Edmund Blackadder was never a peasant in any incarnation of the show, and only the first series took place in what was arguably the medieval period anyway.
The medieval period was called the dark ages largely because of our ignorance of it. The Medieval spans about 1,000 years. There were plagues which made labor immensely more valuable, & wars that lasted generations. Any blanket statement about it is bound to be somewhere between false and meaningless. Including this one.
I get you are probably being purposefully derisive to make a point by saying the name of the dark ages is because of our ignorance, but that's also just not correct. The general consensus of historians is that Europe suffered from widespread material simplification during the early middle ages, compared to classical antiquity. The name was coined by earlier historians, generally less concerned about mixing moral judgements with scholarship, that viewed the period as less enlightened than those surrounding it.
Western Europe did not recover the same level of civilizational development that it had under the Roman Empire until hundreds of years later, maybe 1000. That is a fact. The Napoleonic code of laws promulgated in 1804 was based on Roman law of the sixth century because they didn’t have anything better. The Roman Empire was synonymous with civilization in Western Europe for centuries — people were publishing scientific books in Latin in 1900 (!)
“Dark ages” is an oversimplification, but it contains a quite large grain of truth.
Enjoyable read. People as a whole aren’t typically nostalgic for the Middle Ages specifically, but because of what they feel like they are losing because of modernity - culture, civic pride, sense of belonging, time, and place, and a sense of purpose.
Yeah if anything I'd say people imagine things to be worse than they were. At least in the American education system, there's Rome, then 1000 years of plagues and misery, then the Renaissance. I was shocked the first time I went to a preserved middle ages village in Europe, and it was a moment of realization that the middle ages weren't just dead people carted around on wheelbarrows.
> Our ancestors of the distant past can be invoked in conversations about nearly anything: They supposedly worked less, relaxed more, slept better, had better sex, and enjoyed better diets, among other things.
That’s just an artifact of modern life. Pool enough money between family and friends and you can buy yourself a cheap plot of land in the middle of nowhere and wild out on your own agrarian commune
This keeps coming up in the context of India as well. The Urban centers are so people dense you yearn to escape this life and live somewhere you can enjoy Mountain perspectives, lakes and tall trees. But here is the catch, I go motorcycling often. While you do feel nice riding out in the Sun, see stunning things. You begin to realise why it might not work.
There are no schools, hospitals, shopping centers or everything that makes modern life possible. Plus there is the additional fatigue of getting bored of the same things. Honestly how long are you going to enjoy the Mountain view?
I do have relatives who live in far villages and have not travelled and seen the world(In fact not travelled more than 100 km radius from place of birth), they also know very little of the world, except for latest insta reels and whatsapp forwards. To be frank they do seem more happy. They might not be rich, but there is a slow and peaceful cadence to their lives which honestly feels attractive.
No, that won't work. The dynamics have changed completely: although your agrarian commune has a ton of advantages compared to a farm 200 years ago, neither you or them could get by without their outer societies. The farm 200 years ago would have been unlikely to make its own critical tools, for instance, and certainly not, say, extracted the iron for those tools. And the economy between the farm/agrarian commune and wider society has changed dramatically. The agrarian commune has far less to offer its surrounding society. It will have to get by on charity and endowments (both ultimately based on outer society work).
>> The internet has become strangely nostalgic for life in the Middle Ages.
There’s a flood of AI-generated slop around this nostalgic content and many of them are generated as documentaries but with ridiculous claims, fictitious characters, and timelines that never happened. It’s the enshittification of YouTube and the new rickroll.
Apropos, from a book I read long ago and have forgotten, except for this passage:
"Prior to the twentieth century, when life spans were shorter, a shepherd might have known hundreds of songs, poems, and stories and several languages, how to play several musical instruments, tan leather, make butter, dry and preserve meat, build a shelter, and prepare the dead for burial."
Why middle ages? Most people born in villages of many countries during 50's or 60's would not have seen electricity, running water, toilets, roads, radios, candy, plastic toys, shoes etc until decades later.
Just like how the writings from ancient times were mostly about royal and religious figures, historians of modern times mostly looked at the history of the western world, Europe specifically.
By projecting what I saw in the remote parts of India in the 70's, I can say the following about peasants of old times:
* they didn't care about recording their lives or their appearances in any form except as folklores that were passed on through generations. The lores were sung by a special class of society telling children of higher classes, about their ancestors.
* they didn't care about having distinct names for family members
* they didn't like being portrayed (as in photographed)
* they didn't like outsiders
* they don't record their birthdays
* they didn't try to avoid risk and demography stayed young, with about 10 children per woman.
* if there is any pandemic or famine, they deserted villages and moved to new places
* there is no money involved in transactions. Grain, jewels, land, water, bride and livestock were the stores of value
Medieval life lacked precision measurement: no clocks, no KPIs, no micro-evaluation. Much of modern stress isn't workload but being quantified. That shift from 'work until the task is done' to 'work until the metric is satisfied' changes everything.
18 comments
[ 417 ms ] story [ 491 ms ] thread“Dark ages” is an oversimplification, but it contains a quite large grain of truth.
That’s just an artifact of modern life. Pool enough money between family and friends and you can buy yourself a cheap plot of land in the middle of nowhere and wild out on your own agrarian commune
There are no schools, hospitals, shopping centers or everything that makes modern life possible. Plus there is the additional fatigue of getting bored of the same things. Honestly how long are you going to enjoy the Mountain view?
I do have relatives who live in far villages and have not travelled and seen the world(In fact not travelled more than 100 km radius from place of birth), they also know very little of the world, except for latest insta reels and whatsapp forwards. To be frank they do seem more happy. They might not be rich, but there is a slow and peaceful cadence to their lives which honestly feels attractive.
Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part V: Life In Cycles – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry https://acoup.blog/2025/10/17/collections-life-work-death-an...?
Five parts. This, the last gives a sense of what life was like.
I guess most people imagining those days think they'd be amongst the rich nobility, not in the peasant class.
There'd be few today that would want to go back to life at that time.
There’s a flood of AI-generated slop around this nostalgic content and many of them are generated as documentaries but with ridiculous claims, fictitious characters, and timelines that never happened. It’s the enshittification of YouTube and the new rickroll.
"Prior to the twentieth century, when life spans were shorter, a shepherd might have known hundreds of songs, poems, and stories and several languages, how to play several musical instruments, tan leather, make butter, dry and preserve meat, build a shelter, and prepare the dead for burial."
There is so much potential in all of us!
Why middle ages? Most people born in villages of many countries during 50's or 60's would not have seen electricity, running water, toilets, roads, radios, candy, plastic toys, shoes etc until decades later.
Just like how the writings from ancient times were mostly about royal and religious figures, historians of modern times mostly looked at the history of the western world, Europe specifically.
By projecting what I saw in the remote parts of India in the 70's, I can say the following about peasants of old times:
* they didn't care about recording their lives or their appearances in any form except as folklores that were passed on through generations. The lores were sung by a special class of society telling children of higher classes, about their ancestors.
* they didn't care about having distinct names for family members
* they didn't like being portrayed (as in photographed)
* they didn't like outsiders
* they don't record their birthdays
* they didn't try to avoid risk and demography stayed young, with about 10 children per woman.
* if there is any pandemic or famine, they deserted villages and moved to new places
* there is no money involved in transactions. Grain, jewels, land, water, bride and livestock were the stores of value