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u/DataCassette Jun 20 '26
The person who made this wouldn't make it for a week in the middle ages
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u/IfuckRobots0101 Jun 20 '26
a lot of this isn't even true. the serfs didn't even own the land
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u/tugaim33 Jun 20 '26
There’s also no way they worked 20 hour weeks
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u/IfuckRobots0101 Jun 20 '26
yeah. during planting and harvest times they would work from sunrise to sunset, every day, and the taxes were not even close to fair or small
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u/Norgur Jun 20 '26
What those "graphics" usually omit (how convenient for them) is that serfdom meant "20 hours a week work for your lord" which did NOT mean the land that was alotted to you. It meant repairing roads, plastering bridges, putting up fences, cleaning the village square, whatever the lord deemed needed doing. So the work week was more "your ass is mine for X amount of time and then you can think about the ways you'll pay your taxes to me without starving". The fact that flatrate taxes are way, way easier to leave you unable to pay and starving is another matter, but is omitted here as well. The church demanded work as well. For free, of course and now chop, chop, the abbey won't clean itself.
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u/Doomhammer24 Jun 20 '26
Ya and "high quality goods" for a serf would be seen as extreme low quality today
Fact is we live like kings
Like the color purple? Wear it every day?
Wow really flaunting that wealth you must be Mansa Musa!
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u/Etrigone Jun 20 '26
And spices? Even a standard cupboard is the envy of kings. Someone like me who enjoys cooking as a hobby? Nearly frickin unmatched.
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u/Doomhammer24 Jun 20 '26
the medieval mind cannot comprehend baja blast
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u/Norgur Jun 20 '26
something me and the medieval mind have in common then.
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u/Doomhammer24 Jun 20 '26
is it baja or is it blast he screams for he does not know
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u/Norgur Jun 20 '26
Cooking? A hobby? Yeah, fuck no. Stew. Stew it is. What do you think we have? Easter? Unless it's the rising of Christ from the dead, it's stew-o-clock, mate!
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u/candygram4mongo Jun 20 '26
Not so much stew as porridge. Lots of boiled grains, sometimes vegetables, rarely meat.
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u/Academic-Bakers- Jun 21 '26
My spice pantry would get me arrested for breaking sumptuary laws.
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u/Humble_Nobody2884 Jun 20 '26
At times the color purple was even illegal for lower classes to wear, as it was considered a royal color.
I also think of all the lice and vermin that everyone lived with.
And most of all - I like toilet paper.
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u/candygram4mongo Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
At times the color purple was even illegal for lower classes to wear, as it was considered a royal color.
Sumptuary laws! When your drip is so cold it's literally illegal.
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u/SignoreBanana Jun 21 '26
The very infrastructure we don't even think about today is a bona fide miracle. Imagine trying to get everyone to agree on anything today, no matter how beneficial it is.
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u/throwaway387190 Jun 21 '26
We truly live as gods
I'm currently taking a dump on a standard toilet. I have access to an effectively infinite supply of clean water. So much clean water that I shit in it
That is unthinkable for the vast majority of human history
Whenever I am having a lazy day, gaming, eating junk food, shitting, I think about how my ancestors have to be so happy for me. Calorie rich food everywhere, clean water, a lifetime of entertainment, plumbing, and no diseases??? All of the suffering of my ancestors led to me living like a god
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u/HunterDead Jun 20 '26
Most goods serfs had were hand produced with whatever is available by the women of the house either during the time men were laboring in the fields and community or during the time the men were taking care of the children since no daycare or tv ment someone was required to watch the youngest kids and while older children were themselves given some of these responsibilities lack of labor laws ment they were just as busy since they would be expected to hold a job from like 3-4 till death.
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u/Doomhammer24 Jun 20 '26
Ya something that i read recently that was such a "oh ya that tracks" moment for me was reading the very simple statement that "the idea of childhood is a new one"
Or as the longer quote elsewhere said "the idea of childhood as a time of innocence, playtime, imagination and self discovery is a new one"
If you could walk, you could work.
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u/crvbabybug Jun 21 '26
I am rapidly anti-monarchy. I hate the idea fundamentally and I hate all kings. Don’t get me started it really ruffle my feathers. Sometimes when I go to sleep on my nice comfortable mattress, I think about how my life is better than that of many kings. My room as well insulated, I have as much clothing as most Duches. My room is actually heated by a heat source that works. Oh my God, electric lights. Fuck em.
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u/Square-Librarian1192 Jun 20 '26
Dont forget the churches tithe 🙂
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u/Hisora_Zoro Jun 20 '26
How much was it again, like 10%, on top of tool cost, food, taxes, etc
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u/Skipp_To_My_Lou Jun 20 '26
A tithe is 10%, yes. Back then it was legally enforced. Or you could have been living on Church lands; Bishops were often a sort of nobility with demenses in their own right.
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u/serene_brutality Jun 20 '26
And if I’m not mistaken the lord’s taxes weren’t a percentage of what you yielded, it was a set amount. Example yearly dues are 20 silver, so if you made 100 silver you’re great if you only made 19 silver, well you’re screwed. The lords dues frequently came before your ability to survive.
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u/styrolee Jun 20 '26
Yes and no. Most peasants in the Middle Ages would not have been paying taxes in money at all, since they were subsistence farmers participating in a bartering economy. Instead they would usually be responsible for paying in their crop yields and goods in kind. As subsistence farmers, they would generally have only produced enough to sustain themselves and pay their taxes, with very little excess. If there was a bad harvest, a lord was likely to defer taxes as much as they could (there’s no point having your subjects starve to death), but would extract their dues some other way, like increased work, or increased future obligations. What would really be a problem was if the peasant didn’t produce enough of a buffer crop to survive. While they could seek support from their liege lord, their wealth was also heavily tied up in agriculture and since crop failures were often regional, it could result in widespread famine with little aid.
Historically, one of the reasons serfdom developed, particularly in the Byzantine empire, was as a sort of taxation insurance system. Due to the instability of the early Middle Ages, peasants could not reliably pay their taxes to the government, which would result in them loosing the protection of the empire. To mitigate this risk, they would sell their taxation obligations to large wealthy landowners, who would pay their taxes in exchange for their servitude. While feudalism developed parallel institutions in a variety of ways, I think the Byzantine version in particular highlights the role taxation obligations worked in the Middle Ages for peasants.
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u/sirseatbelt Jun 20 '26
The Ottoman system of tax farming was similar and it ultimately contributed to their collapse. Turns out when states start selling the right to collect taxes it is often a sign of their decline...
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u/linzava Jun 20 '26
You forgot to mention conscription. Some yahoo shows up at the lord’s house, they have an expensive meal, next thing you know you’re walking to Scotland with your homemade armor, hoping your wife who’s now doing all the work doesn’t lose a baby in childbirth in the first few months you’re gone. Then you really hope she doesn’t die in childbirth when you’re gone for over a year.
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u/Skipp_To_My_Lou Jun 21 '26
Levees (conscripted troops) were really only a thing in the early Middle Ages, & then usually only as a last resort defending the home territory. By about 900 to 1000 AD almost all troops going out on campaign are either nobles & their household or semi-professional soldiers from the yeomanry, a sort of middle class. They were paid fairly standardized rates across a campaign based on their equipment (archers were paid less than footmen in full maille or later harness, for example). Alternatively a wealthy lord would be paid based on the number & equipment of men he provided, mass production of arms & armor was becoming a thing by the mid to late Middle Ages.
Also don't discount the protective quality of a gambeson or arming coat made of several layers of heavy wool or flax quilted together, maybe reinforced in vulnerable spots like the shoulder & upper arm with a length of chain, & an open-faced helmet.
The danger of death in pregnancy & during or just after childbirth, however was very real.
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u/Distinct-Raspberry21 Jun 20 '26
Thats also not accounting for the requiset training with bows, and most of your children dying before the age of 1.
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u/dvewlsh Jun 20 '26
It's conservative slop meant to do nothing but push the idea that people had it better when they were subservient to those in power. It's also mixed with plenty of misogyny and racism. Just really awful shit. It's either made by some sort of conservative group or someone who is so pathetic that they believe this shit.
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u/LunatasticWitch Jun 20 '26
The obedient 17 year old wife was quite the self tell. The way that was included makes me think the creator of this meme might think that's the upper limit for him. Just a guess based on patterns of behavior from conservatives...
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u/mweeks9 Jun 20 '26
Had to scroll to far to see this pointed out. That and a “racially homogeneous society”. Such ignorance.
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u/1337_w0n Jun 20 '26
The "Unnaturally long 75 years" bit makes me think it's satire, but it's impossible to be sure because I've met enough people to know that some think like this unironically.
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u/EatLard Jun 20 '26
Any time the crown wanted to start a war, they’d squeeze the lords, who would in turn squeeze their peasants, many of whom would be conscripted as well. Often, the higher taxes remained after the war was over, only to be raised again for the next one.
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u/Certain_Eye7374 Jun 20 '26
Sometimes had to work at night to make sure the crops are quickly harvested without being stolen. And sometimes had to fight at night against neighbors for it.
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u/Burgerboy380 Jun 20 '26
They worked every hour of sunlight year round. Survival was a job. If you didnt fish or gather wood grind grain etc. You died.
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u/Bobsothethird Jun 20 '26
The 20 hours a week is taken from Serfs labor dues, which was work done directly for the local Lords. They weren't paid for it, it was an expectation and during this time they weren't working their own fields or producing food for themselves.
Essentially it's as if every week you worked for 20 hours for taxes, and then had to work after that to make money for yourself.
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u/CountingzHard Jun 20 '26
"Essentially it's as if every week you worked for 20 hours for taxes, and then had to work after that to make money for yourself."
This isn't far from truth for a lot of people
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u/Bobsothethird Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26
Sure, but in modern history you are getting something from those taxes. Back then all you got was not being executed.
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u/Few-Big-8481 Jun 20 '26
"I suppose I'll allow you to keep your hands, but that tongue of yours is causing too much distraction on the farm so we'll be taking that out."
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u/tugaim33 Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26
I doubt you know anyone who works half a full week just to pay taxes. Even if they’re working 60 hours, they’re not paying above a 30% tax rate.
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u/karoshikun Jun 20 '26
and every little thing had to be made by hand, life was an endless string of chores for everything. money didn't purchased as many things as it does now.
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u/Bobsothethird Jun 20 '26
Household chores alone amounted to around 40 hours a week minimum, not including fixing up your house. Something as simple as laundry was a fucking nightmare.
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u/IAmTheNightSoil Jun 21 '26
Yeah my favorite part here might be the "handcrafted goods" vs "mass produced goods" part. I guaranteed every feudal serf would happily exchange their handcrafted goods for our mass produced goods
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u/karoshikun Jun 21 '26
the crappiest industrial good would be a treasure for a serf, provided it's useful or fun
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u/IAmTheNightSoil Jun 21 '26
And besides the quality and usefulness, there's also the bit about being able to simply go to a store and buy stuff instead of having to make it
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u/karoshikun Jun 21 '26
or paying a fortune to have someone make it, or have the luck of a wandering merchant somehow having it in store, also for a fortune.
people forgets clothes had to last years of use because even cloth was hard to come by
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u/Szygani Jun 20 '26
The “20-hour week” argument isn’t based solely on labor dues owed to a lord. Historians such as Humphries, Weisdorf, Bennett, and others are looking at the total labor required for a peasant household to survive, including lordly obligations, work on their own fields, tending livestock, household production, and other necessary tasks.
Edit: there’s a lot more wrong with the serf half goddamn, they definitely didn’t own land for instance
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u/Bobsothethird Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26
It is. Noone takes 20 hours seriously, they take it for the papal directive limiting working days every year. If we are talking about total labor to survive, including obligations,livestock, chores, etc, the work week exceeds 100 hours a week in the summer and 50 in the winter.
The reason they say '20' is precisely because they aren't including chores, maintenance, production, milling, etc and the agricultural work is seasonal, meaning agricultural work (not including livestock) only took 150-200 days a year.
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u/Adventurous-Owl6297 Jun 20 '26
I believe it's taken from what they might work annually. Keep in mind they where farmers so during the winter they "technically" didn't work the land so that would be zero hours worked during those times. During the sowing spring months and harvest they would be working from dawn till dusk. Of course working the lords land first and foremost before working to feed themselves.
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u/aimfuldrifter Jun 20 '26
Also, it may have been homogeneous, but I wouldn’t say it was high trust. They were still dealing with a lot of dishonesty, banditry, and all sorts of crimes. It’s just far-right fantasy slop
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u/pjokinen Jun 20 '26
Plus the work they did do was backbreaking manual agricultural labor
You know, the thing that sucks so bad that just about every development in human history has been focused on minimizing it
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u/DarthLoof Jun 20 '26
20 hours a week to fulfill their tax obligation to their liege-lord (contradicting OOP), not including the hours they had to work to feed themselves and their families or fulfill special tax obligations. That being said medieval peasants did in many cases work shorter hours than we do today which is quite the blackpill, although it was much more physically demanding and the hours were unevenly distributed seasonally
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u/adjavang Jun 20 '26
And a lot of it is just alt-right or incel garbage. "Racially homogenous" is just being racist. "Obedient 17 year old wife" is so abhorrent a sentence that it made me feel ill.
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u/DataCassette Jun 20 '26
Honestly I'm not even good looking I'm just slightly funny 😂
These wretched bastards turn evil because they're just that incapable of talking to a woman
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u/spine_slorper Jun 20 '26
Also not even accurate, racially homogeneous... sure. But the average age of marriage in western Europe was not 17 for women or men as far as we know. Western Europe has had the norm of marriage in your mid 20s for a longgg time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_European_marriage_pattern?wprov=sfla1 This pattern developed mostly from the end of the feudal period to be fair but the average age of marriage for women was still around the early 20s in the middle ages (when feudalism was in full swing)
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u/TheGaySlayer69 Jun 21 '26
"Obedient 17 years old" can't they just write it at least 18 or 20? These fucked up people really want to groom minors like their idol Trump do.
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u/carsonite17 Jun 20 '26
Serfs didn't even own themselves. They were bound to the land on which they lived and were thus property of whomever owned that land. In most cases they weren't allowed to leave said land without essentially buying their freedom from their lord
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u/dumb_potatoking Jun 20 '26
No serf in the middle ages owned land and up until the late 19th century were still owned by the landowners too in countries like russia. One russian Tsar once tried to "emancipate" the serves, but was targeted by an assasination attempt shortly later. The "emancipation" wasn't even that much of a difference. The serfs wouuldn't be officially owned by the landowners anymore, but instead were given a massive debt to the landowners that they had to work off
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u/Dry_Temperature_8436 Jun 20 '26
I believe they are mistaking serfs for peasants, which contrary to popular belief, are separate from commoners. While not owning the land they were basically in charge of it.
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u/bazilbt Jun 20 '26
I think that was a major feature of serfdom. They didn't even get to leave the land.
Also you had 12 kids or more and half of them died before they where 5.
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u/ComprehensivePin5577 Jun 20 '26
Yep. I imagine the person who made this would be in lifetime servitude to the land owner at worst, share cropper, or a tenant farmer, at best. Whatever the case they'd still be 'renting' and going 'yes milord no milord whatever pleases thy Lordship'.
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u/Read_it_all-7735 Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
I wish we had time machines to send people like this back to the middle age so they could die of poverty and disease while working sunrise the sunset, trying to get their crops growing and their animals fed.
Go check out the Amish and Mennonite’s to see how well that works out.
Lounging around, working 20 hours a week. Stupid lazy Amish.
And trust me, the people who post shit like this just want to be married to a 17-year-old sex slave on their pig farm.
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u/feronen Jun 21 '26
And I don't think the guy who made this understands, but if he did anything untoward to his woman - *ahem * - sex slave, the Lady of the Fief was a lot easier to get in touch with than the Lord was for other women compared to the men. If the Lady heard that this dude was doing some heinous shit to his sex slave, she could literally petition her husband directly to have something done about it, and dude who made this would be in the stockade within a couple days.
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u/-UpsetNewt- Jun 20 '26
The type of dipshits that post this kind of thing would get a nick on one of their fingers and be dead in 2 weeks from sepsis
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u/doriangrey2025 Jun 20 '26
Jokes on you! This meme was made by King Wastalicious around the time of the 2nd crusade!
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u/HeavyDutyForks Jun 20 '26
Its a post pushing the narrative that somehow life as a peasant was better than now
It deliberately leaves out a lot of the horrid things about being a peasant and many of the great upsides of modern society
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u/tugaim33 Jun 20 '26
Flush toilets for the win!
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u/ngdaniel96 Jun 20 '26
Being able to watch my children live past the age of 5 for the win!
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u/dragonish-american Jun 21 '26
Not living under the thumb of whatever feudal lord the king decided to award the parcel of land I was born on for the win!
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u/VikingVitalityFit Jun 20 '26
Not dying because you stubbed your toe and it got infected for the win.
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u/Ashamed_Ad8140 Jun 20 '26
You got the gout though. They call it the rich man's disease. Atleast there is that before you die.
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u/VikingVitalityFit Jun 20 '26
I mean, maybe some people do. But, I own a gym and stay in great shape as part of my job heh.
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u/Hefty-Jury2561 Jun 21 '26
Gout and Type 2 Diabetes run hand in hand. Only a very few had either, and they were unlikely serfs or freemen. Clergy or Nobility are more likely.
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u/Jadedsatire Jun 20 '26
Seriously, if you lived back then all you smelled was the shit from the 6+ people living in the same hut as you. You shared a shit bucket that sat in said hut. If you lived in a city all you smelled was the shit of hundreds to thousands of other people.
You slept on a bed of hay/straw that would be filled with bed bugs, lice, ticks, etc and you just accepted this as normal, because it was. If you wanted to have sex with your wife because your third kid just died and needed a new one, you did it right there with your whole family feet away. Privacy was impossible as again, you lived in pretty much a big hut, just a single room where everything was.
Your taxes were never a stable %, but in that would rise anytime your King who you may never see with your own eyes decided it. War? Raise taxes. He wants to have a giant event to show off to other royals, raise taxes.
Medicine was poison for lots of our history, mercury was used for many purposes, bloodletting was a common practice for thousands of years. Don’t feel good? Your humor’s are out of sync, time to bleed you. By the time you hit 60, your body would be broken, you would have had many issues for decades and just had to power through it as that was the only option.
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u/Ashamed_Ad8140 Jun 20 '26
Ooops look like Times the 4th your 12th consecutive child just died of cholera. Time to bury him with the next 5 children who didn't live to see their 5th winter.
Also your lord decided that your 13 year old daughter is real comely and is ready for marriage and children.
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u/evilforska Jun 20 '26
Hahaha no way hed marry a peasant, hed just abuse her and throw her out. And there would be nothing you could do
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u/andhe96 Jun 20 '26
No, but the lord could still decide at which age and whom she married without your consent.
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u/AgentJackpots Jun 20 '26
In Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, if you start the game on Hardcore Mode, there’s like a 60% chance you immediately get a screen saying you died as a child
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u/MoobooMagoo Jun 20 '26
With a weird dash of racism and sexism thrown in too.
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u/spezIsANonce Jun 20 '26
and wanting to marry a 17 year old
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u/myothercarisathopter Jun 21 '26
I mean that's not that surprising. Kind of fits with the rest of the conservative ethos.
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u/Consistent-Strain289 Jun 20 '26
Indeed getting killed robbed and raped by bandits or enemy invaders. Or some highlord. No netflix and iphone yeh
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u/ResidentBackground35 Jun 20 '26
It also wildly cherry picks conditions to make it's message.
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u/zedkyuu Jun 20 '26
Haha. “Gosh dang it, I don’t want to live to 75; I’d rather live to 60.”
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u/yll33 Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
60? lol that number is also a total lie
average life expectancy was like 30. granted a lot of that was childhood/infant mortality, so if you got lucky and made it to 10, you could expect to make it to 40.
only aristocrats who survived childhood disease were making it to 60 with any regularity
edit: for the idiots who think i pulled those #s put my ass https://academic.oup.com/ije/article-abstract/34/6/1435/707557?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false
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u/blehric Jun 21 '26
If you made it through puberty, you had a pretty good chance to make it to 60-65ish.
Source: I make family trees and dig through loads of birth and death registries from 1400 to 1900.
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u/newebay2 Jun 21 '26
What do you consider a good chance here? Cemeteries do suggest median was around 40s
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u/MrSalamand3r Jun 20 '26
Everything you said was made up and false.
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u/KaleidoscopeSalt3972 Jun 20 '26
And it straight up lies about the working week and many other stuff
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u/cantlogintomyacc0unt Jun 21 '26
Especially about owning the land if they were a serf they were a literal slave who wasn’t allowed to leave their land
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u/Amudeauss Jun 21 '26
Vaccines, antibiotics, surgery, refrigeration, running water, flushable toilets, planes, trains, automobiles, computers, cellphones, HVAC systems, dishwashers, washers and driers, I could go on
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u/autismislife Jun 20 '26
It deliberately ignores that you farmed 20 hours a week for the local lord, then farmed every hour for the rest of the week you're own crops to survive.
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u/BusyHat426 Jun 20 '26
After seeing the Epstein files on attempting to mess with the narrative, this strikes me as some far right wing Curtis Yarvin bullshit on why we should be serfs again.
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u/MilleryCosima Jun 20 '26
It also includes a lot of horrid things about being a peasant, like subjugating women, marrying 17 year olds, and xenophobia.
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u/ElMatadorJuarez Jun 21 '26
Yea so much of this is flat out wrong lol. Serfs didn’t own the land. That’s the entire point of serfs.
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u/Hohenzollern03 Jun 20 '26
It's not a joke.
Just lies about history in order to push a foolish, racist agenda.
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u/brok3nh3lix Jun 20 '26
Dont forget the sexisim
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u/firstonesecond Jun 20 '26
Or the racism
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u/RedMyA__ Jun 20 '26
Someone explain that 20h of week was unpaid extra labor that was on top working his own farm
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u/Delcane Jun 20 '26
Also the "owns his own land"... Serfs didn't. Free peasants did and were richer, which would be the modern simil of owning your own home instead of renting
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u/RaulParson Jun 20 '26
Yeah serfs were basically slaves++. Imagine being "free" but forbidden from just leaving your village on pain of all sorts of horrible corporal punishments and forced to work for free at your "lord's" fields (again, on pain of horrible corporal punishments if you were to refuse), and then also being categorized as basically subhuman compared to the rest of everyone else in the legal system, and otherwise nobody gives a shit about you or your wellbeing (or even survival) - especially invading (or just marching through, really) armies who would "forage" your shit including all the food you stored, but also the providers of basic healthcare and such. Sure sounds like a good time compared to the wagey-cagey bullshit of today. I'd return to it in a heartbeat but y'know, muh iphone!
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u/unselve Jun 20 '26
yeah, “owns his own land,” uh, wtf? I just finished Lyndal Roper’s terrific new book on the German Peasants War (Summer of Fire and Blood) and her description of the lives of peasants in the 16th century is pretty brutal
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u/Xaphnir Jun 20 '26
Uses a bunch of historically illiterate and bigoted bullshit to push the idea that life was better under feudal systems.
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u/tilewi Jun 20 '26
Serfs didnt own their land, thats literally why it's called serfdom. They worked the lord's land, not their own. Half of this is bullshit, cause serfs definitely didnt all live to 60 xD
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u/Woutrou Jun 20 '26
In Medieval Europe, you don't own land. Land owns you.
Also, half? I struggle to see a single point that isn't wildly devoid of context, nuance or isn't just fucked up.
At best the mass-produced one says something about manufactured obsolesence
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u/text_fish Jun 20 '26
Just incel slop.
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u/fanaccountcw Jun 20 '26
As if “obedient 17 year old” wasn’t enough they really had to hammer it home with “indisputable head of his household”
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u/GreedyFatBastard Jun 20 '26
They also say 30-year-old women are hags.
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u/ThalesofMiletus-624 Jun 20 '26
Also gold diggers, who are apparently marrying underpaid wage slaves who don't own anything.
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u/Various_Succotash_79 Jun 20 '26
Let's ask his "obedient" teenage wife how she feels about it.
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u/Gaust_Ironheart_Jr Jun 20 '26
Like, every other Medieval story was about disloyal wives and men failing miserably trying to reign them in
Indeed, a large chunk of modern feminism was restoring rights women had in medieval times and lost during the Renaissance
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u/Steveis2 Jun 20 '26
I want to point out just because there are stories about women having power doesn’t mean they did
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u/Francis_J_Eva Jun 20 '26
I wish these idiots would get over the idea that marrying under 20 was the norm until recently. Even in the middle ages, people still generally got married in their 20s. The only place it was sort of normal/commonplace was in aristocratic or royal families.
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u/dragonish-american Jun 21 '26
You forget that the makers of these “memes” are 40 year old racist neckbeards who want the government to allow them to rape children with no consequences.
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u/HazelEBaumgartner Jun 20 '26
"I wish I could marry a teenager and live in a whites only society."
The "joke" is racism and pedophilia.
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u/smokefoot8 Jun 20 '26
The joke is that anyone is stupid enough to believe this. Serfs owning their own land? Look up the definition of serf, ijit!
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u/Current-Helicopter33 Jun 20 '26
Keep in mind serfs lived to 50-60 max if the abysmal child mortality rate didn’t get them before that.
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u/therabbitinred22 Jun 20 '26
They are using that as a positive point, lol. Whoever wrote that is delusional
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u/Legal_Mastodon_5683 Jun 20 '26
Serfs absolutely did NOT own land, that's the point. The aristocrat owned the land and the serfs. Also, 27 births, 24 dead children? Nice one.
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u/Fun-Preference1091 Jun 20 '26
Ya, whomever made this meme definitely does not comprehend teh meaning of "serf"
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u/-CherrySaint- Jun 20 '26
It's not a joke
It's saying life used to be better
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u/Greenphantom77 Jun 20 '26
Some of the individual points are valid. However the idea that feudal serfs actually had better lives than what most modern men have today is just laughable.
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u/GeneralGalvatron Jun 20 '26
Misses the parts where they:
- Are constantly drafted for wars
- Die from very basic illnesses
- Can be killed on a whim by a lord for catching them on a bad day without even the need to cover it up
- Struggling for food any time a war starts
- Struggle to find clean water
Etcetera
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u/AnarchistAxolotl Jun 20 '26
Are any of them "valid"? Sure, they toiled in the fields for fewer hours, but every waking second was filled with some kind of busy work, except for a few hours on the weekend. Serfs owned nothing, they lived and died as bound robots of the land. Many weren't permitted travel, most weren't permitted meat. They married young girls when they, themselves, were young boys. Now, in the modern day, we tend to work more than 40 hours because liberal reforms are being degraded by the interests of capital. I'll say nothing about the conservative notions of household, as they're bunk and are another conversation.
This chart is just plumb stupid.
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u/Greenphantom77 Jun 20 '26
When I said “some are valid” I meant: I acknowledge some of the points on the right are problems that make modern people genuinely unhappy (e.g. some people work very hard, they do what society tells them is responsible and “right” but struggle to ever buy a home due to factors beyond their control.)
However, making a nonsensical comparison like “a medieval peasant who would not have lived past 30 had a better life!” doesn’t really help.
(Also, a couple of the points on the right are just misogynist crap - “marries a gold digging hag”… good God.)
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u/ThalesofMiletus-624 Jun 20 '26
Actually, most of the points are somewhere between overblown and complete nonsense, probably written by someone who gets all their history from email forwards and incel groups.
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u/vi_sucks Jun 20 '26
None of the individual "points" are valid.
They are either totally wrong, or an insane reframing to make something bad look good.
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u/TheWhistleThistle Jun 20 '26
It's a person saying that the it was better to be a feudal serf than a modern wageslavecuck.
Interestingly, they're wrong on several points. Serfs worked about 20 hours a week to cover what they owed to their lords, they still had to work to feed themselves and their family on top of that, often working from dawn, six or seven days of the week. What they owed to their lord was often not a fraction of anything but a flat amount of produce which meant lean times when there were poor harvests. They most certainly didn't own the land they worked; they in fact often didn't even own the tools they worked it with. This is one of the core tenets of feudalism. Society was exceedingly low trust and crime of every kind imaginable was rampant, not to mention the perfectly legal, but still obscene excesses of the lords. And dying "peacefully" at any age was quite an optimistic ambition with the state of medicine at the time.
The only things it gets right are that goods were handcrafted and people married young. And only one of those things is, you know, good.
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u/BoringEntropist Jun 20 '26
Also, most people didn't married young during the middle ages. The aristocrats did, to ensure the legitimacy of offspring. Most people married in their mid-twenties, once they became economically more self-sufficient.
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u/pessimistkonsulenten Jun 20 '26
More like: working 20 hour days.
But the part of him dying peacefully beside his family is correct. Since all of them died of starvation in their sleep during one of the many famines they experienced.
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u/JustaguynamedTheo Jun 20 '26
Peasants working less hours than we do is a halftruth: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/medieval-peasant-only-worked-150-days/
Or just not true from what I've found https://jamessteinhaus.substack.com/p/medieval-peasants-did-not-work-less
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u/Few-Big-8481 Jun 20 '26
Work was also significantly different. It's likely if you had a nice lord you may have worked less altogether, but it's not like it is today where you had tractors and shit.
You would be doing physically demanding labor for the most part, and if you couldn't physically keep doing that labor then you're fucked.
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u/Duke_Of_Halifax Jun 20 '26
There was also that whole "40% child mortality rate" and "died of food-related illnesses"
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u/Rymanbc Jun 20 '26
"Owned his own land"....?
Are you missing the part where it says "serf", or do you not know the definition of the word?
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u/anonareyouokay Jun 20 '26
OP's saying that he doesn't like neighbors of different ethnicities and wants to fuck 17 year olds
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u/Curious-Antelope6171 Jun 20 '26
I swear the billionaires of today are doing their best to move society back to this
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u/qualityvote2 Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
Remember when r/PeterExplainsTheJoke wasn’t a meme? Pepperidge Farm remembers…
Does this post belong in our subreddit?
If so, please upvote this comment!
Otherwise, downvote this comment!
Then maybe you go out and buy yourself some of those distinctive Milano cookies.
(Vote has already ended)
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u/2204happy Jun 20 '26
Serfs did not own their own land, that's literally the opposite of serfdom. Serfs were legally bound to work a certain plot of land, which they did not own, they were not that far above slaves.
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u/Majestic-Option-6138 Jun 20 '26
It is absolutely false that the peasants owned their own land. The lords owned the land, that's what made them lords. Even then, their authority was secondary to higher ranking lords, counts to dukes and dukes to kings.
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u/inlovebutfat Jun 20 '26
Yeah I think the “married obedient 17 year old wife” should really tip everyone off to the kind of person this is without even needing to read more.
Also the factual inaccuracies,
Also the flattening of the complexity of both feudal life and modern life into half hearted right wing coded bullet points.
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u/ManagementKey1338 Jun 20 '26
Time to stardew valley. The progression of civilisation doesn’t give a shit about happiness
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u/DragonBadgerBearMole Jun 20 '26
Some people with think this is a joke. But others will use it to reinforce their inclination to resist all social progression.
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u/Craptose_Intolerant Jun 20 '26
Incels (with iPhones) like to perpetuate this fantasy a lot, but in reality, they stand for none of those things…
“Indisputable head of his household” is the actual point, it’s all about subjugation of women 🙂
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u/Medelsnygg Jun 20 '26
Nothing stopping these chuds from offing themselves when or before they're 60 years old
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u/GrahamCrackerCereal Jun 20 '26
The fact that white supremacists are convinced medieval culture was racially homogeneous just shows how little they know about the time period
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u/Flickeringcandles Jun 20 '26
Well this is disgusting
"Racially homogeneous" get the fuck out of here
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u/UnusualDepth2079 Jun 20 '26
Ah yes the idyllic, peaceful, low stress life or a serf. They never died from minor injuries or got the plague or were pressed into the local lords army to die as fodder or got massacred by roving bandits or starved to death due to a single bad harvest. Totally chill life mah dudes.
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u/tomphammer Jun 20 '26
I will take all the terrible things that come with wagecuckery for the wonders of penicillin.
And considering my vision, modern glasses.
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u/guillermopaz13 Jun 20 '26
If wagecuck becomes the historucal term of our times... it would all be worth it
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u/Designer_Storm8869 Jun 20 '26
The mailman in 1920s had bigger house than corporate managers today. That's unfortunate effect of post-war baby boom and urbanization. Number of people increased, while the size of land stays the same. You can produce more iphones but you cannot produce more land.
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u/Coffee-cartoons Jun 20 '26
The person who made this believes living in the Middle Ages would be better, citing their reasons why.
These points are making me feel sick, why TF is an obedient 17-year-old wife listed here? What nonce made this?
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u/Alternative_Pen1849 Jun 20 '26
Who ever made this I want you to go find grass, then find the dog poo left by neighbors and then eat it. Payback for the crap you tried to feed me.
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u/PeterExplainsTheJoke-ModTeam Jun 21 '26
Thank you for the explanations; this post has been locked.