I can’t call myself an expert either (though the Plantagenets in England are kind of a hobby), but I found The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England both informative and a good read.
Do you think people in any non-democracy are perpetually miserable? That’s been the situation in most of the world for most of history. Take as an example modern China. If you insist on being a trouble-making agitator, bad things will happen to you. It is entirely possible that random bad things can happen - they might move your village to make room for the world’s biggest dam, for example, and maybe the compensation they offer sucks. However, times are better than they’ve ever been for almost all the Chinese.
Similarly, law enforcement (and laws) were more arbitrary and less egalitarian than today, obviously.
Then again, the best thing to have, for anyone, is good health. Same as today, if you were healthy, then things were good. If you got sick - options were a lot worse. (“Doctor says… you gonna die.”) Most medicines were ineffective, some treatments were lethal themselves.
As for enjoyment - there were a lot less luxuries. People stank because water had to be hauled one bucket at a time and boiled on a stove, so hot baths were a luxury and probably not a good idea in winter in a fireplace-heated house. Good clothing was expensive, good nutrition during some months was rare, food could become scarce quite easily.
I suppose depending where you were, what the political and economic climate was like, things could be quite bearable or absolutely awful. I suspect there was a lot more of the latter than in modern society.
I really think the health care issues were the primary issues. Everything else people adapt to. For example if today we had to go out and spend 10 hours doing hard manual labor, the substantial majority of us would find it a quite unpleasant experience. Yet the people who do this everyday are quite accustomed to it. And Sunday, the day of rest, was probably more enjoyable then than now–simply because it was such a big contrast from the rest of the week.
I’m betting “day of rest” was more an expression. You basically got a couple of hours off for church. After all, the livestock still needs to be fed and watered and otherwise tended (milking is everyday, multiple times, for instance). Meals for people need to be prepared and prep was more involved back then, and since Sunday dinner was often the most elaborate meal, it was more work than usual.
Malcolm Gladwell, in an essay about French vs. Chinese peasant farmers, mentions that the French peasant had two major bursts of energy, at planting and harvest. The rest of the time they did as little as possible. Partly this was because the nobility took such a huge share of the harvest, that there was not a lot of food left over to provide energy for effort during the rest of the time since it would in any way help produce more food.
For the house servants, perhaps, but their day-to-day work was probably less strenuous than that of the farmers.
According to this website, numerous liturgical feast days made for a large number of holidays throughout the year. And holidays they were, not just a chance to put down your seedbag for a couple of hours of church.
Also, keep in mind that peasants generally didn’t have to punch a clock or otherwise meet a strict “you must work X hours a day or be fired” schedule. Want to take a break in the mid-afternoon and sit by the lake? Sure, just make sure that everything gets done! As long as the cows got milked, it didn’t really matter whether they were milked by 7:30 or 8:30 as long as they, y’know, got milked. Why do you think people wanted to have as many children as possible? They could help on the farm! Imagine if the average 9-5’er today could just ask their kid to take over for a few hours! Paradise!
If your harvest was big enough that you could afford to hire other peasants to work your farm in exchange for part of the harvest, then congratulations, you just became a lord. Enjoy!
Everything wasn’t peachy keen for babies, back in the Middle Ages. One reason is water, specifically hot water, and the Matriarch of the house (Dad) got to use the bath first when the water was hottest (and presumably cleanest), and then Mom got to take her bath and then the eldest child and then the next eldest child and so forth down the list.
Well the baby being the last to use the bath by then the water was so dark with all that Middle Ages filth that sometimes you might not even see the baby. Hence the phrase “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.”
You might want to pay more attention to Pam’s dialogue on Archer. Not milking your dairy cows really messes up production. 
You sort of have to balance that with the risks of high infant mortality and that childbirth was one of the most common causes of death for women until fairly recently, historically.
Based on my experiences in extremely poor countries…
You kids die, and you don’t get over that. You will bear lots of children, and many of them will get sick and die. You can expect it, you can cope with it, but it still hurts just as bad as it hurts anyone else. That’s the part that really sucks.
That, and getting sick sucks. The death and disfigurement is something you can get used to. But always having diarrhea or a hacking cough or limp or whatever is just a constant drain.
And now and then, you have someone with special needs. Someone who isn’t going to become a farmer, get married and have kids like everyone else. They may be gay, or a skeptic, or brilliant, or slow, or a dreamer or whatever. But whatever they have going on that’s different, they are screwed and likely to be unfulfilled by the narrow path available.
Other than that, life is pretty normal. The meat of life is work, family, and religion/values. The triumphs and miseries associated with those are pretty universal.
TODAY, people are far more likely than ever to accept the notion that “If there’s were a God who cares about us, bad things wouldn’t happen.”
Which is interesting because, for most modern Westerners, things are better than ever. We live longer and more comfortably than any other humans in history. Which is one reason that, when tragedy or suffering DOES happen, we find them less tolerable than ever.
If you’d tried to tell early Christians that there can’t be a God because there’s suffering in the world, they wouldn’t have understood what you were getting at. As C.S. Lewis put it, all the early Christians lived “in a world without chloroform.”
People in the Midle Ages learned to live with tragedies we’d consider intolerable because they didn’t expect this world to be just, painless or free from death.
One thing to keep in mind is that biological death is not caused by physics. We die of old age because our genetic programming degrees it to be so (there’s differing theories on exactly what the reasons are, but it is a problem that can be eventually solved)
We lack hordes of attractive sexual partners because similar genetic program makes people fat and ugly. We also cannot yet build brothels (virtual reality or otherwise) full of convincing and willing sex robots.
Every last one of the problems we have current with things like atmospheric pollution and traffic are limitations of technology. Unfair economic systems are also caused by technical limits.
500 years from now, our lives will seem like miserable lives of squalor, much like we perceive the 19th century.
This kind of bathing order was fairly common among poor families well into the 20th Century. I’ve read in the memoir of some 1960’s rock legend–I think it was Bill Wyman–that he grew up poor with several siblings, and the family did exactly that. Especially in the UK I suppose this sort of thing was common not just because of family poverty, but also general wartime sacrifices the people had to make back then.
I don’t really think that’s true. The problem of evil is not a modern invention, and some of the greatest Christian heresies- Manichaeanism in late antiquity, the Bogomils and Cathars in the Middle Ages- arose precisely because they didn’t find orthodox Christian answers to the problem of evil to be convincing, and they certainly viewed the existence of evil, injustice and death to be a flat disproof of the ideas that God was omnipotent and ruled/had created this world. (A lot of Catholic thought about the problem of evil was formulated in direct response to the Manichaeans in the fifth century and the Cathars in the thirteenth). I don’t think it’s any accident that Manichaeanism, the Cathars, etc. flourished during times when life was, truly, quite a vale of tears.
The difference from the present day of course, and it’s an important one, is that nowadays many people respond to the problem of evil by becoming atheists or agnostics, whereas in the past people typically stayed religious, they just adhered to one of the Christian heresies or some other religion instead.
Peasants in Europe (well, the free or less harshly enserfed ones, not the Russian serfs who were just a little above slavery) might have worked shorter hours than you think. Partly because the snow cover during a good portion of the year meant there wasn’t much to do. And partly, maybe, because European agriculture had access to draft horses, which can plow a field much more efficiently than a cow (used in much of Asia) or with human labour (as in much of Africa). I might be wrong, so I’d welcome correction. During the growing season I’m sure there was of course a lot of hard labour, but my understanding was that (for example) for a lot of medieval peasants the twelve days of Christmas were just that, twelve days ‘off’ (or mostly off).
Do you have evidence that Chinese lords took less of the harvest than the ones in Europe? (There were, in any case, free peasants in Europe as well).
It’s quite possible that European peasants worked less hard than in China, but I’d guess that has more to do with 1) farming upland crops is more heavily influenced/limited by weather, whereas when farming irrigated rice in a subtropical climate the amount you produce can depend very directly on the amount of labour you put in, and 2) Europe used horses for labour, whereas I think China used cows. Horses can do a lot more work than cows.
I recall seeing a documentary TV show about two brothers (at least one was a doctor, maybe both, I forget) who went to live with an indigenous tribe in a jungle. They said the people there seemed fairly happy and well adjusted without any real western influences.
I guess there are drawbacks to western lives. Because we have so much wealth, we don’t need community. So family, friends and community are not as tight. Work is something people feel disconnected from. Relationships and people are commoditized (I don’t know if this was better or worse in history though). I don’t know if people in early history felt the sense of ennui we feel now. I assume so, but don’t know.
If misery is what happens when multiple things go chronically wrong with your life until they overwhelm your defenses, and because we have more control over our environments than in the past there should be less reason for misery. However maybe we just get miserable over less serious stuff (white people problems as Louis CK would say).
I guess for me one factor worth mentioning is the rise in empathy. Domestic violence, political violence, criminal violence, etc. were all much worse in the middle ages. You usually can’t be violent or abusive unless you lack empathy for your target. Most people would be horrified at the idea of torturing political prisoners or beating the hell out of their kids now. It is easier to be empathetic when your life is going ok, and life is much more ok than in the past. What the correlation between empathy and misery is, I don’t know.
Horses were super expensive commodities that were more or less reserved for warfare (both as mounts & pack animals) throughout a large chunk of the European Middle Ages. There are, some specifically bred-for-labour horse breeds out there today, but they were more recent developments (17th/18th century for the Percheron, for example, which I’ve always known as Barrel Horses because they’re shaped like huge barrels that you’d strain your groin trying to ride :)) and, for the most part, originated with “gentleman farmers” rather than muckrakers. The labour breeds of the Middle Ages have all vanished AFAIK.
Early and High Medieval peasants primarily worked with oxen, with a side of mules and donkeys generally speaking. That is not to say there were absolutely no Medieval labour horses whatsoever of course, but I don’t believe they were a common sight until the 12th/13th century or thereabouts (the horse collar itself, a crucial element of the workhorse equation, was only introduced in Europe in the 11th) and slowly became more widespread from there.
You’re right about the free time though - there was a lot of work to do come harvest time, and another big chunk in the sowing season(s) but winter and summer were basically “sleep 18hrs a day” and “drink copiously 'cause there’s a new batch of wine coming soon, pray there’s not a war going on” respectively.
Lukeinva writes:
> Well the baby being the last to use the bath by then the water was so dark with all
> that Middle Ages filth that sometimes you might not even see the baby. Hence the
> phrase “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.”
No.
Off topic, but I really wish you’d use the quote function. It’s annoying to have to scroll through the thread to find what you’re quoting, rather than just clicking the arrow that come with a quote that takes you right to the quoted post.