Would the average serf have felt like life was hell and then you die? Was life a lot like Game of Thrones without dragons?
Or did people in reality have a reasonable amount of happiness in their lives?
these people can probably tell you:
http://historum.com/search.php?searchid=2725254
No medicine, no political liberties, illiteracy, superstition, famine, violence, etc.
Even with all those things vastly improved life is still fairly miserable. So I vote yes.
In thinking about this, one point to note is that people from that time - and indeed most human times - didn’t have modern western expectations of daily life or notions about what was and wasn’t miserable.
Hard to say. They lived a life that we would find unbearably narrow. But it’s difficult to be sure they saw it that way.
Who knows? In a thousand years, people may look back on us and shudder in horror at our lives. “Poor things. They spent their entire lives on a single planet. They never met anyone who wasn’t another human being. They were surrounded by things like crime and war and poverty. And they actually got sick and some of them even died. Their lives must have been constant misery.”
The things that mostly contribute to happiness are good health and good interpersonal relationships. I’m not aware of any evidence that political liberty makes people happier, or literacy. Wealthier, possibly, but that’s not the same thing.
As regards happiness, the biggest difference between the middle ages and now was, obviously, the limited state of medical knowledge and practice.
Depends. Are your nobility, or at least a rich merchant, or are you a peasant? Or serf…
Game of Thrones might reflect it, but the books (ASOIAF) address the “commonfolk” more. The series takes place during a war, so the threat of instant death isn’t always high. IIRC the work schedule for many of these wasn’t as back breaking as stereotypes lead to believe, and days off occurred, although there was more religious devotion in these times. Unless you were in the military, you wouldn’t have traveled much.
GoT focuses on Houses involved in conflict, but not so much on some random family who is happy and safe.
Two falsities: rich people could live long, but the dying at 30 stereotype isn’t true. Also, the mortality will look much higher if you don’t account for infant mortality, which was more common.
Also, people weren’t a whole lot shorter at this time, even with a different diet.
Less developed medicine (e.g. germ theory), but the concept certainly existed. Good thing we became more advanced, and unanimously accept vaccinations!
Civil liberties? What kind/for whom? They didn’t have the right to vote or SSM, but then those concepts would’ve been alien.
Literacy was very important, just not for lower classes. The Bible was the main focus for many but not the only one.
Humans are superstitious by nature, IMHO. It will change forms though.
Famine was always a problem. Note that the biggest famine ever(?) was in the 20th century and was mostly preventable.
Violence is less among some populations, more among others. But that was true then. Just Europe had more war (if we ignore 1939 et al.)
William Langland (around 1370) describes a pretty mundane perspective on worldly life that’s neither paradise nor nightmare for the most part:
For a wealth of information on Langland’s contemporary Chaucer and what his works tell us about the average person’s life in this period, check out Daily Life in Chaucer’s England.
Of course, the mid-14th century saw the devastation of the plague, but the consequent labor shortage and high demand for laborers actually increased the standard of living for non-elites by the end of the century.
I’m not sure what similar sources exist for the Continent, but I’d guess daily life for the average person wasn’t too different. People in general in the medieval period certainly didn’t view themselves as continually miserable.
Of course they did. They were humans. Life may have been hard by our standards, but they didn’t know any differently. I can’t know, but they probably wanted to live a good life and want better for their children. If they did not, we would not be here. Miserable is relative.
I think the kind of pressure and bother that goes with modern life simply didn’t exist then. Most people were born in a city and born into a certain type of work (the work of their parents), and therefore born into a role. Certainly, there were exceptions. You might become a monk and scholar in Europe or a government official in China. But most people had a pretty simple life without a lot of expectations put on them other than to do their work and follow the basic rules of society.
Also, if you worked the land, you could have considerable downtime in the winter, and there was basically no working after dark.
Part of it was devotion and part of it was that religious organizations/places were the center of social and artistic life, and a big chunk of a person’s legal structures were linked to religion as well. And if you’re into SM, nothing beats a good row of flagellants (even if you’re not: half naked men!).
Their lives were less materially-comfortable than ours and shorter (a lot of this was due to child deaths and birthfevers), but the built-in social network would have been incomprehensible for the “Standard American”. Obligations didn’t just go from the bottom to the top; they went in all directions, you gave to many and received from many. And of course, your situation didn’t just change depending on social class, but on where you belonged to it and on the specific time period. Same as it isn’t the same to be a grocer in BFE as in NYC, it wasn’t the same to be a merchant in one of the big merchant cities (such as Barcelona or Venice) as in a Camino town or a middle-of-nowhere village.
Sorry to highjack, but is there any statistics on mortality when chid statistics are taken out?
Not statistics in the modern sense, But, estimates, yes.
Here (Life Expectancy in the Middle Ages - Sarah Woodbury) is a page with information on the life expectancy of a bunch of 13th-century royals who made it to adulthood - 43.6 for woman, 48.7 for men. Obviously they’re of the very highest social class, and protected from risks that others might face, e.g. loss of livelihood. But they face pretty much the same risk of infectious diseases, poor medical knowledge/practice, death from complications of childbirth, etc that everyone in their society faced. And no doubt there are other studies that look at less exalted social groups based on, e.g. parish burial records.
Its no wonder people were superstitious and had their lives centered around religion when your in a society where changes in the weather would affect everyone from king to peasant. For example a long drought or longer winter = famine for the peasants which means no income for the nobleman and more pressure for relief that goes all the way to the top. Whereas abundant crops lead to happy, well fed peasants which mean more revenue from landowners and more merchant traffic for the kings.
It’s too hard to make a generalization. There were good times and bad times. Things are not universally so great today either. What’s life like in North Korea?
Here’s a website you can read about the Middle Ages:
Here are some books that I’ve read which you can use to learn more about the time:
Those Terrible Middle Ages!: Debunking the Myths by Régine Pernoud
The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature by C. S. Lewis
Inventing the Middle Ages by Norman F. Cantor (about Medieval scholarship rather than about the time itself)
But I’m not a real expert on that period, so perhaps other posters can suggest other books.
I suppose that it all depends on how you define 'happiness '.
If all it means to you, is a full belly, a warm dry place to sleep, and a friendly body to cuddle up with at night, then I am pretty sure that most people in those times were probably ‘happy’ most of the time.
This is an interesting point.
I was reading something recently that compared the modern western person’s sense of control over things and how in contributes to aspiration, desire and consumerism. The author stated that you don’t have to go back far in time to reach a point where people just had to deal with the reality in front of them without necessarily having any hope of things getting any better or easier. In fact your wife could get a scratch in the kitchen and die from it.
A while ago I read The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War. Gregory explains that modern thoughts about the willingness to go to war fail to understand the conditions of the times. He argues that the poor were likely to have a better quality of life in the army than in the slums. For example, those in the coal mining communities may have even been less likely to die in the trenches compared with the mines.
People were about as happy then as they are now. Why wouldn’t they be?
Life as a poor villager or subsistence farmer in a village in India today isn’t much different from Middle Ages Europe. Certainly there are huge cultural differences, but the big picture of one’s station, (lack of) education, & expectations in life are almost identical.
Unlike 13th Century peasants, modern day villagers are at least aware of the 21st Century world in the big city and in other countries even if they’ve never experienced the details themselves. And yet collectively they don’t seem overly worked up about it. Yes, there are protests & riots here and there. But most villagers are too busy just getting by to look up from their daily toil, their family & friends, & their daily (small) leisure.
If that’s true now with the full-up 21st Century at most a couple hundred kilometers down the road, how much more true would it have been in the 13th Century when the villagers had no example of any other way to live?
Someone far wiser than I once said “Happiness is the excess of outcomes over expectations.” If you don’t expect much, it’s easy to be happy.
Save for the warm dry places (thatched roofs are leaky, and proper insulation didn’t happen until pretty recently, for windows especially) and, very very often the full bellies (the Middle Ages were in many places a long cycle of war causing epidemics causing famines causing wars), sure.
But warm bodies to cuddle against, that they did have. Of course, they were often pigs and/or sheep because fuck gathering firewood in the dead of winter and you get used to the stench but… 