never be royals

[kindkit]

From the question-a-day meme?

August 11: Everyone always thinks they’d be royalty or a knight if they were born in Medieval times, but let’s be honest, you probably wouldn’t be. So, what kind of person do you think you’d be if you were born in medieval times?

I don't think that I'd have been royalty or a knight, because I've actually read some history.

In any case, my ancestors immigrated to the United States from Sweden and Scotland at various points in the 19th century in order (I presume) to escape being landless, impoverished, exploited peasants. Presumably that's what I would have been too, had I been born much before about 1920.

(Assuming I didn't die in childhood. But I probably would have because lots of children did, and in particular, lots of children with chronic bronchitis and pneumonia did, because no antibiotics. So in fact if I'd been born much before 1950, I probably wouldn't have lived. I was born in 1969, so I feel like I had a fairly narrow escape. Medieval!me isn't really a possibility.)

Comments

[lilacsigil]

Yes, everyone's got about a 90% chance of being a peasant farmer! My family were salmon fishermen and smallhold farmers in Scotland, with a couple of generations of tailors thrown in more recently. And that's all my family did until my paternal great-grandfather's day - he was a stationmaster.

My mum was born 1947 and has had severe asthma (with the expected bronchitis and pneumonia) all her life, but she thinks she survived mostly because she lived less than 5 minutes walk from the Royal Children's Hospital as a young child and literally next door to the local hospital in her rural town for five years after that!

[kindkit]

Fiction has probably given people a skewed idea of the ratio of aristocrats to peasant farmers (with merchants and craftspeople tending to disappear entirely in fictional accounts). Agriculture took huge amounts of labor.

Sounds like your mom was, lucky! Hmm, now I'm wondering about whether sulfa drugs were used for things like bronchitis and pneumonia--I know they were available a couple of decades before penicillin.

Personally, I'm very glad to have been born into what's looking like a narrow historical window of antibiotic effectiveness.

[silveradept]

Most likely, peasant farmer for me, too, unless I got really lucky and lived somewhere that had an academy that took non-nobles and made them apprentices or I ended up in a guild somewhere, which wouldn't necessarily be better, just different.

[kindkit]

*nods* I know that in England, at least, there was some medieval social mobility. But not a huge amount.

I think most of us have reason to be glad we weren't born in any earlier era!

[lilliburlero]

It's very difficult to imagine yourself shaped by a completely different set of material circumstances: makes me realise there is no "me" as such. I think the best outcome for me in medieval England would have been monastic life, but my ability to access that from whatever the equivalent of my parents' circumstances would have been very much depends on when in the medieval period, because you know, not a monolith. On the other hand, I was born in Iran, and for the most part I'd much rather live a medieval life there than in England.

[kindkit]

Yes, that too. The person who is "me" could not exist in another era, because everything that shaped me would have been different. (Also, the person who is me would be very unlikely in a literal sense, because my existence depends on my maternal (mostly Scottish) lineage and my paternal (Swedish) lineage getting together. Which could have happened in the middle ages, but is a lot more likely in the context of American settler colonialism.)

I do wonder how I might have understood my trans-ness in another era. I spent plenty of time not understanding it in this one, so who knows if I could ever have put it into words beyond "I wish I had been born a man"? Neither marriage and children nor the religious life sounds great to me, although a convent does sound like the least worst option.