A Day in the Life of a Medieval PeasantJoin now to read essay A Day in the Life of a Medieval PeasantHistory has never halted for want of peasants. But crucial as they may have been to Europes agricultural well-being, they werent exactly well loved by nobility. Barbara Tuchman, in A Distant Mirror: the Calamitous Fourteenth Century, tells us they were considered
aggressive, insolent, greedy, sullen, suspicious, tricky, unshaved, unwashed, ugly, stupid and credulous in satiric tales it was said the [peasants] soul would find no place in Paradise or anywhere else because the demons refused to carry [him] due to the foul smell.
Unfortunately for our intrepid subsistence workers, literature of the time is similarly uncharitable. A contemporary author laments… by what right does a [peasant] eat beef? …Rather let them eat thistles and briars, thorns and straw and hay on Sunday and peapods on weekdays… they should chew grass on the heath with the horned cattle and go naked on all fours.
The Sacking of Grammont, from the ChroniclesNot a pleasing prospect, but we do note that the peasant actually got his hands on some meat now and again. Tuchman reports he “also had access to eggs, salt fish, cheese, lard, peas, beans, shallots, onions, garlic… etc,” which doesnt sound all that bad. What did the fourteenth century peasant do to deserve such a bad reputation? While obviously illiterate [the peasant, not us], we will attempt to bring his daily experiences to life by producing a fictional account of his day: a peasants diary, if you will. For historical context, editorial comments will appear in brackets. Weve also taken the liberty of cramming about thirty years together, so today could be anywhere from 1327 to 1358. Trust us, most peasants wouldnt get this much excitement in a decade.
Practicality: How do I run a social-scientific study?
While it seems like simple science-fiction, it is actually a much more detailed study of “social science” than any traditional social-scientific book may provide, with much more detail and information, and less reliance on “psychology” like “emotion”, we will now move on to how we will actually get from here through to what will then be the next chapter. It would also be really helpful if some of these aspects of history that are still being explored could be extended further into more mainstream, contemporary, or even philosophical fields, and to more specifically “society”, for example a very useful field for the social sciences (to help us identify what makes for a good social-scientific test that we should be looking for in a social-scientific book). We can then work from a social-scientific viewpoint and do some quantitative test of how one is, in fact, better than others while it still has its value, and perhaps even, has an even greater capacity to affect social-scientific work. If we did not want to deal with the current issues about how to properly evaluate “society” to avoid using the word “social”, we could instead refer to “the human race”, specifically those issues that affect our ability to do science, which does not necessarily mean we can do so any more effectively.
How do I get to know and interact with other people?
The whole notion of a social psychologist is pretty much a “psychological” one, based entirely on two questions. 1) What is a society, and how can we develop one? and 2) Can we really define it as something different from the one that we do know. We understand these two things by reading the books of philosophers. This includes social scientists: the history of social science, the writings of Charles Darwin, and so on, which have long been useful tools for our own well-defined understanding of that nature of our humanity. We understand the human-rights problem by recognizing that there are a wide variety of systems of social regulation, often related to poverty and injustice (though social theorists have used the economic and religious aspects of their different ideas on these issues, and not necessarily in any one specific order) or of how we are supposed to act in the face of problems which we think do not exist. The social neuroscience of this sort are hard to find, though this is also the reason that in much of our social-scientific work (both in the humanities and in medicine) we are generally unable to find a psychologist who is willing to offer an understanding that the human condition is truly an interconnected system. When you consider all of the above, you realise that this “society” is largely a concept based on the idea that we are all interconnected in many different senses in some capacity (for example, that we are all interconnected in the sense of being intelligent or good enough to care about other humans, or that we all have good genes that make us good at what we do). The concept then becomes about how each of us, all of us in different senses in our own right,
Dear Diary,Woke up this morning. Little Jacques lost some more teeth in the evening; so did I. Marie has dysentery, the less said about that, the better. Julianne continues to breast-feed Robert, even though hes four years old [Extended breast feeding lowers fertility, at the cost of introducing some Freudian issues. -HH]. Michel showed up this morning with my spade; hed buried four of his plague-stricken children himself. He was unable to hire gravediggers as they wont bury diseased dead. Im not sure I want my spade back.
Went to town. Left seven-year-old Jacques to borrow one of Lord Foixs oxen and plow the field. Hes a tough little bugger. Saw a large party, maybe 300, striding through town, beating themselves with iron-studded leather whips in front of sobbing townspeople. Pretty strange bunch. They must have a lot of free time. [The flagellants, as they were later called, felt corrupt clergy could no longer save mankind and decided self-abuse was the proper way to absolve humanitys sins. Tuchman tells us “they were forbidden to bathe, shave, change their clothes, sleep in beds, talk or have intercourse…” without their leaders permission. “Evidently this was not withheld, since the flagellants were later charged with orgies in which whipping was combined with sex.” While originally possessing religious fervor, the flagellants grew secular and attempted to usurp power from the Church. Failing that, they settled for slaughtering some 10,000 Jews before Frances Philip VI hanged and beheaded them. -HH] After the crowd moved through, saw neighbor Jean, covered with red rashes, staring openmouthed at the sky, talking about demons, frogs, and wildflowers. He looks different. His wife tells me his left arm fell off last week [Jean has St. Anthonys Fire, a poisoning caused by the ergot fungus in rye flour kept over winter. Ergot contaminates grains in the field, causes wild hallucinations, blood vessel constriction and limb loss and is still a threat to modern agriculture. -HH].
A Beheading from Jean Froissarts ChroniclesRan into friends Charles, Philip, and Gaston in