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Comment by reillyse | Hacker News Reader

This is less historical record than medieval propaganda piece. I get that it was written as such but even the article at the beginning pretends it’s an accurate representation of what the king got up to and then towards the end tacitly admits it’s an idealized representation of how a king should behave. This basically brings into question all of the actual details. Did he go to church every morning ? Maybe it was deemed proper that he did but as the king he just skipped it - we’ll never know.

Likewise listening to commoners- maybe this was done for show with some well cleaned up subjects every so often , or maybe it was a genuine practice , we don’t really know.

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> This is less historical record than medieval propaganda piece

I think you could make a good case that the title is a little sensationalistic, but you could pick at US civics class in exactly the same way (and not just in recent history). The branches of government we learn about fail to include (or at least emphasize) the fundamental role of regulatory capture, lobbyists, and opaque/undemocratic three-letter agencies in real-world governance. Not to mention the fact that even the founding of the country was based on high ideals that were highly caveat-ed ("all men are created equal" unless those men are property).

Regardless of the extent to which ideals are lived out in practice, to many people it's notable that those ideals are there at all. In my experience as a US citizens, most people educated here seem shocked to learn that there can be any ideals behind monarchy besides divine right of kings/"I am the state" [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27%C3%89tat,_c%27est_moi

> unless those men are property

And unless those men are women.

or non white, or foreign, or not cishet, or ...

Separation of powers as it’s described in civics class also doesn’t even pass the sniff test. As soon as you hear the idea your first question should be “why wouldn’t the 3 branches collude to the detriment of the public?”

Ambition counters ambition. Federalist number 51.

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed51.asp

A prediction a reasonable person might make at the time, clearly. But clearly proven to be an incorrect prediction.

I agree, and I will also add that the entire post is just basically quoting from another source, and adding zero original thought. Just point us to the book so we can read it, it's really good enough to say "hey, if you want to know what a medieval king's day to day was, check out this really cool book".

Yeah this reads as a total puff piece to me too.

Seems to really want to paint a picture of the king as a pious, diligent, man of the people, yet it only leaves me with the impression that what was intentionally omitted is the true nature of the man.

Just like any officially sanctioned biography of Trump would omit his late night reality TV binge watching, his gorging on fast food and his raping of children, this account embellishes Charles' best qualities while utterly ignoring his worst, so it is of no historical value whatsoever in terms of understanding who he truly was.

Given all the matters that a head of state has to attend to I would be surprised if they found time to go to church once a week, much less daily. Even with an on-site priest.

As for listening to commoners, I'll accept the possibility of kings that wanted to be accountable to their subjects. The problem isn't the king, it's the nobility. The nobles are going to be filtering the commoners that get to talk to the king, because the king isn't allowed to know any commoners directly. Hell, they might not even be able to speak the same language at all. England's kings all spoke either French or German for a long time, and French wasn't so much the language of France as much as it was the language that France's ruling class spoke[0].

Even if the king could understand commoners and had unfiltered access to them, it's not guaranteed that they could do anything with that feedback. Say, a peasant complained about what they pay to their lord. Does the king actually have the power to overrule the nobility? Will the nobility depose the king, or start a civil war that destabilizes the country?

The game everyone's playing is ultimately to convince subsistence farmers to "go big or go home" - i.e. to overplant and overproduce food, at the risk of crop failure, so that the state can seize some of that food and eat it themselves, nominally in exchange for "protection"[1] from rival states whose main difference is that their king is fake while yours is rightful. In other words: the king and nobility are wolves, the commoners are sheep, and it's bad form for predators to befriend their prey.

[0] At least until France erased their own minority languages in the 1800s and forced everyone to speak French, which I'm pretty sure counts as genocide

[1] Identical to the 'protection' paid to a mafioso

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