What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022) | Hacker News Reader

What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

theatlantic.com

45 pointsthinkingemote61 comments

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.

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.

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.

No, I don't think they would, because we already know that. I think they'd be more surprised at what hygiene there was, e.g. the extensive bathing customs.

You can know something and still be shocked when you encounter it in real life.

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!

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.

> 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

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.

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.

>>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.

The real question of modern life, or may be all life. How much wasted effort goes into acquiring things which one doesn't need? That includes need to be entertained by the minute.

In the context of a motorcycle, I realise how different riding a motorcycle is compared to say driving a car. When you are driving a motorcycle. You feel the sun, the air, the cold, the heat, the drizzle, you enjoy the perspectives and feelings of all kinds(mountains, sun, oceans, lakes, rivers, trees) now you don't feel the need for music as this is entertainment enough. Heck even stopping for food and restroom breaks feels enjoyable.

Compare this to say a car, where you need to play something like music or a podcast to act as fillers to replace all that feeling. Taking a break feels like stepping out of some boredom and tiresome activity.

I have come to realise the need for these constant background entertainment needs largely stem from being in a largely non-interactive, non-responsive, non-natural environments(equivalent of sensory deprivation) where engagement with things around is either 0, or not something that your instinct naturally enjoys.

I love this perspective. Thank you.

> 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.

> 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.

Large metropolitan cities in India are purely for job reasons.

I do believe buying expensive real estate in a city like Bangalore is pointless. You can put the same money in a good mutual fund, and buy a home in a Tier 2 city around Bangalore. You can reach Bangalore in an hour for most of things.

The pollution, population density and pace are all a lot lower. Plus if the idea is to retire early, this is like the best plan you can come up with.

> You can reach Bangalore in an hour for most of things.

* Then it takes 2 hours to reach your office in Bangalore.

* It just postpones the actual problem. Gradually the tier-2 towns will get crowded too.

* It means your local tier-2 town won't develop, and economy will be centred at these metropolitons.

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).

> 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

I know about bog iron, of course. It's an example of a technology which just couldn't compete at all. It was insignificant 200 years ago, at least where I live. It's too much work for too little iron in too low quality.

Even 2000 years ago: I read an article about trying to find archaeological traces accompanying the spread of Sami languages into Scandinavia. They've only found one, tenative one: it seems there was a stop in making bog iron around the same time. And that's not because they didn't need iron, or forgot how to make it: it's just because they had good enough trade networks that they didn't need to.

Those YouTube shows you mention: many of them are outright fakes, you know.

I didn't really say anything about the agrarian urban divide. I just pointed out the problems of going out trying to live in your own in an agrarian commune. If enough people did it, of course it could be viable in theory, if everyone were really committed to it and bloody determined to not dip into the modern economic context.

Bog iron most certainly isn't low quality. There's some variability, but it's generally rather pure with relatively low rates of undesirable impurities, trivial to reduce, and it's a renewable resource. The main issue is in immediate quantity. Bog iron is 'decentralized' and not appropriate for setting up a massive scale centralized iron production facility, but is more than appropriate for village to town level production, maintenance, and even weaponry needs.

And none of this stuff is faked, there is nothing to fake. The Townsends (and other similar groups) are just historical reenactors who happen to have some amazing skillsets. Watching the Brandon guy from that channel work with a wood lathe, blacksmithing, or pretty much anything you can do with your hands is part of the reason I won't be teaching my children to code, but will be nudging them towards wood and metal working. What you can do in the real world is just so much more inspiring than anything in the digital world.

These sort of little sub-cultures generally make revenue from these videos and by selling merch, either produced by their group, or by providing relevant stuff that's otherwise difficult to find, like historically accurate 18th century costumes, gear, etc for the Townsends group.

I haven't seen the Townsend group you speak of so I can't judge. I was thinking more of a channel, I think it was called "primitive technology", out of Cambodia, I think? Anyway, very obviously faked stuff.

You're talking past me here. I think old-fashioned crafts are very cool, and certainly people were more self-sufficient 200 years ago. I've been doing genealogy, and verified a family story that we're descended from a famous local woodcarver, who made the most gorgeous church altar pieces during the 1750s, most of which are still in use. He allegedly carved them with a common pocket knife (tollekniv), or, according to other stories, with self made tools fashioned from scythe blades. Fantastically cool. But no one alleged that he used his own bog iron!

In fact, when I dug into the story, the more connected to his society I understood that he was. Art historians have commented that he was clearly in touch with artistic trends from more central European countries. It turned out, he wasn't just a woodcarver, he was also the local schoolmaster, so he was perfectly literate and may well have corresponded with artists in other countries. He had also made musical instruments.

If he'd lived alone, he wouldn't have been able to do much of what he did. We underestimate how connected everyone was 300 years ago - or even 3000 years ago. Bog iron is one thing but try making bronze on your own!

I think you're creating a false dichotomy here - either some massive interconnected, and relatively singular, society - or people living literally alone. If you're at all into video games, the game Kingdom Come Deliverance, is unique in that it's not only based on real 15th century European (Bohemia - present day Czech Republic) locations but engaged in extensive research to create as accurate a physical representation of these places as possible.

So it can give you a tremendous feel for how "society" in the past might have felt in terms of scale and layout. And a decent sized city, would typically be smaller than a large suburban neighborhood now a days, in spite of there being hundreds of millions of humans alive at the time. And so I wouldn't view stuff as like 'society vs outsider', but rather large numbers of mostly self sufficient societies.

----

The channel discussion is really interesting! The original Primitive Technology channel [1] is 100% authentic and an amazing channel. But its growing popularity spawned a bunch of imitators including the Cambodian one (or 10) you're referencing. The imitators began doing ever more elaborate stuff for clicks, except it pretty much begin being obviously faked at some point - like multi-story spring fed swimming pools with crystal clear water, all constructed with extensive cuts and editing that was the video version of this meme. [2]

For the original you can watch him do stuff in real time, with no cuts or editing. And it's very doable yourself. Townsends uses edits and cuts, but again there's nothing like 'zomg how could they possibly do that' - it's just historical recreations, like building a log cabin, blacksmithing, and so on. All the stuff that would have been carried out in beginning one of these many little autonomous 'mini societies.'

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/@primitivetechnology9550

[2] - https://s3.amazonaws.com/marquee-test-akiaisur2rgicbmpehea/w...

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

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.

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

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.

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.

> 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.

Why would you not want to be a median modern person?

What do you want out of life? Personally I am striving to have a large family, plenty of social relations, and would really like to have some ability to play a role in shaping the future of society. As a medieval king you have these to the point of absurdity.

In modern times? The median personal income (US only) is $45k. [1] That's something that's very easy to forget, especially on a forum like this. And at that income, doing anything, besides accumulating meaningless gadgets, will be a challenge. Even having children, the most fundamentally critical responsibility for a society to sustain itself, is a challenge. I don't think the skyrocketing rates of psychological, mental, and other disorders is simply a coincidence.

We've created a dysfunctional and unsustainable society. This can still be quite a nice place when you're way above the median, but the median lifestyle is going to be quite unpleasant. It's certainly not a lifestyle I would ever even consider preferring over that of a medieval king.

[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

A median modern person, no question. What’s the argument that you are implying but not stating?

I dunno… median OECD state modern person, or median modern person globally?

I might go with being one of the richer medieval kings, in the latter case. Global median is pretty bad.

Only things that might sway me otherwise are antibiotics and if we’re factoring in the whole “sword of Damocles” aspect for despotic rulers.

Global median is pretty good - out of poverty even by modern standards. And antibiotics and other medical care are definitely a large factor here, as well as the general safety that comes from living in a state with laws.

I replied here [2] to an essentially identical question. Basically, it comes down to a question - what do you want out of life? And are you going to be more able to achieve that as e.g. a king, or as somebody earning $45k a year in the US (the current median personal income)?

[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45951385

And again, it feels very obvious to me that the median modern life is better than a king in the Middle Ages. Unless your interests are leading a short hedonistic life being controlled by your court and meeting a violent end. But I don’t think most people would value that.

Going with what I said in the other post - I would like to: have a large family, plenty of social relations, and the ability to play a role in shaping the future of society. Am I more likely to be able to achieve this as a king, or as somebody in the US earning $45k/year? For that matter I can't really think of anything that would be easier as somebody earning $45k a year in the US. What are your aspirations in life?

I remember a study from many years ago: people want to be better off than their immediate peers, regardless of where this puts them on an absolute scale.

The study went something like this. Which do you prefer? 1. You earn $250k but all your friends earn $500k. 2. You earn $125k, but all your friends earn $75k.

It was more refined then that, but anyway: most people picked (2).

I'm also familiar with that study, but I think it's a bit misleading because it implies the behavior is irrational by associating a fixed cost with everything. In reality, there's a perfectly rational logic that I think most people may subconsciously adapt to.

Imagine I give you a guaranteed $100k/year with the nuance that you're not allowed to earn any money beyond that, as the study implied that was your personal earnings. Where are you going to go live? In an area where most people are earning $200k or in an area where most people are earning $50k? It's the exact same question in effect, but now the phrasing makes it obvious that the choice is completely rational.

It's not about wanting to psychologically dominate your peers, but about making your money go further. If your friends are all earning twice what you do, then you're likely to struggle to afford even a decent house in a reasonable part of town. This logic breaks down at extremes of wealth, but $250k/year is nowhere near that point.

>> 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

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

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

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!

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

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.

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.

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).

> 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.

Perhaps. But the narratives we as a society build our culture around are a serious low pass filter — time constant of centuries, not years. The pain around short-term regressions is because there’s such a strong narrative against which to contrast them — the same steps backward, against a backdrop of inevitability, would hit differently, no?

> 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.

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.

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.

I mean, you can see pretty clear evidence of sharp declines in trade and industry in all sorts of ways following the fall of Rome, such as rates of silver production tied to concentrations of atmospheric lead in Greenland ice samples. It's not just something historians made up.

A good point, and to the specificity of early post Roman to 1000AD feels like a valid measure. But you also see innovations in trade, arts and embellishments, cathedral building. I don't think the coining of "the dark ages" label had the luxury of gas chromatography, it was an adjective of philosophical value, figuratively applied as a value judgement.

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.

"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.

https://archive.ph/LpZuj

thank you

>> 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.

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).

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.

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.

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