But the early nineteenth-century English world that Austen describes, at a time shortly before all these inventions took place, was, for the gentry (the well-to-do), sort of a half-way spot between aristocratic life in the Middle Ages and the modern age.
(If you haven't read any of Jane Austen's novels, I urge you to do so. Start with Pride and Prejudice. If they made you read it in high school I hope they told you that it is extremely funny. Austen found all the silliness, greed, misplaced pride, and lack of education of many of her contemporaries hilarious. If you have trouble getting into it--and you shouldn't--start by watching the BBC mini series with Colin Firth.)
Austen's gentry lived in large manor houses with servants, as the twelfth-century aristocracy would have lived. They derived much of their income from agricultural rents and had their own "home farm" lands. They valued music, art, and literature. In this they were like medieval aristocrats.
Also like medieval aristocrats, they believed in love as a reason to get married, even though marrying someone from outside one's social class was unthinkable. Austen's heroines still have their parents and guardians trying to arrange appropriate marriages for their children, as twelfth-century parents had done, though Austen suggests this often led to disaster.
We think of medieval aristocrats as living in castles, and indeed many did, but a castle was too expensive for everyone to have one, so a lot of them lived in large and elegant houses, like their nineteenth-century descendants. The castles not destroyed during the early modern period would still have had wealthy owners in the nineteenth century, but the interiors had been transformed to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ideas of comfort.
Manor houses were thick on the ground in Austen's day, but by a century later (the time of Downton Abbey if you watched that show), it became hard to maintain them, and many were turned into institutions (nursing homes, schools, hotels, etc.) or torn down.
Like aristocratic households of the twelfth century, the nineteenth-century gentry's big meal of the day, called dinner, was in what we would call late afternoon, around 4 or 5 o'clock. But whereas medieval people would have been up at dawn, maybe had a quick bite then, worked till dinner, and then relaxed for a short period before going to bed (with or without an additional quick bite of supper), Austen's gentry liked to stay up late. (See more here on medieval meals and meal-times.)
The nineteenth-century gentry breakfasted at 9 or 10, then had their "morning," which lasted until dinner time (ever wonder why a performance at 1 o'clock is called a matinée?). After dinner there were many more hours of socializing, playing music, and the like, broken at some point by tea. The after dinner period was called evening. This is when one had parties and dancing, and many stayed up until midnight. A party would be expected to include a light supper.
The gentry provided a lot of military leaders for England, as the medieval aristocracy had defined themselves militarily, but wars were far away, and most young men did not take part in military exercises. There were still knights, or at least men called Sir, but unlike medieval knights they never charged into combat with long lances and swords at the ready; nineteenth-century knighthood was primarily a matter of status.
The gentry still learned to fence, and an insult might end in a challenge to a duel. Duels were officially illegal but happened anyway, men without shields or armor fencing with foils (light weight swords) until one yielded or was killed or at least injured. A medieval challenge to single combat in contrast would have required horses, lances, armor, shields, and serious swords, and nobody would have considered it illegal.
© C. Dale Brittain 2018
For more about life of the aristocracy, fighting, knights, and so much more, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.
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