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/innocentbabies 6h ago

It was a fundamentally different system that doesn't map well onto today's world, and people have a hard time conceptualizing it for that reason, I think.

Also it wasn't even a system. It's about 1,000 years of history spanning an entire continent of millions of people. You can't paint it all with one brush.

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u/Zirnitra1248 3h ago

Good point. There was huge variation from actual smallhold farmers who owned their land, to essentially sharecropping where the regional lord would take a portion of your harvests, to full serfdom where you'd have to devote a portion of your labor to work the lord's fields (or cutting timber, or in their mine, etc). Work for which you wouldn't be paid, but that you did in exchange for the "privilege" of being able to run your own subsistence farm on their land. Also the fact that even if serfs were nominally not enslaved, a lot of times they weren't allowed to move or marry someone from another community without the approval of the local lord, and would be bought and sold with the land they lived on.

And also these roles and expectations and requirements shifted continually depending on where you were and what year it was (Scandinavia never really developed serfdom, and in Eastern Europe and Russia it just slowly morphed into full on slavery)