If you believe what Hollywood tells you, then life during the Middle Ages might seem romantic
and glamorous - chock-full of noble knights on noble steeds, beautiful ladies with pointy
hats, chivalry, honor, and, if you're lucky, a dragon or two.
Sadly, the truth is that life in the Middle Ages was about as grim as it gets, and death
lurked around pretty much every corner.
Here's why you'd never stand a chance.
Grief is awful no matter what form it takes, but the passing of a child can be an unspeakably
tragic turn of events.
Luckily, we in the west are far less likely to experience this.
In America, infant mortality is only around .006 percent, and that rate drops once kids
leave infancy.
Mortality for children between the ages of 1 and 4 is around .0002 percent, and for kids
aged 5 to 14 it's around .0001 percent.
Now compare that to childhood mortality in the Middle Ages.
According to Representing Childhood, exact figures are impossible to come by, but estimates
place the medieval infant mortality at around 25%.
That means one out of every four babies born during that time period wouldn't make it past
their first year of life.
The odds went up a bit for children who made it to toddlerhood - kids between the ages
of 1 and 4 had a mortality rate of around 12.5%.
If they made it to 5 then things looked better, as the mortality rate for kids between the
ages of 5 and 9 was only about 6%.
Still, that was still far worse than even the highest mortality rate for infants in
modern America.
The sad truth is that being born in the Middle Ages didn't guarantee you a life - not by
a long shot.
Luckily for us, bubonic plague isn't such a problem nowadays.
It does still exist - in fact, 20,000 people came down with it between 2000 and 2009, including
56 in the United States - but it certainly doesn't exist on the scale that it did in
the Middle Ages.
In fact, were you to travel back in time to 1340s Europe, when the outbreak known as the
Black Death was ongoing, your chances of survival would be somewhere between 7 in 10 and 2 in
5.
"I'm not dead!”
“What?”
“Nothing, here’s your nine pence.”
“I'm not dead!”
“He says he’s not dead.”
“Yes, he is.”
“I’m not!”
Estimates suggest that the Black Death killed as much as 60% of the entire population of
Europe - meaning that three out of every five people you met were going to be dead by the
end of the pandemic, which peaked over the course of just four years.
But the craziest part of all this is what happened after the outbreak died down.
Since around half the known world had died off, the balance of power in Europe underwent
a radical shift.
Suddenly, peasants could ask for pay rises and demand improvements in working conditions
- and, in many ways, life actually got better for them.
And all it took was the deaths of hundreds of millions of people.
Everyone in medieval Europe was a good Catholic, except for those who weren't - and they either
had to make pretend or die for their beliefs.
And that's because the religious freedoms enjoyed today were most definitely not a thing.
During the 11th and 12th centuries, for example, people started thinking critically about the
Catholic Church, and one of the things that some of those people disliked most about the
Church was its vast wealth and power.
Unfortunately, these were dangerous times — and the Church was so wealthy and powerful
that it could snuff out pretty much anyone who criticized it.
In the name of God, obviously.
No one is really sure how many people were burned during that time period, but what is
known is that it was sometimes done in groups of 200 or more.
And this didn't end for a long time, either - Queen Mary of England burned 300 Protestants
over the course of the 1550s.
Women had it especially hard during the Middle Ages.
They were generally regarded as morally weak, and weren't allowed to do things that modern
women take for granted - such as getting a job, deciding who to marry, or generally having
opinions about things.
There were some powerful women, granted, but they were pretty uncommon.
The worst part about being a woman, though, was that you were expected to procreate or
else become a nun.
And you wouldn't have been too mad to have taken that second option, considering the
intense dangers of childbirth, which would kill like one out of every three women.
In comparison, today's maternal mortality rate is one out of every 5,814.
In fact, childbirth in the Middle Ages and the Tudor period was so dangerous that women
were encouraged to write out a last will and testament well in advance of giving birth
- which kinda puts a damper on the whole thing.
Popular culture based around the medieval period tends to focus around the higher echelons
of society - kings, queens, nobles and other aristocrats, for example.
But those people only made up a small fraction of society.
Peasants, on the other hand, comprised around 90% of the population - meaning the chances
were good you'd be slinging mud with the rest of them.
"Bloody peasant!”
“Oh, what a giveaway!
Did you hear that, did you hear that, eh?”
The problem with becoming a peasant, unfortunately, is that the life of a peasant pretty much
sucked.
Peasants wore the same rough, itchy wool outfit every day, ate bread, porridge, and vegetables,
and if they were lucky got a little bit of meat every now and again.
On top of that, whenever the weather sucked, they died.
Peasants would starve when the weather was too wet and they would starve when the weather
was too dry - because when the crops failed, so did they.
The average life expectancy for a peasant in medieval Europe was between 25 and 30 years
old.
If you wanted to travel in the Middle Ages, the local monastery usually offered a clean,
safe place to sleep, but what if there was no local monastery?
Well, in that case, you might be able to stop at an inn.
Conditions in most inns weren't exactly perfect, but they were usually a safe enough place
to spend the night.
Depending on where you were going, however, you weren't always going to have the option
of staying in an inn.
And that might mean sleeping out in the open, which was a really, really terrible idea.
There were always unsavoury characters lurking on the roads after dark, and wild animals
were a serious problem, too.
People embarking on pilgrimages during the Middle Ages often traveled in groups for safety,
and wealthy people would sometimes just pay someone to go on pilgrimage for them.
That may seem kinda like it defeats the point, sure, but it's gotta be better than risking
it out on the road.
Many of history's wars have been fought for pretty silly reasons, and the Middle Ages
were no different.
Many of them, of course, were fought to decide which aristocrat or royal was going to end
up sitting on the throne.
But even though these were faraway disputes contested between people you'd probably never
even seen before, you'd still be the one dying for them.
It wasn't all bad, though.
In many cases, if you weren't killed within the first 40 days, you could go back home
to your family.
That's because it was bad business to draft all the peasants into service at the same
time.
With no one around to take care of the farms, the kingdom would lose money - and then it
wouldn't be able to afford the war in the first place.
Noblemen died in war, too, of course - before 1550, roughly 30% of them could expect to
perish in some battle or another.
But as for the peasants, well, no one really knows, because peasant deaths were considered
so inconsequential that no one ever actually counted them.
It didn't help that defeat in battle often meant the systematic slaughter of the losing
side, which would have been mostly made up of commoners.
Not a good time to be a peasant or a soldier, that's for sure, and most of the time, being
one meant being the other.
In the U.K. today, there are no capital crimes at all, because they abolished the death penalty
back in 1965.
But long before that, medieval England was really big on executing people.
During the Middle Ages, there were 50 capital crimes on the books, which included not just
treason and various forms of murder but lesser things like poaching, robbery, and forgery.
Weirdly, however, this is one of those rare instances where you'd actually be better off
in the Middle Ages than you would be a little later on in history.
Sure, there are no capital crimes in the U.K. today, but by the 1600s the number of crimes
you could be officially executed for rose to around 200, and included things like petty
theft, "damaging Westminster bridge," and cutting down a sapling.
Although, it's worth pointing out that the so-called "Bloody Code" of that time period
actually resulted in fewer executions, probably because juries were reluctant to sentence
people to death for such minor offenses.
Still - you wouldn't want to risk it, would you?
Most medieval people may have been illiterate, but that doesn't mean they were stupid.
Everything you've heard about how people in the Middle Ages covered the taste of rotten
meat with heavy spices isn't actually true - spices were expensive, and anyone who could
afford them could also afford to throw out any meat that had gone bad.
In fact, for the most part, people knew how to preserve food.
They salted, smoked, dried, and pickled it - and there doesn't seem to have ever been
a rash of people dying because they were eating bad meat.
There were other dangers lurking in the food, though.
If you were rich, you probably owned a nice set of fancy glazed dishes, which were full
of lead and other heavy metals like mercury.
But when you filled your plates and bowls up with salty or acidic foods, the glaze would
start to break down and those metals would leach into your food.
So members of the upper class were slowly poisoning themselves as they dined on their
luxury dishware.
"Huh."
Meanwhile, bakers sometimes made bread from rye infected with a fungus called Claviceps
purpurea, and that could cause an outbreak of an illness that modern medicine knows as
ergotism.
The infection caused hallucinations, convulsions, a burning sensation in the limbs, and sometimes
even blackened body parts that would eventually just fall off.
Every meal was a gamble.
Getting sick during the Middle Ages was even more of a nightmare than it is today.
There were no antibiotics, no chemotherapy, and physicians didn't wash their hands in
between patients.
The things doctors did know were mostly wrong and almost always totally useless from a medical
perspective.
A sick person could be diagnosed with the help of an astrological chart, for example,
and treatment might include bloodletting, purging, or trepanning, which was the practice
of drilling a hole in the skull to relieve pressure in the brain.
Unsurprisingly, these treatments not only rarely worked but sometimes even hastened
a patient's death.
Still, the practice of bloodletting persisted for a long time.
In fact, there's still debate on whether George Washington was killed by strep throat or by
the aggressive bloodletting doctors used to treat the condition.
If you somehow managed to escape all those other dangers, you'd still be left with one
very harsh truth: the medieval period was very, very violent.
In fact, according to History Extra, murder in medieval England was around 10 times more
common than it is today.
And there's a reason the men had it so much worse than the women.
Life expectancy for women in the Middle Ages was actually considerably better than it was
for men, despite the fact that they frequently ran the risk of dying in childbirth.
On average, a woman could expect to live about 9.4 years longer than her male counterparts,
and that was mostly because of the constant violence that existed between men.
Roughly 46% of all deaths in men ages 15 and above were caused by violence, so a man living
in medieval England had a roughly 1 in 2 chance of meeting a bloody end.
All in all, those really aren't great odds.
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