Healthy Living and Eating

 Don't get me wrong.  I prefer to eat "healthy" foods.  Lots of fruits and vegetables every day and a minimum amount of the kind of packaged foods where they have to print the ingredients very tiny because there are so many of them that otherwise they wouldn't all fit on the label.  When all you could buy in the store was "WonderTop" bread, we made our own.  It's been years since I had an Oreo (TM).

 

But there's a reason that a lot of food has all those ingredients, as food companies have sought to make their products taste better, to last longer, be more attractive in appearance, and in many cases even include nutritious additions.  Medieval people did not eat processed foods at all in the way we think of processed food, and yet most who survived the ills of childhood did not make it out of their 50s (see more here on medieval life expectancy).

A few years back I had to have eye surgery for a detached retina.  Joking with the surgeon beforehand, I said, "You mean I couldn't clear this up with healthful exercise and a vegan diet?"  Quite disturbed by the question (and probably not realizing I was joking, surgeons are serious people), he told me this wouldn't do the trick.  And yet these days some people at least seem convinced that if we lived and ate like medieval peasants, we would have a long and healthy life.

(Fun fact:  I would have been blind as a bat in the Middle Ages.)

Medieval peasants certainly ate a plant-based diet.  During the summer, they had plenty of fruits and vegetables, though without refrigeration or trucks bringing fresh food from Mexico or California's Central Valley, in the winter vegetables were mostly limited to root crops like onions or turnips and dried beans and peas.  Bread constituted the principal source of calories.  Eggs and cheese were the principal source of protein, along with an occasional fish if one lived along the sea or a river.

Interestingly, meat was considered a health food.  If someone was sick, it seemed appropriate to give them red meat.  Monks, who normally ate a peasant diet, were fed beef broth in the infirmary.  A common accusation against a monastery considered decadent was that most of the monks became "sick" every week.  (Whee! Time for beef broth!)

How about the healthful exercise?  Everybody got far more exercise than most of us do, even those who work out at the gym for an hour every day.  Aristocrats were fairly constantly on the move, and that meant riding.  As anyone who has been on horseback will tell you, riding is a lot more energetic an activity than sitting in a car, even though the horse is doing most of the work.  If you didn't have a horse, you walked, often miles a day.  Peasants would wrestle their animals or their plows around all day.  A little exercise is great, but 12 hours a day is going to wear your body out fast.

I'm still not going to start eating Oreos, but I like having milk (full of calcium) available year round, fortified with vitamin D, and I like being able to get fresh fruits and vegetables all the time.  I exercise a half hour to an hour a day, but it's more likely to be walking than heaving hay bales up into the loft.  I've already made it out of my 50s.  Don't want to take any chances.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval food and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Old Folks Homes

 In the modern West it has become common to have what used to be called old folks' homes (not to be confused with the Stephen Foster song about "old folks at home").  These assisted living facilities, senior centers, nursing homes, or the like have become necessary due to a lot of people growing older and less able to care for themselves easily, and in many cases not having anyone able or willing to care for them at home.

With the pandemic these facilities, where a lot of older people with health problems live close together, have tragically become centers of spreading the disease.  But how about the Middle Ages?  Did they have old folks' homes?

No, because most people died before they had become so incapacitated that they would have needed such a facility.  Without modern medicine, diseases or chronic conditions that can now be handled would have carried people off.  With life a lot rougher physically, even for the well-to-do, the average life expectancy was probably more like lasting into ones 50s or 60s, rather than the 70s or 80s we now assume.  (Of course then, as now, these are averages, with some living much longer, some much less.)

Families were expected to take care of the older generation, once the next generation was ready to take over the work, and grandparents provided advice and insights as well as assistance with less strenuous tasks.  The modern Amish still practice something similar, with grandparents moving into a little adjacent house once the next generation is grown, married, and ready to take over the farm.

But there were still institutions in the Middle Ages that served some of the same functions as a retirement home.  The chief was the monastery or nunnery.  Someone (usually aristocratic) who no longer was active and had started to worry about their soul would convert to the religious life, making a suitable gift, taking the habit, and leaving their possessions and family behind.  The new, strict orders of the High Middle Ages, like the Cistercians, required these converts to become novices, following a rigorous schedule to learn all about the monastic life.  Other monasteries provided a (reasonably) comfortable home where older people could pray and hope to make it into heaven.

These were group facilities, but rather than just being homes for the elderly, they were communities that included all ages down to teenagers, and at a lot of traditional monasteries, down to childhood.

 Alternately, one could go into a hospital.  Medieval hospitals became common from the thirteenth century on, founded as an act of charity by the wealthy and powerful.  The hospital of Beaune, pictured above, was founded by the most powerful lords of Burgundy.

These weren't really retirement homes, however.  They were places for the sick, the indigent, and the dying (more like a hospice).  The nuns would however try to heal the sick.  Chicken soup and saint dust are great cure-alls.

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on medieval social history, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback!

Medieval disease

Until the era of Covid-19, Americans didn't worry too much about disease.  Some diseases that had been real killers, like smallpox, have been eradicated, and others, like polio, have been nearly eradicated, due to vaccines.  Some so-called childhood diseases, like measles and mumps, are unlikely if parents get their children vaccinated.  There are vaccines for seasonal flu and for pneumonia.

These are all viral diseases, where the best bet is to build up the body's own immunity (through vaccines).  For bacterial diseases, including even nasty diseases like Lyme disease or bubonic plague, there are antibiotics.  Antibiotics are also very helpful in fighting off any kind of infection.

There were neither vaccines nor antibiotics in the Middle Ages.  For that matter, vaccines were invented in the nineteenth century and antibiotics in the mid-twentieth.  Thus medieval people had to worry about disease a lot more than modern westerners have done in recent generations.  A nasty infection could be a death sentence.  So could polluted water.

There's a reason that child mortality was a lot higher then than it is now, and that the average life expectancy, which is now in the 80s for people in the US, was more like the 50s.  People got worn out, and something or other might sicken and kill you.

(Of course, as I have discussed earlier, some people lived a very long life then, but a lot fewer than now.)

 You might ask, how could people cope with all that death?  In fact one could ask that very question now.  As I write, the Covid-19 death toll in the US is at 200,000 in seven months, or the equivalent of three jumbo jets falling out of the sky and killing everyone on board every day for that period.  And yet people have grown numb.  Families that have lost someone are of course devastated, but for many of the rest the raw terror has long since worn off, and getting together with friends or going to a show seems "worth the risk."  Medieval people would also have been devastated when a family member died, especially a child, but they went about their daily affairs without thinking too much about disease.

There were of course exceptions, most notably the Black Death (bubonic plague), especially its two big outbreaks in the sixth century and the fourteenth (but not in between).  This really was scary, because it spread and killed so fast.  Like Covid, it was easily spread by people who had not yet developed symptoms, so someone trying to escape it could infect those in the place to which they fled.  Strict quarantine measures were put in place, but they were of only limited success, given how close everyone lived to each other in an urban environment.  A city might seem fine one day, and two weeks later three-quarters of the inhabitants would be dead.  They couldn't bury them fast enough.

The plague retreated once "herd immunity" had developed, that is enough people had caught a mild case and recovered that it wasn't being spread any more, but in the meantime probably a third of Europe's population had died.  This is why waiting for herd immunity to save us from Covid is not a viable option.

And the plague's aftermath disrupted Europe's economy for a century, as I have discussed earlier.

Besides the plague, the Middle Ages had most of the same diseases we do, except they didn't have syphilis, which originated in the Americas, and some believe they didn't have our "common cold."  The second most terrifying disease, after the plague, was leprosy.  Lepers, whose skin and eventually toes and fingers shriveled and fell off, were shunned, treated essentially as AIDS patients were when that disease first emerged toward the end of the twentieth century.

Sick people either got well at home or, increasingly, in hospitals.  A hospital was closer to what we would call a hospice, a place where the sick person was kept warm and clean and treated with chicken soup and saint's dust.  The wealthy would endow such hospitals as an act of charity.  (Lepers weren't allowed in hospitals but had to go to their own leper-houses.)  Above are the beds in the medieval hospital of Beaune.

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on medieval health and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Old in the Middle Ages

As I indicated in an earlier post on growing old in the Middle Ages, medieval people tended to wear out, on average, earlier than we do.  This should not be surprising, given that they lived what we would consider a rough life and did not have the modern medicine that easily remedies things that would have killed a medieval person.  (Medieval medicine was just was not the same.  So much for all-natural cures and the secret wisdom of the ancients.)

This did not of course mean that people keeled over in their 30s.  Indeed, a man who survived childhood and the childhood illnesses that vaccinations have essentially eliminated could expect to make it at least into his 50s, short of death in battle or in a serious farm accident, and some lived substantially longer.  Women could expect to live about the same length of time, short of death in childbirth.

Here I want to discuss a bit more how medieval old people lived--defining of course "old" as they did, not how we do (I consider people in their 60s to be young and fun!).  Old people were a much smaller proportion of the medieval population than they are of the modern western population, however one may define "old," because fewer of them lived to what we'd now call a ripe old age.

There was no specific definition of when one became old.  Different authors came up with different definitions.  However, multiples of 7 appear very frequently.  "Age of reason" began at around 7, the age at which medieval children started their career training.  At 14 one was no longer a child but a youth and could get married.  At 21 one might or might not pass out of "youth"; interestingly, this is the one big turning-point we have kept.  At 35 one might become mature or middle-aged or even "old," depending on who you were talking to.  Or one might remain a youth or young man up to 49.  Everyone agreed, however, that someone past 70 was not just old but very old.  (This was of course approximate, because medieval people didn't really keep track of birthdays.)

One of the more obvious differences between a young or middle-aged man and an old one was that old men grew out their beards.  Youths prided themselves on clean-shaven, sweet faces, to the extent that modern people sometimes have trouble telling the difference between young men and women in medieval illustrations (the clothing is the giveaway).  Active men didn't want a beard that would get in the way of a helmet (for a knight).  Monks were shaved every Saturday whether they needed it or not, and peasants were probably the same.

But an old man in the high Middle Ages would be proud of growing out a long, white beard, which became a symbol of wisdom.  Charlemagne and Arthur were always described in twelfth-century epics as having such a beard.  Even in the image below, probably a tenth-century copy of an image created not long after Charlemagne's death, you can see Charlemagne on the left as having a solid beard and mustache, whereas his son on the right has at most a 5 o'clock shadow.  (Also note the scribe below; see my previous post.)

Medieval old people were expected to pass their wisdom on to the younger generation, stepping back from active farming, for example, as the next generation were able to take up the task.  The Amish still practice this today, where at a certain point the old generation move out of the main house to a small, adjacent house, leaving the main house and the responsibility for the farm to a son or daughter.  Medieval peasants probably wouldn't have the choice to stop working altogether, and they probably wouldn't move out, but they would hand off the heavier chores.

One of the concerns then, of course, as it is now, is who would take care of old people.  As now, one's children were the primary candidates.  But taking care of the old was also considered a "good work."  In part this was because being old and being poor often came together, and the Bible was very explicit about taking care of the poor.  In the late Middle Ages someone wealthy might establish a "hospital" that took care of the indigent poor whether or not they were sick.  Masters were expected to provide small amounts of money to help retired servants.  Servants would be expected to take care of an old master.  Guilds would take care of their members in their old age.  Churches routinely took in old people, as monks or nuns if they were educated enough to take part in the liturgy, or at least as part of the cluster of official poor people whom they fed and clothed.

These days, for most people, a major part of one's total lifetime medical spending occurs in the last few years of life, as serious illness (heart attack, cancer, stroke, broken bones) are treated to give the person another six months or sometimes several years of life.  All of these would have carried off medieval people quickly.  There was no medieval equivalent of the fear about being kept alive by machines.

© C. Dale Brittain 2017

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

Growing old in the Middle Ages

"In the Middle Ages, everyone was middle-aged!"  Umm, no.

As I noted in my earlier post on medieval life expectancy, the "life span" then was the same as it is now.  That is, although the average age a person might reach, barring disease and disaster, before major body parts started wearing out was the same then as now, in practice most people in the Middle Ages would not make it to the age of 70, 80, or more that modern actuarial tables suggest.  A lack of modern medicine, malnutrition, and rough living would do in a lot of people in their 50s.

But some people certainly grew old, even if "old" kicked in earlier for them than it does for us.  And there are documented cases of rare people making it past 100--one is Saint Anthony, founder of monasticism in Egypt during late antiquity.

Old people were revered for their wisdom in the Middle Ages.  Leaders like bishops and abbots were assumed to hold their office for life, rather than being pushed out at 65.  Medieval old people were not put out on the ice floe!  In practice, bishops and abbots might retire if they felt their strength was failing, but they rarely lived more than another year or so, not enjoying any "golden years" retirement.

Among the peasants, everyone worked until they physically could not any more, at which point they transitioned into being the voice of wisdom, telling their children all they had learned in many years of experience, whether the next generation wanted to listen or not.

Among the aristocracy, heirs waiting to inherit might encourage their parents to retire to a monastery.  In practice, aristocratic women were much more likely to do so than aristocratic men.  If widowed in their 40s, having seen their children more or less grow up, they might decide that they had had enough of a world of men and go off to be nuns.  These widows were very often persuaded to become an abbess, because of their administrative experience.

In other cases, widows stayed in the world.  One Burgundian countess in the thirteenth century survived both her husbands, argued with the new bishop of Auxerre who thought she ought to help carry him in procession on the day he was consecrated, and arranged the marriages of her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

In the modern West, most older people wear glasses, and some have had cataract surgery.  Medieval people without good eyesight would just have had to grope along.  (I myself would have been blind as a bat.)  Eyeglasses first appeared in the fourteenth century, mostly for reading and very expensive, and cataract surgery only came into its own in the 1960s.

Few old people would have lived by themselves, because children did not move far away as often happens in modern America.  As they became less able to take care of themselves, their families assisted them.  Most would have been carried off by disease (such as pneumonia) or infection long before memory issues became much of a problem.

Many people now draw up living wills, saying that they don't want to be kept alive by machines and feeding tubes.  This would not have been a concern in the Middle Ages.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

Children in the Middle Ages

One periodically sees the suggestion that medieval parents did not love their children.  This ridiculous and patently false notion is based on the fact that the rate of childhood mortality was substantially higher than it is now, and the assumption that parents therefore must have become callous to childhood deaths.

In fact medieval sources are full of parental laments for dead children.  Those who could afford it would make substantial gifts to churches to benefit the souls of their children.  If the choice was to be callous or be sad a lot, parents went for being sad a lot.

(After all, our primate relatives, monkeys, apes, lemurs, mourn for dead infants.  It would be bizarre if humans didn't.  For that matter, childhood mortality rates in the US were substantially higher before WW II than they are now, and yet no one says twentieth-century parents didn't love their children.)

Childhood was however looked at rather differently than it is now, and, by our standards, kids had to grow up fast.  Even though exact ages were not nearly as important for medieval people as they are for us, and no one had birthday parties, there was a sense that one's childhood was divided into 7-year sections.

Up until age 7 one was an infant, below the age of reason, not yet knowing wrong from right.  Children were baptized at birth, because everyone agreed that the unbaptized went to Hell (baptism wiped away original sin, which otherwise would send you there), and they thus needed godparents, who would act for the infant.  From 7 to 14 one was a child, knowing wrong from right but not legally able to enter into binding agreements or give oaths.

"Youth" set in at age 14.  One was not fully an adult, but one could get married, give legal consent, and the like.  It was convenient that this was the age of puberty, more or less.  (Modern puberty shows up earlier, doubtless due both to our substantial diet and to hormones in the water.)

The age of 7 (or so) would be the age at which boys might start knighthood training (see more here), or be sent off to a monastery (see more here).  The age of 14 (or so) would be when boys might head off to the university (see more here).  Boys and girls who had grown up in a monastery would take their final vows not long after they turned 14.

We treat 21 as the age of majority, of full adulthood.  It is the only age we have left from the medieval configuration, but, curiously, it was much less important for them than it is for us.  "Youth" might continue for boys until they were in their 30s and ready to settle down, if a young knight went on Crusade or enjoyed the tournament circuit while waiting to inherit.  Or "youth" might be over substantially earlier for someone who married in her teens.

Certainly teenagers (a recently coined word) were assumed to be much more responsible then than they are now.  Young men routinely went off to fight, and Joan of Arc was in her teens when her visions told her to free France from English domination (which she then did).  Among the peasantry, children would be helping farm from the time they were tiny--as is still the case among the modern Amish.

(Click here for more on medieval life expectancy.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2014
For more on medieval life, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Medieval Life Expectancy

There is a lot of confusion over the term "life expectancy."  One often hears that in the pre-modern world life expectancy was 35, with the assumption that people just keeled over in their mid 30s.  Actually, they did not.

This figure of 35 is a modern guess, based on assumptions about the "life span."  Span and expectancy are not the same.  The span is how long one could reasonably live, barring accident and serious disease, before body parts start wearing out.  The average "span" (and remember, this is just an average) is genetic, fairly fixed for humans, and has generally been assumed to be about 70.

Thus, making the assumption that half of all babies died in infancy in the Middle Ages, modern people have assumed that the other half lived to 70, and thus, on average (70 plus zero, divided by two), people could "expect" to live to 35.  But this was not in fact the case.

In the modern West, good nutrition and medical care have meant that more people can "expect" to live out the full human life-span, which is probably closer to 80 or 90 than 70.  But as we all know, plenty of people die a lot younger, and some live longer.  That's why it's an average.

In the Middle Ages, child mortality was certainly higher than it is now but was never half.  War, accidents, and (for women) childbirth, as well as the diseases that can easily be cured with modern antibiotics, carried off a lot of people in what we would call the prime of life.  Particularly deadly were the two outbreaks of the Black Death, in the sixth century and again in the fourteenth.  A few people, very few, did live until 90 or so.  But for most, as we can tell from the lives of well-documented individuals, the "expectancy" was probably to live into one's 50s, before the rough life lived by even aristocrats caught up with them.

This is of course not uniquely medieval.  Even though my own grandfather lived to 107, his own grandparents did not make it out of their 50s.  Their obituary (they died within days of each other) said that they were "quite advanced in years, being near 60."

(Click here for more on growing old in the Middle Ages.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2014