# It's 1300 and you're the king of england **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [June 9, 2017, 1:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-1300-and-youre-the-king-of-england/788513 "2017-06-09T13:41:45Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Rick\_Kitchen](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rick_kitchen/32/522_2.png) [@Rick\_Kitchen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rick_Kitchen)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2017, 7:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-1300-and-youre-the-king-of-england/788513/21 "2017-06-09T19:38:22Z")
> [@](#): > > I would likely encourage a war of foreign aggression to give my nobles something to do other than plot my overthrow. Sponsor a Crusade. Get in good with the Pope. Maybe even swear fealty to the dude in Rome so that he can excommunicate anybody who fucks with you. Encourage the proliferation of cats to keep the rat population down in advance of the Black Death. > [@](#): > > eat turkey legs. There were turkeys in England in 1300? ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2017, 8:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-1300-and-youre-the-king-of-england/788513/22 "2017-06-09T20:28:27Z")
> [@Rick\_Kitchen](#): > > There were turkeys in England in 1300? African turkeys might have reached England if they weren’t laden with coconuts. ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2017, 8:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-1300-and-youre-the-king-of-england/788513/23 "2017-06-09T20:36:47Z")
Disestablish the church. If people want to go to church, fine, but make it optional. Note that infections can be fought with bread mold. Institute public health measures like clean water and sewage control (that will be hard). Encourage some explorers to go southeast from the Iceland and Greenland settlements and report back what they find. Encourage experiments with lightning. Maybe build a primitive generator. I know they had wire pullers, so it ought to be possible. ---
**Author:** ![LicketySplit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/65b543/32.png) [@LicketySplit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LicketySplit)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2017, 8:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-1300-and-youre-the-king-of-england/788513/24 "2017-06-09T20:43:11Z")
> [@drewder](#): > > So lets say that you’ve traveled back in time with no hope of return and have spent the last few years using your knowledge of the future to secure yourself the throne of England. You have killed or suppressed all of your rivals so that at current moment you’re the unquestioned leader of England. > > So the question is what is your next step? Easy. Begin a nation-wide rat-eradication process in order to avoid the Black Plague which we know was just around the corner. (I think maybe 1320 or so was when it began?) And we know that Bubonic Plague was caused by fleas from rats. So let’s get rid of the rats. Probably we’re gonna want to trap them and then either burn them or dump them in the ocean. Either way, total eradication is necessary. See? I have been King for, what, about three minutes? And I just saved millions of lives? I saved about 1/3rd the European population. Who Rocks? LOL Cheers. ---
**Author:** ![madsircool](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/madsircool/32/3432_2.png) [@madsircool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/madsircool)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2017, 8:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-1300-and-youre-the-king-of-england/788513/25 "2017-06-09T20:44:22Z")
> [@Rick\_Kitchen](#): > > Sponsor a Crusade. Get in good with the Pope. Maybe even swear fealty to the dude in Rome so that he can excommunicate anybody who fucks with you. > > Encourage the proliferation of cats to keep the rat population down in advance of the Black Death. > > There were turkeys in England in 1300? He already swore fealty to the Pope. But England was a backwater in the 14th century. ---
**Author:** ![Jennshark](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/8e8cbc/32.png) [@Jennshark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jennshark)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2017, 10:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-1300-and-youre-the-king-of-england/788513/26 "2017-06-09T22:23:41Z")
> [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > Disestablish the church. If people want to go to church, fine, but make it optional. Note that infections can be fought with bread mold. Institute public health measures like clean water and sewage control (that will be hard). Encourage some explorers to go southeast from the Iceland and Greenland settlements and report back what they find. Encourage experiments with lightning. Maybe build a primitive generator. I know they had wire pullers, so it ought to be possible. Dang! I forgot that penicillin is relatively easy to make. I’ll study up on this as well. ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2017, 10:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-1300-and-youre-the-king-of-england/788513/27 "2017-06-09T22:27:04Z")
> [@Quartz](#): > > You only kill and burn and destroy those who oppose you. Then you move your own folks in. Land is a great incentive for service and there are plenty of younger sons of nobility seeking their own titles. Yes, but I thought you were upset about the bandits? So why are you killing the peasants? Oh, because the bandits swim among the peasants like fish in water, classic Mao? So now you murder the peasants and drain the ocean and no more bandits. Except now your land is empty. Oh, you move new people in? From where? Yeah, younger sons of the nobility. Except they don’t want empty land, they want land stocked with peasants to do the work. No peasants, the land is useless. Yes, eventually the land gets resettled. Eventually. You can’t just get depopulated land back up and productive in a year. You burned and pillaged and murdered, remember? If you move peasants from your lands to the new lands, then suddenly your old lands don’t have enough people to work them. And then you’re planning on giving those lands and the peasants on them to your vassals? You can’t kill thousands of peasants today and replace them tomorrow, it takes a generation. Your problem is that you are thinking like a modern industrial age autocrat, not a medieval monarch. Yeah, when you’ve all Connecticut Yankee’d your new industrial revolution from scratch then go ahead and act all modern. But the social organization of the medieval period followed from the technological and economic base of the medieval period. In the medieval period every mouthful of food was laboriously wrung from the earth by hard labor. Every piece of metal represents hours of work digging ore with hand tools, collecting fuel, smelting and smithing. Every scrap of cloth was laboriously wrung from the land the same way–tend the grazing sheep, sheer the sheep by hand, wash the wool by hand, card the wool by hand, spin the wool by hand, weave the wool by hand, sew the cloth by hand. Kill the peasants and who’s going to do this work–the knights? Hell no. Killing the peasants is like an industrialist who gets mad that his proletarian workers are demanding better wages and so he burns down his own factory. The peasants are the factory that produces everything. So better get that anachronistic early industrial revolution going before you start destroying the means of production that supplies the economic base of your aristocracy. ---
**Author:** ![Kropotkin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kropotkin/32/18045_2.png) [@Kropotkin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kropotkin)\ **Post date:** [June 10, 2017, 12:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-1300-and-youre-the-king-of-england/788513/28 "2017-06-10T00:06:45Z")
It’s a little late in the day, but I would encourage peasants to organize autonomous collectives, that is, anarchosyndicalist communes. We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week. But all the decision of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting, by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs,but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more–um, plus sanitation. ---
**Author:** ![stillownedbysetters](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/41988e/32.png) [@stillownedbysetters](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/stillownedbysetters)\ **Post date:** [June 10, 2017, 12:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-1300-and-youre-the-king-of-england/788513/29 "2017-06-10T00:08:02Z")
> [@Quartz](#): > > You wouldn’t go the Elizabeth I route? Don’t forget that childbirth was very risky, even for the highborn. Actually, because I seem to have come to the thrown without a powerful family to back me, I felt a marriage into a powerful family was prudent in order to further legitimize my reign. I still would want to exercise the power a la Elizabeth I, though, hence the scholarly consort uninterested in politics. ---
**Author:** ![elfkin477](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/a9a28c/32.png) [@elfkin477](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elfkin477)\ **Post date:** [June 10, 2017, 2:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-1300-and-youre-the-king-of-england/788513/30 "2017-06-10T02:17:13Z")
> [@drewder](#): > > So the question is what is your next step? Honestly, I think I’d spend quite a while confounded by the fact that time travel led me to acquire a penis. ---
**Author:** ![Terminus\_Est](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terminus_est/32/3087_2.png) [@Terminus\_Est](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Terminus_Est)\ **Post date:** [June 10, 2017, 3:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-1300-and-youre-the-king-of-england/788513/31 "2017-06-10T03:18:23Z")
> [@Quartz](#): > > You only kill and burn and destroy those who oppose you. Then you move your own folks in. Land is a great incentive for service and there are plenty of younger sons of nobility seeking their own titles. Been playing a lot of Crusader Kings II, have you? ---
**Author:** ![KRC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/45deac/32.png) [@KRC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KRC)\ **Post date:** [June 10, 2017, 3:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-1300-and-youre-the-king-of-england/788513/32 "2017-06-10T15:39:25Z")
What about those incessant rainstorms of 1314-15 that destroyed crops and led to the Great Famine? How does anyone plan to deal with that? ---
**Author:** ![Quartz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quartz/32/267_2.png) [@Quartz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quartz)\ **Post date:** [June 10, 2017, 5:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-1300-and-youre-the-king-of-england/788513/33 "2017-06-10T17:26:11Z")
> [@KRC](#): > > What about those incessant rainstorms of 1314-15 that destroyed crops and led to the Great Famine? How does anyone plan to deal with that? Revive the story of Joseph. Encourage stocks of food and salt. Don’t enact restrictions on merchants, but deal with profiteers severely. ---
**Author:** ![drewder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/57b2e6/32.png) [@drewder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/drewder)\ **Post date:** [June 10, 2017, 5:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-1300-and-youre-the-king-of-england/788513/34 "2017-06-10T17:26:54Z")
> [@elfkin477](#): > > Honestly, I think I’d spend quite a while confounded by the fact that time travel led me to acquire a penis. It’s not unheard of for a woman to rule as King. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-1300-and-youre-the-king-of-england/788513.md?page=1)