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The last scene of Joseph and Mary from the tres riche heures shows an adjustable pot hanger, over the fireplace. Assuming it's not just artistic licence or artistic invention, The fireplace has a reverbatory rear: it's designed to reflect heat. It's also part of the thermal mass of the house.
The adjustable pot hanger would be familiar to any cook for the next 400 years: it provides for variable sizes of pot, and distance from the fire: it's heat adjustable cooking for a slow summer or fast boil. I checked in Google images, Victorian examples abound, substantively the same.
You'd be as much in control of cooking temperature as in an aga cooker.
A trammel hook! Something I find interesting is that it is used in the French equivalent of house warming: "pendre la crémaillère" or hanging of the trammel hook.
Trammel hooks are still used in the corner of Portugal in which I live - quite a lot of families have an old house which still has a hearth covering half the kitchen, filled with chains and hooks for setting various fires and putting pots on at various heights.
Of course, most folks also have a modern kitchen, but for high days and holidays they cook the old way still. Not unusual to see an old lady cranking a kid goat on a turnspit, either.
Thing is, some of these “old” houses were built as recently as the 70’s, using techniques which hadn’t changed since the medieval era - stone and timber, lath and plaster, packed earth floors - such are the privations of nearly a century of stunted development, particularly in rural areas.
The couple warming up their genitals by the fire was a rather unexpected detail in an otherwise mundane early 15th century painting (and one I'm surprised did not warrant a mention). I suppose it was a mundane act indeed.
Good catch. I think that's where one major artery lays (femoral artery, if I searched correctly). I am not a back sleeper but I was advised to put a hot water bottle between my legs, to stay warm when camping in the winter. Apparently that was already well-known in medieval times.
Still used in winter in cold places.
The style of art from that period tends to show human figures at a much larger scale than their environment - I remember a picture showing a siege in which the attacking army could almost have stepped over the walls! I'm sure there are interesting reasons behind this, but it does have the unfortunate effect of making it very difficult to discern how big these dwellings actually were.
I have a pet theory that this relates to how on social media picture sharing apps, in general, low effort selfies tend to get more engagement than beautiful landscape photography.
People like looking at other people, and people especially like looking at themselves
Visited “Golden Lane” under Prague Castle not long ago. Dates back to 16th century. What fascinated me was how tiny some of the “apartments” were. Basically 15 square meters for living, but also conducting their craft or business. Yet many of them seemed quite charming. Maybe we don’t need much.
They could be small partly because several of the feature of modern homes that are regarded as indispensable now were mostly absent from such dwellings: kitchens, bathrooms, and toilets in particular.
I have an ex-colleague who lives with his wife in Oslo in a 45 sq. m. flat but that does include a bathroom, kitchen, and a bedroom.
That would feel claustrophobic to me having lived for the last 34 years in a house with three times the floor area, 800 sq. m. of garden, and a cellar. Nonetheless the demand for apartments where he lives is such that his 45 sq. m. apartment is worth almost double what my 130 sq. m. house and garden are worth.
We might not need much but many of us feel much more comfortable and happier with more!
> Oslo in a 45 sq. m. flat
While I live in Sweden (about 4 hours away from Oslo by train), I think the two countries are sufficiently similar that I can mention some of my experiences moving here from the US.
Many apartments here have a shared laundry room/area, with washer and dryer, or drying cabinet/room, and place to iron/fold.
I think just about every apartment also has a storage area, either in the basement or the attic. For us this is about 10 sq. m.
Many apartments have access to a common area that can be booked for parties or other larger events. Two rooms with kitchen is pretty common. Some have a bookable sauna, that isn't common. I've also seen places with a bookable guest rooms, which reduces the need for everyone to have a guest bedroom.
Many have some sort of green space with a play area for the kids. Some have an enclosed courtyard where residents can have their own garden. Some have a gazebo, or grill area, and one new construction here has a freestanding shared conservatory (labeled "orangery", but without any orange trees).
We don't have this, but we are a block from a small park and four blocks from a couple good play areas.
Even with these, the result is certainly not as spacious as the house you describe. Rather, I wanted highlight there might be some additional aspects of the Oslo flat which aren't reflected in your summary.
While researching what I wrote I found https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arealberegning_av_bygninger with a chart showing "Size in relation to primary area and number of people in the household - Area standards" ("Størrelse i forhold til primærareal og antall personer i husholdning - Arealnormer"). It puts 45 sq. m. for 2 people as "cramped", with the lower range for "normal" being 55 sq. m. Above 100 sq.m. for 2 people is "spacious" and above 150 sq. m. is "very spacious."
You are right too about kitchen and toilet. In the late 1800s there would have been one shared well, for the apartment building, with a shared toilet. I've read that people would have kept a pig or other animals in the courtyard. And one of the buildings here was the first worker-owned apartment building in town. The historical sign on it says it had a shared kitchen for all the residents.
What you say and add to my comment is pretty much the case. I used to live in a flat in Drammen, much bigger though, about 72 sq. m. We had a storage area in the loft of the building and as you say there were communal washing machines. But in fact we would have had plenty of space to have our own washer and dryer.
I would make one point though:
> the two countries are sufficiently similar
That's true for most of this discussion but Norwegians until quite recently almost overwhelmingly wanted to own their own their home (over 80% do) and prefer a detached house, most still do. In 2010 according to SSB half of the just over two million dwellings in Norway were detached houses (enebolig). My impression of Sweden when visiting places like Gothenburg, Västerås, Linköping, Ludvika, etc., on business and holiday is that Swedes are noticeably more likely to live in flats. My house is pretty much in the middle of the size distribution for detached houses (see https://www.ssb.no/bygg-bolig-og-eiendom/faktaside/bolig)
> Norwegians until quite recently almost overwhelmingly wanted to own their own their home (over 80% do)
https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/sverige-i-siffror/mannisk... says that in 2021, of the over 4.8 million Swedish households (which may be multiple people):
Småhus, äganderätt / detached house, owner - 1 909 024 = 41.2%
Småhus, bostadsrätt / detacted house, co-op owner - 93 678 = 2.02%
Småhus, hyresrätt / detached house, rent - 73 654 = 1.59%
Flerbostadshus, bostadsrätt / multi-family building, co-op - 1 006 560 = 21.7%
Flerbostadshus, hyresrätt / multi-family building, rent - 1 379 720 = 29.8 %
Specialbostad / special (student, old-age, etc) - 165 510 = 3.6%
48.1% / 1,198,659 households live in single family houses ("Enebolig"). The Swedish "småhus" total is 44.9%.
47% / 1,170,000 or so live in multi-family housing ("Tomannsbolig" / "Rekkehus, kjedehus, andre småhus" / "Boligblokk"), compared to 51.6% in Sweden.
4.9% / 121,486 live in "other", which I'll map to the 3.6% "specialbostad" in Sweden.
This matches your observation that more Swedes tend to live in multi-family homes compared to Norwegians, though I don't think it's a substantial difference. (I hope I did my numbers correct!)
FWIW, my impression of visiting Oslo is that they mostly live in flats too. grin
Yes, human can live in a burrow, it seems.
Setting aside the problem (mentioned in the article) that these images were produced for an aristocratic class, and possibly don’t accurately describe the reality of a peasant’s home, then what’s most striking is how decorative the interiors are: patterned floors, painted walls, and neat carpentry.
I’ve read the theory that the life of peasants in the Middle Ages was demonized and made to sound dystopian to encourage the working class of the Industrial Revolution (including ‘forgetting’ all the traditional festivals and days free from labor), and this sort of article makes me wonder whether this is additional evidence. Or possibly just the sanitized version for the entertainment of the upper class?
PS: a sidenote - strange to see spelling mistakes like a “pain of glass” in an academic paper.
The life of a peasant was one of serfdom, watching too many of your children die before their 4th birthday. The wheat you grew you had to mill in a landlord's mill and they collected a tax from it. There was no light in the evenings because tallow or other wax was far too expensive so when it got dark there were limited things to do. Floors were covered in rushes instead of carpet and were host to bugs. True medicine was not there, surgery unheard of for the peasant class.
The days "free from labour" weren't really free from labour, those "free" days are days spent doing menial boring work that we have industrialised away. days spent butchering animals, repairing clothes and tools, teasing wool.
You'd be lucky to own more than 2 sets of clothes. Work was backbreaking and if you couldn't work, you were a pauper.
Yeah, if you only look at the "good" (only 150 "work" days a year!) and ignore the bad (all of the above), yeah it sounds great. The reality was not so rosy.
For my ancestors, it would undoubtedly have been fucking awful. They'd have loved to this in this world we now have.
Light in peasant houses didn’t use candles but rush dipped in fat or tallow. Rushlights took minimal effort to create and rush was basically free. Candles where more consistent and significantly longer lasting though vastly more expensive, while rushlights where plenty useful and cheap.
The major cost was you could also eat the fat, but an hour of light every night would cost you something like 1% of the calories you needed to survive. Making them viable outside of true starvation situations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rushlight
Similarly, work was intense during planting and harvest, but slowed down the rest of the year. So people would do things like take pilgrimages surprisingly often. Rather than long days of backbreaking labor the major issue was they lacked productive work most of the year.
I am not saying life was good, but rather it was very different than we imagine.
> was they lacked productive work most of the year.
I'm surprised. Do you have a good source for this?
It really depends where. England ended serfdom in the 14th century, and in much of western europe (Italy notably, but also Scotland and Spain) serfdom never really developed. In central and eastern europe, peasants were ensurfed into the 19th century, though in most places this was an imposition in the 16th - 17th century.
It's also important to remember that peasants weren't a homogenous group. There were rich peasants and poor peasants, often in the same village, and they lived different lives.
This might be true, but being working class during the industrial revolution might be even worse than this. You move away from your loved ones to go to a big city, sleep in extremely cramped spaces, work extremely demanding and repetitive jobs for sometimes 12 hours a day, etc. If a policeman sees you strolling on the streets they'd question why you're not working and you better have some fucking proof that your boss asked you to go somewhere. Diseases and illnesses were at similar levels in this lifestyle as well. The modal lifespan of a human in hunter gatherer groups is around 70 years old. The artificially low lifespans of the medieval period in Europe was mostly due to peasants being forced to live in close quarters with all of their animals, making it a prime breeding ground for zoonotic diseases to spread (worth noting, every major human plague has been zoonotic in origin). Working in a factory doesn't expose you to as many zoonotic diseases but there's a whole host of novel risk factors and pollutants that also lower your lifespan. Not to mention, indentured servitude was the norm and is not much better than serfdom. Peasants also at least had more overall freetime than even the modern American worker. As you pointed out, only 150 days of work each day (though hunter gatherer groups still worked even less than this)
A couple of notes:
The child mortality rate was equally high among the upper classes, which is why motherhood was a outsourced occupation. The likelihood of death was conceived as such a stressor it might ruin a woman. There are counter examples (parents rearing their own) that we know about precisely because it, being extraordinary, was a topic of conversation.
Your description of daily life is striking. It's also why I like reflecting on our folklore: it is usually very dark, full of fear, sickness and death. I live in Norway, and there are specific supernatural explanations for almost anything: death, malformed babies, rape, incest, abortion, suicide, insanity etc. "hidden" in what is usually presented as rosy fairytales and omens.
Most of the "bad things" were independent of social class. This was just the way people lived back than.
> watching too many of your children die before their 4th birthday
> There was no light in the evenings because tallow or other wax was far too expensive so when it got dark there were limited things to do.
(Not even rich people could afford much light!)
> Floors […] were host to bugs.
> True medicine was not there
But just think about the work days and hours. Most people (even the poor ones) were not working the most time of the year. Only in summer it was possible to work the whole day. That's why industrialization needed to "teach" the "lazy people" to "actually work".
> watching too many of your children die before their 4th birthday
It was that much better for aristocracy/middle class. Obviously access to better nutrition and conditions improved the chances of survival. However mortality was still huge and not really that distinguishable between social classes from a modern perspective.
> True medicine was not there, surgery unheard of for the peasant class
Which might have been a good thing in some cases. For many illnesses and diseases the methods used by highly paid 'doctors' might have as well done more harm than good.
I agree with the general sentiment however. Yet in many ways life for upper classes wasn't that great either.
Yes, the upper class was actually endlessly tormented by doctors during most of history. Until germ theory you would generally have been better off avoiding them.
It's interesting to look at feudal tax rates. It varied between countries but the concept of "thirteenth" seems to be common, based on what I see it used to be between 2% and 10% of "revenue".
I wonder when did we normalize 40-60% taxation. Seems we made a wrong turn somewhere. Perhaps our convenient modern life wouldn't be sustainable on such low taxes, but maybe it would - looking at Monaco or Dubai firmly at 0%.
The rate of taxation depends on what is the maximum possible rate, what is the available surplus that can be extracted while still enabling the workers to survive and 'reinvest' in things that affect productivity.
In earlier times a farming community of e.g. 20 farmer families simply did not produce enough surplus to feed 20 other families; if someone would tax them half of their harvest, then they would starve, eat their seed grain and breeding animals, and there would be nothing to tax next year. A 10% tax was probably the limit of what could be sustained long-term.
On the other hand, as people become more productive, it became possible to devote a larger share of that production to goals beyond the survival needs of the household.
A direct outcome of the growth of the administrative and regulatory state throughout the 20th century. High government spending must always be balanced by high taxes, an increase in the national debt, or both.
Idk what country you’re paying 40-60% tax in. I make very good money in the US and I don’t pay close to that.
Using the US as an example, most people pay an effective tax rate of 20%. This is equivalent to a peasant getting a 10% tax and their 10% tithe to the church, so it’s not far off.
Basically we’ve moved redistribution/welfare from the control of the church to the state. In medieval times these were effectively the same thing anyways.
>I wonder when did we normalize 40-60% taxation
It's generally common, these days, to blame everything that isn't perfect on the state. Pandemic? State must sort it out. Bad parents? State. Interpersonal violence? State. Crime? State. Infrastructure needed? State. Children are hungry? State.
For better or ill (and I'd say better) 40% taxation is here to stay, since we have all become left wing, now.
Average tax rate in the US appears to be less than 20%
> Floors were covered in rushes instead of carpet and were host to bugs.
What do you think the carpets owned by rich people were made out of? It certainly wasn't synthetic fibers. I don't see any reason to believe their carpets weren't host to pests as well. The rich class were doubtlessly covered in lice and other parasites.
Taxes should probably fall into the "good" column as the cuts the landlords took was paltry by any modern standard (though I'm sure they would have taken more if the economy could support it).
There's a big divide here though, between pre-Black Death (poverty as you describe) and the couple centuries afterward. It took forever for population numbers to recover (more than two centuries, in England) and things were much better during that period. Infant death remained very high until recent times, of course.
The "only 150 "work" days a year" is fundamentally stupid, because it ignores all the work that needs to be done in the winter, childcare, repairs of tools, wood chopping for fire etc.
Aristos also covered floor with rushes and other scented herbs. Serfdom generally didn’t exist in the West unless you are using the term over broadly.
I think you gravely misunderstood my comment, I’m certainly not harking back to some romantic ideal of pre-industrial Arcadia.
If you were an under-nourished worker, living in the rat-like polluted conditions of an Industrial Revolution town in Northern England (for instance), constantly breathing sulfurous fumes, suffering cholera epidemics, seeing the whole town and all the countryside around it blackened by the ash from the local factories, while still seeing children die prematurely from all the same diseases and accidents that were common in the Middle Ages, but with less access to fresh air and your own vegetables and (to some extent) your own livestock, then making the life of a peasant seem less attractive than it maybe was in reality, is not such a far-fetched possibility.
> watching too many of your children die before their 4th birthday
As for children dying - maybe the children of peasants would die in greater numbers than the aristocracy, but nothing stopped their children from dying of an infected scratch or a bacterial infection, any more than anyone else, before the invention of antibiotics.
I think your comment falls into the “it was unadulterated hell being a peasant”-trap that I was referring to, instead of evaluating whether the life was actually more nuanced (especially in relative terms to those richer than themselves at the time).
I live in NYC, "greatest city in the world," and I encounter rats almost daily. Almost every apartment here will have a cockroach problem at some point. And since most of the city is a food desert, it takes pretty serious determination to eat a balanced diet, and usually at quite a cost.
So, notwithstanding all the negative points mentioned in this thread, I agree there are still many aspects of medieval peasant life that I wish we would aim for in today's world. There are even quite a few so-called modern "conveniences" that I would happily give up for them. I wish the things around me in my life were made of stone and wood and clay and durable textiles, rather than synthetic, disposable materials, shoddily assembled for a quick buck.
I think, just as you claim this false medieval story was told to industrial society, there is absolutely a concerted effort today to paint our current world as so much rosier than it is in comparison to other past living conditions. The idea in Better Angels of Our Nature and other such revisionist and cherry picked arguments seem like they could only be made to keep us pacified.
> I think your comment falls into the “it was unadulterated hell being a peasant”-trap that I was referring to
You might be reading my comment as if that were the case, but I assure you that my thoughts are not that.
Humans adapt to any situation, that's why we are the superior species, we are the world's greatest adapters. Peasant life wasn't misery all the time, but there was FAR MORE misery on a FAR GREATER scale than there is for the average Brit. That's my point.
I think it's important to understand how many things we have that most of us take for granted (refridgeration, essentially infinite light, the world's information at your fingertips, I could go on).
I have read a few articles over the past few days about people waxing lyrical about how great medieval peasants had it, and my comment is merely counterpointing those arguments.
> As for children dying - maybe the children of peasants would die in greater numbers than the aristocracy, but nothing stopped their children from dying of an infected scratch or a bacterial infection, any more than anyone else, before the invention of antibiotics.
I think picking one bit of all of my examples, countering it, and then treating the rest of my argument as if it is worthless is a really bad way to engage with people. It's why I stopped commenting on HN, it's full of pedantic tripe like that.
Take care.
True, most socio-economic 'revolutions' e.g. agricultural, industrial, Rome conquering/"brining civilization [to]" most of the know world had huge negative effects for the majority of the population at least in short and medium term,
Life as a peasant was fine until it was not. If a flood or drought wiped out your crops, you were completely screwed. You might be able to get by with rationing or foraging, but you'd have to start over the next year weaker and demoralized. As populations grew, it becoming increasingly riskier to live off the land, which is why they moved to the cities where they can earn money that you can save in the case of an emergency.
You live in an age of excess, where you can always fall back on the welfare of others, so you can't imagine working 12 hour days in shitty conditions, but this is not the case for people who moved from hundreds, if not thousands of miles away to work in a factory. For them, an extra hour of work is an extra hour of security. The fact that billions of people made this move is evidence that rural life was that bad. Dismissing these incredibly thoughtful decisions as the result of capitalist propaganda completely dismisses their agency.
There's this common trope that medieval peasant clothing was all drab sackcloth. It was actually usually vibrantly dyed, and ACOUP goes into this in considerable detail:
https://acoup.blog/2021/03/05/collections-clothing-how-did-t...
Likewise, medieval houses were often painted with local dyes, like Falu red in the Nordics.
> PS: a sidenote - strange to see spelling mistakes like a “pain of glass” in an academic paper.
Presumably transcription errors; that example appears as "pane of glass" in the original paper visible at <https://books.google.com/books?id=AQDtAAAAMAAJ&lpg=PP7&pg=PA...>
It depends what you’re trying to say.
Showing the home of a typical HN poster would be very different than many working poor in the United States.
The transition from craft work to industrial production and assembly changed many aspects of life. My home is an urban single family detached house built in 1924 as a partially finished home that could be adapted by the owner to be a two family or you could finish the bedrooms upstairs. We did some research and the first owners of the home worked for the phone company. So not a super expensive home then, but there is still custom craftwork masonry, good trim carpentry (custom built-ins, custom millwork, etc). Today those tradespeople don’t exist. To a 1920s middle class person, a modern high end home would look unfinished in comparison.
>strange to see spelling mistakes like a “pain of glass” in an academic paper.
I did a double take when I read that a "white car warms itself by the fire". Good to know that medieval peasants had motorized transport!
You're assuming that factory workers are stupid and incapable of judging living conditions on their own. The fact is that millions of people voluntarily moved thousands of miles away from their families and hometowns to a country where they can't even speak the language, just so that they can work in a factory. That is not a decision that they make lightly. The fact that they had to work for long hours and shitty conditions is evidence not evidence that they made poor decisions, but that their supposedly idyllic country life was that much worse.
I think you’re right, peasant life wasn’t so dystopian through the Middle Ages, and it seems to get a bad rap. Peasants didn’t have modern freedoms but they were not chattel slaves. They had a lot of free time and for much of history had a lot of land-per-person. Humans with free time and space, even if they are economically poor, carve out interesting and non-dystopian lives for themselves.
I know explicit propaganda was used to try to convince Russian peasants their lives were miserable to spur the communist revolution. I’m not sure about explicit propaganda elsewhere. I think our collective consciences have merged together images of “old poverty” and we have an image of surfs that are closer to chattel slaves thanks to colonialism and industrialization. I also suspect quality of life among peasants was volatile over time, with famines and political turmoil hitting them extremely hard. By the industrial revolution it may really have been dystopian in much of Europe.
> Russian peasants their lives were miserable
They were miserable though. The conditions of Russian peasants were much closer to chattel slavery than many of those who lived during the late middle ages in Western Europe. In fact the relative conditions of serfs in Russia (and Eastern Europe in general) got progressively worse during the 15-18th centuries as the conditions at the same time as they were gradually improving in the west.
> By the industrial revolution it may really have been dystopian in much of Europe.
I think the lives of people living in the country side who owned some lands (or tenancy) at least improved during the industrial revolution. Farmers in western Europe were increasingly focused on less labor intense cash crops or husbandry (as grain imports from Eastern Europe increased) which meant that there was demand for labor (forcing many to move into the crowded cities). Those who remained to a large degree were left with a bigger slice of the 'pie' compared to their ancestors.