We are in modern-day London and we are in the heart of the city down near Westminster Abbey. And there's this wonderful circle there. Where you see Parliament, Big Ben, you see the river, and across the river, if you were to see that far, would be the former site of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre.
And it was the artistic side of the river throughout much of the early modern period on the side opposite that of Westminster. But right now we're in Westminster Abbey. And if you go to Westminster Abbey today, one of the things that you'll notice is that there are a significant number of people who are buried there. There are kings and queens, Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen is there buried next to Mary, Queen of Scots. in a little bit of political theater after both of them had died, because Elizabeth I had actually had Mary, Queen of Scots, put to death for...
treason, and now they lay there side by side in death. Henry VII is buried on the far end, Henry who gave us the Tudor dynasty, the father of Henry VIII, and therefore the father-in-law to each of Henry's six wives, though he was already dead before any of them had ever met Henry. And as you enter Westminster Abbey, off on the right, on the floor, and all along the walls, is an area that we know as Poets'Corner.
And Poets'Corner really is an amazing place. There are a number of English poets buried there, and as time wore on, those who inevitably are not buried there will often have a commemorative plaque placed instead. Those buried include Alfred Tennyson, Edmund Spencer, Laurence Olivier, the great actor from the 20th century.
Kipling, Charles Dickens, and Robert Browning. Memorials are there for a number of other poets and writers. Just in 2013, in fact, there was added, finally, a plaque commemorating C.S. Lewis. But in Poet's Corner, the first and by far, at least according to most accounts, the most important person to be interred there in Westminster Abbey was Geoffrey Chaucer.
Chaucer was a 14th century poet and an author and a scholar who had given us, above all, Canterbury Tales, a book that today continues to be read by students and by scholars in an effort to understand what the medieval world was like, as well as to understand Chaucer and his poetic brilliance. And one of the things that Geoffrey Chaucer gives us in the Canterbury Tales is A real kaleidoscope picture of the kinds of people that were alive in the Middle Ages. The kinds of everyday sort of folks. Now there are clergy there as well, but there are also lay people of a number of different stripes.
And what's so amazing about Canterbury Tales is that none of these figures, or at least very few of these figures, really conforms to a bland stereotype. Take, for example, the wife of Bath, the one that many love to talk about, one of the more salacious characters because of her somewhat bawdy tales that she tells on the way. But the wife of Bath is a wealthy widow, and at least in Chaucer's tale, she bucks the trend of seeking another husband, and she's very much on her own two feet, and she knows it.
And Trosser does give some stereotypes here and there. The miller, for example, is a drunken fool. He's sort of debauched, he is bad with his finances, and he cheats people out of their money.
And there is also the honest plowman. The man from the fields. Not from the urban center, or from more of the village life like the miller, but the man of the fields, the plowman. And if we were to sit down and read Canterbury Tales today, what we would discover is that medieval life was more varied and more rich and more interesting than many of the stereotypes of the medieval world that we currently have.
And it really is a case in point that if Trosser, this medieval poet, the greatest poet in the English language, can sit down and write a colorful portrait of all of the different characters and all the different stripes, in varieties of lay life and clerical life from the wealthy to the middle class to the poor. If he can describe all of this variety in the Middle Ages that he is a part of, how much more ought we to look into the past and look into the Middle Ages and appreciate the rich variety of day life, faith, marriage, and all the things that comprise life in the Middle Ages. And so in this lecture, we're going to be looking at everyday life, because as we begin this lecture, we are now into the high Middle Ages.
We're now past the year 1000. And we're beginning to notice a number of changes in the culture, a number of changes in medieval life and faith, that were not present as far back as, say, Charlemagne, and certainly not as far back as Constantine. So we're going to pause for a while, and we're going to look at lay life, and we're going to sort of contrast that life, the everyday life of the farmer, the peasant, the tradesman, and the guildsman. And we're going to contrast that with what it was like to have been a noble. What was day-in and day-out life like?
And we can begin by saying just a few things about what we're getting into with the High Middle Ages. After the year 1000, we are noticing a number of changes in the Middle Ages as a whole. First and foremost is the obvious point that the first millennia of the Christian world is now over.
For a thousand years, roughly, there has been a Christian world. Lots of ups and downs, lots of persecution, followed by political triumph, followed by missionary activity, followed by innumerable other things for the first thousand years. And as we move into the year 1000, what we find is that for the first time, the Christian world has really worked its fingers and worked its way down into all levels of society. By no later than 950, all levels of society that have been conquered by the Christian world, by Christian kings, have now more or less adapted and accommodated themselves to the Christian religion.
Now, there's no way ever to know how sincere, how faithful people were. There simply are no demographics that we can pull out. But what we do know is that by the year 1000, what we begin to see is innumerable cultural changes that appear to signal a significant buy-in or a significant adoption of the Christian faith at all levels of society.
Moreover, by the year 1000 and all the way down until the year 1300, the number of things that were ravaging and plaguing the Christian world, or just the Western world in general, began to subside. After the year 1000, you see significantly fewer numbers of invasions and wars and the sort of calamitous things that we saw in the early Middle Ages. The culture just seems to settle down for a period of time.
We see dynasties and kingdoms more or less become rigid and set. Disease, famine, these kinds of things all begin to subside. And there are a number of reasons for this, and we're going to go into some of them in the next lecture on the three estates. But by and large, what you have to realize is that from 1000 to 1300, you have essentially a golden age of the Middle Ages. This is true intellectually.
This is true in terms of technology. This is true in terms of health and prosperity and all the things that drive society. You see a flourishing of these things during these 300 years.
The first thing we want to talk about is faith life in the high Middle Ages. Now, first and foremost, we have to disabuse ourselves of a few popular misconceptions. Faith in this day and age was not necessarily a situation of dumb, illiterate, moronic, half-hearted pagans who have been sort of imposed upon by the Catholic Church. That myth of the Middle Ages has long been developed since the Renaissance, since the Enlightenment, but it is simply not true.
The fact remains is that the Church was always aware of the fact that it could not coerce faith, that its goal was rather to preach and to teach and to educate. Now, it had a monumental task on its hands. It had significant numbers of people who were illiterate or who were simplistic in their general outlook.
But don't mistake being illiterate with necessarily being stupid, because one of the things that historians have noted for a long time is that people in a preliterate age, in an age that is still uneducated... we might say, an oral tradition culture, where there are still stories being told again and again, where the recounting of tales, where memory in general is stronger than it is in our modern age. In those worlds, people retain a great deal more in their minds and in their memories than we're used to.
Modern historians of technology have often commented on the fact that as our technology has gotten stronger, which is a good thing, but as it's gotten stronger, one of the ancillary results of that is the fact that the modern person, you and I, tend to worry a great deal less about memorizing anything. The idea that we're going to hold much of anything in our head for very long, lists or bits of poetry or names and dates. Increasingly, simply by the fact that we could look them up in a flash, our memories are a bit weaker.
We don't put a high premium on memorization. Well, in the ancient world and in the medieval world, without these things, and often without the ability even to write them down, you do see a number of people who have pretty staggering memories by comparison of ours today. We see, for example, in the troubadour tradition, those who would go around singing tales and recounting poems and all these kinds of things.
At times, we see them being able to recount and recall and retell long, poetic narrative stories that, frankly, boggle the mind sometimes. They could walk their way through them. They could recount them.
They could recite them. What does this mean for biblical literacy and faith? Well, simply put, those who were at the lay level, those who were involved with church, very often relied on their memory for the things of the faith, for passages of Scripture and these kinds of things. Lacking the ability to read the Bible itself is not a good thing, but they made up for it in their own way. And I do want to also say that the authoritarianism of the Middle Ages is not itself the problem of the church.
Now, when we study the Reformation at some later date, it is of course the case that there arose an abuse of power in the late medieval church, that popes and bishops and clergy, for lack of a better word, lorded it over the laity. and really kind of put structures around lay life that were not natural. We see this in Luther's life where whenever he mounts a challenge against some of the abuses and corruptions of the church, he is essentially told to shut up and sit down, that it's not his place ever to question his superiors.
However, not all authority is bad. In a world where there is some uncertainty at the lay level as to what is true and what is right, It is not a bad thing for them to seek out the authorities of the church to understand the faith and the scriptures. And we're going to say similar things when we get to the authoritarianism of the political regime.
But in this case, when we're looking at the church, from the early church on into the Middle Ages, it was just simply commonplace to know that if you needed to know what the faith was, if you needed to know right from wrong, if you needed guidance, just simply go to the church. Go to your pastor, go to your priest. It was a hierarchical world.
And simply because later generations and later centuries will abuse that power and that hierarchy doesn't necessarily mean that everyone in the church is basically being drummed upon. You don't have to take 500 years of church history from 1000 to 500, or even going back maybe to 500 to 1500. We don't have to take 500 or 1000 years and simply consign it to the flames. There were honest, Christ-loving people then.
who sought the faith. There were good priests and pastors. There were good bishops. And of course, there would be abuses, just by the way, as there are abuses in the modern church.
But that doesn't cause us to rebel and say that the modern church is apostate, and therefore, we're going to go our own way. And the faith of the everyday person in the high Middle Ages was pretty ritualistic in some senses, but not overly ritualistic in the sense of simply being about ritual and form and lacking any true faith. The Middle Ages, for example, was big on the sacraments.
In the noble houses, for example, often when one arose in the morning, you began the day with Mass. You began the day with the Eucharistic service. And then from there, you went and had your morning meal. Noble houses had chaplains. Church services and devotional life were part of the fabric of the Middle Ages.
One did not have the issue that we maybe sometimes have today of having periods of time where we become very religious, say on Sundays, and other periods of time where we sometimes wonder, are we actually acting Christianly throughout these days? We today maybe struggle with the difference of getting Sunday into Monday, of the Sabbath and the rest of the week thereafter. In the Middle Ages, they don't really suffer from that as much. If anything, the church and church life and devotional life, and the Eucharistic sacramental services always seemed to pop up here and there.
There are innumerable holidays and feast days and memorial days of Christ and the church and these kinds of things. It was just simply part of the rituals of life. And so when we look at faith in the Middle Ages, in the high Middle Ages, from 1000 to 1300, we do see a very personal and well-attended to faith.
So if we turn our attention now to the issue of everyday life and work, there are a couple of features of high medieval life that are unique to that period of time versus, say, the way we live and work today. One of the most important factors of the early Middle Ages is that, by and large, People lived in an agrarian world. Most people lived in farms, but not the kind of farms we're used to today, where people live essentially out on their own. And because of the ease of technology, they're able to plow and harvest lots of food for themselves, and then through cars and trucks and these kinds of things, cart them or carry them on into a place to sell them.
For a farming life, or an agrarian life in the early to high Middle Ages, very often what you would have is a group of people, a group of families, all clustered around a village or a town of maybe a couple of hundred, maybe at most a thousand. Now, there are always exceptions to the rule, but the ideal town or village in the Middle Ages was a group of families or clans clustered together, sharing in some cases a certain amount of pasture land, and they would all take their animals out there to pasture. Life was very interwoven with each other. And in general, it was pretty distant from the urban life of either the classical period or of the modern period. There were urban centers.
There were large cities. But large in the Middle Ages is not large by our standard. The city of London in the Middle Ages sometimes hovered around 50,000 people.
The bigger cities in Europe, places like Florence and other places in the Netherlands, would hover somewhere between 100 and 130, maybe 140,000 people. We are not talking about classic antiquity, where urban life was supreme. Take, for example, Rome, which at times got upwards of a million people. Now, the way Rome sustained this is, of course, through widespread slave labor.
They had slaves out on the farms doing all their work and then bringing the food to them. Very often, it was not much of a challenge, or at least it was relatively simple compared to the medieval world. What happens in the medieval world, though, is you have two different types of workers. You have freedmen, and you have serfs.
Now, a freedman is very simply someone who works on his or her own. They are not bound to any lord, and they are not bound to any particular parcel of land. And these freedmen would be, as the word implies, free.
They could grow what they... wanted and they could harvest as they pleased. Now, they weren't isolated folks. They would very much take part in city life or village life. They would share, they would sell things, they would be consumers on all kinds of levels.
But a freedman is in contrast to a serf. And we mentioned at the end of the Vikings lecture that there was a rise of feudalism in part as a result of the expansion of military castles and... soldiers out into the peripheries of certain lands in an effort to stave off invasion.
Well, one of the things that a nobleman brought or that a soldier brought whenever they took over a piece of land was the concept of serfdom. A serf was someone who was not their own property. They were not free.
In many ways, serfdom is an extension or a watered-down version of Roman slavery. A serf would be tied to a lord. They would owe a certain amount of service to them, either a certain number of work days.
The land that the serf harvested on was not their own land. It was the land of the Lord. They were responsible for rents, and the Lord had certain rights to a certain percentage of every harvest.
And in the kernel of this idea of serfdom, you see lots of legislative taxation policies that, for centuries, all the way down until today, will still be a part of government. So, for example, if two serfs got married, it was pretty common that the lord would have something called a marriage tax. At the death of the serf, there would be a death tax.
And of course, in essence, we still pay some of these taxes today to our government. Now, one of the things that you have to understand about serfdom is that if you were to ask a serf, would you rather be a freedman or a serf? And in some cases, if you were to ask a freedman, would you rather be a serf or a freedman?
The overwhelming response, maybe not the unanimous response, but the overwhelming response would be that they desire to be serfs. Why is that? Well, it really raises some of the issues or the differences between the Middle Ages and our own day.
We prize freedom. We prize limited restraint whenever possible. We don't like government telling us what to do, these kinds of things, at least not in certain areas of our lives. We certainly wouldn't want the government telling us where to work, and we certainly wouldn't want the government pinning us to a piece of land so that we are forever bound to that piece of land. But if you think of...
serfdom in the negative sense, of course, as an extension of the slavery of the Roman world, but in the positive sense as tenure, much in the same way certain jobs, professors, for example, or teachers or union workers fight for the right to have tenure. Well, what is tenure? Tenure is security. It is the ability to know that no one can downsize you out of a job, that you are there permanently. There was in the concept of serfdom Not this hyper-tyrannical sense that a lord could do what he wanted with his own people.
He couldn't kill them indiscriminately. He couldn't, you know, do all kinds of harsh penalties to them just willy-nilly. But from the perspective of the serf, to be permanently affixed to a piece of land and to be permanently affixed to a lord meant that you and your family had stability. So in other words, the modern world prizes freedom, but we prize freedom because we know that there are more options out there besides the one we might have been born into.
We can get in our cars and drive to another city, put down roots and start over. But imagine you're in the Middle Ages and the crop fails and the Lord says, okay, you're gone, I'm going to bring in some new serfs. Or if you just decide to up and leave yourself and try your hand somewhere else, the chances are you're not going to find anything within a real reasonable distance of yourself.
And he very well might end up being a beggar. And so for the serfs, and for the Middle Ages as a whole, the concept of authority was always wrapped up in the idea of security. To have a lord was to have security. Now they knew what tyranny was, and they knew what abuse was. But in their minds, and this was repeated all throughout the Middle Ages and on into the Reformation, tyranny is not the opposite of freedom.
The opposite of tyranny is a good king. to have a good lord, to have someone who cares for you and looks after you, and make sure that you have everything you need to harvest your crops and that you are never lacking for things. And so, while we can find abuses in the Middle Ages, and while we certainly wouldn't want to be serfs ourselves, you have to realize that when we're dealing with medieval people, you're dealing with very much people that wanted this kind of thing, at least out in the agrarian world where things were precipitous at times.
The other thing that we can look at is urban life. Now, we've already said that urban life wasn't essentially the dominant form of existence in the Middle Ages. But as the Middle Ages go from the early to the high Middle Ages and down into the late Middle Ages and early modern period, which is essentially the Reformation, what happens is you have a return to urban life. And so it's good right now to sort of sketch out what an urban life looked like in the Middle Ages, just so that you're aware. Well, an urban...
existence in this day and age would have been a really good experience. The main thing, as we'll say in just a second, that distances us so much from the Middle Ages are the concepts of hygiene and medicine. We are so used to being worried about germs and viruses and dirt and all the things that we know cause illness. We're also very concerned about removing our human waste and other unsavory elements from our city. I always joke that we don't really care that much about a plumber until we need one.
Suddenly there's big issues in the house, and we suddenly feel as if we ourselves are back in the Middle Ages. But before I get to the negative bits, the nasty bits about the urban life, let me go ahead and paint a more positive picture. Urban life would have been bustling with sounds and sights and smells.
It would not have been bland or boring. The people would not have been dirt-besmudged, kind of skinny, scrawny peasants working their fingers to the bone 18 hours a day. Urban life was relatively quaint.
If you had made your way into urban life... By and large, you are part of either the wealthy class or you are part of the upper middle class to middle class. And that is because you essentially purchased most of your goods. You didn't grow them yourself.
And so you had some means of income to do this. So walking down an urban city in the Middle Ages, you would see all kinds of shops and taverns and people selling things out of their house. Very often a house of, say, an artisan, someone who was doing hand-carved crafting ornaments that you might decorate your home with. Well, that artisan would work out of his...
essentially his ground floor of his house. He and his family would live upstairs. And so as you pass down the street, you would see his wares out on a big display and you could potentially buy them right then and there, straight out of the home.
Those of you who have ever been to the city of York in England, or if you ever happen to go there, you could actually go see essentially a medieval street in existence even down to this day. The street is called Shambles. And yes, this is where we get the word something being shambled or something being in shambles.
If you go down the street, all of these ancient houses are leaning almost against each other at times. If you try to see if anything has a perfect right angle, you're not going to find one very often. And even to this day, if you walk down the street, you'll see people who are essentially mimicking the way medieval life would have been in the Middle Ages.
They open their shops, they open their doors, sometimes the windows are open and you can see the things you might buy as you walk down the street. This very much would have been medieval life. And so it would have been rich. It would have been full.
There would have been all kinds of things that were wonderful going on in a medieval urban context. One of the other more interesting elements of urban life in the Middle Ages was the guild system. Guilds in this day and age were things that protected artisans and allowed the artisans to train up another generation of craftsmen.
And there would be guilds for everything. In Italy, for example, one of the major areas that produced cloth. There weren't just guilds for cloth making in general, but rather there were guilds for every level of the cloth making process.
There was a dyer's guild, there was wool manufacturing guilds of different varieties, and it goes all the way up until the rank of tailor or the bolters and these kinds of things. Now the medieval guild is something like a cross between a union and a fraternity. These people were social together, but they were also designed to ensure conformity and harmony. and a consistency of product. So what would happen is if your family decided that you were going to become a blacksmith, that this was maybe your father's profession and you were going to take this on.
Well, initially you would be apprenticed into a guild of blacksmiths and you would apprentice for a period of time. You would learn the ropes. In the case of blacksmithing, you would learn the bellows.
You would learn the hammers. You would learn the tongs. You would learn all the things that it took to make something with metal. After a period of time of being apprenticed, And usually an apprentice was somewhere between the age of, say, seven or eight, all the way up until early adolescence, in the early teens.
At that point, after you've really learned the craft, you would become a journeyman. And a journeyman is someone who knows what they're doing, they can craft just about anything. And in most guild workshops, what would happen is the master of the workshop would leave the vast majority of the labor to his journeyman.
The journeyman would do... most of the work and the master would sit back and, as we like to say, he would supervise, which could mean do nothing at all. But very often the master was there to maybe put the finishing touches on things, maybe to ensure quality along the way, these kinds of things.
But he was also training the journeyman as he rose up. And then finally, after a period of time of being a journeyman, you would craft your own piece entirely on your own. So in the case of Blacksmith, maybe you craft... a sword or a shield or stirrups, something that would be useful and sellable in your particular city. And this piece that you would make as a journeyman would be called your masterpiece.
And this is where we get the word masterpiece. Now for us in modern English, masterpiece means the supreme thing that you make above all else. It is the highest craft that you've ever done in your entire career or life. Well, in this case, masterpiece actually means a bit of the opposite. A masterpiece would be something that you bring to the guild, you would submit it to them, and they would expect it for quality, but also, more importantly, they would inspect to make sure that you weren't outdoing the other guild members.
A masterpiece, in other words, had to be good enough to be a master, but not so good that you ended up trumping the others and becoming the sole person that people came to for blacksmith work. You needed to conform, you needed to be part of the union. And so your masterpiece was good enough, but not too good.
And once you pass the masterpiece level, you are now a full member of the guild, and you are now a master yourself, and you could potentially open your own shop. Now, the importance of these guilds is not simply just for the sake of the history of it, but the guilds will become a major player in breaking down serfdom and some of the economic policies of the Middle Ages as we move closer to the early modern world. As we'll see in the next lecture, in fact, guilds actually become riotous in Italy in the 14th century. They end up challenging the status quo, and they end up rebelling.
But in terms of right now, particularly in the high Middle Ages. As you walk down that urban street in the Middle Ages, what you would be passing would essentially be guildsmen shops, master shops of various stripes. So maybe you're passing by the distiller. Maybe you're passing by the miller.
Maybe you're passing by the blacksmith. Maybe you're passing by the clothmaker, the dyer. On the outskirts of town, because of the unsavory smell, you'd have the butcher, and so on and so forth.
And so at the end of it, what you have is a very bustling... Busy, very complex life in the urban world in the Middle Ages. And lastly, we want to talk about marriage and death in the Middle Ages.
Now that's a bit of a strange thing to bring together, marriage and death. But if you think about it, marriage and death are the two most important ways that a society handles its culture. How does one get married?
How does one choose a spouse? What is entailed in marriage? What is assumed in marriage?
And in death... How does one go to one's death? What is the life expectancy? How is medicine applied?
These kinds of things. And we could say a few things about this. In terms of marriage, medieval marriage was very similar to modern marriage, but it was also quite different in many respects. The ways in which marriage was different from today in the past is that marriage was principally an economic consideration in the Middle Ages. Now, this is true of much of the ancient world, but when you look at the Middle Ages, very often the bride and groom would not have had a lot of say in their choice for a spouse.
Now, again, if you're living in a village or a town, it's not as if the gene pool is a large ocean of people. And so very often what would happen is your families would put husband and wife together. Now, at the front end, the biggest negotiation was the payment owed. Now, in this case, the biggest gift was the dowry, which is a gift that the husband and the husband's family paid to the wife after consummation of the marriage. For this reason, it was sometimes called the mourning gift.
Now, there are some misconceptions about this. It's sometimes said that the dowry was paying the wife's family for the loss of a childbearing daughter, as if she's chattel, as if you're somehow buying her. But, in fact, that's not what a dowry was.
A dowry or a mourning gift was payment to the wife, usually in land or in money, a certain amount of livestock, these kinds of things, which would secure the wife. in the inevitability that the husband dies. In other words, the husband, his property might very well be tied up or secured through the family clan as a whole. This is certainly true in the nobility. A young prince further down the line might have very little recourse to his own property, and more importantly, that property or that money might not very well pass to the wife if he were to die.
It might be reabsorbed into the family. Land is precious, and so lots of families do not want to see their land. parcel it out and divided and divided again by sons and daughters and sons and daughters, etc. And so what would happen is a dowry would be a payment to a wife saying, I will buy your security.
If I die, you will have this security here. And so there is an economic transaction piece that is a part of medieval marriage that is a bit different from modern marriage. And very often, marriage contracts, marriage alliances would break down at this point.
The family of the bride would do everything they could to ensure that their daughter was not left out in the cold. Death was a very real concern. And so they would make sure that she would not be getting shortchanged, and that she would be secure if the husband would die in battle or in disease. And so again, far from being chauvinistic or treating women as chattel, the dowry system was actually an effort to ensure the security of women.
Now what about life expectancy? Life expectancy was quite abysmal at this day and age. And again, now we're entering into a period of discussion in which the Middle Ages looks nothing like today. Imagine a world without painkillers.
Imagine a world without aspirin, even. Certainly not any antiseptic. Nothing like narcotics if you are in serious pain.
Surgery would not be done with a patient asleep. They'd be very much awake and very much screaming. childbirth without epidurals or even antiseptics.
When you look at medicine and health in the Middle Ages, you are looking at a period of time that is doing its best, but its best simply is primitive. They know so very little about health. They know so very little about the internal workings of the body.
Health was a significant issue, and health in the Middle Ages affected women very often more than men, and it also affected children. The life expectancy for a child born in the Middle Ages was that you had essentially a 50% chance of making it into adulthood, sometimes much less. Sometimes it was as much as 60% or 70% had died in a region.
It would not be uncommon for a woman, for example, a wife, to have as many as 10 or 12 children, and only two make it to adulthood. Most children die between the ages of newborn and four, roughly 50%. They simply don't make it. If you make it to the age of four, then...
making it to the age of 12 is roughly another 50% off of that, maybe less, depends. And so at the end of it, children died at a staggering rate. Women also died at a staggering rate, often in childbirth.
Just think of any of the complexities or the issues that might arise during birth, and then imagine not having any hospital, any understanding of blood pressure, of hemoglobin, of all the things that can affect mom and baby. And you're going to realize that you're living in a very, very primitive world. And so in the Middle Ages, it would not have been uncommon for a man to have to marry several times. His wife dies, and he marries again. Now, the myth of this, of course, is that people believe that if you get into your 20s, that you're probably going to die over the age of, say, 35. And there are stats out there that point out that the average life expectancy was to the age of 40. Well, the actual fact is, if you made it into your 20s, you had a very good chance of living quite some time, with the exception of war or famine or pestilence.
If you made it into your 20s, again, if you were one of the lucky few, then you had a very good shot of making it, say, to the age of 60, 65. Assuming, again, that you had healthy living and no accidents or disease. But death was very common in the Middle Ages. In fact, it was all too common.
Now, we simply don't know the psychology of the Middle Ages. Did they see this as abnormal or did they see this as just simply the way things work? I'm relatively convinced that they were not depressed emotionally or psychologically because of death.
That they took it as part of the fall, part of sin in our lives, and that if everyone essentially is going through the same thing, it's very hard for people to rise up and say, this is unfair. In our modern world, we only really rise up and find death to be a real challenge when someone is taken away from us early. But at the end of it, we don't have any real strong evidence that the medieval man or woman saw death as somehow depressing. It was simply a fact of life.
By and large, early death, frequent death, was part of life. And so, in the end, when we look at the Middle Ages, we see a different picture than might have been in our minds when we were taught medieval history as children or as college students. On the one hand, it's more rich. It's more varied.
There's more color on that portrait than there might have been before for many of us. Still, it is a foreign world. Death is always around the corner, much more so than for us today.
Famine was a real concern. Disease, hygiene, sewage on the streets, these kinds of things, meant that if we had gone back in the Middle Ages, many of us would have looked for the first ticket back to the modern world.