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!

[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.

[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.