) whose publicly-accessible abstract says that "the proportion undernourished has been in decline since the 1960s and that the absolute number has also declined in recent years".

So I think the truth is not "hunger has been getting worse for the last quarter century or so" but something more like "10 years ago, hunger had been improving for about half a century; the improvement stalled for about 5 years and over about the last five years it has been getting worse".

(Which is still bad news, as far as the present state of things is concerned, but a rather different sort of bad news.)

> I think about 5-10 million die every year from starvation.

That's an outrageous claim you need to back with some hard facts, otherwise patently untrue.

"According to the World Food Programme, an estimated 9 million people died from hunger and hunger-related diseases in 2021."

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+people+die+worldwid...

Unsupported claims are not "patently untrue"; THAT claim also requires citation.

Couple of points on life expectancy: If you made it to age 15, it was likely you'd live to be 60-80. Life expectancy wasn't lower in the past because people died earlier, they just died as children at a much higher rate, but there are some important caveats. In King Charles V's day, a simple cut that today we would not even think twice about could prove fatal from infection. Add to that the common plight of royal families being extremely inbred (I'm not sure if this was the case for Charles V) and it is actually likely that most people alive today, regardless of wealth, would likely live longer than him.

Now, when you compare a low wealth person today to a peasant from the medieval era, if you remove child mortality, they likely had a similar life expectancy, although again, the modern human is more likely to have access to antibiotics, regardless of wealth--as others have mentioned, they just didn't exist back then.

> a simple cut that today we would not even think twice about could prove fatal from infection

maybe .. most mammals do not get infections from an ordinary cut.. it is humans that are uniquely weak that way

source: retired medical surgeon

My cat almost died from an infected wound from the bite of another cat, so maybe it depends on the wound.

Expert fallacy.

Nothing in your career particularly informed you of non-human mammal infection rates, unless you moonlighted as a veterinarian.

That's why I said `could', instead of `would'.

You might be interested in "A Distant Mirror" by Tuchman

With how many times you find: "horse and man fell to the ground", and "he smote him such a buffet", and "armed himself at all points", "hauberk covered in blood" and so on... I'd think that life expectancy wasn't exactly great...

Wasn't Arthur alone responsible for the untimely death of like a dozen kings? :)

Worse: Arthur is responsible for hundreds of bad self-published fantasy novels.

Yearly.

Arthur was fictional as far as we can tell, so he was only responsible for the deaths of imaginary kings.

Edit: duh, just saw the smiley. Carry on!

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