In certain respects, it was not good, together with many other historical periods, due to high infant mortality rates, lower life expectancy rates, etc.
The twentieth century solved some of these problems through oil and other technologies which lead to manufacturing and mechanized agriculture on a global scale. At the same time, though, they also led to overpopulation, environmental damage, global warming, the threat of a resource crunch, and more destructive power of weapons.
Here are a few:
You’re right about Cantor’s book – it’s more a meta-history, a history of histories, than actually about the Middle Ages. I would highly recommend a book by one of the historians Cantor discusses in Inventing the Middle Ages – that would be The Making of the Middle Ages, by the great (and very readable) R.W. Southern.
G.G. Coulton’s The Medieval Village goes into great detail about ordinary village life, which is pretty much what the OP was asking about. Coulton was a pretty extreme anti-Catholic, but as long as you stay away from his books about religion in the Middle Ages, he was pretty good. I also seem to remember a book by him about the Black Death, but can’t think of the title.
One of the most fascinating sources of detailed information about day-to-day life in the (late) Middle Ages is Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error. It concerns an inquisitor’s investigation of the rise and spread of the Cathar heresy in the Languedoc region of France. Jacques Fournier, the inquistor, was very much interested in the spread of the Cathar belief, and interrogated just about everyone in the village of Montaillou. He was interested in their relationships with others in the region, within their own class and outside of their class, so that he could learn how the heresy took hold. He brought a stenographer (a court reporter, essentially) to his interrogations, and asked endless questions about who knew who, and who interacted with the villagers, and who spent time with the sheepherders in the mountains, and who traveled to other villages, and (yes) who had sex with who, and who traded with others, or shared ovens, and so on and so on.
The records of the interrogations survived, because Fournier later became Pope (Benedict XII), and so all his papers have been preserved in the Vatican Library. The Montaillou transcripts, especially, are a treasure trove for historians.
I’m pretty sure that Ladurie’s book is still in print. I’m not sure about Southern’s book, or Coulton’s.
Afterthought – I remember, when reading Ladurie’s book, that nobody seemed particularly miserable (other than about being interrogated by an inquisitor). But mostly, they thought life was OK, and enjoyed their lives. I got the same impression from Coulton’s book, which was about English village life rather than French village life, but still, I think the idea that serfs and peasants and people at or near the bottom of the social pyramid would have been miserable and unhappy is a distinct case of us moderns projecting on to these Middle Agers how we would feel about living the way they lived.
The whole point of Gladwell’s essay was that Chinese peasants were allowed to keep a lot more of the produce from their paddies and the profits. As a result, they were motivated to be much better managers of their assets, also allowing them to squeeze up to three harvests a year out of their fields. This required far more intense management and attention to detail, which Gladwell then hand-waves into better skills at learning and thinking resulting in Chinese being better at math. A bit of a stretch, but he does mention the difference on taxation resulting in much better crop management and richer peasants.
Of course, the French couldn’t do anything about their climate, but they could minimize their superfluous consumption.
The reason you can get three harvests a year of irrigated rice, in warm areas, and only have one harvest per year of wheat, has everything to do with the physiology and ecology involved, and isn’t fundamentally limited by how much labour you put in.
This. The number of harvests a given crop can have is fixed, depending on the environment.
The theory I’ve heard is that rice is a plentiful crop, but requires a lot of work over a long period, which encourages communal farming. Wheat isn’t a as bountiful, but it requires less work overall, so it encourages independence. Corn is awesome, but has a nasty habit of failing periodically, which some blame for the violence found in the Americas.
This all sounds too neat and clean for my tastes, however.
It may sound too clean because, while corn was important in several areas, it was not the staple crop in a lot of other areas, including the biggest empires in South America (potato).
Also, in the Caribbean, the staple crop was cassava (yucca).
Gladwell’s essay from Outliers can be found in pieces online:
I apologize for taking large chunks of his essay, but it makes the point.
Mind you, Gladwell is often criticized for cherry-picking his arguments, but the basic premise is valid. (I.e. he does not mean “hibernate” for real, there was plenty of daily work in food preparation, animal care; plently of seasonal and holy day celebrations, etc.)
The other thing we forget is how deadly dull and boring the previous centuries must have been. The local story teller probably had a repertoire of maybe a few dozen stories (Grimm, anyone?) that were seared into everyone’s brain through repetition, much like how your kids watch the same mind-numbing My Little Pony DVD over and over. there were maybe a few dozen folk songs and dances repeated at every celebration.
We’ve forgotten how little information was easily available before the internet, how what was playing at the theatre was important before DVD or VHS, how most people were lucky if they owned more than a dozen vinyl records. This was “pure luxury” compared to medieval entertainment.
A few of my ancestors tried sugarcane farming in the Bahamas in the 1800’s. Given the fact that I am not a Bahamanian citizen today, we can sort of imagine how this turned out.
Languedoc means, literally, “language of yes”. So the Languedoc region was a place where people said, “Yes!”.
I doubt it was as grim as it is in Game of Thrones except in periods of civil war - and GoT is set in a period of civil war. Most of the Middle Ages was not like that; if it had been, we wouldn’t be here, because our ancestors wouldn’t have survived long enough to beget those who begat us.
Pain and cold and hunger would have been much more common, and losing your children early was much more common, so those things would have made people more miserable; I guess you can claim that bereavement would have been thought of differently, but pain, cold and hunger are just what they are.
And the peasants would have still had the comparisons that we have now - they would have seen the Lords riding by on their grand horses and they’d have known that life could have been easier for them. So it would have been harder than now. But constantly miserable? No. People find ways to be happy by focusing on the little things.
An interesting note about cassava is that it is blamed today for prolonging wars in Africa. Cassava is fairly easy to grow, and can be stored in underground caches for long periods of time. This allows men more time away from the fields to go fighting, and can be used to create strategic reserve which can keep distant battles going.
I suspect that in a thousand years, people will view people in our times as slaving away in tiny 2’x2’ cubicles under the harsh rule of our Kardashian overlords, only to die harsh, brutal deaths in gang drive-by shootings or from overdoses of Red Bull and heroine.
IIRC, it was the bishop during the war against the Cathars that the bishop in charge famously was asked how they would know the heretics from the Catholics when they sacked the main town, and replied: “Kill them all, God will know his own.”
When trouble and strife hit, things were bad all over. But not every decade was trouble and strife.
Not quite: the name comes in opposition to Languedoui. The terms Languedoc and Languedoui are, respectively, “the language in which yes is oc” and “the language in which yes is oui” (aka French).
A reasonable point. A peasant living in certain areas of France during the peak of the Hundred Years War might well think that between the various voracious armies, bands of routiers and the plague, that he was living on hell on Earth. Similarly the poor bastards in some areas of the HRE during the Thirty Years War.
It was all well and fine to be a medieval peasant ( well, you know, excepting the miserable state of health care and constant economic uncertainty ), but one imagines the utter lack of security or redress for injustice could also grate just a tad at times ;). Hence the occasional peasant jacquerie, themselves often orgies of retaliatory violence. Medieval Europe was frequently violent and despoiling the lands of your enemies, including terrorizing peasants and burning their possessions ( and very occasionally slaughtering them wholesale ) as a matter of course, was generally preferred to the uncertainties of set-piece battles.
Considering the heroine in most modern action adventure tales, that sounds like a hell of a way to go. Count me in. ****ed to death by an Angelina Jolie character sure beats dying of piles.
I didn’t mention work. I mentioned pain, cold, hunger and bereavement, but not work.
Rice often requires irrigation canals, which make it well suited for communal ditch-digging, etc. (e.g. digging one canal can irrigate a lot of people’s fields).
Of course, the rice growing Cantonese were also traditionally considered an entrepreneurial culture, and the wheat- and barley-growing Russians and Scandinavians were traditionally fairly collectivist, so I’m not sure how far that takes you.
True, but they wouldn’t have had the hope of betterment dangled in front of them the way *we *do today. Which in some way is less cruel.
A peasant sees the Lord of The High Castle ride by and thinks, “that’ll never be me”. Whereas a prole sees some trust fund tosspot scream by in a Porsche and thinks “one day, that’ll be me !”. Which might seem like it would provide more comfort, but since it’s also bullshit in 99.9% of cases that leads to more misery when disillusion and bitterness sets in IMO.
Regardless, I do believe humans tend to hover around a contentment “default” that is their current existence, that of their parents and that of their peers. They’ll always want more because we’re just fucked up that way, but their daily life will always be OK as long as they have companions of misery (or happiness) to relate to. And from that baseline, the day you feast a bountiful harvest or get a hummer from the redhead in Accounting is Happy; and the day your child dies or the plague wipes out everyone in town is Unhappy. But that, too, will pass. As the poet sang, “we never forget, we just get used to it”. That works both ways, of course.
The poet was Jacques Brel, in case you wondered.
A peasant sees the Lord of the High Castle ride by and thinks “I hope that guy doesn’t fuck my wife and then cut off my head if I complain”.
And these days, there are a lot more paths to gaining wealth than inheriting it.
LSLGuy - Sorry I’m not up on your “drug lingo”.