The simple and obvious answer is, people were far more rugged and resilient back then. They had to be.
I remember as a child looking at my grandfather in awe. He was an old man. Obviously. But, his ability to easily handle harsh conditions. Manual labor. His attitude towards hard work under harsh conditions was amazing to me. My dad had many of those traits himself but, not to the degree my grandfather had.
It occurred to me, even as a boy, that we are getting much softer over the generations as we “progress” in providing ourselves through technology more and more comforts.
My grandfather was the catalyst for those thoughts. He simply amazed me with his rugged persona and his work ethic. He seemed almost like Superman to me in comparison to what I was used to seeing on a daily basis.
Adapt or die.
Using this same logic, it might be said that, in facing their own challenges, wild animals are a lot smarter than, for example, today's college graduates. Smarter in their own way of course.
When parents put barriers between their children and life's challenges, they make them less adaptable--they prevent their children from learning from learning "adaptability."
The other day I heard someone say that most depression and sadness is due to boredom. A challenging life is a lot of things but it certainly isn't boring.
We found a diary of Grandpa’s at the farm a few years ago. It’s south of Buffalo with harsh winters. He was a farmer and would deliver milk and food to be sold in Buffalo and Rochester — by horse and buggy.
The trip is two hours by car now in perfect weather. He was gone for days at a time in blizzards.
I just wanted to cry reading about this and other trials they dealt with in the late 1800s and early 20th Century.
Mom and my brother’s family live in the farmhouse now, and winters still are a problem. -15 yesterday morning and they lost power. I was freaking out, but Mom, who’s 98, was in great spirits. She’s been through worse.
Couple of things ....
Very fortunate to have ‘known’ both sets of my grandparents, all of whom had tough lives and who survived by working hard every day - the kids, my parents, had to pitch in as well - everyone worked for food & fuel - it was a matter of survival. My dad in particular had a more austere life on a farm in the Shenandoah Valley. We spent nights in the house as kids. There was ONE source of heat, a large coal stove down in what was a ‘family’ room next to the kitchen. It had a large table where the family gathered to eat, some chairs and an old couch. It was the one ‘warm’ room in the house & the farther you got from that stove, the cooler it was. Granddad had his rocker right in front of that stove.
When visiting, we slept upstairs in an unheated room. The bed was piled high with quilts. There was ice on the inside of the windows. When electricity finally came, there was a small electric heater that really didn’t take much of the chill out of the air and the bucket for use if you had to pee during the night was still cold as ice. I found out that if you put your clothes under the covers for a while, they warmed up & it was much more pleasant getting dressed for the dash downstairs to the coal stove to really warm up. As a boy, my dad slept in a small room that was above the family room - he would open the window and in the morning, sometimes snow would have drifted in.
My maternal grandparents had built a house when mom was a kid - the old house (that I never saw) had no modern source of heat, but the new one had an oil furnace in the basement. Hot air was blown up through a grate in the floor - the grate was in a hall between the kitchen and their bedroom downstairs. Granny also had an electric stove, but half of that stove was a ‘fire box’ - she could burn small pieces of wood, paper, etc. in it & that was a small source of heat in the kitchen. It was also great for warming up food.
There was another grate in the ceiling above the grate on the ground floor - the heat went straight up into the upstairs, but the only place it was really warm was to stand on that grate ... we kids loved to do that and get warm, before piling into bed with heaps of blankets so we could stay warm during the night.
I’ve done a lot of hiking in Shenandoah National Park. There are some cabin ruins still visible - those made out of chestnut logs have lasted a long time. What struck me, seeing these cabin ruins, is how very small the cabins were - basically one room with a stone chimney. When keeping warm is a struggle, the smaller the area you have to heat, the easier it is and with enough wood, I suspect they could stay fairly warm.
There was a time, even within my own memory, when people knew how to take care of themselves. They did not rely on the government to feed them, clothe them, entertain them, house them, or even provide them with entertainment. When winter came they owned blankets, heavy layer clothing, and had a pantry of food put away. Humanity is regressing. Sit back, prop up your feet, and watch civilization collapse.
At 94 my grandfather set out on foot with suitcase to walk to our house 65 miles away. He made about 25 miles, and got a ride the rest of the way. Stayed two days, and headed home on foot. He thought nothing of walking like that.
I toured a museum in Dublin years ago that had recreated the average person’s domicile during the Middle Ages. It was fascinating. I said to one of the docents that it seemed to me people had to concentrate primarily on where they would get their next meal. He said this was true. There were no grocery stores on every other corner, and you had better hope the market - if there was one - had vittles at all and those that you could afford.
Thanks everyone for the replies, kind remarks, and well-wishes, and Merry Christmas to all!
The short version is, they ate whatever was available, labored during the warmer parts of the year to put food into storage, and most obviously, experienced shorter life expectancy, high infant mortality, and were much more physically active than we all tend to be.
When the bubonic plague hit, it carried away a significant chunk of the population of Europe, but hit harder in some areas than in others. That led to the disruption of the feudal hierarchy via the disappearance of the labor force that supported them.
Labor became something for which laborers had to be paid, led to openly practiced trades, what we call private enterprise or even the gig economy.
It took a long time to die, but large off-limits ranges where poaching had been furtively practiced were opened up either for a cut, or de facto thanks to a lack of personnel to enforce the will of the local landed lord.
By the time of Liz I in England, these trades in England were under a burden of taxation. Shakespeare's dad wound up financially ruined by getting caught in the bootleg woolens trade (he was a glover and needed the skins).
It was called deforestation. Until coal was the accepted method of staying warm, wood was the preferred method of staying warm in mud huts for the peasants. We’re heading this way again. We are about to become serfs again. Serfs with high capacity guns.