The daily life of a medieval king(medievalists.net) |
The daily life of a medieval king(medievalists.net) |
Likewise listening to commoners- maybe this was done for show with some well cleaned up subjects every so often , or maybe it was a genuine practice , we don’t really know.
I think you could make a good case that the title is a little sensationalistic, but you could pick at US civics class in exactly the same way (and not just in recent history). The branches of government we learn about fail to include (or at least emphasize) the fundamental role of regulatory capture, lobbyists, and opaque/undemocratic three-letter agencies in real-world governance. Not to mention the fact that even the founding of the country was based on high ideals that were highly caveat-ed ("all men are created equal" unless those men are property).
Regardless of the extent to which ideals are lived out in practice, to many people it's notable that those ideals are there at all. In my experience as a US citizens, most people educated here seem shocked to learn that there can be any ideals behind monarchy besides divine right of kings/"I am the state" [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27%C3%89tat,_c%27est_moi
And unless those men are women.
Seems to really want to paint a picture of the king as a pious, diligent, man of the people, yet it only leaves me with the impression that what was intentionally omitted is the true nature of the man.
Just like any officially sanctioned biography of Trump would omit his late night reality TV binge watching, his gorging on fast food and his raping of children, this account embellishes Charles' best qualities while utterly ignoring his worst, so it is of no historical value whatsoever in terms of understanding who he truly was.
As for listening to commoners, I'll accept the possibility of kings that wanted to be accountable to their subjects. The problem isn't the king, it's the nobility. The nobles are going to be filtering the commoners that get to talk to the king, because the king isn't allowed to know any commoners directly. Hell, they might not even be able to speak the same language at all. England's kings all spoke either French or German for a long time, and French wasn't so much the language of France as much as it was the language that France's ruling class spoke[0].
Even if the king could understand commoners and had unfiltered access to them, it's not guaranteed that they could do anything with that feedback. Say, a peasant complained about what they pay to their lord. Does the king actually have the power to overrule the nobility? Will the nobility depose the king, or start a civil war that destabilizes the country?
The game everyone's playing is ultimately to convince subsistence farmers to "go big or go home" - i.e. to overplant and overproduce food, at the risk of crop failure, so that the state can seize some of that food and eat it themselves, nominally in exchange for "protection"[1] from rival states whose main difference is that their king is fake while yours is rightful. In other words: the king and nobility are wolves, the commoners are sheep, and it's bad form for predators to befriend their prey.
[0] At least until France erased their own minority languages in the 1800s and forced everyone to speak French, which I'm pretty sure counts as genocide
[1] Identical to the 'protection' paid to a mafioso
Fun facts, Christine married at the age of 15, now will be considered by both Italian and French law as an illegal underage marriage. The marriage was, by all accounts, a happy one [2].
She had 3 children from the marriage to Etienne du Castel, (a royal secretary) for about ten years, remained widow after her husband's death.
Christine was Catholic and is often presented as one of the first feminists in history.
[1] Christine de Pizan:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_de_Pizan
[2] Biography of Christine de Pizan, Medieval Writer and Thinker:
https://www.thoughtco.com/christine-de-pizan-biography-41721...
Etienne was apparently 8 years older than Christine.
For me, the most curious thing here would be to know if a person in today's world in 5th percentile in wealth (i) would have (i) a larger life expectancy than a king in the 15th century, (ii) more food security, and (iii) more life opportunities.
Every time that I hear those stories from medieval times, as soon as I become fascinated by their tales and so on, I imagine how hard it would be to live there, even as a king.
Does someone know any reliable sources about that kind of comparison?
Men don’t spend a lot of time looking at jewels anymore, but I guess the modern equivalent would be hanging out with your buddies having some beers and admiring your fancy car.
I’m endlessly perplexed how a human with the same number of hours as me, can rule a kingdom, or run a modern country, or be CEO of a major company, meanwhile I’m working long hours every day and still get nothing accomplished.
Being a leader is a matter of taste. Make the decisions you need to make, take the actions you need to take, delegate the rest. If you had a very qualified group of people to do absolutely everything done you didn't want to do yourself "you" would get an incredible amount of stuff done.
Watch The West Wing for a taste of how the president of the US operates.
Another way to see it is they themselves don't get anything done, in the end others do all the work.
It also paints Charles in quite a good light. I assume that she wrote to please, but it also sounds like he was a genuinely good king.
I have heard that the best form of government is an absolute monarchy, and the worst form of government is an absolute monarchy.
- Winston S. Churchill, 11 November 1947
Just in case you were thinking of Lerner & Loewe's England: this ain't that.
More specifically about kings, ACoUP has a great writeup [0] on royal legitimacy and the various purposes of the king's court in the context of my favorite medieval shenanigans simulator, Crusader Kings III.
[0] https://acoup.blog/2022/02/18/miscellanea-thoughts-on-ckiii-...
In the early years of his reign, he was involved in military campaigns to expand his kingdom.
Among these people are probably a good number of what would be called lobbyists today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society#The_...
here is also a link to a video interview of Jeff Bezos explaining that he prioritizes sleep, because at his level, quality of decisions is more important than quantity of decisions.
Worth noting that this is a relatively immobile king. Various other kings spent a lot of time on:
- hunting for sport
- military campaigns (e.g. Richard Lionheart spent more time out of England than in it)
- assizes (mobile courts)
- summer residences (Versailles is a huge, late example of this, but lots of monarchs around the world have had holiday homes of one sort or another)
To be fair, most of his prize holdings were also out of England.
I'm going to go with a cautious "yes" to the first: the ages at death of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_monarchs are not great.
"No" on the second (king is never going to have to worry about food security, that's for the peasants)
And "life opportunties" .. bit of a divide by zero situation. As king, you technically have all the opportunities. But you can only do things which actually exist at the time. And you're bound by the social and religious conventions of the time, which you mess with at your peril. Doing so worked for Henry VIII but not for the various Georges. See, for example, the controversy over whether James 6 might have been gay.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forme_of_Cury
This is where you get the memes about shocking medieval Europeans with a time travelling bag of Doritos: both the bag and its contents are completely impossible items for them.
Worth noting that durable items could be shipped long distance - precious metals, gems, textiles - but foodstuff shipping was more limited to high value density stuff like spices and the European wine trade.
Speaking of wine: no modern stimulants. No coffee, no tobacco, no weed, no cocaine, no opiates. No painkillers, no anasthesia. For all those situations, you have one option: alcohol.
A huge number of critical historical decisions were taken by people who would fail a brethalyser.
Apart from his painful, smelly leg ulcers that he had to tolerate for years
He wasn't gay, but his many male lovers might have been. :D
Simplest example? Indoor plumbing: Boom, 15th century king.
Silly example? I got my wife seven silk pillow cases one year as a Christmas gift. A bit spendy, but instantly "living like a king".
We don't have "the royal kitchens", but do have Door-Dash. We took a tour of a castle somewhere in Canada (probably Craigdarroch) and they had a bunch of sitting rooms and reading nooks with extra lights and stuff... Steal Those Ideas! You too can live like a king, you just have to rewind a century or two, and be strategic about the luxuries you pick.
> For England, including the Kings of Wessex from Æthelberht on (the first I could find a birthdate for), and the Kings of England up to Edward IV, whose reigns extends to 1483 (and consequently into Modern Ages, if we take the usual date of 1453 - the fall of Constantinople - as the end of the Middle Ages), I found the average age of death of monarchs to be 44 years. (http://ideias.wikidot.com/reis-da-inglaterra-na-idade-media)
Life expectancy is longer than that in even the poorest countries today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...
Given that until roughly the 1700s infant mortality was brutal (according to [1] fully 50% of children died before reaching adulthood), this comparison becomes even starker, since average life expectancy of a crown prince at birth would be far lower (somewhere in their 20s).
[1] https://acoup.blog/2025/07/18/collections-life-work-death-an...
Hunger worldwide has been getting worse for the last quarter century or so.
733 million people don’t have food security. I think about 5-10 million die every year from starvation.
In medieval times there were famines, but they were caused by there not being enough food to go around due to disease or bad harvests.
Today millions of people starve even if there is no bad harvest or animal pandemics.
I find the percentile measure terrible to technically mean 95% of the population, but is often colloquially understood the other way around. It's like German numbers, when people say five and forty to mean 45. The general population rejects needless complexity.
Now, when you compare a low wealth person today to a peasant from the medieval era, if you remove child mortality, they likely had a similar life expectancy, although again, the modern human is more likely to have access to antibiotics, regardless of wealth--as others have mentioned, they just didn't exist back then.
maybe .. most mammals do not get infections from an ordinary cut.. it is humans that are uniquely weak that way
source: retired medical surgeon
Wasn't Arthur alone responsible for the untimely death of like a dozen kings? :)
Maimonedes Human Dispositions 4 (Trans. by Eliyahu Touger)
The great Medieval water myth (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9031856 - Feb 2015 (71 comments)
"The child mortality rate in the United States, for children under the age of five, was 462.9 deaths per thousand births in 1800. This means that for every thousand babies born in 1800, over 46 percent did not make it to their fifth birthday"
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-states-al...
It is so horrendous that I don't think we are really able to process the difference in 2025.
Nothing in your career particularly informed you of non-human mammal infection rates, unless you moonlighted as a veterinarian.
To be fair, he wasn't really English and didn't speak the language either. It wasn't until Henry IV (reign 1399 - 1413) that a post-invasion King's mother tongue was English. Most people don't realise that for over 300 years the (language at) court was Norman French.
Even though he did not speak it, himself.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_XI_of_Sweden#Greycoat
She typed his messages; that task is obviously done by the boss himself these days (Obama's blackberry addiction is a case in point). Voice-to-text handles her job while I'm driving; NO ONE did that job back then.
In the middle of the night, I can set an appointment that just occurred to me. Again, that's not something 1980s me could do.
Technology is a force multiplier you are ignoring. As bad as Outlook seems, it is better than most secretaries could be.
Note again that I'm using "she" intentionally. When females are considered unable to do "real work" we don't value their time and so it is a force multiplier for the men who don't have to sit on hold, and we ignore all of her time that is wasted. I agree with those who are glad such days are over.
And that works very well even today when you are high enough to get a personal secretary. For the engineer who always shared the secretary with several others she didn't know you as well, and in any case their preferences were not important enough to consider (you don't get first class options).
Even for my boss, outlook is a force multiplier over a secretary because he (happens to be he today, has been she in the past, and likely will be again in a few years) doesn't have very many things where knowing preferences matter and doesn't have such complex scheduling needs that a human needs to do it. The ability to schedule his own meetings is much more powerful than asking someone to do it - while it might take more time to do it he can see that by not inviting one person the meeting can be had sooner and that is a much greater multiplier than the time saves by having someone else who not knowing those details delays the meeting until everyone can be there.
Yes when your situation is such that a secretary can "understand you, and act on your behalf in the matters you delegate, knowing what outcome you would choose yourself" it is a force multiplier. However most of us are not really that different from anyone else and even where we are we are not allowed the level of differentiation. We also don't have nearly the ability to delegate things, much less enough things that someone else can delegate them on our behalf. And so for most of us outlook is a force multiplier over the secretary we would get.
More times than not it will not be stronger, it will be compounds that are not psychoactive at all, effectively “cutting” the potency of the substance while multiplying the quantity.
There are cases with fentanyl where a stronger substance is mixed in with the original and this often is what you read about in the news, but it is not in generally in the distributors best interest to be killing their clientele.
That doesn't appear to be true. E.g., following links from the WHO page you cite gets me to https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/39d... ...
where Figure 1 shows hunger consistently decreasing from the start of the graph in 2005 to somewhere around 2014, at which point it plateaus for a while and then starts increasing somewhere around 2019-2020.
My recollection is that by 2005 where that graph begins, hunger had been consistently decreasing for quite some time, but a bit of googling hasn't found anything that quite answers that question. I did find https://www.jstor.org/stable/40572886 (looking at data from 1930 to 1990) whose publicly-accessible abstract says that "the proportion undernourished has been in decline since the 1960s and that the absolute number has also declined in recent years".
So I think the truth is not "hunger has been getting worse for the last quarter century or so" but something more like "10 years ago, hunger had been improving for about half a century; the improvement stalled for about 5 years and over about the last five years it has been getting worse".
(Which is still bad news, as far as the present state of things is concerned, but a rather different sort of bad news.)
> Similarly, new estimates of adult obesity show a steady increase over the last decade, from 12.1 percent (2012) to 15.8 percent (2022). Projections indicate that by 2030, the world will have more than 1.2 billion obese adults. The double burden of malnutrition – the co-existence of undernutrition together with overweight and obesity – has also surged globally across all age groups.
Obesity will soon, if not already, become a major public health disaster in poor countries.
That's an outrageous claim you need to back with some hard facts, otherwise patently untrue.
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+people+die+worldwid...
Unsupported claims are not "patently untrue"; THAT claim also requires citation.
Why doesn't Africa have more farms and infrastructure?
Long answer: Western colonialism.
How do you explain lack of farming / infrastructure prior to colonialism? More or less all environments populated by sub saharans struggle with infrastructure. This is true before, during, and after colonialism.
Of course in 1950 we didn't have computers able to do many of the things assistants did. As such we needed them to manually do various tasks that today computers do better. However the sexist making it females who are doing the job harmed the better female who could have done something better, and also the less capable males who couldn't do anything more complex anyway. (though there are a lot of jobs that those males could do that are even less complex)
Well, except for food preserved via pickling, salting, drying, smoking, fermenting, sugaring, and confit. Which makes for quite a long list.
Plus, various foods like grains, root vegetables, onions, and even apples could be stored for months using proper techniques. They didn't have the luxury we have of not paying much attention to how we store things and just replacing them when they go bad, so they became quite good at this.
I would also expect them to have various special variaties of apples/pears that actually improved their taste with storage. For example a variety that was best with 2 months of storage, another one that was best after 6 months.
Then you have cheeses, yoghurts, milk. Those things could be available year round. One would expect the king of France to have quite a variety of cheeses at his disposal. Then we have meats prepared in a hundred different ways. From simple roasting, to gelling, pickling like modern hams. And so on.
Then we have various types of wild mushrooms. I wonder if the king ate wild mushrooms and who picked these mushrooms for him... Poisoning would be so easy to get away with if he did.
It would be tough without potatoes, tomatoes and peppers, but I think food-wise I'd be just fine (assuming money and power).
Yes, but also my understanding is that the preservation technique of that name involves much more salt than modern palettes are willing to tolerate, and also salt itself was much more limited in supply.
Despite this, salt as a preservative was indeed critical to civilisation.
> fermenting
True, and also I want to say "blessed are the cheesemakers" etc. here. :)
None of which preserves the taste/nutrition well for a wide range of foods like greens/fruits/vegetables, you the limits in seasonal availability don't get resolved
Plus the excellent point that dylan604 made, they weren't bougie bitches.
Hemlock and henbane were both used as painkillers and dulling agents .. up to unconsciousness and death, depending on dosage.
Added: Monastery herb gardens often had quite the range, eg: https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/inspire-me/blog/ar...
https://www.neurology.org/doi/10.1212/WNL.92.15_supplement.P...
Alcohol, though, is great for dissolving opium into an easily ingestible potion, whence one gets dwale or laudanum.
The taste wasn't so fun though.
Not by the standards of the world 5th percentile, as in the question posed. The 5th percentile today is mostly subsistence farming and doesn't have access to imported foods or own a refrigerator (though there probably is one in their local village, and they may well own a mobile phone).
[citation needed]
The idea that historically people went around hammered because the water supply was poor is a myth.
The water myth is not the cause.
I have been told there is a huge difference between the two.
There are the fermented pickles
There are the pickles that get mixed with prefermented preservative (usually vinegar/salt) and pressure-canned
And then there are the pickles that get flash cooked or not cooked, mixed with preservative, and refrigerated for a limited time
There is some difference in taste, due to modern additiomal conservants and minor changes in receipta, but not all that much.
And thus potatoes and sauerkraut was born.
