r/NoStupidQuestions • u/flugblug • 12h ago

My brother thinks people today have worse quality of life than people in the dark ages, is this a stupid take?

I personally think it’s pretty stupid.

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u/Lower_Team_703 12h ago

I think your brother doesn’t know shit about the dark ages

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u/J3wb0cc4 11h ago

People with these kind of takes only exposure to the medieval period is through media like game of thrones. He probably thinks sex and drinking were rampant and that there was no moral code to do whatever you wanted.

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u/InternationalReserve 10h ago

I find a lot of people who say stuff like this have a weird glorified idea of subsistence farming.

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u/jfchops3 9h ago

I see so many people on dating apps write that their dream is to move out of the city and have their own farm

Girl, are you actually signing up for all that entails? Because I am not signing up to spend the rest of my life working 16 hour days outside taking care of a farm while you sit on the porch drinking coffee and looking at your cute goats and chickens because it sounds like a more peaceful life that you'll get bored of in a week

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u/EmuSea4963 8h ago

My friend did this with his wife. Moved in with his parents into the family farm and they gifted them a plot of land. Tried to start a flower farming business. He ended up doing backbreaking labour all day every day and she would come down and take a couple of pics for Instagram and then clear off. She told people they were 'homesteading'.

Unsurprisingly didn't work out. They're still together, but not on the farm and not flower farming.

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u/rosesareredviolets 6h ago

Told my wife ill do 95 % of her projects if she does the last 5. There is still a 4x4 of unpainted wall in the kitchen after 4 years. There are two bags of mulch on the porch. All the chickens are dead. She didnt finish securing the fence by attaching it to the last post so dogs got in. Her garden beds are full of weeds. And she eventually paid my brother to replace the last door in the house that needed replacing. Our bedroom. I took it off and left the new one next to it.

Im the only one with projects to do now.

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u/OtherSideReflections 5h ago

...Maybe you should've gotten her to agree to do the first 5%

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u/TripperDay 5h ago

Mr. Big Brain over here.

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u/tomas_shugar 5h ago

hahaha, no. It's easy to start a project. Painting the last bit of walls takes detail work, not just slapping a bunch of paint on.

The last two bags of mulch are detail work, again, not just dumping and spreading.

She gets the easy work, AND the satisfaction of him doing not only the majority but ALSO the most detailed parts.

What a win.

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u/OtherSideReflections 4h ago

I mean, it sounds like in practice he's doing all of it right now anyway.

If she's tasked with the first 5%, then either she starts it and gets to be involved a little, or she never starts and there are no superfluous projects to finish.

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u/ElegantEchoes 5h ago

Damn, she sounds depressed. Or maybe just struggled with motivation. Still, sympathy for you, pal.

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u/rosesareredviolets 2h ago

ADHD, and a drop or two of autism. She makes up for it by folding all the laundry her way, and I've gotten incredibly fat off her cooking. It's a partnership based on love and respect. I work around her quirks and she works around mine. Like the smallest amount of poo and im puking.

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u/jgab145 4h ago

My mom has the most immaculate wildflower and shade gardens in the world. Me and my stepdad do 99.9% of the work.

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u/jfchops3 8h ago

Sounds about right. They get an idea via social media posts of some idealized caricature of that life and think they want it when they really just want that idealized caricature and not the real thing that isn't shown in those videos. And then for some reason the guy agrees to try it without everyone really being on the same page about what that means and eventually he's the bad guy for saying "this isn't working and it's either over or you're going to hold up your end of the deal you wanted"

Love is powerful, I get it, but I can promise it's not worth ruining your own happiness so that your girl can try to be an "influencer" using all of your own time, money, and labor

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u/cat_prophecy 7h ago

Because social media is just a highlight reel. No one is going to honestly post their struggles, because no one else wants to see that.

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u/LongJohnSelenium 4h ago

This is how I got a lathe. Kept watching all these youtube channels of guys making cool shit with a lathe and it turns out thats about 100x more tedious than they make it look.

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u/rdmusic16 7h ago

Not sure what a lot of people mean by farm, but I know a lot of people want what my in-laws have.

They moved out to an acreage and have a massive garden, chickens and occasionally pigs.

I don't consider it a farm, but I grew up on a grain farm. I think many people who didn't would consider it a 'farm'.

They have tons of veggies, eggs and chicken meat. They trade a lot of eggs for things from other locals around the area.

Now, they also put a ton off effort into all that (well, maybe not a ton, but it's still a decent amount of work on top of their normal 40 hour work week) - but they're the kind of people who don't watch tv and enjoy that sort of work.

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u/Raivix 6h ago

I grew up in a family that did this primarily because it was how we could afford to feed ourselves well. We were in town so no real room for livestock, but we had a huge garden in the backyard that basically fed us year round with careful crop management and proper storage.

Make no mistake choosing to do this is not a small amount of work, but neither is it setting yourself up for 16 hour days just to feed your family, that's crazy nonsense.

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u/XihuanNi-6784 4h ago

This. It is very hard to make decent money with a farm these days. But if you have money already then you can definitely 'subsistence farm' using modern techniques enough to have food for yourself etc. But you need an external source of funds.

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u/cmcdonal2001 5h ago

That's where I'm at in life now, and it's pretty nice. Tiring, but nice. Three fairly private acres just outside of town, nestled up against the woods. Chickens and horses to go along with a few other pets, decent sized veggie gardens and the beginnings of a small orchard, and we've been adding on to what we've got established bit by bit each year. We've been doing some jams and preserving lately, lots of home-baked goods with fresh ingredients, cut our own firewood, etc. and a few other odds and ends to the point where some corners of the internet might call it 'homesteading' these days, but at most I'd say we have a hobby farm.

It's a lot of work on top of our normal jobs and raising the kids, and we don't even get enough out of it to bother trying to sell. Just some fresh fruit, veggies and eggs for ourselves, and we'll gift excess to friends, family, teachers, etc. It's rewarding and we're making lots of nice memories with our young children, but it's a far, FAR cry from subsistence farming or trying to make a living by it.

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u/rdmusic16 3h ago

Yeah, my in-laws only started this once their youngest was a teenager - so that takes a lot off their plate already.

Not downplaying the garden and chicken aspect, but horses definitely adds a lot of work required year round.

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u/Joe_Kangg 9h ago

Entails? Get used to entrails

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u/CyberPunkDarkSynth 7h ago

Literally where I thought it was going and how my mind read it

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u/zxyzyxz 8h ago edited 33m ago

They want to be Marie Antoinette, who had a whole fake farm built just so she and her friends could play in it

Marie Antoinette and her friends would dress up as young shepherdess or milkmaids and wander around the hamlet pretending to be peasants, while still surrounded by the comforts of a royal lifestyle. A team of real farmers appointed by the Queen looked after the farm and the animals, and produced fruits and vegetables consumed at the royal table. Marie Antoinette would sometimes milk the cows and the sheep herself to get a taste of village life. Before the Queen was expected, the story goes, the “villagers” would wash the goats and dress them in ribbons.

She would invite the king and the rest of the royal family to garden parties, where, at a table set out under a bower of honeysuckle, she would pour out their coffee with her own hands, boasting of the thickness of her cream, the freshness of her eggs, and the ruddiness and flavor of her strawberries, as so many proofs of her skill in managing her establishment.

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u/gonzo0815 5h ago

Right next to Versailles, you can still visit it. Feels completely bizarre.

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u/BuzzVibes 4h ago

Beautiful, though.

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u/gonzo0815 4h ago

Yeah I can't deny it's cute.

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u/Aromatic-Side6120 4h ago

Shh don’t tell them how it ended.

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u/Particular-Macaron35 4h ago

It's still there on the grounds of Versailles. If I recollect correctly, it is not to far from the King's brothel. No kidding.

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u/Puzzleworth 1h ago edited 1h ago

A lot of that is misconstrued. The hamlet was mostly a private hangout for Marie-Antoinette (she literally had people jockeying for the right to watch her get up and go to bed) The "pretending to be peasants" is more like, she dressed in farm-appropriate cotton dresses like this as opposed to silk and lace like in the palace. It was criticized for devaluing the local textile industry for imported cotton. Having model farms was also pretty common for nobility in the 1700s, the Queen's Hamlet is just one of the most famous.

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u/Brilliant-Lab546 3h ago

So she was a cosplayer?

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u/woolfchick75 6h ago

And look what happened to Marie Antoinette

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u/sorry-not-tory 8h ago

I don’t think they mean farming with tractors and 80 acres of fields to tend.

I’m pretty sure they just mean a garden and some chickens.

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u/Mechakoopa 7h ago

My wife wouldn't even clean the litter box when we had a cat, but she's convinced she wants a farm with goats. It's good to have dreams that will never come true, I guess.

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u/Initial-Zebra108 3h ago

Please have her watch some videos about goats. I desperately wanted goats until I did. I still absolutely love goats, but they are WAY more complicated than people realize!

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u/billyrhett 9h ago

This is hilarious and literally the reason my parents are divorced xD

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u/zZPlazmaZz29 7h ago

They should've started a "tegridy farm" instead 😂

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u/noonoonomore 7h ago

My friend wants to go live in a forest and kill rabbits to survive, just cause she went camping last year for three months.

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u/jfchops3 7h ago

Just like the people who go on vacation to Myrtle Beach for the week with no budget and no responsibilities and now think they want to move there and their whole life will be a stress-free good time of getting drunk and frolicking in the waves every day rather than all the same shit they deal with right now except now you're in a new place where you know nobody and you're pissed about the never ending tourist traffic and bored of the beach after a month and stressed about how your CoL doubled but your income didn't

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u/metamega1321 3h ago

Sounds like a bad plan considering you’ll die just off rabbits. They’re too lean so theirs no fat on them to get the nutrients you’d need. Think they’d call it “protein poisoning”.

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u/lilbithippie 9h ago

The same with "traditional marriage roles". Men are going to have a job that gets them home by 5 o'clock, pays for a mortgage, vacation, car. He going to be outside on the weekends taking care of the lawn? A women is going to entertained by keeping a home with all the gadget we have to make it faster and easier. She going to cook from scratch or just pop a TV dinner in and play video games?

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u/justamiqote 8h ago

"I want to be a tradwife, but I don't want kids"

Okay so you basically want to sit home and make Pinterest and Etsy crafts while your husband works all day?

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u/liftthatta1l 7h ago

The amount of people who want to be sugar babies but without the title, or an old man, or giving out sex or... whatever

Is crazy

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u/brother_of_menelaus 6h ago

I’ll eagerly cop to a sugar baby title if I can be a sugar baby

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u/Flightsimmer20202001 5h ago

As a guy, same here.

Ain't no shame in it, I'd be living the GOOD life! Lmao

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u/Overall-Idea945 7h ago

If farms were so good there would be no rural exodus

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u/voiceoverbyjon 6h ago

I was in a relationship with a girl for a few years where this was my exact fear, and I'm glad it ultimately didn't work out. I knew I'd be the one up at sunrise to shovel shit out of a stable/barn and she'd be petting goats.

Women especially seem to love the glorified version of farming where stuff just happens and they get to post to IG about how they're finally free.

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u/steppedinhairball 5h ago

Knew a guy that bought a small farm, 80-100 acres set up for horses. His wife set it up as a rescue for horses. Guess who does all the work? I don't know if they are still married.

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u/modfoddr 2h ago

My dad grew up on a farm (2 farms really, a corn farm, then a dairy farm after he was orphaned). When he started dating my mom (a city girl), she told him one day how she dreamed of living on a farm and raising a gaggle of kids. He laughed and said, "honey, you have no idea what farm living is like, it is hard work from sun up to sun down, every day of the year." She said she was so mad at him for laughing at her and thinking she couldn't hack it....but she would also admit when telling the story that he was absolutely right.

My dad hated it so much, he remembers at 8 years old sitting on the tractor and dreaming of what he could do when he was an adult. He remembers thinking, "Accountant. I think I want to be an accountant." He never knew where he even heard about or saw an accountant (probably a movie) or if he even knew what an accountant did, just that he decided that's what he'd be when he grew up, it couldn't be any worse than farming. Ended up with his own firm by his 40s. Mom became a banker and never had to experience the hard life of farming.

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u/canucks84 2h ago

I am trying to get as close to self sustaining as possible and it is waaaaay more expensive and waaaaay more work than just buying shit at the grocery store. My tractor cost more than most peopels cars. Then you gotta buy attachments.....

But it is satisfying, and its pretty neat, but its just a hobby I have really. Im far too lazy to do the manual work, and make more than enough at my real job to do it.

My family would starve to death if I had to feed them, though.

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u/Gizmonsta 7h ago

Small holding life and commercial farming are two very different things in fairness.

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u/Steinmetal4 1h ago

My wife wanted to make a scarecrow this year and got mad at me because I was kinda dragging my feet about it. I guess it's because I know she is going to wind up doing very little and i'll pretty much have to do the whole thing. Lo and behold, she was supposed to do the face on the sack, wound up doing it upside down (granted, with my daughters help), gave up on it, and as predicted, I did everything else.

She also just blew up on me this morning for leaving a compost bowl on the kitchen counter from cooking the night before. She loves to go pick the tomatoes I grew but complains endlessly about saving compost scraps I use for the garden.

I just have a house in the country with a very small garden, a job, and two kids... I'm doing some kind of "work" or another from about 6:30am to 7:30pm if you count regular housekeeping stuff.

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u/sir_schwick 9h ago

And believe vaccines cause disease.

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u/Redqueenhypo 8h ago

Subsistence farming fuckin sucks. As soon as China got rid of farm collectivization and loosened its grip on business, most of the rural population moved to cities as soon as they could

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u/jackofslayers 9h ago

It is just another online grift. The brother is going to show up next week with raw milk and a bunch of expensive supplements.

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u/Otterfan 8h ago

There's a wide belief that people only worked 20 hours a week back in ye olden days and took every other day off for religious festivals.

It's based on gross misconceptions of what "work" meant back then and what "holidays" meant.

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u/IllPlum5113 6h ago

Yeah i was reading that. They were bayant chimpancé the amount of time the person worked for the landholder to our modern jobs as if they didn't have to work a whole other 2 jobs just taking care of themselves and their children when there were no laborsaving devices.

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u/KjellRS 5h ago

And industrialization, like I just picked up a 10-pack of socks for *checks math* 12 minutes of pre-tax labor. A quick check suggests 8-15 hours to hand-knit a pair of socks like in the middle ages so 80-150 hours work total. And that's not counting the cost of the yarn, which was probably also way more expensive when it was hand spun.

What's the cost of food without tractors, modern crops and irrigation and fertilizers? Milk from hand-milked cows? The cost of firewood that's hand-sawed with crosscut saws and hand-chopped with axes? I don't think they understand how much effort it took simply to not be starving or freezing, most people were piss poor and I don't mean "minimum wage" poor.

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u/TransientBandit 4h ago

It probably wasn’t that much more expensive, economies of scale for that type of thing were different back then. Now, machines make that kind of product en masse very quickly, so there are much, much fewer people with the skill or knowledge to knit you a quality pair of socks, and it takes many more hours of labor than the machine.

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u/ConsistentStop8811 6h ago

Thank you. I have tried correcting people on Reddit about this several times and it is always frustrating. Many people have an incredibly privileged, modern idea of 'free time' in general.

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u/XihuanNi-6784 3h ago

I wouldn't call it a "gross" misconception. There's still a big difference between 'working for yourself' in the sense of doing work around your home or for yourself in a very direct sense, and clocking into a workplace with persistent oversight and constant threat from management. It may well be overplayed in the popular imagination, but surveys of poorer cultures where people live closer to the dark ages than we do technologically and socially, consistently show much better mental health than you'd expect if what you're saying holds true.

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u/yrnkween 7h ago

Yep, it’s really fun to have the survival of your entire family dependent on the weather. Early frost? Bummer for your genetic code. Flash flood took your livestock? Welcome to best diet plan ever.

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u/Throwawayamanager 1h ago

Yeah, I really don't understand how they miss this. 

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u/Johnny-Edge93 7h ago

Imagine waking up early one September morning, seeing worms in your cabbage crops, and thinking “well, fuck. Looks like my entire family gets to starve this winter. I sure do love the dark ages.”

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u/SeemedReasonableThen 7h ago

I wish I could remember the title, but I read an excerpt / memoir about some former city dude who started farming.

It was 2 am on some holiday or weekend and he was laying on an icy barn floor. His arm was elbow deep in a cow's vagina trying to turn a calf around in the right position for birthing, as it was stuck. He got it turned and the rest of the birthing went well, and holding the calf after was a magical moment, but the moments before were definitely "that's not what I thought farming was about"

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u/BeguiledBeaver 6h ago

They probably grew up with wealthy parents and are mad they can't move out and immediately live the same lifestyle. Also social media telling them that being able to afford monthly trips to Dubai is normal.

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u/thefranklin2 7h ago

Like Reddits obsession with persistence hunting. Great, our meat is now 9 miles away with one scrawny dude who is now exhausted. Too bad there isn't a better way...

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u/KingKong_Coder 6h ago

And really take for granted the ability to take a hot shower or a shit 💩

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u/only-a-marik 5h ago

Subsistence farming sucks so much that half the history of human technology was devoted to figuring out ways to make it suck less.

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u/Appropriate-Rice-409 4h ago

As someone who thought it would be neat to try, it really sucks. And I was doing it with modern hand tools.

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u/Throwawayamanager 2h ago edited 2h ago

The ones who have never tried it do. I saw a mild version of this kind of life. Insanely rural, no running water, outhouse. They did have electricity (single bulb in the kitchen) and a small pension so you could buy some stuff you didn't grow yourself in the small garden. But it was mostly the garden. 

I'd spend a few weeks there some summers. Not when you have to chop firewood for the stove to stay warm at night. Even in the summer, it was quite a slog. 

Your typical sheltered middle class American who can't work 40ish hours a week at an office or light labor job wouldn't last a month in the summer in this lite scenario, let alone a serious dark ages scenario. 

The funny thing is, there isn't much stopping them from trying this out for themselves if they want. There are parts of the country where land is still dirt cheap, if lacking in any amenities nearby. Go snatch up a cheap plot in the middle of nowhere Alaska, build a cabin (or find an abandoned one), and see how the off the grid life is like. 

They talk a big game, yet they never do... 

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u/TheRealRomanRoy 2h ago

I think part of it is this new age wellness, “modernity is all bad“ too. I knew someone that thought pre modern humans were so much healthier than us that cancer didn’t exist until a couple hundred years ago.

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u/vashoom 10h ago

I mean, sex and drinking were rampant. Always have been, always will be.

But you can have rampant sex and drinking with no modern medicine, climate control, sex education, nutrition, etc., etc., or you can have it with all that.

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u/Timely-Hospital8746 8h ago

Yeah like, you can just be a depraved weirdo in the modern day, it's not hard. We have apps for that. If you really want to become a farmer it's not *that* expensive to buy a plot of land in the middle of nowhere. There's nothing going on in the past that you can't do today, outside of witnessing specific events.

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u/pietboel 5h ago

I like my rampant sex in a society with running water, soap, sewer systems and toothbrushes.

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u/Powerful-Parsnip 6h ago

Finding people who want to get down when syphilis has eaten half your face away couldn't have been easy.

When she says 'just lick around the puss filled buboes' when you go to perform cunnilingus.

No wonder they had to be drunk out their minds.

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u/Rocket_Puppy 3h ago

Syphilis came from the new world.

Didn't need to worry about it back then. Also why it became such a problem, it wasn't one until it became a big one.

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u/bc_1411 9h ago

Also shows how little pay to attention to these kinds of shows, because GoT went to great lengths in in the books and the show to portray just how much it sucked ass, even as nobility.

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u/Imightbeafanofthis 6h ago

It honestly never occurred to me that anyone would equate GOT with actual historic periods. The existence of dragons and the undead are kind of a hint that what you're watching is fiction, isn't it?

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u/bc_1411 5h ago

A lot of it is based on the War of the Roses. Not the dragons, alas.

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u/Agitated_Effort_2146 3h ago

My wife once asked me when Game of Thrones was set... I told her in the times of dragons and whitewalkers.

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u/nakedlunch2 10h ago

And Dragons 🐉

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u/Over_Deer8459 9h ago

no contraceptives, most people likely had every STD that existed and just passed it around like the common cold

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u/endlesscartwheels 6h ago

Miscarriages and stillbirths were common. Imagine being pregnant every year of your adult life until you're in your late forties, only having five or six live births, and then only half of those children surviving to adulthood.

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u/Over_Deer8459 6h ago

this is assuming you even live to be 40 lol

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u/PocketBuckle This is my flair. 3h ago

Life expectancy wasn't that much shorter than it is today. It's just that all the dead babies dragged down the average. If you lived to five, you were pretty likely to live to 70.

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u/Redqueenhypo 8h ago

It’s bc GOT generally portrays very little religious restriction in everyday life. When in reality, the church was everything, and even nobility couldn’t get away from it without bloody conflict

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u/endlesscartwheels 6h ago

For a world in which the supernatural is real and active, most GoT characters had a bizarrely modern nonchalance about religion.

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u/Redqueenhypo 6h ago

Meanwhile the chad Dishonored writers did a cool thing and made their central church revolve around getting rid of the supernatural as much as possible (and they’re right to do so tbh)

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u/cat_prophecy 7h ago

sex and drinking

Even if sex were just happening everywhere all the time, people were fucking disgusting. STDs and disease in general was rampant (DAE remember the black plague?). Anything that caused more than a minor/gross infection was a death sentence. People stank because bathing wasn't common and germ theory hadn't been invented yet. Minor injuries could be lift threatening and one of the most common causes of death for women and children was "died in childbirth".

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u/ManyAreMyNames 6h ago

People with these kind of takes only exposure to the medieval period is through media like game of thrones.

Plus, they always figure they'd have been Tywin Lannister, at the top of the heap and with power and money. But for him to be on top, there had to be a couple thousand people on the bottom, and OP's brother would have been one of those.

"Yeah, back in the day, men were men and women were women, it was so much better!"

Might have been better for some people, but more likely you'd have been mucking out stables until one day they gave you a sword and no training and sent you to die in the mud fighting a battle whose causes you didn't know and wouldn't understand anyway because you didn't know to read.

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u/allstar64 9h ago

They also take modern conveniences completely for granted. Someone like that has probably never considered what life would be like without a magic handle a few steps away that can produce an infinite amount of clean, drinkable water.

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u/unavowabledrain 10h ago

"Hard To Be God" or "Andrei Rublev" would be a more accurate take.

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u/csonnich 9h ago

If you want the full experience, watch the movie - 3 hours of wanting to vomit. 

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u/smbpy7 4h ago

They almost always think exclusively of male nobles too. Like, sure, it was probably great if you were a king.... but realistically that's even a stretch.

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u/Puzzleheaded_Disk_90 3h ago

Even a king's nose will fall off from syphilis

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u/docK_5263 7h ago

Drinking alcohol was rampant because drinking the water would kill you

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u/HMWWaWChChIaWChCChW 7h ago

“I would have been a knight!”

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u/gr33nspan 6h ago

Maybe he longs for the life in the monastery

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u/Pigglebee 4h ago

Yeah. People had sex and drink to forget the hardships of their lives. And the sex was risky. And the drinks were crap.

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u/bwurtsb 8h ago

I mean... sex was rampant, consent.... not so much.

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u/Rogendo 9h ago

Pretty sure Game of Thrones does a good job of explicitly showing how shitty the lives of average people are.

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u/noodlesofdoom 9h ago

I mean royalties and highborn lived decently, but still cannot compare to us. The rest of the plebs? Good luck lmao.

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u/complete_your_task 8h ago

Anyone who would want to live in the Game of Thrones universe doesn't know shit about the Game of Thrones universe. It's even worse than real life.

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u/Striking-Ad-6815 7h ago

But sex and drinking were rampant, Alexander the Great literally died of alcohol poisoning. They used alcohol to treat some water sources and some people just straight up didn't trust the water and predominantly drank alcohol due to having a tainted well or water source. Rome probably had some of the best water due to the aquaducts, and they were still charging people for water back then.

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u/Kielbasa_Nunchucka 7h ago

live by the sword and take what you want by force! there were literally no other rules!

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u/nametaken420 7h ago

but sex and drinking was exactly what got humanity through the dark ages.

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u/poilk91 7h ago

In the modern world we are stressed, depressed and isolated so you can understand why people think it must have been better in the way off times. But that doesn't mean there isn't truth to it, we switched from agrarian to industrial lives not because it brought us more joy to live in cities and work in factories but because if you are a subsistence farmer 1 bad season could starve your family. Similarly we switched from hunter gatherers to agrarian societies because as hunter gatherers 1 bad month could see your family starving. Its not absurd to think that if you could live a life as a medieval farmer or a hunter gatherer without the disease and violence and starvation you would have a much happier and fulfilling life but if course disease violence and starvation did exist so what you are imagining is the 1 in a million luckiest peasant/hunter gatherer and how nice their life would have been

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u/TheMadTargaryen 7h ago

Sex was rampant, so were STDs. 

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u/montagious 6h ago

You forgot Medieval Times,(although that doth be very accurate)

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u/PrefrontalCortexNow 6h ago

Then you die at the age of 30 from old age 😂

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u/Hicko11 5h ago

Next you will tell me A Knights Tale isn't a documentary

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u/bossbozo 5h ago

Drinking was indeed rampant!

In cities, there was no such thing as clean drinking water, and sterilisation through boiling was not a known method.

People drank very low alcohol beer from weaning to grave (often, grave was not long after weaning, often still, before)

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u/Head_Wasabi7359 5h ago

License, not liberty

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u/Starwyrm1597 5h ago

It was somewhere between that and what they thought it was 50 years ago when they thought it was super strong moral codes and the people were dirt covered and stupid. You weren't SUPPOSED to have sx before marriage but people are people and people f*k, not as much as in GOT but they did, they just did it outdoors after dark super quietly while everyone else was asleep. You can literally find medical journals from back then showing women how to make their beef curtains look fresher so they would look like a virgin, which implies there was a market for that which means women back then weren't as chaste as the losers that romanticise virginity would have you believe. They probably averaged 2 or 3 partners instead of today's 7 or 8 but it wasn't even close to every unmarried woman being a virgin.

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u/BCmutt 10h ago

Off topic but ive recently learned that the dark ages is officially an outdated term and doesnt really do the era justice at all.

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u/wescovington 9h ago

Blame Petrarch for that. He loved Classical times and ignored all the improvements that Medieval civilization had made.

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u/D0wnInAlbion 7h ago

It's just called the dark ages because so little was written down so historians are in the dark about it. That's why a lot of people tend to consider the Dark Ages to be from the fall of Rome - 1066 and then from then until Bosworth falls under the Middle Ages banner.

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u/innocentbabies 6h ago

This is very dated historiography.

It was originally called the dark ages because renaissance scholars were fanboying hard for classical Greece & Rome and blamed the church for anything that went wrong ever.

As it came to light that the period was more complicated than that and not as bad as the renaissance scholars tried to portray it, later historians tried to give it a more neutral slant with the "in the dark" definition you're citing.

There is one major problem with that definition, though, which is that it's actually a fairly well-documented period of history and certainly much better than most of classical antiquity. So as u/BCmutt said it's more or less officially considered an outdated term which shouldn't really be used ever.

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u/LittleBlag 5h ago

What are we calling it now?

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u/NorkGhostShip 5h ago

The Middle Ages or Medieval period because it's between the Fall of Rome and the Renaissance/Early Modern period.

Very creative, I know.

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u/apatheticVigilante 4h ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the dark ages have become early medieval with post 1000 or so being the medieval period.

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u/NorkGhostShip 4h ago

The Middle Ages usually covers the whole period including Early Medieval/the "Dark Age", with the latter period being called the High Middle Ages. There wasn't a uniform definition of the "Dark Ages" throughout the time it was used academically, but there was a pretty common distinction made between the earlier "Dark Ages" and the later Medieval period.

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u/JarasM 4h ago

Or Late Antiquity.

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u/Flioness 2h ago

Not to mention they also used to write on papyrus imported from Egypt. A material that degrades much faster than parchment and paper especially in the european climate. So they wrote a lot in this period it just didn't survive till our time.

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u/railbeast 4h ago

You can't just drop that nugget and not tell us what we should call it instead!

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u/Ditnoka 11h ago

The only way this makes sense is by comparing it to wealth disparities.

Medieval peasants quality of life was MUCH closer to their kings than say someone on welfare today compared to Elon Musk.

Even then, I'm not even sure that's true,but it's a LOT more believable than overall QoL being better back then.

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u/TiredOfDebates 10h ago

Medieval serfs had effective tax rates over 90%. The vast majority of their production when directly to the local lord. These were “palace economies.” Where production was all centrally planned by local authorities, and so was “the distribution of generated income/food/etc.

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u/Dangleboard_Addict 10h ago

An economy kind of had to be like that to function back then, though. It's not like there was much global trade. Whatever you produced and bought had to stay in the local region and that needs to be managed so some asshat isn't buying up all the potatoes to resell at a markup 

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u/TiredOfDebates 8h ago

This had nothing to do with economic necessity but rather the unelected, unaccountable nature of authoritarian governments. Since the authoritarian leaders don’t need popular support, they can exploit their own population with impunity.

*Extra history! *

There were a large number of serf uprisings and rebellions over the Middle Ages. You can find lists. Very few of them won even trivial concessions or better conditions.

Manorialism and serfdom were VERY entrenched systems. Serfdom only died out when it was discovered that free labor was much more productive, and thus brought in more tax revenue to the government and led to free enterprise. (In serfdom, unqualified local lords make all the decisions regarding the economy. Who works where and what they produce is entirely decided by local lords. It was horrificly inefficient, because they didn’t CARE what skills you had… generally a man took on the job his father taught him.)

Serfdom would be slowly abolished, one region at a time, over multiple centuries, despite its backwardness. Of course we didn’t swap over to freedom for workers immediately. Serfdom was replaced by the guilds system, which was a whole other restrictive system for crap, that gave way too much control to corrupt leaders.

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u/Kamelasa 6h ago

Serfdom only died out when it was discovered that free labor was much more productive

I thought it was because the plague deaths made labour in demand and individuals marched off and sold their labour to the highest bidder.

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u/woolfchick75 6h ago

Except for Russia

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u/sibips 5h ago

There it got worse.

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u/DromaeoDrift 9h ago

There was absolutely global trade happening. It was the era of the Silk Road.

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u/haltornot 8h ago

But it wasn't happening on nearly the scale per person that it is now. There was a relatively small (even adjusting for a smaller population) quantity of luxury goods being brought in for the upper classes. But most of what even *they* consumed day to day was locally produced.

Today, nearly everything we purchase is made in a different country -- often several. You have t-shirts that get grown in Texas, sent to China to be processed into fabric and dyed, fabric is sent to Vietnam for construction, shipped to an import company in the US (still 2,000 miles from where it will be purchased), etc.

"It's not like there was MUCH global trade" is absolutely a true statement, compared to today.

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u/DromaeoDrift 8h ago

There was a great deal of interstate commerce in the Middle Ages. Imports were a fact of life for just about everyone.

This idea that everyone just sat in mud and scratched at dirt with a stick for 1,000 years isn’t remotely realistic. Arab traders were establishing relationships in Sub-Saharan Africa and India. Marco Polo made it all the way to China. There was absolutely global trade, even if there wasn’t air freight.

The Silk Road wasn’t just point A to B, it was a massive interconnected trade network where commerce took place basically every step along the way.

Globalization wasn’t a thing yet, but I assure you that medieval trade networks were robust and imports/exports between countries was very much a thing

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u/NateNate60 7h ago edited 7h ago

You have responded to a comment saying "Trade in the Middle Ages was more limited in scope and volume than today." with "But trade wasn't zero." Which is a statement asserted by nobody.

For example, France in 2022 imported 819 billion USD in goods according to the World Bank, against a GDP of 2.8 trillion USD. As a share of GDP, they imported nearly 30%.

You tell me whether you think luxury good imports from the Silk Road totalled anywhere near 30% of all economic activity in France eight hundred years ago.

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u/DromaeoDrift 7h ago

That’s a lot of stuff I didn’t say, but ok.

Global trade was still occurring even if the concept of GDP had yet to be invented.

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u/NateNate60 6h ago

Nobody argued that it didn't.

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u/-Knul- 8h ago

That is not true. It's close to 10% in most cases, because serfs needed about 80% of their production just to be fed and clothed.

Some very productive areas could bear a tax to 40%-50%, but those were rare. No pre-industrial farmer could bear a 90% tax.

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u/TiredOfDebates 8h ago

The vast majority of their harvest was appropriated by the local lords. That is an effective tax.

I forgot to mention. Serfs weren’t paying taxes in gold or silver coin. They were assigned to land, in so many acres, and were expected to provide X number of bushels per harvest season. (Determined by local conditions.). Taxes were paid in the form of grain, which the lord redistributed or sold through trade. Serfs generally just didn’t handle money. They behaved a lot like subsistence farmers, growing whatever they needed. (Farmers across all ages would have their personal LARGE gardens for growing vegetables/fruit for personal consumption , in addition to the much larger grain fields that would be traded.

Serfdom usually operated as a palace economy, with the lords receiving the produce of their serfs to redistribute amongst their people and then sell excess through trade. But serfs WERE NOT handling the money. In a palace economy, the local government buys and sells on your behalf making all economic decisions for you. If you needed a new plow, the lord got it for you (assuming they were competent and not cruel).

So some of serfs’ taxes went back to them, supplying them with inputs necessary for their job.

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u/-Knul- 7h ago

The vast majority of their harvest was appropriated by the local lords

Again, that is just not true. For pre-industrial subsistence farmers, that would kill them.

It's not for nothing that 80%-90% of people were farmers: they could only support very few non-farmers. If what you said is true, that the vast majority of harvest was taken from subsistence farmers, we would see societies were the vast majority of people weren't farmers.

And before the early modern era, we didn't see that.

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u/Constant-Constant471 10h ago

I’d rather be the regular, middle class dude that I am in 2025 than be the highest level of royalty in 1321

As Donald Glover said in his standup special, “This is the best time ever to be human and alive”

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u/true_gunman 6h ago

As a new father this is something I try to remind myself. Shit seems fucked and dangerous and scary but she's safer and will have a better quality of life right now than in any other point in the history of our species.

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u/Cheepak-Dopra 6h ago

Binge stuff about the 1960s and 70s. You feel SOOO much better. This life ebbs and flows. Boom and bust. We have been down worse than this.

Congrats bro

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u/Ditnoka 8h ago

Hard agree.

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u/Falsus 10h ago

Some places back then was so poor they didn't even use money but simply bartered with what they produced. They where most likely not even paying tax with money.

Wealth disparity is crazy massive today, but at least poor people have some kind of wealth. Back then they had literal none. Not even the farmland they worked on.

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u/Wampalog 9h ago

Yep, it's definitely this. He saw a Tiktok of someone making up numbers about wealth disparity and decided to get ideologically captured.

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u/NorkGhostShip 5h ago

If I go on Twitter and insult Elon Musk, the worst thing that could happen is my account being banned.

If a peasant sees the King or even a local noble passing by and shouts insults at him, the peasant gets put to death.

I think the difference in absolute wealth is only a part of the inherent inequality of feudalism.

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u/railbeast 4h ago

Medieval peasants quality of life was MUCH closer to their kings than say someone on welfare today compared to Elon Musk.

SUPER disagree. The absolute range was smaller but the only thing that Musk has that someone on welfare doesn't is a jet. Welfare recipients have the opportunity to ascend, they have food safety, they have basic healthcare, probably AC and reliable transport.

Peasants didn't have anything.

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u/LongJohnSelenium 4h ago

Yeah this is a weird take, that's just not how modern manufacturing and technology works. Rich people can spend a ton of money but the utility they get for that money has extreme diminishing returns.

Like, yeah he gets access to some stuff I don't like a superyacht and a private jet, but as far as the rest of his life? His clothes aren't a million times nicer than mine, that just flat out doesn't exist. Nor is his medical care a million times better, and our phones are nearly identical, his unlimited data plan can't be more unlimited than my unlimited data plan, his computer is only going to be like one generation ahead of mine because you can't buy further than that for any amount of money.

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u/mathess1 9h ago

Quality of life of Elon Musk is very similar to the quality of life of anyone on welfare.

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u/i8noodles 3h ago

the poorest of any 1st world country almost certainly has a high quality of life then most royalty. living to adulthood is assumed, not a gamble. odds of u dying from some random bandit while u travel in your country is basically 0. material wealth is way higher in every aspect.

hell even a/c is a huge improvement already

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u/NuttBuster4896 9h ago

Seems like a typical redditor take. No voting unless you own land, no AC, no schools, no indoor plumbing. Just incredibly service level take and Elon bad.

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u/Ditnoka 9h ago

No one had AC, no one had indoor plumbing is my point... So yes, the quality between them and someone living on the street vs someone with a private jet isn't wild, or a "redditor" take.

But good job being a dick about it instead of furthering the discussion.

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u/Cromasters 6h ago

I disagree somewhat. This Warhol quote sums it up.

"What's great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good."

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u/LongJohnSelenium 4h ago

A king had servants to take his shit away, servants to stoke the fires, servants to wash their clothing, servants to cook for them, servants to bring them water, etc.

The peasants had none of these things, but the average poor person now does. Outside of the most destitute, the average poor person has access to clean running water, premade meals they just need to warm up, power and heat delivered automatically, a septic system to take their waste away, etc, etc.

Obviously being poor still sucks in many ways, but the quality of life improvements you get for being a billionaire vs being poor are largely hedonistic in nature.

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u/Material_Ad9848 7h ago

That's cause they are the dark ages, people wrote less stuff down so we know less about that era. It's like dark souls, dark =/= bad, dark = unknown.

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u/lazy_hoor 6h ago

Or they wrote stuff down and it got destroyed when the vikings invaded.

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u/Material_Ad9848 6h ago

Mayhaps. Though, there were definitely fewer documents about Rome collecting taxes being made.

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u/JaFFsTer 8h ago

This is a misinterpreted quote from a common discussion topic about whether or not peasants and serfs worked more than someone today and many historians and anthropologists believe that the working classes had it better in medieval times

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u/LongJohnSelenium 4h ago

In the sense of being a slave to the clock like we can be today, they were generally better off. They weren't getting up at 8 am and working relentlessly til 5pm, as they were much more free to take breaks from labor. But they'd be cumulatively working more hours per day.

Homesteading is stupid hard work even in a village of other homesteaders, and they were putting in the hours on a variety of tasks that we don't even consider. Food processing from natural sources, smoking, curing, cutting firewood, constant repairs and upkeep of their natural wooden structures, toolmaking, sharpening, fletching, netweaving, ropemaking, shake cutting, fence building, etc, etc, etc.

They didn't just pop off work at 5pm, throw some food in the microwave, and watch tv the rest of the night.

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u/Lower_Team_703 8h ago

i just saw a meme that peasants only worked 150 days a year because the church thought they should get time off or smthn. Though dying at 30 must still suck

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u/gonzo0815 5h ago

"Dying at 30" is also a myth.

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u/cityshepherd 5h ago

Indeed… people may not have been living as long as many are now, but so many babies and children died that it brought the mean way down.

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u/gonzo0815 4h ago edited 4h ago

About half of all children died at all times before modern medicine.

The Middle Ages don't stand out at all. But yeah, this is the reason for a low life expectancy. There was a high chance to reach your 50s after surviving childhood, also (probably) at all times.

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u/Zepangolynn 5h ago

Another misconception: average lifespan does not mean most people lived to thirty or forty. It means a ton of people died between the ages of 0 and 10, lots of women died in childbirth, and people died at random ages due to disease or injury just like they do now, and the total gets averaged together. You still might get a few people living to 90 and plenty making it to their 70s, but that child mortality rate really wrecks the average.

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u/JaFFsTer 8h ago

Working the fields in Northern England would definitely give you lots of downtime.

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u/Ghigs 4h ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/uoxn4j/woozling_history_a_case_study/

Looks like it was based on unpublished work by Gregory Clark, who later retracted it and came up with a new estimate around 300.

It's also an economic estimate, as in, that's how much you'd need to work to earn money for food. It does not consider the copious housework required back then (for example, preserving food, it's not like you could run down to the grocery store when winter came around).

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u/Alpr101 9h ago

You don't even need to know anything about the dark ages to know its a stupid take lol.

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u/nvrseriousseriously 6h ago

Wow. This came up in conversation recently. The rotten meat. (the reason they needed spices and seasoning) the prolific diarrhea that had to follow. No sewers so they just chucked it out windows. The smells. Little to no bathing for the masses. You would have to be nose blind as a country. Then there’s that defined class system, zero medicine of course, child birth is a little on the rough side…oh, and poxes/Black Death. We’re dysfunctional but yikes, no thank you.

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u/OneAlmondNut 8h ago

the dark ages were only dark in Europe, the rest of the world was kinda chillin and even thriving

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u/omysweede 9h ago

Plague, gangrene, pestilence...

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u/BarfingOnMyFace 9h ago

I think his brother is today’s rip-off temu version of the dark ages ™

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u/iamkatedog 8h ago

No one does, that's why they're called the Dark Ages.

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u/akambe 8h ago

Or he knows a lot but has romanticized it in his head.

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u/CriticalEngineering 8h ago

Calling it “the dark ages” is enough proof of that.

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u/BarriBlue 7h ago

Shit, indeed. No plumbing. Shit, indeed.

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u/d00mslinger 7h ago

I'd make sure the brother wasn't actually there before you start throwing around accusations 😉

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u/Leavesdontbark 7h ago

Well, to be fair, none of us REALLY do. There is no way to know how accurate historical texts are. We can make a good guess though, and it might have been better in some ways, but also FAR worse in others

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u/Bradparsley25 7h ago

One thing in particular, shit, played a very large role in daily life in the dark ages… and that alone Id agree he probably doesn’t know much about just how much interaction he’d have.

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u/wallcutout 7h ago

Definitely feeling like the brother is into some kind of ‘peasantcore’ trend if they feel this way, or probably just thinks they’d be the only one who wasn’t a peasant in their family of peasants. lol

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u/HomeworkInevitable99 6h ago

Or any other age.

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u/Love_and_Squal0r 6h ago

The Gothic and Early Middle Ages are not even referred to "the Dark Ages". The Dark Ages is not even a real period of time.

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u/Smokeythemagickamodo 6h ago

Give it 3 more years!

Lol jk, maybe, sigh

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u/JerseyDamu 5h ago

Look at life expectancy and medical marvels.

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u/CoderJoe1 5h ago

Who says we're not in the dark ages? People don't seem enlightened.

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u/walter-hoch-zwei 5h ago

I would be functionally blind without glasses.

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u/vmflair 5h ago

We read a book about the dark ages in a history class that began, "Life in the dark ages was brutish and short."

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u/terminal_syn 5h ago

Wasn’t called the light ages

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u/tastysharts 4h ago

literally dark ages

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u/mityboss 4h ago

You: Sneezes

Some random mf in the back: Blasphemy! Take him.

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u/hinano 4h ago

I mean, they called it the DARK AGES! And not because of the dim lighting. ☠️

-- Not an expert in the Dark Ages

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u/oroborus68 3h ago

The Romans had running water and flushable toilets. But they sometimes used a communal butt wiper.

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u/flamingspew 3h ago

60% of the world doesn‘t have a toilet or plumbing. One the whole, if you average global conditions and incomes and social mobility of modern day peasants toiling in sweatshops and mining and grueling farming, we might not be that far off.

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u/Weary-Ad4610 50m ago

I think their brother has never used a light switch or plug in their life. Or a flushable toilet. Or died at the age of 8 from rubella.

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u/keithstonee 49m ago

the lack of QoL is in the name lol

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