A Time of 'Incredible Violence' Historian Gives Readers Glimpse of Medieval Life

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http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/historian-ian-mortimer-describes-everyday-life-in-the-middle-ages-a-842820.html



Historian and author Ian Mortimer: "There was real filth and stench in the streets until less than two hundred years ago."


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Mortimer recently met with SPIEGEL for an interview at his favorite pub, the White Horse Inn. But it wasn't the next chance to get tipsy that attracted the author -- it was the fact that the inn is more than 200 years old. "We are sitting in the middle of history here," he said. Sipping his coffee, he was ready to begin the interview.

SPIEGEL: Readers of your book about the Middle Ages could be forgiven for coming away with rather starry-eyed images of the period you describe: The loudest noise to be heard was the chiming of the church bells, and stopping for a chat on market day was a firmly observed ritual. Was all well with the world then?
Mortimer: Well, it was also a time of death, disease, suffering and incredible violence. Both of us would probably be dead by now -- half the population didn't live past the age of 21. If you had a toothache, the doctors would explain to you that little worms were tunneling into the enamel of your teeth. On the other hand, this was also an age that saw the building of stunning cathedrals, and a time when Shakespeare took literature to new heights.

SPIEGEL: Your book, though, doesn't tell the reader much about those things. Instead, you give us an enormous amount of everyday detail about the Middle Ages. But why exactly do I need to know what kind of toilet paper a particular earl used?

Mortimer: It's about gaining an understanding of what the human race is actually like. I believe we can gain a much deeper understanding by looking back in time. Humans are unbelievably adaptable. As a group, we contended with the plague in the 14th century and with the terrible flu in the 16th century. We're extraordinarily creative, even under enormous pressure.

[gtar100]

1. If most people died before the age of 21, then essentially the country was populated

mostly with children and teenagers. That might explain a lot of the irrationality. Imagine high school not as a time in your life but the way life actually was.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. Yes, I've seen similar things with regard to happenings in medieval Japan

The high school-like scheming among the court ladies, the pointless wars of the samurai. When you read the literature of the period, you realize that the court ladies and the emperor and empress are at most in their early twenties (because emperors were forced to abdicate after fathering a couple of sons who could then be controlled by their maternal grandfathers) and that many of the samurai are between 14 and 18.

Of course, not everyone died young. The oldest people lived as long as our oldest people. What kept life expectancy low were infectious diseases, injuries that couldn't be healed with existing techniques, and childbirth. Those three things killed a lot of young people in a way that doesn't happen in industrialized countries today. If you got cancer, all you could do was to start planning your funeral. If you had a heart attack, you died.

If you could survive into middle age, you had a good chance of living to be quite old, because you were obviously tough and resilient. My great-grandmother was one of the five out of sixteen of her parents' children who lived to adulthood, and she and her youngest brother both lived well into their eighties. There's no way of how long her other surviving siblings might have lived, because they stayed in Germany and were killed during World War II when they would have been in their fifties and sixties.