“Life in the Middle Ages was romantic and glamorous if you believe Hollywood. There were heroes on noble horses, beautiful women with pointy hats, honor, and sometimes dragons. You’d want to get on a TARDIS and go back in time after seeing that. It may come as a surprise that Hollywood has it all wrong. France’s middle ages were not at all like Hollywood’s middle ages.”
“Life was hard, dirty, and dangerous for almost everyone. Many of the people who died were young and died of things that people today almost never die of. If you could go back in time, you might be surprised at how short your stay would be. These are some of the many reasons why you and everyone else wouldn’t last long in the Middle Ages.”
“You may not survive middle childhood. No matter what form it takes, grief is awful. But in the West, we don’t see the worst of it as often. The infant mortality rate in the United States is only 0.54% and it goes down after babies are born. Between the ages of 1 and 4, about 0.02% of children die. Between the ages of 5 and 14, about 0.01% of children die. Now think about how many children died in the Middle Ages. According to Representing Childhood, exact numbers are hard to find, but about 25% of medieval babies died before they were 1 year old. That means that one in four babies born during that time would not make it past their first year.”
“The odds got a little better for kids who lived to be toddlers. About 12.5% of kids between the ages of 1 and 4 died. Only about 6% of kids between the ages of 5 and 9 died. So, if they made it to age 5, they were pretty much safe. Still, that was worse than the baby mortality rate in modern America. But hey, kids in the Middle Ages could play with swords and drink alcohol without having to follow all those strict child safety rules. Not a big deal.”
“You might be a peasant, and middle-aged peasants died young. In the Middle Ages, if you did manage to TARDIS, your purple unicorn eyewatch and blue jeans would probably make you stand out like a sore thumb among the white horses. You’ll need to blend in quickly, which you won’t do by dressing up as the queen in a silk robe. Of course not.”
“Your best bet is to fit in with the peasants so no one will notice you. About 90% of the people living in ancient Europe were peasants. So, what’s one more peasant? But the bad thing about becoming a peasant was that life as a peasant was awful. According to Western Reserve public media, peasants wore the same dang, rough, itchy wool outfit everyday.”
“They also ate veggies, bread, porridge, and sometimes a little meat. They also died when the weather was bad. When it was too wet or too dry, the peasants would go hungry because when the fields failed, so did they. Based on the time period, History Extra says that the normal lifespan for a peasant was 30 to 40 years. If weather didn’t kill you, black death would.”
“The only people who got the Black Death between 2000 and 2009 were in the United States. They were among the 20,000 people who got it. We don’t have to worry too much though if we act like we don’t know that and stay away from chipmunks like the plague because they clearly carry disease, right? And if you go back in time to say Europe in the 1340s, your chances of making it are between 7 and 2 in 5.”
“It is thought that the Black Death killed up to 60% of all the people living in Europe. To get an idea of how big of an effect this might have had the next time you’re at work, cross off three of every five people you see and act like they’re dead. Then try to imagine how you and your co-workers would get by without them.”
“But here’s the crazy part. Now that your co-workers are gone, you can say to your boss, ‘Hey, it looks like you need a new middle management team.’ In the Middle Ages, the same thing took place. Things were different after half of the world’s people died. All of a sudden, peasants could ask for better working conditions and higher wages, and things got better for them.”
“Maybe not worth losing three-fifths of the people you loved, but hey, money can help ease the pain. If black death didn’t kill you, childbirth would. During the Middle Ages, things were really tough for women. People thought they were morally weak, and they couldn’t do things that women today take for granted, like getting a job, choosing who to marry, or expressing their views.”
“There were some strong women, but they weren’t very popular. But the worst thing about being a woman was that you had to have children or become a nun. And to be honest, becoming a nun sounds pretty appealing compared to the risks of having children, which would kill about one in three women. Today, only 0.0028% of women who give birth die. So, no one will blame you if you decide to leave the TARDIS after 9 months. According to the Raven Report, giving birth in the Middle Ages and the TUDA era was so risky that royal women were told to write their wills well before they gave birth. Think about fitting that in somewhere between decorating the nursery and setting up an account to save for college for your child.”
“Religion or lack thereof could kill you in the Middle Ages. Almost everyone in medieval Europe was a good Catholic. Those who weren’t had to act like they were or be ready to die for their views. It was very clear that the idea of religious freedom was not a thing. People began to think critically about the Catholic Church in the 11th and 12th centuries.”
“According to history extra, one thing that some critical thinkers didn’t like about the Catholic Church was how rich and powerful it was. Anyone who has wealth and power knows that people who don’t have those things don’t like it when people who do have those things criticize them for having them. But these were especially dangerous times because the church was so rich and strong that it could pretty much silence its critics.”
“It could do this in the name of God since it was the church and everything it did was approved by God during that time. No one knows for sure how many people were killed. But we do know that it was sometimes done in groups of 200 or more. It also didn’t end for a long time. In the 1550s, Queen Mary burned 300 Protestants. Yes, you can visit ancient Europe, but don’t make jokes about the Pope.”
“Famine. You couldn’t pretend it wasn’t happening to others. People who are hungry in the modern west are poor not because of the weather. Hunger has nothing to do with the supply of food. It’s possible for us to get food from other places when our crops fail here.”
“The only place we really need to worry about famine is in the developing world. Here we can mostly just ignore it and whine about our own problems like how hard it is to get good cell phone service in rural America. During the Middle Ages, most people could not just go somewhere else to get food. Also, there was no cell phone service anywhere, which made things even worse.”
“Historic UK says that the hunger that happened was huge and killed a lot of people. England got a lot of rain from the summer of 1314 through most of 1316. This was not like them at all. If you’ve ever been to the UK, you know that uncharacteristically huge quantities of rain means a lot of rain since most cities already get a lot of rain during the year.”
“Anyway, it rained and rained and crops went bad in the fields and farm animals drowned in the floods. People also ate all the food that had been saved and then they started to go hungry. About 5% of England’s people were dead by the end of the hunger. That’s not as bad as the black plague, but it’s also not as bad as Whole Foods just ran out of kale.”
“Forget Middle European backpacking in summer. In the Middle Ages, if you wanted to travel, you could stay at a clean and safe convent. But what if there wasn’t a monastery nearby? You could stay at an inn, though. There were rats and so many fleas that it was kind of like giving blood at the local blood bank, only itchier, but it was a mostly safe place to spend the night.”
“The beds were made of straw, and you might have to share yours with one or two other visitors. You might have been able to stay in an inn sometimes, but it depended on where you were going and how many towns you came across along the way. And that could mean sleeping outside, which the book Travel and Trade in the Middle Ages says was a terrible idea.”
“When it got dark, there were always people on the roads waiting to kill you for your change. Wild animals were also a problem. In the Middle Ages, people who were going on pilgrimages often did so with other people to keep themselves safe. Rich people would sometimes pay someone else to go on their behalf, which seems to defeat the purpose. But hey, whatevs.”
“Anyway, if one of your dreams is to backpack across Europe in the Middle Ages, forget about it. You could always pay someone to do it for you, though. Middle Ages wars were stupider than today’s. These days, wars are always over reasonable things, like which country has the biggest missile and the best soccer team.”
“But in the Middle Ages, people went to war over silly things like which rich person who wasn’t fit would become king. That was between rich person one and rich person two. But it wasn’t really. If you were a man living in the country of one of those two rich people, you would have to go fight in his stupid war.”
“However, finer times said it wasn’t so bad because you could go home after 40 days if you didn’t die. That’s because forcing all the people to work at the same time would have been bad for business. The kingdom would lose money because no one would be running the farms. It would then not be able to pay for the stupid war.”
“Noblemen also died in battle before 1550. About one-third of them could expect to die in some fight. No one really knows what happened with the peasants. No one ever kept track of how many peasants died because they were thought to be so unimportant. And when they lost, all the regular people who were left were often killed in a planned way.”
“Being a fighter or a peasant at that time was not fun at all. In the Middle Ages, capital crimes were much more common than today. The UK no longer has any capital crimes because it got rid of the death sentence in 1965. But before that, Britain did a lot of killing people. Back in the Middle Ages, there were 50 sins that could lead to death.”
“These included treason, different kinds of murder, poaching, robbery, and forgery. In this one case though, you’d be better off in the Middle Ages than a little later in history. In the UK, there aren’t any capital crimes right now, but in the 1600s, there were about 200 crimes that could get you killed. These included small thefts, damaging Westminster Bridge and cutting down a tree.”
“You would no longer be able to move through time if you flew your TARDIS into Westminster Bridge or a forest with a lot of young trees. history. Extra on the other hand says that during that time the bloody code led to fewer executions because juries were hesitant to put people to death for minor crimes. To be safe, you should keep your TARDIS out of the Middle Ages and the 1600s, though.”
“Middleage food may kill you. People in the Middle Ages were often smelly and couldn’t read or write, but they weren’t stupid. It’s not true what you’ve heard about how strong spices in the Middle Ages covered up the smell of rotten meat. Spices were expensive, and anyone who could afford them could probably also afford to throw out all that rotten meat.”
“People knew how to keep food fresh for the most part. They smoked, salted, dried, and pickled it. But no one seems to have died because they were eating bad meat. But the food also had other harmful things in it. There was a lot of lead and other heavy metals like mercury in fancy glazed items that rich people used to have.”
“Smithsonian says that when you put acidic or salty foods on your plates and bowls, the glaze would begin to break down, letting the metals into your food. So, people from the top class were slowly poisoning themselves while they ate on fancy plates. At the same time, bakers sometimes used wheat that had been infected with a fungus called Clavisps per perea to make bread.”
“This could lead to an outbreak of erotism, which is a disease that we now know today. People who got the infection had dreams, seizures, burning sensations in their limbs, and sometimes blackened body parts that would just fall off. Bring some snack mix and beef jerky with you when you go back in time. Being careful is always a good thing.”
“If you survived a middle-ag illness, it was probably despite your doctor. Don’t worry about getting sick in the Middle Ages. Antibiotics, appendectomies, chemotherapy, and doctors washing their hands between patients were not available. Most of what doctors thought they knew was wrong and rarely useful from a medical point of view.”
“The British Library says that an astrological chart could be used to figure out what was wrong with a sick person. They could also be treated by bloodletting, purging, or tree panning, which meant drilling a hole in the skull to ease pressure in the brain. The shocking truth is that these medicines rarely worked and sometimes made people die faster.”
“Still, people continued to let their blood flow for a long time. There is still some disagreement about whether George Washington died of strep throat or the harsh bloodletting doctors used to treat it. So, if you get a sore throat and fever while you’re on vacation in the Middle Ages, it’s best not to call the doctor or just don’t go back to the Middle Ages, please.”
“Then there was old-fashioned violence. Even if you avoid all of those other risks, you will still have to face one harsh fact. The Middle Ages were a lot stronger. History Extra says that murder happened about 10 times more often in England in the Middle Ages than it does now. If you think about it, that sounds really bad until you realize that the death rate in the US is about 4.7 times higher than it is in the UK. But let’s not talk about that.”
“Even though there were very high rates of death among mothers, women in the Middle Ages had a much higher life expectancy than men. According to Purple Moes, women could expect to live about 9.4 years longer than men. And this was mostly because of violence between men. That’s right. About 46% of all deaths in men aged 15 and up were violent. If you were a guy living in England in the Middle Ages, you had a about one in two chance of dying violently.”
“Yes, you can tardis back to the Middle Ages and enjoy the sights, but you might want to hold off on going outside to look around. The Middle Ages were dangerous for people who were born and raised there. Today, people don’t have much of a chance of surviving at all.”
