[null_object]

Setting aside the problem (mentioned in the article) that these images were produced for an aristocratic class, and possibly don’t accurately describe the reality of a peasant’s home, then what’s most striking is how decorative the interiors are: patterned floors, painted walls, and neat carpentry.

I’ve read the theory that the life of peasants in the Middle Ages was demonized and made to sound dystopian to encourage the working class of the Industrial Revolution (including ‘forgetting’ all the traditional festivals and days free from labor), and this sort of article makes me wonder whether this is additional evidence. Or possibly just the sanitized version for the entertainment of the upper class?

PS: a sidenote - strange to see spelling mistakes like a “pain of glass” in an academic paper.

[guntherhermann]

The life of a peasant was one of serfdom, watching too many of your children die before their 4th birthday. The wheat you grew you had to mill in a landlord's mill and they collected a tax from it. There was no light in the evenings because tallow or other wax was far too expensive so when it got dark there were limited things to do. Floors were covered in rushes instead of carpet and were host to bugs. True medicine was not there, surgery unheard of for the peasant class.

The days "free from labour" weren't really free from labour, those "free" days are days spent doing menial boring work that we have industrialised away. days spent butchering animals, repairing clothes and tools, teasing wool.

You'd be lucky to own more than 2 sets of clothes. Work was backbreaking and if you couldn't work, you were a pauper.

Yeah, if you only look at the "good" (only 150 "work" days a year!) and ignore the bad (all of the above), yeah it sounds great. The reality was not so rosy.

For my ancestors, it would undoubtedly have been fucking awful. They'd have loved to this in this world we now have.

[Retric]

Light in peasant houses didn’t use candles but rush dipped in fat or tallow. Rushlights took minimal effort to create and rush was basically free. Candles where more consistent and significantly longer lasting though vastly more expensive, while rushlights where plenty useful and cheap.

The major cost was you could also eat the fat, but an hour of light every night would cost you something like 1% of the calories you needed to survive. Making them viable outside of true starvation situations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rushlight

Similarly, work was intense during planting and harvest, but slowed down the rest of the year. So people would do things like take pilgrimages surprisingly often. Rather than long days of backbreaking labor the major issue was they lacked productive work most of the year.

I am not saying life was good, but rather it was very different than we imagine.

[_a_a_a_]

> was they lacked productive work most of the year.

I'm surprised. Do you have a good source for this?

[Retric]

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2589850

To be clear work never ended and got really intense for part of the year, but productive labor was limited by raw materials, transportation issues etc.

[_a_a_a_]

Couldn't read your link but did a quick dig myself and found this, backing up what you say https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...

[watwut]

That article ignores quite a lot of activity that needs to be done. It seems to count only some kind of field work or work for landlord as work and ignores everything else that needs to be done.

Or take this:

> t stretched from dawn to dusk (sixteen hours in summer and eight in winter), but, as the Bishop Pilkington has noted, work was intermittent - called to a halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and dinner. Depending on time and place, there were also midmorning and midafternoon refreshment breaks. These rest periods were the traditional rights of laborers, which they enjoyed even during peak harvest times.

This literally describes full day of work, but tries to make it sound like it is less then that. It is made to sound like it is somehow less, because there is time for lunch, dinner and a break once in two to three hours.

[bodhiandphysics]

It really depends where. England ended serfdom in the 14th century, and in much of western europe (Italy notably, but also Scotland and Spain) serfdom never really developed. In central and eastern europe, peasants were ensurfed into the 19th century, though in most places this was an imposition in the 16th - 17th century. It's also important to remember that peasants weren't a homogenous group. There were rich peasants and poor peasants, often in the same village, and they lived different lives.

[culi]

This might be true, but being working class during the industrial revolution might be even worse than this. You move away from your loved ones to go to a big city, sleep in extremely cramped spaces, work extremely demanding and repetitive jobs for sometimes 12 hours a day, etc. If a policeman sees you strolling on the streets they'd question why you're not working and you better have some fucking proof that your boss asked you to go somewhere. Diseases and illnesses were at similar levels in this lifestyle as well. The modal lifespan of a human in hunter gatherer groups is around 70 years old. The artificially low lifespans of the medieval period in Europe was mostly due to peasants being forced to live in close quarters with all of their animals, making it a prime breeding ground for zoonotic diseases to spread (worth noting, every major human plague has been zoonotic in origin). Working in a factory doesn't expose you to as many zoonotic diseases but there's a whole host of novel risk factors and pollutants that also lower your lifespan. Not to mention, indentured servitude was the norm and is not much better than serfdom. Peasants also at least had more overall freetime than even the modern American worker. As you pointed out, only 150 days of work each day (though hunter gatherer groups still worked even less than this)

[sigg3]

A couple of notes:

The child mortality rate was equally high among the upper classes, which is why motherhood was a outsourced occupation. The likelihood of death was conceived as such a stressor it might ruin a woman. There are counter examples (parents rearing their own) that we know about precisely because it, being extraordinary, was a topic of conversation.

Your description of daily life is striking. It's also why I like reflecting on our folklore: it is usually very dark, full of fear, sickness and death. I live in Norway, and there are specific supernatural explanations for almost anything: death, malformed babies, rape, incest, abortion, suicide, insanity etc. "hidden" in what is usually presented as rosy fairytales and omens.

[still_grokking]

Most of the "bad things" were independent of social class. This was just the way people lived back than.

> watching too many of your children die before their 4th birthday

> There was no light in the evenings because tallow or other wax was far too expensive so when it got dark there were limited things to do.

(Not even rich people could afford much light!)

> Floors […] were host to bugs.

> True medicine was not there

But just think about the work days and hours. Most people (even the poor ones) were not working the most time of the year. Only in summer it was possible to work the whole day. That's why industrialization needed to "teach" the "lazy people" to "actually work".

[qwytw]

> watching too many of your children die before their 4th birthday

It was that much better for aristocracy/middle class. Obviously access to better nutrition and conditions improved the chances of survival. However mortality was still huge and not really that distinguishable between social classes from a modern perspective.

> True medicine was not there, surgery unheard of for the peasant class

Which might have been a good thing in some cases. For many illnesses and diseases the methods used by highly paid 'doctors' might have as well done more harm than good.

I agree with the general sentiment however. Yet in many ways life for upper classes wasn't that great either.

[frostburg]

Yes, the upper class was actually endlessly tormented by doctors during most of history. Until germ theory you would generally have been better off avoiding them.

[ricardobayes]

It's interesting to look at feudal tax rates. It varied between countries but the concept of "thirteenth" seems to be common, based on what I see it used to be between 2% and 10% of "revenue". I wonder when did we normalize 40-60% taxation. Seems we made a wrong turn somewhere. Perhaps our convenient modern life wouldn't be sustainable on such low taxes, but maybe it would - looking at Monaco or Dubai firmly at 0%.

[PeterisP]

The rate of taxation depends on what is the maximum possible rate, what is the available surplus that can be extracted while still enabling the workers to survive and 'reinvest' in things that affect productivity.

In earlier times a farming community of e.g. 20 farmer families simply did not produce enough surplus to feed 20 other families; if someone would tax them half of their harvest, then they would starve, eat their seed grain and breeding animals, and there would be nothing to tax next year. A 10% tax was probably the limit of what could be sustained long-term.

On the other hand, as people become more productive, it became possible to devote a larger share of that production to goals beyond the survival needs of the household.

[zozbot234]

A direct outcome of the growth of the administrative and regulatory state throughout the 20th century. High government spending must always be balanced by high taxes, an increase in the national debt, or both.

[HEmanZ]

Idk what country you’re paying 40-60% tax in. I make very good money in the US and I don’t pay close to that.

Using the US as an example, most people pay an effective tax rate of 20%. This is equivalent to a peasant getting a 10% tax and their 10% tithe to the church, so it’s not far off.

Basically we’ve moved redistribution/welfare from the control of the church to the state. In medieval times these were effectively the same thing anyways.

[arbuge]

You are probably not counting all the other US taxes: payroll, property, sales, state income tax, business taxes, etc. If you only consider personal federal income tax, the picture will of course appear rosier than it really is.

Once you include other taxes, the overall figure climbs rapidly. It's already almost 30% counting just federal income tax, social security, and medicare, and none of the other taxes mentioned above.

https://www.thebalancemoney.com/what-the-average-american-pa....

"The OECD reported that the U.S. "tax wedge" for the average single worker was 28.4% in 2021." ... "The OECD tax wedge only includes these three taxes: income, Social Security, and Medicare. It doesn’t include sales, property, vehicle, or state income taxes."

[ricardobayes]

Lots, in Europe. Top brackets which are really easy to reach in most cases - think 50-60k per annum: Austria 55% Denmark 55% France 52% Sweden 53% And so on...

[automatic6131]

>I wonder when did we normalize 40-60% taxation

It's generally common, these days, to blame everything that isn't perfect on the state. Pandemic? State must sort it out. Bad parents? State. Interpersonal violence? State. Crime? State. Infrastructure needed? State. Children are hungry? State.

For better or ill (and I'd say better) 40% taxation is here to stay, since we have all become left wing, now.

[ricardobayes]

I mean, there's a "slight" difference between taxing 10% vs 50%, so I guess it's kind of okay to demand some things in return.

[secabeen]

>Pandemic? State must sort it out. Bad parents? State. Interpersonal violence? State. Crime? State. Infrastructure needed? State. Children are hungry? State.

> For better or ill (and I'd say better) 40% taxation is here to stay, since we have all become left wing, now.

I think it's largely better, because people who are impacted by those incidents in an outsized way often become revolutionaries, or radicals, and they tear down the state that has failed to support them. I'd rather pay 30-40% tax and have a stable government and a low-crime society than a 15-20% one and have to pay for my own personal security and to worry if the next government is going to decide that my property is to be seized.

[rpvnwnkl]

Average tax rate in the US appears to be less than 20%

[LarryMullins]

> Floors were covered in rushes instead of carpet and were host to bugs.

What do you think the carpets owned by rich people were made out of? It certainly wasn't synthetic fibers. I don't see any reason to believe their carpets weren't host to pests as well. The rich class were doubtlessly covered in lice and other parasites.

[dsfyu404ed]

Taxes should probably fall into the "good" column as the cuts the landlords took was paltry by any modern standard (though I'm sure they would have taken more if the economy could support it).

[Nomentatus]

There's a big divide here though, between pre-Black Death (poverty as you describe) and the couple centuries afterward. It took forever for population numbers to recover (more than two centuries, in England) and things were much better during that period. Infant death remained very high until recent times, of course.

[watwut]

The "only 150 "work" days a year" is fundamentally stupid, because it ignores all the work that needs to be done in the winter, childcare, repairs of tools, wood chopping for fire etc.

[mountainb]

Aristos also covered floor with rushes and other scented herbs. Serfdom generally didn’t exist in the West unless you are using the term over broadly.

[null_object]

I think you gravely misunderstood my comment, I’m certainly not harking back to some romantic ideal of pre-industrial Arcadia.

If you were an under-nourished worker, living in the rat-like polluted conditions of an Industrial Revolution town in Northern England (for instance), constantly breathing sulfurous fumes, suffering cholera epidemics, seeing the whole town and all the countryside around it blackened by the ash from the local factories, while still seeing children die prematurely from all the same diseases and accidents that were common in the Middle Ages, but with less access to fresh air and your own vegetables and (to some extent) your own livestock, then making the life of a peasant seem less attractive than it maybe was in reality, is not such a far-fetched possibility.

> watching too many of your children die before their 4th birthday

As for children dying - maybe the children of peasants would die in greater numbers than the aristocracy, but nothing stopped their children from dying of an infected scratch or a bacterial infection, any more than anyone else, before the invention of antibiotics.

I think your comment falls into the “it was unadulterated hell being a peasant”-trap that I was referring to, instead of evaluating whether the life was actually more nuanced (especially in relative terms to those richer than themselves at the time).

[kiliantics]

I live in NYC, "greatest city in the world," and I encounter rats almost daily. Almost every apartment here will have a cockroach problem at some point. And since most of the city is a food desert, it takes pretty serious determination to eat a balanced diet, and usually at quite a cost.

So, notwithstanding all the negative points mentioned in this thread, I agree there are still many aspects of medieval peasant life that I wish we would aim for in today's world. There are even quite a few so-called modern "conveniences" that I would happily give up for them. I wish the things around me in my life were made of stone and wood and clay and durable textiles, rather than synthetic, disposable materials, shoddily assembled for a quick buck.

I think, just as you claim this false medieval story was told to industrial society, there is absolutely a concerted effort today to paint our current world as so much rosier than it is in comparison to other past living conditions. The idea in Better Angels of Our Nature and other such revisionist and cherry picked arguments seem like they could only be made to keep us pacified.

[woodruffw]

What part of the city do you live in that’s a food desert? They definitely exist, but I wouldn’t say they’re anywhere near common (especially relative the city’s staggering wealth disparities)[1].

[1]: https://medium.com/@olivialimone/mapping-food-deserts-and-sw...

[kiliantics]

This map is great and all but it's mostly worthless without actually going into the grocery stores and checking how the fruits and vegetables look. I live in Brooklyn but it's pretty well known that good quality fresh produce is not easy to get in the city, especially not for cheap, if you compare with other cities. You have to join a CSA or make the trip to chinatown or something like that, which is just not an option for a lot of people.

[tee_0]

They had to make laws preventing peasants wearing aristocratic clothing. Yeah peasants experienced brutal conditions but the upper class did as well by modern standards. It’s scary to think that the beast of societal dogma could even spoil history as well as everything else.

[guntherhermann]

> I think your comment falls into the “it was unadulterated hell being a peasant”-trap that I was referring to

You might be reading my comment as if that were the case, but I assure you that my thoughts are not that.

Humans adapt to any situation, that's why we are the superior species, we are the world's greatest adapters. Peasant life wasn't misery all the time, but there was FAR MORE misery on a FAR GREATER scale than there is for the average Brit. That's my point.

I think it's important to understand how many things we have that most of us take for granted (refridgeration, essentially infinite light, the world's information at your fingertips, I could go on).

I have read a few articles over the past few days about people waxing lyrical about how great medieval peasants had it, and my comment is merely counterpointing those arguments.

> As for children dying - maybe the children of peasants would die in greater numbers than the aristocracy, but nothing stopped their children from dying of an infected scratch or a bacterial infection, any more than anyone else, before the invention of antibiotics.

I think picking one bit of all of my examples, countering it, and then treating the rest of my argument as if it is worthless is a really bad way to engage with people. It's why I stopped commenting on HN, it's full of pedantic tripe like that.

Take care.

[pessimizer]

> Humans adapt to any situation, that's why we are the superior species, we are the world's greatest adapters. Peasant life wasn't misery all the time, but there was FAR MORE misery on a FAR GREATER scale than there is for the average Brit. That's my point.

Life expectancy dropped with the industrial revolution, and the condition of your average working class Brit was so abject that it literally inspired Communism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Condition_of_the_Working_C...

[watwut]

The industrial revolution was even worst is not exactly argument for "average lowly peasant life was better then ours". It just means other (otherwise short) period was even worst.

For that matter, medieval times had uprisings and discontents. Feudalism itself had also periodic uprisings, both during medieval times and after. French revolution did not exactly started when everything was fine and dandy.

[null_object]

> full of pedantic tripe like that.

Ah here was me thinking this was an uncontroversial and enjoyable discussion on HN.

Anyways. Once again, just to underline what I wrote before - my comment wasn’t supposed to suggest that there was a golden age of Elysian harmony in the pastoral landscape of Europe, somehow superior to the ‘terrible’ existence we have now, with our hospitals, antibiotics, electronic gadgets, space travel etc.

Over the last few years there’ve been quite a few studies linked on HN that have begun to give a nuanced image of life in the ‘Dark Ages’ - albeit one that was ravaged by conflict and disease.

I thought these interiors gave another dimension to this new perspective. That’s all my post was about.

[germinalphrase]

Perhaps we should all be required to live for some period of time in the cold, hungry, dark pre-modern world such that we can return to modernity and be appropriately enthused.

[pessimizer]

Maybe we should examine why we think that the past was darker and colder than the present.

[bjelkeman-again]

For me it has been enough visiting subsistence farmers. I really don’t want to live like that, and have spent a decade trying to help at some useful scale.

[_a_a_a_]

I consider that a damn good suggestion

[qwytw]

True, most socio-economic 'revolutions' e.g. agricultural, industrial, Rome conquering/"brining civilization [to]" most of the know world had huge negative effects for the majority of the population at least in short and medium term,

[JackFr]

That makes no sense. The immediate result of the Industrial Revolution was a significant improvement in the material well being of vast classes of people.

[qwytw]

> immediate result

If we agree that the first phase of the industrial revolution began in the mid 18th century and lasted until the 1840s. The material well being for most people did not really start improving until the middle if not the end of that period.

For instance: - average height of men in England peaked around 1740 and continued decreasing until at-least the 1830s or 40s or even later. Similar trends are noticeable in France and Holland. In the United Stated it was even worse, the trend didn't reverse until the late 19th century (of course this was mostly driven by immigrants from Europe, since the 18th century Americans were considerably taller than average Europeans).

- similar things could be said about real income. According to estimates real wages in England peaked around 1600 and then collapsed during the civil wars and other calamities in the 17th century. Then returned to similar levels just on the eve of the industrial revolution (1740s) when they crashed again and didn't surpass their past height until around 1820.

[Aunche]

Life as a peasant was fine until it was not. If a flood or drought wiped out your crops, you were completely screwed. You might be able to get by with rationing or foraging, but you'd have to start over the next year weaker and demoralized. As populations grew, it becoming increasingly riskier to live off the land, which is why they moved to the cities where they can earn money that you can save in the case of an emergency.

You live in an age of excess, where you can always fall back on the welfare of others, so you can't imagine working 12 hour days in shitty conditions, but this is not the case for people who moved from hundreds, if not thousands of miles away to work in a factory. For them, an extra hour of work is an extra hour of security. The fact that billions of people made this move is evidence that rural life was that bad. Dismissing these incredibly thoughtful decisions as the result of capitalist propaganda completely dismisses their agency.

[Spooky23]

They didn’t necessarily choose anything. As the feudal system broke down, those peasants were released from the land. (ie kicked out)

[Aunche]

Not true. The wealthy were more than happy to employ peasants. Even as late as 1800, hundreds of years after the feudal system, 78% of Europeans were peasants.

https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-...

[Spooky23]

Sure, but much fewer than in earlier times. There’s a reason the British liked to ship people off to America, Australia, etc.

I’d suggesting googling the term “enclosure”, specifically with regard to England. Similar issues and conflicts happened in other places.

The progression/transformation was not quick, cheap or without significant conflict.

[janef0421]

That population movement occurred during the early modern period through the Industrial Revolution, after the medieval period.

[rippercushions]

There's this common trope that medieval peasant clothing was all drab sackcloth. It was actually usually vibrantly dyed, and ACOUP goes into this in considerable detail:

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

Likewise, medieval houses were often painted with local dyes, like Falu red in the Nordics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falu_red

[manderso]

> PS: a sidenote - strange to see spelling mistakes like a “pain of glass” in an academic paper.

Presumably transcription errors; that example appears as "pane of glass" in the original paper visible at <https://books.google.com/books?id=AQDtAAAAMAAJ&lpg=PP7&pg=PA...>

[Spooky23]

It depends what you’re trying to say.

Showing the home of a typical HN poster would be very different than many working poor in the United States.

The transition from craft work to industrial production and assembly changed many aspects of life. My home is an urban single family detached house built in 1924 as a partially finished home that could be adapted by the owner to be a two family or you could finish the bedrooms upstairs. We did some research and the first owners of the home worked for the phone company. So not a super expensive home then, but there is still custom craftwork masonry, good trim carpentry (custom built-ins, custom millwork, etc). Today those tradespeople don’t exist. To a 1920s middle class person, a modern high end home would look unfinished in comparison.

[automatic6131]

>strange to see spelling mistakes like a “pain of glass” in an academic paper.

I did a double take when I read that a "white car warms itself by the fire". Good to know that medieval peasants had motorized transport!

[Aunche]

You're assuming that factory workers are stupid and incapable of judging living conditions on their own. The fact is that millions of people voluntarily moved thousands of miles away from their families and hometowns to a country where they can't even speak the language, just so that they can work in a factory. That is not a decision that they make lightly. The fact that they had to work for long hours and shitty conditions is evidence not evidence that they made poor decisions, but that their supposedly idyllic country life was that much worse.

[HEmanZ]

I think you’re right, peasant life wasn’t so dystopian through the Middle Ages, and it seems to get a bad rap. Peasants didn’t have modern freedoms but they were not chattel slaves. They had a lot of free time and for much of history had a lot of land-per-person. Humans with free time and space, even if they are economically poor, carve out interesting and non-dystopian lives for themselves.

I know explicit propaganda was used to try to convince Russian peasants their lives were miserable to spur the communist revolution. I’m not sure about explicit propaganda elsewhere. I think our collective consciences have merged together images of “old poverty” and we have an image of surfs that are closer to chattel slaves thanks to colonialism and industrialization. I also suspect quality of life among peasants was volatile over time, with famines and political turmoil hitting them extremely hard. By the industrial revolution it may really have been dystopian in much of Europe.

[qwytw]

> Russian peasants their lives were miserable

They were miserable though. The conditions of Russian peasants were much closer to chattel slavery than many of those who lived during the late middle ages in Western Europe. In fact the relative conditions of serfs in Russia (and Eastern Europe in general) got progressively worse during the 15-18th centuries as the conditions at the same time as they were gradually improving in the west.

> By the industrial revolution it may really have been dystopian in much of Europe.

I think the lives of people living in the country side who owned some lands (or tenancy) at least improved during the industrial revolution. Farmers in western Europe were increasingly focused on less labor intense cash crops or husbandry (as grain imports from Eastern Europe increased) which meant that there was demand for labor (forcing many to move into the crowded cities). Those who remained to a large degree were left with a bigger slice of the 'pie' compared to their ancestors.