The middle ages weren’t as bad as some make them out to be
by SocratesPuppet
The middle ages weren’t as bad as some make them out to be
by SocratesPuppet
18 Comments
Still wasn’t a picnic. You either were farming, doing household chores, or spending your time working for your lord without pay. That, coupled with disease, lack of proper medical care, and no modern luxuries meant that you weren’t having a good time, even as a lord or whatever
I would still much rather live in today’s society than in medieval society
You’d still drink the local beer because it really was still safer than the well or local river because…fuck, even the local wells in Victorian England could have shit leaking in it.
Some of these are correct
but they absolutely just threw their waste into the street
“Small beer” or barley juice isn’t really alcoholic. It’s mostly a way of drinking your calories that wasn’t bread. And while we all love bread, if your diet is 50% bread, it gets boring fast.
Hey them country boys knew how to keep clean. It was those slothful city slickers who threw their shit out the window.
Idk what aclhohlohl is but it sounds dangerous
I thought they indeed would prefer alchohol to water on any opportunity but people hydrated a lot less compared to modern days and the beer was very stale.
I’d rather live in modern society than medieval. But I’d rather live in a medieval society than Rome. Rome is overrated.
What’s with this weird rose tinted glasses for the middle ages in the internet?
Also great social life and lots of festivals. I still think modern medicine wins tho.
Adding to this, my favorite theory, never directly confirmed but supported by a lot of indirect evidence and pure logic, is that many medieval commoners, including women, probably had what we would now see as some kind of gym powerlifter physique.
So nobles may have started valuing the opposite traits: softer or chubbier bodies, pale skin, and visible delicacy, basically as a contrast to the tanned and physically worked bodies of peasants.
And that’s probably part of why nobles resented Sissi of Austria so much. They didn’t just resent her body, they resented what her body represented. She was basically a gym rat before gym rats were a thing.
What about the fact that it was always a drab gray outside? Thats enough to let me know the middle ages sucked.
Negative portrayals of medieval life in art is at least partially a classist, industrialist reaction to the relatively idyllic life led by some medieval peasants.
Prior to the discovery of the New World, European peasants had quite good teeth (lots of grains, no sugar). They got heaps of exercise. They enjoyed village commons which had not yet been enclosed. They had many Church-guaranteed days off. They had well-established legal avenues to resolve disputes. Some of them were prosperous landowners. Villages were slow to change but relatively secure barring famine.
During the transition to industrial city life, many peasants’ lives became shorter and their health and nutrition declined. Working hours shot up dramatically. Diseases spread. There was a new urban precariousness which hadn’t been seen before, at least not at the same scale.
I would not be surprised if anti-medieval propaganda was a way to soften these changes in the minds of the working class.
It’s funny to me that most of the worst ideas people have of the medieval era are based on the experiences of people during industrialisation. Polluted water, rundown homes, diseases everywhere, alcoholism, religious extremism, bad smell… All of it was worse when people became *checks notes* „more civilised“ apparently.
Half of them are stillborn tho . And you still put a little bit a wins in your water for taste
People forget that all throughout history people tried to look richer than they were. And the easiest way to look richer was to wear bright and colorful clothes. Plus colors are fun. So for all of human history right up to the modern era people used as much color as they could. And many colors such as red, yellow and green are achievable very cheaply using natural dies. So they did. Only in the modern era with all imaginable colors available to everyone have we started to go for muted tones.
“Wears many different bright colours”
Most people did not have the money to buy bright colours and they also produced their own clothes.
If they for example lived in a region which mainly used linen and not wool, good luck wearing bright colours with medieval dyeing techniques.
Also good luck wearing bright colours if you do not have the money to buy the select few dyes that produce bright colours like woad, madder or dyer’s weed and you could only use one of the many poor substitutes the grow wild in your region.