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 ...
Just because something could have happened (theoretically) doesn’t mean it did happen. History doesn’t support this theory.
Just my cursory reading today doing those searches proves otherwise. They had a social and economic system and it worked in its way, in some ways probably better than what we have now.
Anyone with any power can always abuse their positions if they are immoral. Happens now all the time. If anything, morality now is infinitely worse.
I’m sure it was nice they could keep the family business alive (well, at least for a while) after returning from abroad. :-))
It cracks me up that wars are so much less damaging now, thanks to better technology — except among the Islamofascists and other terrorists, who continue to attack non-combatants, and as a consequence, need to be hunted down, killed, or if captured, executed in a large public venue as the crowd chants against them.
Another consequence of fewer casualties is that they are even more concentrated in the combat units. We don't do enough to make them as safe by technology or tactics or adequate force levels.
At a minimum we should treat the islamofascists who use the civilian population as shields when they aren't killing them need to be treated like the war criminals they are by summary tribunals and executions. But Zero and Holder give them American constitutional rights instead.
later read ping
don’t forget you kept what farm animals you had inside your cottage at night with you
also, the term "raining cats and dogs" comes from the animals falling through the thatched roofs
Marry the beest? Well, if her name was Wilde... ;-)
I’ve seen it written that the scorched-Earth tactics the Romans used to defeat Hannibal (so that he couldn’t live off the land during his sojourn into southern Italy) were never made whole, and everything looks kinda barren to this day. The footage I’ve seen has been WWII-era Italian campaign stuff.
Wholeheartedly agree. And not least because the left only cares about collateral damage done to the enemy.
Oh, I get it! Being a serf wasn’t half bad:)
Prepping us?
“Shut that bloody bazouki off!”
Think that might be the origin of the Bazouki Bashers? ;)
What’s the difference between an onion and a bazouki?
Nobody cries when you chop up a bazouki.
(old joke, works for any instrument, really)
The place was pretty well established, however, before my first known ancestors arrived there as transportees, in 1765.
That is one of the jokes that doesn’t have a short half-life, unless you really LIKE bagpipes... ;)
As I do.
The first time I heard the joke the instrument was banjo, but I first saw a t-shirt with the joke using bagpipes. :’) I love the pipes.
There was no shortage of water and mosquitoes. However, the water was no doubt too salty to be used for agriculture. This was a tidal area.
The Loehle graph at your link is very interesting. It clearly shows the drop in temperature at the Maunder Minimum and the other low sun spot activity periods. I presume we don’t have any really good data on sun spots during the Medieval Warm Period. If the west Antarctic ice cover is again going to melt to the degree it did during the MWP, how much sea level rise can we expect from that? While we may not be facing total disaster, some cities such as New Orleans, and countries like Bangldesh are in big trouble with only a few feet rise in sea.
On a separate note, I read that during the MWP the scattered lords would have a circular tower Donjohn(sp) in which everyone slept with a fire in the center and a few curtains for privacy. With the coming of colder weather, the lords began to build private heatable rooms. This caused a change in political dynamics. The lords were no longer so close to the people, did not undertand their problems as well, and became more “lordly” with attendant political problems. So we need to make our politicians sleep with their constituents!! ;-)
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