10 Main Reasons why YOU Cannot Live In The Medieval era.

10 Main Reasons Why YOU 

Cannot Live In The Medieval 

Times

10- Living in a castle.

A medieval castle was the fortified home of an important person in the medieval periods such as a lord or a king. Many castles were built in europe and the middle east since 5th century to the end of the 15th century, but what you do not know is castles were built For defence not comfort. They were dark places with Defensive slits instead of windows and even if there was windows, glass won't be used!

Castles were also smelly because of the lack of sewers! So you'll have to expect the company of rats and diseases. There wasn't any running water, so clothes were not washed often.

Castles were known to always be damp, especially when it rains, or ground water makes it’s way through the floor.

The leaking roofs didn’t make it any better!

Castles were cold, it was really hard to keep a room inside a castle warm.

You also have to expect company. Castles might appear to be fortresses from the outside, but the large and open floor plans on the inside left little room for privacy, especially if you were a servant. The lord and lady of the home would almost certainly have private chambers in which to dress and bathe, but all others who dwelled within the castle walls were forced to spend their days and nights in the constant company of each other.

In reality, castles were often were often so dark and dingy most areas of the castle that it might have been nice to have others close by for body warmth. Or perhaps they found other ways to stay warm however, during the Middle Ages you could get it on with your spouse only for the purpose of procreation.

This meant no new sexual positions, and even lusting after your own partner was considered a sin.

9-Diseases.

Like i mentioned before, there wasn't much available water in some places in the medieval era, so catching a disease was commonplace.

The common victimes of these diseases were poor peasants and townspeople, who do not have access to proper hygiene. They had to bring water from nearby wells or rivers in order to take a bath. This process is difficult and time consuming so they only took a bath only once a week or less.

Scurvy is an example of a comonplace disease as people were poor, they couldn’t afford fresh fruits, which were the main source of vitamin C. As a result, peasants would often have scurvy, which made gums spongy and loosened the teeth.

Dirty water and spoiled food caused cholera and diarrhea. It was thought that these diseases were caused by eating raw fruits and vegetables, which wasn’t the case. People used to vomit after having stomach viruses and food poisonings.

Another major medieval era disease is the infamous bubonic plague. It was one of the three plagues that comprised the Black Death. It was caused by the bacteria named “Yersinia pestis”, which is transferred to a human through an infected flea bite. When bacteria entered into a person’s lymphatic system, it developed buboes, painful bumps, under the armpits, groin or on the neck. These bumps gave way to fevers and headaches. The only way a person could survive was if the bumps broke open, spilling out the poisonous bacteria. If the bump did not open the people died within three days of first bump.

8-Wars.

Medieval wars have a distinct "fighting season." They stopped for the winter when it was too cold to camp outdoors and nothing to eat. Their organization, execution, and purposes were very different from modern wars.

Second, there were far more political entities to fight. Instead of large nation-states like we have now, there were dozens or even hundreds of feudal landholdings, with families quarreling over one thing or another.

Finally, a lot of what we might call "wars" today were actually just large-scale banditry. A bunch of knights would gather together with their squires and households and form a "company" -- effectively a well-armed criminal gang. Their goal wasn't to fight but to rob -- sacking towns and churches. Sometimes they would have a license from their king to do this (as long as it was in another country), sometimes not. If they happened to run into another "company," or heaven forbid the authorized army of whatever country they were robbing in, there might be a pitched battle; but on the whole they hoped to avoid battles. The point was plunder.

7-Traveling.

People in the medieval period faced a host of potential dangers when traveling.

 safe, clean place to sleep upon demand was difficult to find. Travellers often had to sleep out in the open – when travelling during the winter, they ran the risk of freezing to death. And while travelling in groups provided some safety, one still might be robbed or killed by strangers – or even one’s fellow travellers.

Nor were food and drink provided unless the traveller had found an inn, monastery, or other lodging. Food poisoning was a risk even then, and if you ran out of food, you had to forage, steal, or go hungry.

Medieval travellers could also be caught up in local or regional disputes or warfare, and be injured or thrown into prison. Lack of knowledge of foreign tongues could also lead to problems of interpretation.

Illness and disease could also be dangerous, and even fatal. If one became unwell on the road, there was no guarantee that decent – or indeed any – medical treatment could be received.

Travellers might also fall victim to accident. For example, there was a risk of drowning when crossing rivers – even the Holy Roman emperor, Frederick I, drowned in 1190 when crossing the Saleph river during the Third Crusade. Accidents might also happen upon arrival: in Rome during the 1450 jubilee, disaster struck when some 200 people in the huge crowd crossing the great bridge of Sant’ Angelo tumbled over the edge and drowned.

While it was faster to travel by sea than land, stepping onto a boat presented substantial risks: a storm could spell disaster, or navigation could go awry, and the medieval wooden ships used were not always equal to the challenges of the sea. However, by the later Middle Ages, sea travel was becoming faster and safer than ever before.

An average traveller in the medieval period could expect to cover 15–25 miles a day on foot or 20–30 on a horse, while sailing ships might make 75–125 miles a day.

If you do massages, you would've made a huge income back in the medieval times!

6-Giving Birth.

Moms today think that they are having a rough time being pregnant now in the 21st century? Well, if they tried being pregnant back in the Dark Ages and then they wouldn't feel so bad. Becoming pregnant carried so many consequences on the socioeconomic status of the woman who was carrying the child. Since these times had a caste system (from the royalty right down to the indentured serfs), having children either meant more heirs to the fortune or more help in the fields for labor.

In today's society, childbirth is an openly discussed topic. Images of women well into their third trimesters are all over magazines and women giving birth is highly televised. In the medieval times, childbirth was a private affair that was kept tightly under wraps. No matter if you were rich or poor, young or old, childbirth was a dangerous endeavor to undergo for women because medical technology had not caught up with those needs.

According to Tudor Society, many texts written about pregnancy in those times were written by men, many of whom were clergy and members of the church. Those men also took a vow of celibacy so clearly we don't have clear account about the women's perception about childbirth during those times.

was common knowledge in Medieval Times that women were at high risk for dying during childbirth. Sadly, one in three women died during childbirth in Medieval Times (Tudor Society). In fact, it wasn't even a shock to hear about that happening. According to Mental Floss, the upper classes also had the latest medical knowledge at their fingertips, but this wasn't always such a good thing. In fact, having more doctors who didn't know what they were doing increased the maternal death rate more so than having women just give birth naturally.

In the United States today, about 15 women die in pregnancy or childbirth per 100,000 live births. That’s way too many, but a century ago it was more than 600 women per 100,000 births. In the 1600s and 1700s, the death rate was twice that: By some estimates, between 1 and 1.5 percent of women giving birth died (Slate.com).

No matter what time era that you are born in, bearing a child is one of the most dangerous things that a woman can do. Even today, it’s the sixth most common cause of death among women age 20 to 34 in the United States (Slate.com).

Before the Protestant Reformation, England during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was a devout Catholic nation (Tudor Society). This means that religion and faith were held in the highest regards when it came to the rules that people lived by, with no questions asked.

Because of the story of the Garden of Eden, women were demonized because they were modeled after Eve who was tempted by the serpent. The pain associated with labor and childbirth was thought to be due to Eve's fall in the Garden of Eden.

Her original sin meant that all women were to suffer great pain and without the painkillers that we have available today many women turned to religion to provide them with the support and relief they greatly desired (Tudor Society).

P.S: Good luck to all pregnant Ladies out there. <3

5-Church.

After the fall of the Roman empire in the fifth century, the Church appeared as the new dominant power of Europe. Like the Romans they had their capital in Rome and they had their own emperor – the Pope.

The power of the Church lay in their perceived status as the gatekeepers to heaven. Cross them in any way, shape or form and you could find yourself barred from the gates of paradise.

This could apply to anyone from the poorest peasant to the most powerful King.

For the average person the Church was an all-consuming presence. For starters every peasant had to give up a portion of their weekly work to labour on church land for free.

As if this wasn’t enough they had to pay 10% of their earnings to the Church through a tax known as the tithe.

Since many peasants couldn’t lay their hands on much cash, this tithe was more often than no paid in grain which was stored in vast barns known as tithe barns.

Considering the subsistence level at which most peasants operated, coming up with this tithe was a constant struggle.

Even so, they laboured to produce the good for the very simple reason that if you didn’t, you’d be cut off from heaven.

The control the Church had over the people was total. Peasants worked for free on Church land. This proved difficult for peasants as the time they spent working on Church land, could have been better spent working on their own plots of land producing food for their families.

4-Communication Was Slow.

They did not have any interent or wire connection which is a MUST in our current day.

In 12th-century England, kings did not stay in London – rather, they travelled around their lands. This necessitated an organised and efficient messenger service, ensuring that correspondence reached the king, and that royal letters, grants, patents and orders arrived at their intended destination. Messengers therefore became a permanent royal expenditure, paid continuously and travelling the kingdom to carry the king’s word.

The English system was efficient, allowing news to be carried quickly: in 1290 Edward I summoned a parliament to grant new taxes. The order, or writ, for the taxes was issued on 22 September at Edward’s hunting lodge in King’s Clipstone, in the Midlands. This was carried to the Privy Seal Office and then to the Barons of the Exchequer, in Westminster. The Exchequer then issued its own writs on 6 October to the sheriffs, ordering them to begin collections between the 18th and 29th of the month.

Thus, less than a month after Edward’s order, his messages had been transmitted to London and then out to the counties, and commissioners had begun their task.

3-Knowledge Was Very Limited.

The Catholic Church played two roles with respect to knowledge.

One was curating and preserving ancient texts by copying them. By doing this they preserved some knowledge from the ancient world (many texts were lost over time).

Scholars in the Arabic world contributed even more to this preservation of knowledge; after the Crusades, some of this knowledge was transmitted to Christian Europe.

The other role of the Church was information control. During most of the Middle Ages, it was forbidden to translate scripture into the vernacular (everyday) language. Everyday people may have repeated a few prayers in Latin, such as the Lord’s Prayer, without knowing what they meant. Literacy was limited, in any case, during much of the Middle Ages (even some of the clergy probably were not literate). Books were prohibitively expensive for most people. These things blocked access to much information and knowledge for the majority of people (except perhaps some of the more educated nobility— who may or may not have been interested).

The Catholic Church also discouraged and in some cases punished research activities that might uncover facts that challenge things in the Bible.

Keeping Biblical knowledge hidden would have helped the Church to maintain its claim that access to God was possible only through the Church. Some heretical groups, such as the Bonnes Hommes, later called Cathars), argued that individuals had direct access to God and did not need the church hierarchy, and as far as I can tell, they did translate some of the Bible (this group only believed in the New Testament). When argument failed, the church began to destroy this and other heresies because they were seen as a threat to church authority.

Keeping other knowledge hidden (such as knowledge of ancient texts) may have been another way of preventing people from developing heretical ideas.

2-Medicine And Doctors.

Most medieval ideas about medicine were based on those of the ancient work, namely the work of Greek physicians Galen (129–216 CE) and Hippocrates (460–370 BCE). Their ideas set out a theory of the human body relating to the four elements (earth, air, fire and water) and to four bodily humours (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile). It was believed that health could be maintained or restored by balancing the humours, and by regulating air, diet, exercise, sleep, evacuation and emotion. Doctors also often advised risky invasive procedures like bloodletting.

Medical knowledge derived from antique theory was largely confined to monasteries and the highly educated. For ordinary people, especially those outside towns, it would have been difficult to access professional practitioners. Those in need of medical assistance might instead turn to local people who had medical knowledge, derived from folk traditions and practical experience.

Middle Ages Doctors

Medicine was basic and Middle Ages doctors had limited knowledge. Medieval doctors had no idea what caused the terrible illnesses and diseases which plagued the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages was devastated by the Black Death in England (1348-1350)which killed nearly one third of the population of England. The Middle Ages doctors were helpless. The underlying cause of many of the illnesses was due to the lack of sanitation. but Middle Ages doctors did not make this link until after the outbreak of the Black Death. The Middle Ages doctors had no idea what caused the Black Death - the best they could offer was to bled the patient or administer a concoction of herbs. There were no Antibiotics during the Middle Ages and it was almost impossible to cure illness and diseases without them.

1-The Black Death.

This one never gets old.

Among the medieval diseases the Black Death or the black plague was the deadliest. From 1346 until 1353 AD around 75 to 200 million people died of this disease. It was estimated that this disease had killed 1 in 4 people. It is believed that Black Death came to Europe on 12 trading ships that sailed from central Asia. These ships docked on the Italian seaports had sick and dead people onboard them. Although locals succeeded in sending the ships away, but it was already too late as most of the people had caught the disease. The infected people, then unwillingly spread the disease as they travelled from town to town. The black plagues consisted of three types of plagues i.e. bubonic, septicemic and pneumonia. Some people thought that these plagues were from God in order to punish them for their sins. These people arranged religious processions for forgiveness.

The consequences of this violent catastrophe were many. A cessation of wars and a sudden slump in trade immediately followed but were only of short duration. A more lasting and serious consequence was the drastic reduction of the amount of land under cultivation, due to the deaths of so many labourers. This proved to be the ruin of many landowners. The shortage of labour compelled them to substitute wages or money rents in place of labour services in an effort to keep their tenants. There was also a general rise in wages for artisans and peasants. These changes brought a new fluidity to the hitherto rigid stratification of society.

In England the immediate effects of the epidemic of 1349 seem to have been of short duration, and the economic decline which reached its nadir in the mid-15th century should probably be attributed rather to the pandemic recurrence of the plague.

The study of contemporary archives suggests a mortality varying in the different regions between one-eighth and two-thirds of the population, and the French chronicler Jean Froissart’s statement that about one-third of Europe’s population died in the epidemic may be fairly accurate. The population in England in 1400 was perhaps half what it had been 100 years earlier; in that country alone, the Black Death certainly caused the depopulation or total disappearance of about 1,000 villages. A rough estimate is that 25 million people in Europe died from plague during the Black Death. The population of western Europe did not again reach its pre-1348 level until the beginning of the 16th century.