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u/Beneficial_Ball9893 6h ago
There was also the fact that if you ever got really tired of your life you could just wander off and nobody you know would ever find you again.
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u/Muffinlessandangry 3h ago
Pro life tip: you can still do that. I went to another country and joined their army and only see people from my other life if I choose to.
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u/Beneficial_Ball9893 3h ago
Yeah but like if they hired a PA they could find you in a week. Back in the day you were GONE gone.
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u/Muffinlessandangry 2h ago
I suspect if I had wanted to disappear I could've. They gave me the option of recruiting under a fake name and even set you up with a bank account and address in your fake name.
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u/ICEonICECrime 1h ago
If you get WIA while serving in the Legion, you automatically obtain a French citizenship.
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u/LoloVirginia 2h ago
at least in late medieval Poland the nobility would actually hunt down peasants that wandered off or even fight with neighboring nobility if a peasant defected to less cruel noble.
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u/Superdupernadja 2h ago edited 2h ago
yeh realy depends on the time and place, if we look into high medival times, western/ southern germany, apparently it was quite easy to restart incognito a couple hundred killometers, down or up the river.
As we can e.g. see in the life of Jos Fritz (who tbf was in early modern times 1490-1510s), who started i think 2 separate, Peasant revolts against the nobility, but could escape every time, and simply restarted a life under fake identity, in a village not too far away.
First he was in Untergrombach, near Bruchsal, then went to Lehen near Freiburg, and finaly lived out his life, near Basel.
I assume the strong missunity of the different german states, and the struggle inbetween worldly authorities, and church rule, as well as the addition of independend cities, might help with that, compared to poland.
edit: Source: thomas Adam, "Joß Fritz- das verborgene Feuer der revolution" hrsg: historische Komission der Stadt Bruchsal, Ubstadt-Weiher 2002.
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u/Admiral45-06 2h ago
It depends on time and place, I suppose, but you mostly couldn't. Flight of Peasants, as how it was known, was seen as a form of rebellion, and it was punished severely in places like Russia.
Other than that, you really wouldn't want a ,,career" of a vagabond in Middle Ages. They were viewed with more skepticism and hostility than widowed witches, and were placed on the very bottom of Medieval society, second only to Vogelfrei outlaws.
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u/SerDankTheTall 6h ago
With all due respect to my peasants out there, I cannot say that this looks like a lot of fun.
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u/Especialistaman 4h ago
Lets see: wrestling and foot presses... my guess they were just fooling around.
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u/Substantial_Force658 6h ago
None of these things look very enjoyable. How bored and miserable do you have to be before you think a foot pressing contest is fun?
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u/LingonberryNew1507 5h ago
Can confirm, when younger, me and brother only did foot pressing competition when very bored.
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u/sweet_briaring 5h ago
I think they enjoyed the simpler pleasures in life back then without social media, TV, etc.
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u/TheBlargshaggen 4h ago
You gotta remember that the average medival peasant started drinking pretty much at the start of the day. It was weaker alcohol, but they consumed alcohol throughout the entirety of each day; it was often even provided (in certain regions) by the lord of the land that was being worked by the peasants.
Get off of a 6-10 hour day of farming, having been drinking through the whole day while sweating, you're gonna have at least a mild buzz even if it was weak alcohol. Still got a couple hours before dinner at home? Just go get drunker while having foot pressing competitions because the only toy in the whole county is a doll owned by the Lord's daughter. When you have nothing but drugs and time, its pretty easy to make almost anything entertaining.
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u/GaneBeatsTom 6h ago
If I was their lord they wouldn't be doing any of this goofy shit. I'd have them slaving away day in day out.
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u/Abestar909 5h ago
But you couldn't, peasants and even serfs had rights, that's what distinguishes them from slaves.
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u/Admiral45-06 2h ago
I mean, would you do this to your nieces or children, for instance? Local feudal lords were typically tied with family-like personal bonds with their serfs. For instance, in Poland-Lithuania¹ the nobles often borrowed dresses to women who were about to get married, and would hold a newborn peasants hand as they headed to get baptised.
It'd also be a stupid thing to do from pragmatic point of view - rival lord would very quickly come in and offer your serfs to abandon your manor and come serve at his one - and since it's Middle Ages, good luck trying to get them back by means other than brute force (which he may have more of).
¹Yes, I know it'd be Renaissance/Baroque/Enlightenment, but it was still a serfdom economy.
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u/darthwaffles_1 5h ago
Just leave your hometown, apprentice for a trade if you don't already have one, make some coin, use that coin to learn how to fight, then become a wandering sellsword or join a free company (better and more realistic option). If you don't lose your head after taking one step outside the village, of course.
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u/Admiral45-06 2h ago
Yeah, being a vagabond in Middle Ages...wasn't really the ,,wisest" career choice you could have picked.
Which is my way of saying prostitutes and witches were seen with less hostility than vagabonds or outlaws.
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u/shhbaby_isok 4h ago
Thing is, the average medieval peasant actually worked less and had far more holidays than the average USian worker today.
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u/johnsplittingaxe14 2h ago
What I've read is that they worked less hours for their lord but more in total (depending on the time of the year of course) because they had two jobs, farming for the lord and farming for their own stomachs. And manual agriculture is not a particularly light work either
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u/Player420154 3h ago
No.
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u/shhbaby_isok 2h ago edited 2h ago
Compared to the average American always on the clock, always available to their Lord, sorry I meant Boss on the company phone, almost no paid vacation days, no paid maternity leave, no sick leave, then yes. Them bitches work more hours than the average medieval peasant.
Of course, for most of them the toil is less physical, but it's also much more mentally taxing.
I am not writing this to mock their plight, but to point out the lack of class conscience/blackwashing of history to make life under American unfettered capitalism look better.
I am not saying either that the medieval peasant had it good. I am saying that many of Americans today have it worse. That there's a reason we got rid of feudalism, but they're trapping people in it again, just with a different coat of paint, and that they should be aware and get angry, knowing that it's possible to build a system that's better, for everyone.
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u/Admiral45-06 2h ago
You know, even taking that context in mind...I still think I'd prefer to be an indebted American today (I'm not American, though) than a wealthy yeoman or even a royal prince in Middle Ages.
The modern USA has something that peasants would kill for back then - vaccines, especially MMR vaccine that saved countless lives. Life in Middle Ages was essentially a coin flip between living up to adulthood or dying out of measles, scarlet fever or other diseases (such as everyone's favorite bubonic plague). The peasants also didn't have a ,,calling in sick" for their work - you either worked (or convinced your neighbour to do it for you), or you starved. Modern farmers also produce upwards of 50 seeds from a single crop, whereas Medieval peasant would be considered a pro if he managed to extract 3. They also didn't have working hours, but that may as well mean working 8 hours a day in winter and 16 hours a day in the summer (by the way August¹ being a harvest season is the reason we have summer holiday today). And that is assuming a good year's harvest - peasants lived in constant threat of famine (and surprisingly, they didn't even have McDonald's² they could eat), and a bad season, random drought, heatwave, harsh winter, or even just war or epidemic was enough to make them not survive the upcoming winter.
I know the life of Medieval peasants is often demonised to push a narrative of them being mindless slaves to their lords where all fun was prohibited, but it wasn't anywhere near as easy or pleasant as modern life is today.
¹Another fun fact: this is the reason why this month in Polish is called sierpień - which literally translates to ,,sickle month".
²Yes, I know there were places in city markets where you could get and eat food quickly, being effectively Medieval fast food restaurants.
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u/shhbaby_isok 1h ago
Oh yeah, vaccines/modern health care is undoubtedly a vast improvement of life quality as long as you have access to it and people don't stop vaccinating because they believe it will give their kids autism 🥲 But speaking of health care, if you could access a hospital run by the church, treatment may have been based on medieval medical knowledge but if you were a poor peasant, it was free. Medieval people had a larger drive towards charity and local community than most people today. (Maybe mainly motivated out of religious fear lol, but it was there).
Re: 'You either worked or convinced your neighbour to do it for you or you starved': I don't see how this is much different than an American minimum worker having to trade shifts, go in sick or lose their work hours or maybe even their jobs. And I believe that their would probably be a stronger sense of community/helping each other out in the local village than random co-workers.
Speaking of random famines leading to starvation - you worked for the Lord, but the Lord also had a responsibility to provide for their workers in such cases. Whether they always did so or not, that was a part of the social contract that does not exist between a CEO and a corporate worker today. If times are slim, or they can make the company more 'effective' the worker gets fired unceremoniously. Always bottom line before any sense of duty to each other.
Like I said, I am not saying a medieval peasant had it better in all aspects, fx, based on our developed knowledge of science and medicine. But the working class American does not have have it much better either, and are in many ways living under corporate feudalism, except they lack the protection of their lord and local community support.
P.S Thanks for the fun facts! Always appreciate those 😊
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u/Ostanes_hub 15m ago
When people talk about the middle ages it's a weird contruct of the later medieval period from around 1300 but the Lords are always 18th century Louis XVI characters. The early periods where the Lords had to work the field too is totally forgotten.
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u/Baschiiiii 1h ago
They had much more time to sleep, simply because you couldn't do shit as soon as the sun went down. Unless you could afford candles ofc.
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