Constable or palace guard.
I would be dead long before adulthood.
I’d probably be a cooper. I’d pounding on barrels, but wishing to get away and become a traveling minstrel.
Hard to say, but likely a farmer. As far as we can trace back we were farmers, craftsmen and soldiers. I would like to think that I would have given up the land to seek my fortune in the city, but I would have ended up as a beggar or the town drunk.
I doubt I would be a craftsman since working with my hands was never my forte.
I don’t know if I would have to be a professional soldier since I am the oldest son and would have inherited whatever property we owned. My useless brother would have been a soldier and probably contributed to the downfall of the Holy Roman Empire.
Another corpse checking in.
Never mind 500-1000 years ago; I would never have lived this long if I’d been born before the invention of penicillin.
Well, the tactics are different, but the principle is largely the same. Lawyers today are roughly analogous to the “Chosen Champions” of lore, resolving controversy by combat. The modern version is less physically violent, but it’s still a fight to the finish, sorta.
The time period I’m thinking of would predate the 1500s, though, so maybe I’d just be a regular lawyer then. Still, my nature is to saddle up my jackass, don my armor which hasn’t been shiny is decades, and go tilting at windmills.
Well, I’m not bad looking (Huge Tracts of Land) so I probably could have married not so bad as my family also has a certain amount of wealth that could have been put towards a dowry (assuming they still did those things then).
Otherwise some sort of artisan, knitting, spinning, sewing, etc.
Why not a lawyer? They certainly existed, though I don’t believe many people, if any, made a full-time living at it.
I can trace my family history back to 1600’s England and they grew pear trees back then so if I was born into the family back then I’d be a grove tender or some such.
If I had to translate my current job into something back then I’d be a smithy of some sort crafting and mending things. If I got to choose I’d probably be a woodworker.
If I get to just choose what I’d want to do then I’d definitely be a Virgin Tester on women for couples about to be married.
I’d be a nun. Reading, music, and celibacy - that’s basically what I do now!
Alchemist. Maybe a wizard.
Cunning man, trading my knowledge of fairy lore and rudimentary cures, not to mention prestidigitation, for the goods of the gullible.
Farmwife.
Is this, like, if I were magically transported back in time? Or if I had just happened to be born 500 years ago? Would I know everything I know now - or would my mind be the mind of someone in 1510? Could I just, like, do whatever I wanted to do? Or would my job be restricted by my family’s social standing and religion? The OP is pretty vague.
If I was born 500 or 600 years ago, I would have been born into a Jewish family, probably somewhere in Poland, Lithuania or Germany. (No idea where my family members were, exactly, in Europe back then.) Jews at that time would have been merchants or moneylenders; but no way would I be Jewish back then. Their stubborn insistence to remain Jewish caused them a world of trouble. I would definitely steal all of my family’s money, convert to Catholicism, and go to one of the German electorates. I would buy a horse and armour and I’d volunteer in the service of the elector, and hope that I could distinguish myself in battle enough to be given some kind of reward. Everyone back then was basically either warrior, clergy, or a slave. Even the artists, merchants, entertainers, etc were essentially slaves existing at the sufferance of the warrior class.
Yeah, what she said, only without the music, as I’m conspicuously lacking in talent.
Either that or eking out a precarious living with my pen, Christine de Pizan-style, but there weren’t too many openings in that field.
I have a number of skills that would come in handy: I can grow and preserve vegetables, preserve meat, sew by hand, knit, make books, cook and bake, throw pottery (I mean on a wheel, not at someone’s head, although I can do that, too), milk a cow by hand, and I have some very basic carpentry skills. If we’re talking 1500s or later, I’m pretty skilled with a letterpress machine, as well as a couple types of hand printing presses. According to my mother, in my past life as a Medieval woman, I escaped an unwanted marriage by joining a convent and painting manuscripts. That would be a viable option, but I’d probably end up married to a subsistence farmer or a craftsman. I could bring in some money as a book-binder, and if I married a printer I could help out in the shop.
Everything that makes me be me includes a marriage between two people who back then would have had as much probability of meeting as a toad of growing wings and whose marriage (assuming they had somehow managed to meet) would have led to something like his family disowning him. Then again, back then he probably would have been a priest (they still could marry so I wouldn’t necessarily have been a bastard), so his family’s opinion wouldn’t have been as important as that of his bishop.
You have to set the cutoff at some point, after all I’m yet another who would have died in childhood. The cutoff I used is “someone with my mindset, but not necessarily my family or my body, and born in either parental location and either parental class.”
Maybe work in a Tavern, make Beer. Possibly tell stories work as a scribe, something like that.
Me? Well the Mary Rose has just been built so I am off to sea! ( with a sackful of lemons and limes! to beat the old scurvy thing!)
Probably a brewer or a weaver, occupations suitable for women that I wouldn’t mind doing for a lifetime. If I had my choice, I’d probably have married a yeoman farmer, since that was the occupation of my ancestors on both sides of the family at the time they emigrated to the New World (one side was from Germany near the Netherlands, the other side were French Huguenot living in England by - we think - the early 1600s).