The 19th century and the Middle Ages

Okay, historians generally put the close of the Middle Ages at the end of the fifteenth century, somewhere in the decades surrounding the year 1500, when Columbus, the Protestant Reformation, and the printing press changed a whole lot of things.  Today however I suggest that in many ways the Middle Ages lasted until the "long" nineteenth century.

Historians like to use the term "long" when discussing a century.  That way we aren't locked into a strict hundred year period where the first two digits are all the same (if after 1000).  Here I discuss the period from roughly the 1770s to the outbreak of World War I (1914), arguing that the many upheavals and developments during this period changed many aspects of everyday life that had been unchanged since the Middle Ages.

Three of the big developments of the late eighteenth century in Europe and North America (where European culture predominated) were the Industrial Revolution, the beginnings of universal education, and the end of the assumption that countries would naturally be ruled by kings.

The Industrial Revolution, which appeared first in England, was based on a turn from human/animal power, plus a good amount of wind/water power, to power from fossil fuels, primarily coal. Machines powered by coal (or steam generated by coal fires) could work very fast without tiring.  Manufactured products became much more accessible and affordable, starting with cloth and steel.  Factories (and the resulting air and water pollution from burning coal) spread rapidly.

The Enlightenment, which began in France, believed in the basic rationality of humans and thought that people would make wise decisions and be able to make good lives for themselves if they just had a better education.  Although it took a while, this idea resulted in the next generation or two of schools being established for everybody, not just the well-to-do.

Small entities (like cities, or the Swiss cantons) had long been ruled by elected leaders.  But the American colonies, which after freeing themselves from England had started as a confederation of small entities/states, with elected governors (that's why the name of the country is the United States), decided in the Constitution (1789) that there would be an elected central government for the whole country.  George Washington rejected being called king, which would have been the default title, and settled on the innocuous title of president, he-who-presides.  The French, whose Revolution also began in 1789, originally wanted a limited monarchy (as England already had) rather than the absolute monarchs they'd been having, but they eventually also settled on presidents (after various adventures, including Napoleon as emperor, which I won't discuss now).

Now we get into the real nineteenth century.  Peoples' lives were radically altered by improvements in transportation and communication.  Trains, which were everywhere by the 1860s and 1870s, meant you could now travel in an hour a distance that would have taken all day on horseback.  By the first decade of the twentieth century cars were appearing, allowing individualized travel.  Telegraphs came in with the railroads (you had to let the next station down the line know a train was coming, so there wouldn't be two trains on the same tracks going opposite directions), and then by the final decades of the nineteenth century telephones appeared, allowing people to speak across town or even across the country without having to be in the same room.  Photography developed rapidly, allowing  people to see scenes (like the aftermath of Civil War battles) far away.  We now take all these things for granted (plus being able to get restaurant recommendations or play games on our phones), but they would have drastically changed how people lived.

In many ways the Napoleonic wars (wrapped up in 1812) were very similar to fifteenth-century wars, with big cannons, horses, foot soldiers dragged into the fighting.  But the soldiers had uniforms, and there were individual firearms as well as cannons.  The American Civil War of the 1860s was the first modern war, with rifles and trains playing serious roles, and it really bore little resemblance to fifteenth-century wars, except that of course a lot of people died.  By the time of WW I, medieval warfare was clearly far in the past.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, first gas and then electricity spread to private homes, replacing candles and lamps for illumination (although even in the US not all areas were electrified until the 1920s or even 1930s).  Coal replaced wood for heating at the same time.  Movies first appeared at the very end of the century.  We're looking less medieval all the time.

Curiously, just as the Industrial Revolution spread pollution and separated the worker from the work of his or her hands, and made a whole lot of manufactured goods more easily available, people became nostalgic for a golden past and decided this past was the Middle Ages, as I have discussed earlier.

My own fantasy series that begins with "A Bad Spell in Yurt" (available on Amazon and other online bookstores) is set in a version of the 19th century, where magic made the Industrial Revolution unnecessary, and where such Middle-Ages-ending events as the discovery of the New World, the Protestant Reformation, and the French Revolution never took place (though they are still Enlightened in the world of Yurt and have limited monarchies).

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on medieval and modern history, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

The twelfth century and the nineteenth

In many ways life for most people continued remarkably unchanged from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century.  Sure, there was now a whole New World full of new foods (corn, potatoes, tomatoes, turkeys, chocolate...), and books were printed rather than handwritten, and there was gunpowder, and more organized institutions meant more people got a basic education and were taxed more regularly, and the cities were bigger, and more laws got written down.

But in 1800 the majority of Europe's population still lived in country villages and farmed, using human power and animal power rather than mechanical power.  If they wanted to go somewhere, they went on foot or horseback, and the roads were unmarked and a muddy mess.  They heated and cooked with fire, made their own clothes, used latrines, and sent messages over long distances by having someone travel with the message.

Even though we now live in an age of rapid technological change (the web is only about 25 years old, and a generation ago no one had cell phones, much less apps), in many ways the nineteenth century has us all beat for rapid technological change.

The things we take for granted, the things that separate "civilized" life from "third world" in our thinking, are electricity, telephones, indoor plumbing with running water, and furnaces/AC, plus being able to get quickly down the road.  We also take for granted factory-made goods, from clothing to cell phones to cars.  These are all nineteenth-century inventions.  Before trains, before all the rest of it, the daily life of an ordinary person at the beginning of the nineteenth century would have been a lot like life in the Middle Ages.

But the twelfth century was also a great age of invention.  Architects were trying new and exciting techniques to build churches taller and lighter than they'd ever been built before.  Windmills and watermills revolutionized the grinding of grain and hence the ease of making bread, as well as performing other useful mechanical chores.  Cities and commerce grew rapidly.  Metallurgy was greatly improved, leading to better tools, weapons, and cook pots.  Advances in plowing and crop rotation increased agricultural yields.

But you'd still rather live in the nineteenth century than the twelfth, you say.  Or would you?  The twelfth century had a functional society.  It can't have been comfortable by our standards, and child mortality was high, and the food was awfully bland, and everyone probably smelled of wood smoke.  But there were support systems and a general knowledge of how things were supposed to work.

The problem with the nineteenth century is that it disrupted everything.  Monoculture agriculture, supposedly more efficient, led to such disasters as the great Irish famine.  There were multiple revolutions and the origins of communism as reactions to a perception that everything was getting much worse very fast.  The growth of cities and factories were a big part of it.  One can talk on an elevated level about the separation of the worker from the product of his work, but it was more simple than that.

People were crowded into cities with a level of unsanitary crowding that never would have been allowed in a medieval village.  (New York City had a problem with dead horses piling up in alleyways.)  People worked not out of the home but in the factory, where 16 hour days were common and the thought of safety devices on the machinery was laughable (to management).  Pollution filled the air and the rivers, again at a level that medieval people would never have allowed.

And I would think that for those who did not have running water or furnaces or electricity, when those around one did, life would really have been grim.  (I'm talking here about Europe--don't even get me started on the situation for slaves in the American antebellum south.)

The well to do did just fine in the nineteenth century, but I've got to think that for the mass of the population, those whose ancestors had been on the farm just a generation or two earlier, it must have been awful.  Cities promised a chance to get ahead, but most weren't able to get ahead, and it was too late to go back.

So would I rather live in the twelfth century?  Actually I prefer the twenty-first, but that's just me.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For more on medieval life, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

One Thousand Years Ago

The Middle Ages can seem very far away.  Let's set the way-back machine for 1017 and see what's different.

For starters, you wouldn't be reading this on a screen but on parchment.  Plus you wouldn't be reading it in English, a language that only slowly emerged out of a fusion between Anglo-Saxon and Old French, as I have discussed elsewhere.  And then you probably wouldn't be able to read at all, since most people in the eleventh century were illiterate (including most of our ancestors, in spite of our best efforts to claim descent from kings and knights and princesses).

If you're in the US, you're in a building that certainly didn't exist in 1017 and, most likely, not even before World War II.  (I take this back if you live in a pueblo.)  You have electricity, modern plumbing, and most likely a furnace or heater that can keep you warm without an open fire.  Almost certainly today you ate some processed food, like cereal or chips or store cookies or anything made with flour or sugar, or consumed coffee or tea or chocolate or potatoes or tomatoes or anything made with corn, all foods unknown in the Middle Ages.

You would neither own a gun nor worry about gun violence in the early eleventh century, for the excellent reason that there were no guns.  Gunpowder only appeared in Europe in the fourteenth century (China had had it earlier but used it for fireworks, not killing people, at least intentionally), and for several centuries it just used for cannons, not handguns.  (Medieval people did of course worry about violence, but it was more the up-close-and-personal kind.)

You rely for entertainment on things reaching you from outside--radio, TV, streaming broadcasts.  You travel by bicycle or car or bus or train or plane, not by horsepower or on foot.  You communicate with your friends by telephone or Facebook or email or texts.  You took a nice bath or shower in the recent past.  Your clothing was probably made by someone you've never met, most likely in a different country.  Now imagine not having any of this.

And yet in many ways there are strong similarities between life a thousand years ago and now.  The dominant religion was Christian, in spite of minority populations of Jews and Muslims and atheists, as is the case in the modern US and western Europe (not so many Hindus, however).  Muslims, in the abstract, were considered scary by people who didn't know any, as now the thought of "Islamic terrorism" lurking among refugees can now send shivers of fear.

Towns then, as now, were the centers of trade, commerce, and opportunity (or at least the hope for opportunity).  Northern Europe's cities were just starting to grow in 1017, but Italy already had cities, and cities had mayors and elected city councils.  Almost all of modern Europe's cities are in the same place as medieval cities, usually with the same names.  Modern Dijon, for example, was Divionensis in medieval Latin, probably pronounced something like "Divion" or "Dijon" by people who lived there.

Speaking of Dijon, the above is one of the carvings in the crypt of St.-Bénigne of Dijon.  It was brand new in 1017, and you can still go see it.

Europe's countries were taking shape in the eleventh century.  England and France were more or less where they still are.  Both Spain and Italy were divided into smaller states, but in both cases their peninsulas had a certain cohesion (complicated in Spain because the southern half was ruled by Muslims).  Germany thought of itself as a country, though it sort of wandered off to the east.

Most people paid rent for their housing to landlords.  Much of the rent was paid in labor or produce rather than coin, but they still had coins for some things.  In their houses, they did the same things we do, eat, sleep, store their possessions, relax after work.

People lived in families a thousand years ago, a mother and father, who were supposed to be married to each other, trying their best to raise the children and teach them what they needed to succeed.  Although there were not yet any public schools or universities, there were plenty of places to get an education, either in a monastery or cathedral school, although only a few could take advantage of these.  Parents loved their children and got exasperated by their teenagers, just like today.  And they worried about and took care of older relatives.

(Note, I seem to have pulled together in this post a lot of earlier ideas.  If you haven't been following my blog all along, click on the links to learn more from earlier posts.)


© C. Dale Brittain 2017