This is less historical record than medieval propaganda piece.
I get that it was written as such but even the article at the beginning pretends it’s an accurate representation of what the king got up to and then towards the end tacitly admits it’s an idealized representation of how a king should behave.
This basically brings into question all of the actual details.
Did he go to church every morning ? Maybe it was deemed proper that he did but as the king he just skipped it - we’ll never know.
Likewise listening to commoners- maybe this was done for show with some well cleaned up subjects every so often , or maybe it was a genuine practice , we don’t really know.
> This is less historical record than medieval propaganda piece
I think you could make a good case that the title is a little sensationalistic, but you could pick at US civics class in exactly the same way (and not just in recent history). The branches of government we learn about fail to include (or at least emphasize) the fundamental role of regulatory capture, lobbyists, and opaque/undemocratic three-letter agencies in real-world governance. Not to mention the fact that even the founding of the country was based on high ideals that were highly caveat-ed ("all men are created equal" unless those men are property).
Regardless of the extent to which ideals are lived out in practice, to many people it's notable that those ideals are there at all. In my experience as a US citizens, most people educated here seem shocked to learn that there can be any ideals behind monarchy besides divine right of kings/"I am the state" [1].
Seems to really want to paint a picture of the king as a pious, diligent, man of the people, yet it only leaves me with the impression that what was intentionally omitted is the true nature of the man.
Just like any officially sanctioned biography of Trump would omit his late night reality TV binge watching, his gorging on fast food and his raping of children, this account embellishes Charles' best qualities while utterly ignoring his worst, so it is of no historical value whatsoever in terms of understanding who he truly was.
Given all the matters that a head of state has to attend to I would be surprised if they found time to go to church once a week, much less daily. Even with an on-site priest.
As for listening to commoners, I'll accept the possibility of kings that wanted to be accountable to their subjects. The problem isn't the king, it's the nobility. The nobles are going to be filtering the commoners that get to talk to the king, because the king isn't allowed to know any commoners directly. Hell, they might not even be able to speak the same language at all. England's kings all spoke either French or German for a long time, and French wasn't so much the language of France as much as it was the language that France's ruling class spoke[0].
Even if the king could understand commoners and had unfiltered access to them, it's not guaranteed that they could do anything with that feedback. Say, a peasant complained about what they pay to their lord. Does the king actually have the power to overrule the nobility? Will the nobility depose the king, or start a civil war that destabilizes the country?
The game everyone's playing is ultimately to convince subsistence farmers to "go big or go home" - i.e. to overplant and overproduce food, at the risk of crop failure, so that the state can seize some of that food and eat it themselves, nominally in exchange for "protection"[1] from rival states whose main difference is that their king is fake while yours is rightful. In other words: the king and nobility are wolves, the commoners are sheep, and it's bad form for predators to befriend their prey.
[0] At least until France erased their own minority languages in the 1800s and forced everyone to speak French, which I'm pretty sure counts as genocide
[1] Identical to the 'protection' paid to a mafioso
The author is Christine de Pizan, an Italian-born (Venice) French court writer [1].
Fun facts, Christine married at the age of 15, now will be considered by both Italian and French law as an illegal underage marriage. The marriage was, by all accounts, a happy one [2].
She had 3 children from the marriage to Etienne du Castel, (a royal secretary) for about ten years, remained widow after her husband's death.
Christine was Catholic and is often presented as one of the first feminists in history.
> For the sake of HN's guidelines (to assume good faith) I am assuming this was just you being curious and oblivious to the unintended undertones of your comment, but I'll humbly suggest going over it again.
Part of why I love Hacker News is exploring all the millions of ways people can sound like assholes without actually saying any bad words, or anything negative at all. It’s truly incredible to me and I never get tired of it.
It’s a fun fact because it’s different from current society, and it’s nice to highlight that something now viewed as abuse was not, at the time for her specifically, a traumatic situation according to her public records. Obligatory “just because it wasn’t traumatic for her doesn’t mean that wasn’t overwhelmingly the case for others”
> His meal was not long, for he did not favour elaborate food, saying that such food bothered his stomach and disturbed his memory. He drank clear and simple wine, light in colour, well cut, and not much quantity nor great variety. Like David, to rejoice his spirits, he listened willingly at the end of his meal to stringed instruments playing the sweetest possible music.
For me, the most curious thing here would be to know if a person in today's world in 5th percentile in wealth (i) would have (i) a larger life expectancy than a king in the 15th century, (ii) more food security, and (iii) more life opportunities.
Every time that I hear those stories from medieval times, as soon as I become fascinated by their tales and so on, I imagine how hard it would be to live there, even as a king.
Does someone know any reliable sources about that kind of comparison?
I've made it a hobby to compare my current standards of living to "When would this be kingly?" We've traded down so much on quality of products (and sometimes: quality of life) but making a conscious decision to "live like a king" in a lot of cases isn't that hard.
Simplest example? Indoor plumbing: Boom, 15th century king.
Silly example? I got my wife seven silk pillow cases one year as a Christmas gift. A bit spendy, but instantly "living like a king".
We don't have "the royal kitchens", but do have Door-Dash. We took a tour of a castle somewhere in Canada (probably Craigdarroch) and they had a bunch of sitting rooms and reading nooks with extra lights and stuff... Steal Those Ideas! You too can live like a king, you just have to rewind a century or two, and be strategic about the luxuries you pick.
I love this! It's really a mindset of taking seemingly common things that we take for granted, and reconsider them under a fresh look to appreciate how amazing they actually are.
I don't know how common it is, but having consommable water delivered at home, being able to take daily shower and just having to push a button to get rid of my shit, always leave me in amazed state. I wish every human could enjoy all these "commodities" and more.
I remember many years ago the Economist pointed out one of the Rothschilds died young of something that would have been readily solvable with penicillin, but no amount of money could get you something that didn't exist yet.
"No" on the second (king is never going to have to worry about food security, that's for the peasants)
And "life opportunties" .. bit of a divide by zero situation. As king, you technically have all the opportunities. But you can only do things which actually exist at the time. And you're bound by the social and religious conventions of the time, which you mess with at your peril. Doing so worked for Henry VIII but not for the various Georges. See, for example, the controversy over whether James 6 might have been gay.
Addendum: food security was assured, food choice was very restricted by modern standards. Remember the medieval period is pre-Colombian exchange, so no potatoes, no tomatoes, no peppers. Some spices, but a different range to what modern palates are used to. No refrigeration either, so you're limited to seasonal availability. In the winter that means you're eating a lot of root vegetables and bread, even if as king you're guaranteed a supply of fresh meat and fish (from the royal holdings dedicated to producing it).
This is where you get the memes about shocking medieval Europeans with a time travelling bag of Doritos: both the bag and its contents are completely impossible items for them.
Worth noting that durable items could be shipped long distance - precious metals, gems, textiles - but foodstuff shipping was more limited to high value density stuff like spices and the European wine trade.
Speaking of wine: no modern stimulants. No coffee, no tobacco, no weed, no cocaine, no opiates. No painkillers, no anasthesia. For all those situations, you have one option: alcohol.
A huge number of critical historical decisions were taken by people who would fail a brethalyser.
> No refrigeration either, so you're limited to seasonal availability.
Well, except for food preserved via pickling, salting, drying, smoking, fermenting, sugaring, and confit. Which makes for quite a long list.
Plus, various foods like grains, root vegetables, onions, and even apples could be stored for months using proper techniques. They didn't have the luxury we have of not paying much attention to how we store things and just replacing them when they go bad, so they became quite good at this.
>Plus, various foods like grains, root vegetables, onions, and even apples could be stored for months using proper techniques. They didn't have the luxury we have of not paying much attention to how we store things and just replacing them when they go bad, so they became quite good at this.
I would also expect them to have various special variaties of apples/pears that actually improved their taste with storage. For example a variety that was best with 2 months of storage, another one that was best after 6 months.
Then you have cheeses, yoghurts, milk. Those things could be available year round. One would expect the king of France to have quite a variety of cheeses at his disposal. Then we have meats prepared in a hundred different ways. From simple roasting, to gelling, pickling like modern hams. And so on.
Then we have various types of wild mushrooms. I wonder if the king ate wild mushrooms and who picked these mushrooms for him... Poisoning would be so easy to get away with if he did.
It would be tough without potatoes, tomatoes and peppers, but I think food-wise I'd be just fine (assuming money and power).
Yes, but also my understanding is that the preservation technique of that name involves much more salt than modern palettes are willing to tolerate, and also salt itself was much more limited in supply.
Despite this, salt as a preservative was indeed critical to civilisation.
> fermenting
True, and also I want to say "blessed are the cheesemakers" etc. here. :)
Also because salt itself was much more valuable back then you wouldn't have as much or even any salt in your fresh food so you use the "preserved in an intolerable amount of salt" food products with the unsalted food products to get a quite tolerable middle ground at consumption time. Mash potatoes and pickle bits mmm
Properly picked, as in preserved and can be stored ambient for extended periods, or "pickled" as sold in a supermarket where the small print says "keep refrigerated after opening"?
I have been told there is a huge difference between the two.
> pickling, salting, drying, smoking, fermenting, sugaring, and confit. Which makes for quite a long list
None of which preserves the taste/nutrition well for a wide range of foods like greens/fruits/vegetables, you the limits in seasonal availability don't get resolved
There's a difference of being a bougie bitch expecting to have fresh greens in the dead of winter with a meter of snow on the ground and being thankful you stored the fall's harvest in such a way that you have food to last until that meter of snow has melted. Maybe they could have utilized green houses earlier, but when did it become practical to make clear sheets of glass?
I don't know where the "no painkillers" meme comes from, but opium's been around forever and is among the easiest drugs to harvest: just lightly score the poppy seed pod and collect the latex. It was as known and available in the middle ages as in the ancient Greek world.
> Addendum: food security was assured, food choice was very restricted by modern standards.
Not by the standards of the world 5th percentile, as in the question posed. The 5th percentile today is mostly subsistence farming and doesn't have access to imported foods or own a refrigerator (though there probably is one in their local village, and they may well own a mobile phone).
It doesn't work for everything but clove act as a decent local painkiller. I once broke a tooth and cloves in my mouth made me go through the day until my appointment to the dentist.
Quite a few precursors to modern stimulants though, there were many Solanaceae (nightshade) variations in Europe, from harmless through high to deadly. Papaver somniferum (opium poppy) got about the place quite a bit (according to archaeologists at least.
Hemlock and henbane were both used as painkillers and dulling agents .. up to unconsciousness and death, depending on dosage.
Controversy... yeah... Historians have seen the mountain of evidence think one thing, and people ignorant of history who think he had something to do with their favorite version of the Bible know The Lord wouldn't have chosen a gay "author".
He wasn't gay, but his many male lovers might have been. :D
> For England, including the Kings of Wessex from Æthelberht on (the first I could find a birthdate for), and the Kings of England up to Edward IV, whose reigns extends to 1483 (and consequently into Modern Ages, if we take the usual date of 1453 - the fall of Constantinople - as the end of the Middle Ages), I found the average age of death of monarchs to be 44 years. (http://ideias.wikidot.com/reis-da-inglaterra-na-idade-media)
And very very importantly, this is taking the death ages of kings (i.e. people who lived long enough to actually become monarchs) compared to life expectancy at birth (i.e. people who lived long enough to be born).
Given that until roughly the 1700s infant mortality was brutal (according to [1] fully 50% of children died before reaching adulthood), this comparison becomes even starker, since average life expectancy of a crown prince at birth would be far lower (somewhere in their 20s).
This "average life expectancy in the ancient world" thing is nothing more than an illustration of when to pick the median over the mean because the data is skewed by outliers.
Except kings very frequently died for "good" reasons: being killed in battle, or by political opponents, or during hunting accidents, or victims of coups, or beheaded. As a leader, you lead your subjects into all kinds of battles and take all kinds of risks and today's politicians don't do that anymore.
Not that I have any direct knowledge, but I think a real king (either medieval or modern day) has a huge number of constraints on life opportunities. They have a lot of nominal wealth, but probably also too many obligations and duties (real or perceived) to just say, the heck with it, I'm going to be a full time traveling musician or rock climber or some such.
We've seen this recently in British and Japanese royal families. Some people just don't want it, and to get a normal life they have to leave the monarchy.
This is reminding me of folk tales where the king, prince or princess disguises themselves and goes among the commoners, but I can't name a definite example of the trope at the moment.
I assume someone in the 5th percentile of wealth is going to have very negative wealth which is only really possible in developed countries, eg an American medical student or a doctor who is part-way through paying off their loans, or someone suffering from massive credit card debt / car loans. (I think this isn’t really what you were thinking of though. I think the poorest people in the world still live, in many ways like medieval peasants except with much lower infant mortality and somewhat net food security)
where Figure 1 shows hunger consistently decreasing from the start of the graph in 2005 to somewhere around 2014, at which point it plateaus for a while and then starts increasing somewhere around 2019-2020.
My recollection is that by 2005 where that graph begins, hunger had been consistently decreasing for quite some time, but a bit of googling hasn't found anything that quite answers that question. I did find https://www.jstor.org/stable/40572886 (looking at data from 1930 to 1990) whose publicly-accessible abstract says that "the proportion undernourished has been in decline since the 1960s and that the absolute number has also declined in recent years".
So I think the truth is not "hunger has been getting worse for the last quarter century or so" but something more like "10 years ago, hunger had been improving for about half a century; the improvement stalled for about 5 years and over about the last five years it has been getting worse".
(Which is still bad news, as far as the present state of things is concerned, but a rather different sort of bad news.)
And malnutrition isn't only about lack of food, it's also about mediocre quality of food:
> Similarly, new estimates of adult obesity show a steady increase over the last decade, from 12.1 percent (2012) to 15.8 percent (2022). Projections indicate that by 2030, the world will have more than 1.2 billion obese adults. The double burden of malnutrition – the co-existence of undernutrition together with overweight and obesity – has also surged globally across all age groups.
Obesity will soon, if not already, become a major public health disaster in poor countries.
How do you explain lack of farming / infrastructure prior to colonialism? More or less all environments populated by sub saharans struggle with infrastructure. This is true before, during, and after colonialism.
I find the percentile measure terrible to technically mean 95% of the population, but is often colloquially understood the other way around. It's like German numbers, when people say five and forty to mean 45. The general population rejects needless complexity.
Couple of points on life expectancy: If you made it to age 15, it was likely you'd live to be 60-80. Life expectancy wasn't lower in the past because people died earlier, they just died as children at a much higher rate, but there are some important caveats. In King Charles V's day, a simple cut that today we would not even think twice about could prove fatal from infection. Add to that the common plight of royal families being extremely inbred (I'm not sure if this was the case for Charles V) and it is actually likely that most people alive today, regardless of wealth, would likely live longer than him.
Now, when you compare a low wealth person today to a peasant from the medieval era, if you remove child mortality, they likely had a similar life expectancy, although again, the modern human is more likely to have access to antibiotics, regardless of wealth--as others have mentioned, they just didn't exist back then.
With how many times you find: "horse and man fell to the ground", and "he smote him such a buffet", and "armed himself at all points", "hauberk covered in blood" and so on... I'd think that life expectancy wasn't exactly great...
Wasn't Arthur alone responsible for the untimely death of like a dozen kings? :)
I always question how accurate these types of accounts were. Even if she wrote this after his death, his successor obviously wouldn’t look too kindly on it being disparaging.
It reads a lot like those instagram/magazine profiles of "I get up at 7am and eat healthily" (author actually gets up at 9am and eats junk food on most other days).
Worth noting that this is a relatively immobile king. Various other kings spent a lot of time on:
- hunting for sport
- military campaigns (e.g. Richard Lionheart spent more time out of England than in it)
- assizes (mobile courts)
- summer residences (Versailles is a huge, late example of this, but lots of monarchs around the world have had holiday homes of one sort or another)
> To be fair, most of his prize holdings were also out of England.
To be fair, he wasn't really English and didn't speak the language either. It wasn't until Henry IV (reign 1399 - 1413) that a post-invasion King's mother tongue was English. Most people don't realise that for over 300 years the (language at) court was Norman French.
If you want to talk about competent governance, look to William II, the "Hammer of the Scots" villainized in Braveheart. He made it law that legally binding contracts must be written in plain English, so that both parties would (most likely) be able to understand what they were agreeing to...
Btw: The successor was “Charles the Mad” who is known for mental illness and psychotic/schizophrenic episodes and had to be placed under regency. So maybe she also wanted to give an example how a sane King normally ruled.
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time...."
It means the variation in monarchy is higher. So the best monarchy is better than the best democracy, but the worst monarchy is worse than the worst democracy
> ”After this rest period, he spent a time with his most intimate companions in pleasant diversions, perhaps looking at his jewels or other treasures.”
Men don’t spend a lot of time looking at jewels anymore, but I guess the modern equivalent would be hanging out with your buddies having some beers and admiring your fancy car.
I imagine there also wasn’t much else to do if you couldn’t participate in sports. (Article claimed he was frail so I imagine he wasn’t out there playing soccer or jousting.)
Little has changed, except it's coffee and Spotify for me. Keep in mind that back then, wine / beer were an important source of clean drinking water, and it would often be low alcohol.
"One should not eat until his stomach is full. Rather, [he should stop when] he has eaten to close to three quarter's of full satisfaction.
One should drink only a small amount of water during the meal, and mix that with wine. When the food begins to be digested in his intestines, he may drink what is necessary. However, he should not drink much water, even when the food has been digested."
Maimonedes Human Dispositions 4 (Trans. by Eliyahu Touger)
I’ve always heard it generally used as a synonym with dilute - generally speaking with drugs, cut often means incorporating any less expensive (not easily detectable) substance in with the original substance.
More times than not it will not be stronger, it will be compounds that are not psychoactive at all, effectively “cutting” the potency of the substance while multiplying the quantity.
There are cases with fentanyl where a stronger substance is mixed in with the original and this often is what you read about in the news, but it is not in generally in the distributors best interest to be killing their clientele.
Assuming it's translated literally from French, and the meaning of the French verb "couper" hasn't changed since the Middle Ages, it means mixing with water, and is a widely used expression in French.
Brilliantly, the "Lion in Winter" opens with the King of England, the most powerful person in Europe at that time, rising from bed and breaking the ice atop his personal washbasin in his bedcroom.
Just in case you were thinking of Lerner & Loewe's England: this ain't that.
Not specifically about kings but — I recommend The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer, for a very thorough look at daily life in this era.
More specifically about kings, ACoUP has a great writeup [0] on royal legitimacy and the various purposes of the king's court in the context of my favorite medieval shenanigans simulator, Crusader Kings III.
Abdul Azziz al Saud, founder of Saudi Arabia, received supplicants on a near daily basis as all his subjects believed they had a right to bring their complaints to him.
In the early years of his reign, he was involved in military campaigns to expand his kingdom.
From the looks of it, a medieval king spent more time with his subjects that a typical US congressman spends with his constituents -- rather, they tend to spend more time at dinner parties with lobbyists and donors. In fact, the only time I here from my congressional rep is when I get texts asking for more money.
Medieval kings were a lot closer to mafia dons, in scope of government, role in government, and strength of position than any kind of politician we have in the western world today.
Much lower population, and you had to see the king in person, travelling at walking speed. It means the king could afford to listen to the comparatively few people who get to him.
Among these people are probably a good number of what would be called lobbyists today.
The supplicants brings to mind the opening scene of The Godfather.
I’m endlessly perplexed how a human with the same number of hours as me, can rule a kingdom, or run a modern country, or be CEO of a major company, meanwhile I’m working long hours every day and still get nothing accomplished.
By having a team around them. I'd recommend listening to podcasts by former politicians to get an understanding of the types of challenges they have. Rory Stewart regularly talks about his time in government. I recall former chancellor George Osborne talking about how much government energy is spent reacting to crises and giving the illusion of control.
If you have people who take orders from you, obviously you can accomplish much more. If you're CEO, literally everyone in the company is that. Of course they can get a lot done.
Another way to see it is they themselves don't get anything done, in the end others do all the work.
75 years ago someone in my position would have had a secretary - she (sexism intended) would have covered about 4 others. My boss would have had a personal secretary. Today Outlook (or similar programs) do the majority of what she would have done and they do it better. I can book an airline ticket myself in the time it would take to explain what I really want to the secretary.
I think you are mistaken, because you have made a category error. The work of a personal secretary or an assistant isn't merely to book you an airline ticket or manage your calendar. These are part of it, yes, but not the entirety and even in those you are missing the nuance of it. Their job is to understand you, and act on your behalf in the matters you delegate, knowing what outcome you would choose yourself. This is a force multiplier in the way that Outlook will never be.
I started work in that era. That secretary booked an airline ticket by calling her contact at the same airline, regardless of price savings.
She typed his messages; that task is obviously done by the boss himself these days (Obama's blackberry addiction is a case in point). Voice-to-text handles her job while I'm driving; NO ONE did that job back then.
In the middle of the night, I can set an appointment that just occurred to me. Again, that's not something 1980s me could do.
Technology is a force multiplier you are ignoring. As bad as Outlook seems, it is better than most secretaries could be.
A large part of the force multiplier is just that she would sit on hold for you. Web sites rarely get so slow that you can't book the ticket yourself when it occurs to you.
Note again that I'm using "she" intentionally. When females are considered unable to do "real work" we don't value their time and so it is a force multiplier for the men who don't have to sit on hold, and we ignore all of her time that is wasted. I agree with those who are glad such days are over.
I think it's odd to devalue the time of someone who is helping you achieve more. That's definitely not a charitable way to treat people, nor is it the way I think about secretaries and assistants, regardless of their gender. While rank and file employees are no longer entitled to assistants, there are still thousands of people across corporate america in these roles and they are in many ways the most critical people to getting things done in many companies, and I have the utmost respect for them.
> Their job is to understand you, and act on your behalf in the matters you delegate, knowing what outcome you would choose yourself.
And that works very well even today when you are high enough to get a personal secretary. For the engineer who always shared the secretary with several others she didn't know you as well, and in any case their preferences were not important enough to consider (you don't get first class options).
Even for my boss, outlook is a force multiplier over a secretary because he (happens to be he today, has been she in the past, and likely will be again in a few years) doesn't have very many things where knowing preferences matter and doesn't have such complex scheduling needs that a human needs to do it. The ability to schedule his own meetings is much more powerful than asking someone to do it - while it might take more time to do it he can see that by not inviting one person the meeting can be had sooner and that is a much greater multiplier than the time saves by having someone else who not knowing those details delays the meeting until everyone can be there.
Yes when your situation is such that a secretary can "understand you, and act on your behalf in the matters you delegate, knowing what outcome you would choose yourself" it is a force multiplier. However most of us are not really that different from anyone else and even where we are we are not allowed the level of differentiation. We also don't have nearly the ability to delegate things, much less enough things that someone else can delegate them on our behalf. And so for most of us outlook is a force multiplier over the secretary we would get.
>Give as few orders as possible, once you've given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject.
Being a leader is a matter of taste. Make the decisions you need to make, take the actions you need to take, delegate the rest. If you had a very qualified group of people to do absolutely everything done you didn't want to do yourself "you" would get an incredible amount of stuff done.
Watch The West Wing for a taste of how the president of the US operates.
What is work? Those religious services were mandatory to set the image of him as a king. The discussion around the jewels was also mandatory - again setting an image. While he had the ability to skip any of those things, not doing them sets him up as an image of a bad king and soon he will be removed.
here is also a link to a video interview of Jeff Bezos explaining that he prioritizes sleep, because at his level, quality of decisions is more important than quantity of decisions.
Read the critisim section. There is no reason to think hunter-gathers worked only 4 hours per week, unless you define work so narrowly that the majority of what they did doesn't count even though anyone who has done those tasks knows how much work they are.
Hard disagree. Boredom is the consequence of a disengaged mind. Seems like his life was pretty fulfilling, with new music and entertainment, new people to meet and talk to, and new issues to solve, and when he did get bored I'm sure he had ample opportunities to do new things and take on new endeavors to satiate his mental appetite.
Donald Trump, the Ayatollah and Putin are very disciplined people. Ordered lives need to be grounded in value systems, moral emotions, and philosophies deeper than self preservations. Otherwise people start behaving like ants. Don't need a human brain for that.
I'm curious what you mean here -- what discipline do you think Trump demonstrates?
Clearly no moral discipline; so I assume you mean work regimen? Which disagrees strongly with the evidence of Trump's golfing (although likely that in part is about him taking money from the treasury).
Putin may be disciplined (I would believe it in case of a career KGB employee), but that has zero to do with the outcomes of his reign. The Russo-Ukrainian war already looks like a completely avoidable disaster, and we don't know yet what is going to happen.
Maybe a more sloppy ruler would not invade, instead preferring time-outs with lovers.
Likewise listening to commoners- maybe this was done for show with some well cleaned up subjects every so often , or maybe it was a genuine practice , we don’t really know.
I think you could make a good case that the title is a little sensationalistic, but you could pick at US civics class in exactly the same way (and not just in recent history). The branches of government we learn about fail to include (or at least emphasize) the fundamental role of regulatory capture, lobbyists, and opaque/undemocratic three-letter agencies in real-world governance. Not to mention the fact that even the founding of the country was based on high ideals that were highly caveat-ed ("all men are created equal" unless those men are property).
Regardless of the extent to which ideals are lived out in practice, to many people it's notable that those ideals are there at all. In my experience as a US citizens, most people educated here seem shocked to learn that there can be any ideals behind monarchy besides divine right of kings/"I am the state" [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27%C3%89tat,_c%27est_moi
And unless those men are women.
Seems to really want to paint a picture of the king as a pious, diligent, man of the people, yet it only leaves me with the impression that what was intentionally omitted is the true nature of the man.
Just like any officially sanctioned biography of Trump would omit his late night reality TV binge watching, his gorging on fast food and his raping of children, this account embellishes Charles' best qualities while utterly ignoring his worst, so it is of no historical value whatsoever in terms of understanding who he truly was.
As for listening to commoners, I'll accept the possibility of kings that wanted to be accountable to their subjects. The problem isn't the king, it's the nobility. The nobles are going to be filtering the commoners that get to talk to the king, because the king isn't allowed to know any commoners directly. Hell, they might not even be able to speak the same language at all. England's kings all spoke either French or German for a long time, and French wasn't so much the language of France as much as it was the language that France's ruling class spoke[0].
Even if the king could understand commoners and had unfiltered access to them, it's not guaranteed that they could do anything with that feedback. Say, a peasant complained about what they pay to their lord. Does the king actually have the power to overrule the nobility? Will the nobility depose the king, or start a civil war that destabilizes the country?
The game everyone's playing is ultimately to convince subsistence farmers to "go big or go home" - i.e. to overplant and overproduce food, at the risk of crop failure, so that the state can seize some of that food and eat it themselves, nominally in exchange for "protection"[1] from rival states whose main difference is that their king is fake while yours is rightful. In other words: the king and nobility are wolves, the commoners are sheep, and it's bad form for predators to befriend their prey.
[0] At least until France erased their own minority languages in the 1800s and forced everyone to speak French, which I'm pretty sure counts as genocide
[1] Identical to the 'protection' paid to a mafioso
Fun facts, Christine married at the age of 15, now will be considered by both Italian and French law as an illegal underage marriage. The marriage was, by all accounts, a happy one [2].
She had 3 children from the marriage to Etienne du Castel, (a royal secretary) for about ten years, remained widow after her husband's death.
Christine was Catholic and is often presented as one of the first feminists in history.
[1] Christine de Pizan:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_de_Pizan
[2] Biography of Christine de Pizan, Medieval Writer and Thinker:
https://www.thoughtco.com/christine-de-pizan-biography-41721...
Etienne was apparently 8 years older than Christine.
Part of why I love Hacker News is exploring all the millions of ways people can sound like assholes without actually saying any bad words, or anything negative at all. It’s truly incredible to me and I never get tired of it.
For me, the most curious thing here would be to know if a person in today's world in 5th percentile in wealth (i) would have (i) a larger life expectancy than a king in the 15th century, (ii) more food security, and (iii) more life opportunities.
Every time that I hear those stories from medieval times, as soon as I become fascinated by their tales and so on, I imagine how hard it would be to live there, even as a king.
Does someone know any reliable sources about that kind of comparison?
Simplest example? Indoor plumbing: Boom, 15th century king.
Silly example? I got my wife seven silk pillow cases one year as a Christmas gift. A bit spendy, but instantly "living like a king".
We don't have "the royal kitchens", but do have Door-Dash. We took a tour of a castle somewhere in Canada (probably Craigdarroch) and they had a bunch of sitting rooms and reading nooks with extra lights and stuff... Steal Those Ideas! You too can live like a king, you just have to rewind a century or two, and be strategic about the luxuries you pick.
I'm going to go with a cautious "yes" to the first: the ages at death of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_monarchs are not great.
"No" on the second (king is never going to have to worry about food security, that's for the peasants)
And "life opportunties" .. bit of a divide by zero situation. As king, you technically have all the opportunities. But you can only do things which actually exist at the time. And you're bound by the social and religious conventions of the time, which you mess with at your peril. Doing so worked for Henry VIII but not for the various Georges. See, for example, the controversy over whether James 6 might have been gay.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forme_of_Cury
This is where you get the memes about shocking medieval Europeans with a time travelling bag of Doritos: both the bag and its contents are completely impossible items for them.
Worth noting that durable items could be shipped long distance - precious metals, gems, textiles - but foodstuff shipping was more limited to high value density stuff like spices and the European wine trade.
Speaking of wine: no modern stimulants. No coffee, no tobacco, no weed, no cocaine, no opiates. No painkillers, no anasthesia. For all those situations, you have one option: alcohol.
A huge number of critical historical decisions were taken by people who would fail a brethalyser.
Well, except for food preserved via pickling, salting, drying, smoking, fermenting, sugaring, and confit. Which makes for quite a long list.
Plus, various foods like grains, root vegetables, onions, and even apples could be stored for months using proper techniques. They didn't have the luxury we have of not paying much attention to how we store things and just replacing them when they go bad, so they became quite good at this.
I would also expect them to have various special variaties of apples/pears that actually improved their taste with storage. For example a variety that was best with 2 months of storage, another one that was best after 6 months.
Then you have cheeses, yoghurts, milk. Those things could be available year round. One would expect the king of France to have quite a variety of cheeses at his disposal. Then we have meats prepared in a hundred different ways. From simple roasting, to gelling, pickling like modern hams. And so on.
Then we have various types of wild mushrooms. I wonder if the king ate wild mushrooms and who picked these mushrooms for him... Poisoning would be so easy to get away with if he did.
It would be tough without potatoes, tomatoes and peppers, but I think food-wise I'd be just fine (assuming money and power).
Yes, but also my understanding is that the preservation technique of that name involves much more salt than modern palettes are willing to tolerate, and also salt itself was much more limited in supply.
Despite this, salt as a preservative was indeed critical to civilisation.
> fermenting
True, and also I want to say "blessed are the cheesemakers" etc. here. :)
And thus potatoes and sauerkraut was born.
I have been told there is a huge difference between the two.
There are the fermented pickles
There are the pickles that get mixed with prefermented preservative (usually vinegar/salt) and pressure-canned
And then there are the pickles that get flash cooked or not cooked, mixed with preservative, and refrigerated for a limited time
None of which preserves the taste/nutrition well for a wide range of foods like greens/fruits/vegetables, you the limits in seasonal availability don't get resolved
https://www.neurology.org/doi/10.1212/WNL.92.15_supplement.P...
Alcohol, though, is great for dissolving opium into an easily ingestible potion, whence one gets dwale or laudanum.
Not by the standards of the world 5th percentile, as in the question posed. The 5th percentile today is mostly subsistence farming and doesn't have access to imported foods or own a refrigerator (though there probably is one in their local village, and they may well own a mobile phone).
The taste wasn't so fun though.
[citation needed]
The idea that historically people went around hammered because the water supply was poor is a myth.
The water myth is not the cause.
Hemlock and henbane were both used as painkillers and dulling agents .. up to unconsciousness and death, depending on dosage.
Added: Monastery herb gardens often had quite the range, eg: https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/inspire-me/blog/ar...
Apart from his painful, smelly leg ulcers that he had to tolerate for years
He wasn't gay, but his many male lovers might have been. :D
> For England, including the Kings of Wessex from Æthelberht on (the first I could find a birthdate for), and the Kings of England up to Edward IV, whose reigns extends to 1483 (and consequently into Modern Ages, if we take the usual date of 1453 - the fall of Constantinople - as the end of the Middle Ages), I found the average age of death of monarchs to be 44 years. (http://ideias.wikidot.com/reis-da-inglaterra-na-idade-media)
Life expectancy is longer than that in even the poorest countries today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...
Given that until roughly the 1700s infant mortality was brutal (according to [1] fully 50% of children died before reaching adulthood), this comparison becomes even starker, since average life expectancy of a crown prince at birth would be far lower (somewhere in their 20s).
[1] https://acoup.blog/2025/07/18/collections-life-work-death-an...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_XI_of_Sweden#Greycoat
Hunger worldwide has been getting worse for the last quarter century or so.
733 million people don’t have food security. I think about 5-10 million die every year from starvation.
In medieval times there were famines, but they were caused by there not being enough food to go around due to disease or bad harvests.
Today millions of people starve even if there is no bad harvest or animal pandemics.
That doesn't appear to be true. E.g., following links from the WHO page you cite gets me to https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/39d... ...
where Figure 1 shows hunger consistently decreasing from the start of the graph in 2005 to somewhere around 2014, at which point it plateaus for a while and then starts increasing somewhere around 2019-2020.
My recollection is that by 2005 where that graph begins, hunger had been consistently decreasing for quite some time, but a bit of googling hasn't found anything that quite answers that question. I did find https://www.jstor.org/stable/40572886 (looking at data from 1930 to 1990) whose publicly-accessible abstract says that "the proportion undernourished has been in decline since the 1960s and that the absolute number has also declined in recent years".
So I think the truth is not "hunger has been getting worse for the last quarter century or so" but something more like "10 years ago, hunger had been improving for about half a century; the improvement stalled for about 5 years and over about the last five years it has been getting worse".
(Which is still bad news, as far as the present state of things is concerned, but a rather different sort of bad news.)
> Similarly, new estimates of adult obesity show a steady increase over the last decade, from 12.1 percent (2012) to 15.8 percent (2022). Projections indicate that by 2030, the world will have more than 1.2 billion obese adults. The double burden of malnutrition – the co-existence of undernutrition together with overweight and obesity – has also surged globally across all age groups.
Obesity will soon, if not already, become a major public health disaster in poor countries.
That's an outrageous claim you need to back with some hard facts, otherwise patently untrue.
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+people+die+worldwid...
Unsupported claims are not "patently untrue"; THAT claim also requires citation.
Why doesn't Africa have more farms and infrastructure?
Long answer: Western colonialism.
How do you explain lack of farming / infrastructure prior to colonialism? More or less all environments populated by sub saharans struggle with infrastructure. This is true before, during, and after colonialism.
I find the percentile measure terrible to technically mean 95% of the population, but is often colloquially understood the other way around. It's like German numbers, when people say five and forty to mean 45. The general population rejects needless complexity.
Now, when you compare a low wealth person today to a peasant from the medieval era, if you remove child mortality, they likely had a similar life expectancy, although again, the modern human is more likely to have access to antibiotics, regardless of wealth--as others have mentioned, they just didn't exist back then.
maybe .. most mammals do not get infections from an ordinary cut.. it is humans that are uniquely weak that way
source: retired medical surgeon
Nothing in your career particularly informed you of non-human mammal infection rates, unless you moonlighted as a veterinarian.
Wasn't Arthur alone responsible for the untimely death of like a dozen kings? :)
Yearly.
Worth noting that this is a relatively immobile king. Various other kings spent a lot of time on:
- hunting for sport
- military campaigns (e.g. Richard Lionheart spent more time out of England than in it)
- assizes (mobile courts)
- summer residences (Versailles is a huge, late example of this, but lots of monarchs around the world have had holiday homes of one sort or another)
To be fair, most of his prize holdings were also out of England.
To be fair, he wasn't really English and didn't speak the language either. It wasn't until Henry IV (reign 1399 - 1413) that a post-invasion King's mother tongue was English. Most people don't realise that for over 300 years the (language at) court was Norman French.
Even though he did not speak it, himself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_VI_of_France
It also paints Charles in quite a good light. I assume that she wrote to please, but it also sounds like he was a genuinely good king.
I have heard that the best form of government is an absolute monarchy, and the worst form of government is an absolute monarchy.
- Winston S. Churchill, 11 November 1947
Men don’t spend a lot of time looking at jewels anymore, but I guess the modern equivalent would be hanging out with your buddies having some beers and admiring your fancy car.
Maimonedes Human Dispositions 4 (Trans. by Eliyahu Touger)
The great Medieval water myth (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9031856 - Feb 2015 (71 comments)
More times than not it will not be stronger, it will be compounds that are not psychoactive at all, effectively “cutting” the potency of the substance while multiplying the quantity.
There are cases with fentanyl where a stronger substance is mixed in with the original and this often is what you read about in the news, but it is not in generally in the distributors best interest to be killing their clientele.
Just in case you were thinking of Lerner & Loewe's England: this ain't that.
More specifically about kings, ACoUP has a great writeup [0] on royal legitimacy and the various purposes of the king's court in the context of my favorite medieval shenanigans simulator, Crusader Kings III.
[0] https://acoup.blog/2022/02/18/miscellanea-thoughts-on-ckiii-...
In the early years of his reign, he was involved in military campaigns to expand his kingdom.
Among these people are probably a good number of what would be called lobbyists today.
I’m endlessly perplexed how a human with the same number of hours as me, can rule a kingdom, or run a modern country, or be CEO of a major company, meanwhile I’m working long hours every day and still get nothing accomplished.
Another way to see it is they themselves don't get anything done, in the end others do all the work.
She typed his messages; that task is obviously done by the boss himself these days (Obama's blackberry addiction is a case in point). Voice-to-text handles her job while I'm driving; NO ONE did that job back then.
In the middle of the night, I can set an appointment that just occurred to me. Again, that's not something 1980s me could do.
Technology is a force multiplier you are ignoring. As bad as Outlook seems, it is better than most secretaries could be.
Note again that I'm using "she" intentionally. When females are considered unable to do "real work" we don't value their time and so it is a force multiplier for the men who don't have to sit on hold, and we ignore all of her time that is wasted. I agree with those who are glad such days are over.
And that works very well even today when you are high enough to get a personal secretary. For the engineer who always shared the secretary with several others she didn't know you as well, and in any case their preferences were not important enough to consider (you don't get first class options).
Even for my boss, outlook is a force multiplier over a secretary because he (happens to be he today, has been she in the past, and likely will be again in a few years) doesn't have very many things where knowing preferences matter and doesn't have such complex scheduling needs that a human needs to do it. The ability to schedule his own meetings is much more powerful than asking someone to do it - while it might take more time to do it he can see that by not inviting one person the meeting can be had sooner and that is a much greater multiplier than the time saves by having someone else who not knowing those details delays the meeting until everyone can be there.
Yes when your situation is such that a secretary can "understand you, and act on your behalf in the matters you delegate, knowing what outcome you would choose yourself" it is a force multiplier. However most of us are not really that different from anyone else and even where we are we are not allowed the level of differentiation. We also don't have nearly the ability to delegate things, much less enough things that someone else can delegate them on our behalf. And so for most of us outlook is a force multiplier over the secretary we would get.
Being a leader is a matter of taste. Make the decisions you need to make, take the actions you need to take, delegate the rest. If you had a very qualified group of people to do absolutely everything done you didn't want to do yourself "you" would get an incredible amount of stuff done.
Watch The West Wing for a taste of how the president of the US operates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society#The_...
here is also a link to a video interview of Jeff Bezos explaining that he prioritizes sleep, because at his level, quality of decisions is more important than quantity of decisions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ze0op3sJr2A
Kings usually slept around with way more women than average boys these days.
Clearly no moral discipline; so I assume you mean work regimen? Which disagrees strongly with the evidence of Trump's golfing (although likely that in part is about him taking money from the treasury).
Fascinated to know your answer.
Maybe a more sloppy ruler would not invade, instead preferring time-outs with lovers.
> moral emotions
…