Did the serfs in the late Middle Ages feel toward their ruling class as we now do toward ours?

[Stinky The Clown]

Times and places were different, but people were no less intelligent or aware.

[msongs]

1. intelligent yes, more superstitious and under the thumb of the church and ignorant by design....nt

[DJ13]

2. Sounds like the tea baggers

:rofl:

[sfwriter]

3. So... exactly like us...

[Odin2005]

4. Peasant uprisings were not uncommon.

[aquart]

5. In the Middle Ages there were reciprocal responsibilities.

The ruling class got its money and goods in exchange for protection in an otherwise lawless time...because central government basically didn't exist.

Our wealthy have no obligations of any kind.

On edit: In those times, leaders were called leaders because they led the battle, not viewed it from the rear. Noblemen had as hard a time reaching old age as everyone else.

[QC]

6. Here's a great example of how serfs felt about their lords:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=282769&mesg_id=282769

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

9. Whoa, that's excessive.

But only slightly.

[QC]

10. I agree with Franken--when placed in that context, raising the top marginal rate a couple of points

is simply not class warfare.

[JVS]

11. Nice avatar

[QC]

18. Yes, we used to talk about lefty stuff like class conflict here.

Believe it or not.

[JVS]

21. We also expressed approval for jokes and or humorous references to jokes.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-evidence-suggests-god-also-had-incredibly-bust,18133/

[QC]

22. Jokes are bad because sometimes they offend people. n/t

[QC]

24. I just realized I made a terrible mistake that probably has you confused.

I meant to reply to Stinky's post expressing approval of my story about peasants eating the lord of the manor.

I guess my reply to you didn't make much sense.

Sorry about that.

I do like your avatar, as a matter of fact.

[Stinky The Clown]

13. Ha! Good link!

[Dappleganger]

48. Whoa, that's righteous...

:toast:

[nadinbrzezinski]

7. While uprisings were not uncommon

no, they did not.

The reasons for the rebellions, for example in England, came late in the period only when things like the Enclosure Acts and the walling off of the commons started.

The social contract was this simple. You work the land for me, go to church and I protect you if we get attacked. Usually the revolts came when this social contract failed to be followed, or corvee labor became too onerous.

[EFerrari]

8. Sure they did. That's mostly what the Canterbury Tales are about,

what @ssholes rich, powerful people are.

[brewens]

12. Serfs weren't convinced that they would somehow get promoted

to the ruling class. The self made millionaire/billionaire story's are heavily promoted. While it's possible to do it your odds are really slim. It's actually zero for most people.
People that say they don't want taxes raised on the rich, because they hope to be rich some day, don't realize they will never see the real big money.

[RKP5637]

25. The ultimate fulfillment of a dumbed down society, "People that say they don't want taxes raised

on the rich, because they hope to be rich some day..." I'm known them and decades later they are still poor.

[brewens]

47. They don't want to lose all their lottery winnings to taxes. Or they

don't want to be screwed out of their inheritance by taxes. Never mind that the little bit they may inherit one day won't be subject to the inheritance tax.

[scheming daemons]

14. I disagree.. they were a LOT less intelligent

The Church and their lords made SURE they weren't literate or educated at all.


Their "awareness" about the possibility of a better life was nowhere near ours. They had no knowledge about what was happening in other parts of the world like we do.

They couldn't see that it was different anywhere else.


They also were extremely superstitious...almost child-like in their ignorance of basic science.

[RKP5637]

27. I bet we could easily find some teabaggers and RW religious nuts that are, "almost child-like

in their ignorance of basic science."

[Odin2005]

29. Don't confuse intelligence with knowledge

And they did have knowledge of things going on elsewhere, and many simple peasants went on quite long pilgrimages.

[Posteritatis]

41. Many, many, *many* more did not, though. (nt)

[csziggy]

31. Oh, I don't know - some had ideas about how things worked

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Xd_zkMEgkI

Actually, the social systems even at the bottom were reasonably complicated - and the spread of news was much better than you think. For instance, when Martin Luther began speaking against the Catholic Church, the news about his teachings spread very fast. Enough people had sufficient knowledge of the scriptures and of the church systems to fully understand the revolutionary nature of his ideas. And those ideas lead to an upheaval in the social systems that propagated across Europe rapidly.

[Fumesucker]

32. Intelligence and education are two different things..

It is possible to be intelligent and uneducated, it's also possible to be unintelligent and educated, I know people in both categories.

And your description of medieval peasants sounds remarkably like many modern Americans: No knowledge of other parts of the world, extremely superstitious, almost child-like in their ignorance of basic science.

What's truly ironic is that many Americans don't even understand the superstitions they claim to believe in, it's a world-class jaw dropper that American atheists and agnostics know more of religion than do religious Americans.

Medieval peasants at least had a fucking excuse for their ignorance, that is not true of modern Americans.

[raccoon]

49. I agree with some of what you said, however,

"Their "awareness" about the possibility of a better life was nowhere near ours."

Many people in the US aren't aware that the quality of life for the average citizen in more civilized countries where they have a national health plan and more of a social safety net, is better than the quality of life for the average citizen here.

[Davis_X_Machina]

15. Half of them loved their ruling class....

....with a real and enduring love. Go find Shakespeare's Henry V. Look at the common soldiers -- for every Williams, there is a Bates.

[EFerrari]

23. H5 isn't exacty a historical document and Shakespeare never belonged

to the lower class. He did, however, have to get by the Stationers censors in order for his work to be preformed in London. He was pretty good at that. :)

[Posteritatis]

28. He didn't exactly belong to the medieval era, either. (nt)

[EFerrari]

36. Right, the depiction of those characters when through his Elizabethan brain. n/t

[Davis_X_Machina]

46. Your basic ancien regime mindset....

...lasts pretty much unchanged right through the 19th century, and in some folks to this day.

Notions of privilege and deference don't just go away.

[Lagomorph]

16. With all the...

lawyers, anti-biotics and social welfare, a lot more people are living long enough to become grumpy old bastards.

[EFerrari]

19. LOL! For the win!

:applause:

[JVS]

17. It's nearly impossible to summarize the attitudes of people over a period of roughly 1000 years

There were times and places where the alternative to serfdom was horrifying. There were times and places where serfdom was an incredible hardship. There were feudal leaders who were popular and considered wise, there were others who were hated.

[RKP5637]

30. Gee, kinda like working for various corporations, some ... "who were popular and

considered wise, there were others who were hated."

I've worked in some of each...

[JVS]

34. I'd use mafia protection as a metaphor.

If you were in central France or in Italy, being a serf was probably an imposition that really didn't seem to have much of a payback, especially in the late years of feudalism.

On the other hand, if you were near the edges of civilization in areas adjacent to barbarians such as the Saxons or Huns, then you might consider yourself lucky to be part of the ordered society under the protection of the local aristocracy (which unlike in the late period actually was the military class of the society.)

[Posteritatis]

40. I like that metaphor. (nt)

[hulka38]

20. Man, I don't think you can compare the two scenarios.

I believe we have a serious situation but it's a mole hill comparatively.

[Posteritatis]

26. No less intelligent, certainly, but I don't buy that they were equally aware.

There was nothing close to our level of mass communication, of literacy as the default, the centuries of legal and philosophical traditions informing the ability of a collection of random people to even be having this discussion, and so on. I wouldn't dare argue for an instant that any random healthy person in the thirteenth or fourteenth century wasn't every bit as intelligent as any random healthy person today, but the most blighted Third World regions still have communications, connections and contexts that simply weren't there centuries ago.


(Ed. - typoes that completely reverse my argument are awesome.)

[EFerrari]

33. Well, technically, they did have centuries of legal and philosophical traditions.

And it may be that their family and community systems were more tightly knit than ours so those people weren't as much of a collection of random people as we are. You're right about literacy and mass communications but neither is really a reliable measure of how aware people are, cf your random tea klanner. These are the same people that fought and died for the right to have a Bible in their own language, remember? To take that kind of power out of the hands of the Church?

/grammar

[Posteritatis]

38. Yeah, I mean mainly that we have more centuries of same

We're sitting on top of the late medieval period, the Renaissance, and everything which followed those, each period of which had vast, far-reaching impacts on how people living through and after them viewed the world. None of those had happened in the medieval period yet except in the highest classes; at the time, the notion that someone like me, a descendant of coal miners and common soldiers, mattered in the system at all was deeply alien. Today, it's taken for granted as true and protected by solid systems of law and tradition which getting into the realm of a couple centuries deep by now.

J. Random Teabagger is likely as not to be deeply clueless, of course - as impolitic as it is to say so around here, there's certainly some dangerous exceptions - but even they would have at least a slight awareness of the broader world and events in it that would go far beyond what a medieval peasant would have. Remember, people then were living in a time where it would often take decades for trends or ideas to migrate across Europe and the Middle East, and even rushed messages among the leaders would be a matter of weeks or months. The most clueless freeper of these days is still literate enough to sloganeer across the intarwebz and can hear of events in the broader world at a speed that popes and emperors would give non-paired organs to have access to in the 1300s. Anyone who's put even the least effort into becoming engaged with the world, with their role in it, with their rights within it? They're even further along than that.

(Vernacular translations of the Bible are largely post-medieval as well; they started showing up "commonly" at the very end of the medieval period, and their definition of "common" would be a lot narrower than ours. Even a lot of the peasants' conflicts towards those end would involve being jerked around by at least local nobility.)

[JVS]

35. How much of our mass communication is true?

[Posteritatis]

39. Enough of it that you can carry that thought in your head.

That's better than what a medieval peasant - whose access to long-distance communication was usually literally nonexistent save for rumors spawned from rumors of rumors of long-past events - had by a vast amount.

Don't take that for granted.

I don't mean to come across as flippant here, even if it might sound that way. A lot of us do take for granted the implications behind the fact that we can even have conversations like this as average members of the states we live in, and compared to large swathes of human history those implications are staggering.

[Starry Messenger]

37. Peasant rebellions were common

They didn't have the bourgeoisie to explain why supporting the ruling class is pragmatic though...

[EFerrari]

42. They had church flunkies to explain the great chain of being.

Same difference.

lol

[midnight]

43. They at least had Robbin Hood..... Who are we going to get to be our Robbin Hood?

[raccoon]

50. Robin Hood wasn't real. nt

[Ozymanithrax]

44. In traditional medieval society there were three estates...

The Three Estates
Feudal society was traditionally divided into three "estates" (roughly equivalent to social classes). The "First Estate" was the Church (clergy = those who prayed). The "Second Estate" was the Nobility (those who fought = knights). It was common for aristocrats to enter the Church and thus shift from the second to the first estate. The "Third Estate" was the Peasantry (everyone else, at least under feudalism: those who produced the food which supported those who prayed and those who fought, the members of the First and Second Estates).

It always sucked to be the underclass.

Who are the "ruling class?"

[chollybocker]

45. The Serfs named Dennis were not fooled.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAaWvVFERVA

;)