Posted on 12/06/2010 1:36:58 PM PST by decimon
LONDON (Reuters) – Maybe being a serf or a villein in the Middle Ages was not such a grim existence as it seems.
Medieval England was not only far more prosperous than previously believed, it also actually boasted an average income that would be more than double the average per capita income of the world's poorest nations today, according to new research.
Living standards in medieval England were far above the "bare bones subsistence" experience of people in many of today's poor countries, a study says.
"The majority of the British population in medieval times could afford to consume what we call a 'respectability basket' of consumer goods that allowed for occasional luxuries," said University of Warwick economist Professor Stephen Broadberry, who led the research.
"By the late Middle Ages, the English people were in a position to afford a varied diet including meat, dairy produce and ale, as well as the less highly processed grain products that comprised the bulk of the bare bones subsistence diet," he added.
He said a figure of $400 annually (as expressed in 1990 international dollars) is commonly is used as a measure of bare bones subsistence and was previously believed to be the average income in England in the Middle Ages.
But the researchers found that English per capita incomes in the late Middle Ages were actually of the order of $1,000.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
People now are very arrogant - we believe that we live at the peak of society and civilization. In many ways, especially material goods it is true — but it is also possible that people of 1000 years ago could have many positive traits that we longer posess.
Rapid Refund with a sword or a bow & arrow.
Apparently even early western culture produced results superior to those of many ‘modern’ cultures today...from the perspective of this bigoted ethnocentricist anyway (is it a hate crime to say this...better call the Southern Poverty Law Center and ask.)
Medieval people in England didn’t have the exploitation and parasitism we have to deal with and they had their own money system, mainly tally sticks, which represented pure bargain and did not involve fractional reserve banking, any sort of impossible bargain paradigm, or our present system of lending money into existence. Ellen Brown’s excellent “Web of Debt” goes into this and it wasn’t just England, much of the rest of Europe was much more prosperous than we’d imagine.
Which was eminently sensible compared to the gentry who peed in the stairwells of the palaces.
Only in reverse.
Peasant #1: “Who’s he?”
Peasant #2: “He must be a king.”
Peasant #1: “How do you know that?”
Peasant #2: “Well he hasn’t got shit all over him, has he.”
I'm more inclined to accept the traditional definition as beginning with the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215 and ending with the death of Elizabeth I, the last Tudor monarch, in 1603.
During this 388 year period, there were a total of three monarchs who could be considered reasonable competent: Edward III (1327-77), Henry IV (1399-1413) and Elizabeth I (1558-1603). That's 109 years or 28% of the total. Edward III was, at best, mediocre and is makes the list of comparatively competent monarchs only because others in the same era (particularly his predecessor) were so bad. Take out his 50 year reign and you are left with only 15% or so of that era which has good leadership and even less considering a substantial part of their early reign was spent just cleaning up the messes left by their predecessors.
Many of the gains made by the average Englishman during the reign of Edward III were due to an abrupt rise in wages following the 1348-49 black plague which reduced the labor force by more than 30%. Supply and demand tends to do that!
Like modern Libtards, many historians defend the reigns of monarchs like Edward I and Henry VII and VIII because they maintained firm control on the country.
But said control was achieved at an extraordinarily high cost. Henry VIII, for instance, ruled a country of 2.5 million and sent 70,000 or so of them to the gallows or chopping block as a price of maintaining control. That's an execution rate of 2.8%! The United States would have to execute nine million Americans over 38 years to achieve a comparable scale of brutality!
In terms of international importance, from the death of Henry IV in 1413 until the Coronation of Elizabeth I in 1558, England went from a country having substantial holdings in modern-day France (Normandy, Burgundy, Picardy, Calais) to being a country flirting with extinction whom some saw the possibilities of survival dependent only by merging with France, Spain or some greater power.
bump
I read somewhere that when knitting was first invented, during the Middle Ages, it was illegal, because peasants could make their own clothes instead of using the loom owned by the local lord.
Thanks for the history lesson.
“You will be bound to the land of the local Lord.”
Great deal. If you’re a Lord.
wow
Then later on there were Guilds that were like unions but even stronger. They set the prices and decided who could work. The Guilds in London elected the mayor.
Fascinating period in history
If you believe that some humans are more evolved than others then Feudalism actually makes a lot of sense.
Yes, and firearms were outlawed from war because a common soldier was able to kill a knight with one. That wasn’t fair, knights were supposed to be immune to any weapons but those of other knights. Outlawing them didn’t work, however, as history well shows.
“It was certainly uncontaminated by cheese”.
Blessed are the cheesemakers.
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