What It’s Like to Be Middle-Aged (in the Middle Ages)

Have you ever found yourself agitated or confounded or just sick of the current state of affairs, and wondered what it might be like to live in another time?

Andre SINOU: I do not belong to this time period. I know it sounds crazy, but when I wore armor and I was sitting in front of the castle in Germany or in Poland, I felt like I belonged there. You know, I feel at home. 

For some people, home is in the Middle Ages.

Michele MOUNTAIN: It appears to be a simpler time. People worked hard and played hard, It seems exotic to us now.

The exotic place these people are in is New Jersey, at the Burlington County Fairgrounds. It’s a warm, sticky Sunday in June, and they’re attending the annual New Jersey Renaissance Faire. “Faire” with an “e” at the end. Despite the heat, they’re wearing woolen vests and long-sleeved dresses and heavy boots — also, among the men, a lot of very bushy beards. Matt Schwarz is one of the musical performers; he’s a harpist:

Matt SCHWARZ: I think nowadays, you look at a world that doesn’t have a lot of our modern problems, and you think it was perfect. Of course, back then, they had their own problems, but I think there’s much to be said with a world in which you’re in touch with, with the outdoors and nature.

Jordan Cavalier is another musical performer.

Jordan CAVALIER: This is called the nyckelharpa. It’s a Swedish key fiddle. It’s 16 strings of medieval Swedish glory. It has three melody strings, one drone string, and 12 sympathetic strings. I started playing six years ago and now I’m here at Ren Faire playing it. This is, like, my life now.

In the U.S. alone, there are a couple hundred Renaissance faires each year. They give you a chance to hear period music, eat a turkey leg or a giant pickle — and pretend that you are not only in a different time, but that you’re a different person.

Sir MALIGAN: I am Sir Maligan, the Knight of Fortitude, part of the Knights of Virtue, soon to fight in the Tournament of Virtue, here at 1:30 on the field.

Joust SPECTATOR: Okay, so there’s two knights on like different horses on opposing sides and they like they have a jousting stick and they’re trying to get the rings. So whichever one gets the rings, they get the point. 

Another knight, Paul Mehaffey, emerges from his jousting tournament sweaty and winded.

Paul MEHAFFEY: It’s almost been a year since I armored up, and I love it. It was exhausting, but I could do it again in 10 minutes. The adrenaline gets going and you just get in there, it’s just you and him, that’s all you see, because you can’t see anything else in the helmet, and it’s great.

Okay, so that’s what they’re all doing here; what are we doing here? When we set out to make a three-part series about the arc of human life, we knew we would begin with birth and child-rearing. That was last week’s episode; you can catch up later if you missed it. We also knew that the final episode would be about aging and death. But what about the middle episode? We thought it would be interesting to explore what it’s like to be middle-aged but then you realize that our current concept of middle-aged is very new: at the beginning of the 20^th century, average life expectancy was only 31 years old! Now, that number on its own is misleading — there were plenty of old people, and middle-aged people too; but the average was brought down by the incredibly high rate of child mortality. So we got to wondering: what was it like to be middle-aged back in the Middle Ages? And we asked the Renaissance Faire attendees a simple question: if you could go back, would you go back?

CAVALIER: I’d rather be middle-aged in pretty much any century other than the Middle Ages. That was rough. Rough time. 

Benita WILLIAMS BUTCHER: I would have not survived anything. No, I need like a Marriott, but I need a JW Marriott. I don’t even survive this when it rains. 

Vince CONAWAY: So we have this thing today called ibuprofen that is a very, very powerful help to being middle-aged.

So that’s how the fairegoers feel. Today on Freakonomics Radio: we get an expert view on what it was like to be middle-aged in the Middle Ages. Ibuprofen not included.

*      *      *

The Middle Ages, as agreed upon by most historians, cover the years from roughly 500 to 1500. Most historians also agree that renaissance fairs are not entirely accurate. So we decided to speak with a couple of actual historians.

Neslihan ŞENOCAK: My name is Neslihan Şenocak and I teach medieval history at Columbia University.

DUBNER: How would you describe generally your research interests?

ŞENOCAK: My research interests are mostly in religious history of the Middle Ages, specifically, history of Christianity. But because religion is so pervasive in the medieval world, basically every other type of history falls into the religious history that is social history, political history, and everything. So, I basically study everything.

DUBNER: How did you come to this particular concentration?

ŞENOCAK: My story is a little bit unusual, really, because I actually graduated from college as an industrial engineer.

DUBNER: Sorry, yeah, that’s a change.

ŞENOCAK: That is a change. But then in the last year of engineering, I had read Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose. And there I met for the first time the Franciscan order. What is special about Franciscan order is that they really wanted to be poor — very, very poor, poorer than everybody else. And I thought, who on earth might like to be poor? It seemed to me so strange, such a great contrast to modern life, when everybody wants to be rich. I was very fascinated from the beginning with the monks and friars’ life. Now I see a lot of problems in that kind of life that I didn’t see before. 

DUBNER: For instance?

ŞENOCAK: For instance, no matter how hard they try, their passions and moral issues do not leave them. We think that the monks are calm and peaceful, dedicating their lives to God. But when you read the sources, it’s not like that. They are very much acting. 

DUBNER: They could be angry and horny.

ŞENOCAK: Exactly — and corrupt and greedy.

Okay, so that’s Nesli Şenocak, our first scholar of the Middle Ages; let’s meet the other one.

Phillipp SCHOFIELD: My name is Phillipp Schofield. I’m a medieval historian at Aberystwyth. 

That’s a university in Wales.

SCHOFIELD: My main interests are in the broad area of economic history, and I work particularly on peasantry.

DUBNER: What would you say drew you to the study of peasantry?

SCHOFIELD: As an undergraduate, I was really intrigued by the broad socioeconomic history that medievalists, especially in France, were doing, looking at the social structure of medieval villages.

DUBNER: When I read about the work of archeologists and others who find physical evidence or ruins, it always seems a bit miraculous that things have survived from so long ago — and yet it does happen. When you study economic history, I’m curious what the evidence is like — and if it feels as though you’re always reaching through a veil of sorts, never quite getting to the reality.

SCHOFIELD: That’s always the sense on one level. When I was doing my doctorate, I wrote at one stage something like, “He probably thought that …” And my supervisor, someone called Barbara Harvey, she said, “What are you doing? You don’t “probably think it.” You either know it or you don’t know it. And if you don’t know it, leave it out.” That’s sort of of old school, but I, it appeals to me really. I imagine if I walk through a 14th century peasant village on the basis of my understanding from 14th century records, there’s undoubtedly a lot of things that would surprise me. But there are local court records, manorial records, that are really the records generated by lords, but include a huge amount of incidental information directed at the peasantry — including, for example, litigation. That’s something I work on quite a bit, is actually — peasants not litigating with their lords, but peasants litigating with each other. 

I asked Phillipp Schofield if he was willing to imagine the daily life of a middle-aged peasant from that era, maybe a composite figure based on bits and pieces of Schofield’s research. He was actually able to do us one better than that.

SCHOFIELD: I did write something almost 30 years ago now in a journal called Past and Present about two peasants who litigated. So they’re both real people. And because they were extremely enthusiastic litigants, they tended to be more evident. And because they were relatively wealthy, they were also more evident, and they also exist in taxation data. So that’s the kind of person I would maybe go to. 

DUBNER: Excellent. Of these two peasant litigants, I need you to pick one that you can describe for us. Who would you prefer? 

SCHOFIELD: I will pick someone called Robert, the son of Adam.

DUBNER: Okay. Robert, the son of Adam. Where does he live? 

SCHOFIELD: He lived in a place called Hinderclay in Suffolk. 

DUBNER: And what year would you like to place Robert, the son of Adam, in Hinderclay, that would count as his middle age? 

SCHOFIELD: Let’s say about 1305. I hope he’s not dead by then. He was certainly active around that time, and was doing pretty well.

DUBNER: How old is he?

SCHOFIELD: I would say he was probably in his 30s.

DUBNER: And that counts as middle-aged then?

SCHOFIELD: I think so, yeah. I was thinking about this today, and what I know about calculations of life expectancy. Most of that is really hard to do from the records I’m describing, but it’s really monastic evidence from the 15th century where you’ve got a whole range of moments in a monk’s life in places like Westminster Abbey and Durham Cathedral Priory and so on, and then you can follow them through various administrative tasks, and then often they end up in the infirmary and their deaths are recorded. The estimates for that tend to suggest that life expectancy is taking people into their late 40s, 50.

Okay, we’ll return later to Robert, son of Adam, a relatively wealthy peasant in Hinderclay, England. I asked Nesli Şenocak, who grew up in Turkey, what it’s like to really immerse yourself in medieval history.

ŞENOCAK: It gives you perspective. It gives you an alternative. It takes you out of the bubble, which is modern life. When we grow up, we are born into this life. We sometimes think that this is the only way things could be, but it could have been another way. 

DUBNER: So if I asked you to switch places with someone from that period, would you be willing or interested?

ŞENOCAK: If I’m going to have my kids with me, yes. If certain conditions are met, I guess I would, yeah. Because it’s a much simpler life. I’d like to be an artisan in a city, I guess.

DUBNER: Mmm. What would you make? 

ŞENOCAK: Stained glass would be nice. I mean, stained glass is so beautiful. People in the Middle Ages had their shops actually inside their homes. So I don’t have to even go somewhere else. 

DUBNER: Where exactly would you choose to live?            

ŞENOCAK: Let’s make it Italy. 

DUBNER: In a city or rural? 

ŞENOCAK: It has to be in a city, really. Italian cities were much more advanced in the 13th century, much better organized. You have free healthcare, free education. If I’m rural, then I would have to be a peasant.

DUBNER: And you want to be an artisan? 

ŞENOCAK: Yes. I’d rather be an artisan. I think being a peasant requires far too much energy, which I don’t think I have. 

DUBNER: Let’s start with the city. Where will you live?

ŞENOCAK: Well, I quite like Florence, so it would have to be Florence.

DUBNER: What year shall we pick? senocak

ŞENOCAK: 1250’s would be good. 

DUBNER: In real life today, do you have a spouse or partner?

ŞENOCAK: I do have a spouse, yes. And he’s Italian, actually.

So Nesli Şenocak has raised the stakes by including herself in our exercise, and she’s bringing along her husband and two sons. I asked Phillipp Schofield what we know about the family of Robert, the son of Adam.

SCHOFIELD: He’s got a brother. Beyond that, it’s difficult to be entirely sure. We do know from other contemporaries that if he was fairly typical, he would have a wife and maybe a small number of surviving children, some of whom would survive into adulthood. So it’s quite reasonable to suppose that he had three or four children who moved beyond infancy.

DUBNER: What do his children do? At what age do they start to perhaps work with him? 

SCHOFIELD: While they were still really young, you know, less than 10, so, small-scale herding, managing crops, keeping birds off things, helping with harvest and so on.

DUBNER: What level of education would these kids be getting?

SCHOFIELD: Education is fairly limited. A lot of education is the education of the village in a sense, of learning from doing in some ways.

DUBNER: What does Robert eat and drink?

SCHOFIELD: The bulk of his diet would have been predominantly grain- based. But leavened by fish, both sea fish and freshwater fish. Maybe a little bit of meat, probably bacon, but also poultry. Quite a lot of ale in his diet.

DUBNER: Is there a relatively low-alcohol version of ale that children and others would drink since it was safer than water? 

SCHOFIELD: I mean, children are drinking ale, definitely. Whether it’s low- alcohol or not, it’s difficult to be entirely sure.

ŞENOCAK: Obviously, in Florence, you would have access to very good wine. 

DUBNER: What would a family dinner look like?

ŞENOCAK: It would definitely have vegetables and fruits. Meat is a little bit more problematic for medieval people because it’s expensive. Pork and chicken would be cheaper than beef. So we might have that maybe once a week. People did consume a lot of beans and lentils and things like that — also because they were durable. They don’t go bad. We wouldn’t obviously have any fridge or anything. Not even a cellar. But also of course the main staple of any diet is the bread. 

DUBNER: Say a bit more about why you’re determined to put yourself in a city and not a village or the countryside. 

ŞENOCAK: The big difference is that you are much less exposed to the elements. City life is pretty safe compared to the rural life, because the cities are walled. They are very well-protected. In the countryside, you do get raids. You might have animals coming in, wild animals which were much more in number in the Middle Ages than they are now. Obviously, they’ve been hunted down over the years. There is food insecurity in the countryside. I wouldn’t have food insecurity because generally what the medieval cities like Florence did, they had big granaries. They stored grain just in case there’s famine, and then they would distribute it to the citizens. 

DUBNER: Let’s talk about the state of commerce. How does that work? How much do you make, and what are you able to buy with it? 

ŞENOCAK: I would have to find commissioned jobs if I’m a stained- glass maker. That would mean either a church or a monastery would have to give me orders. There are lots of churches, many more than now — and if a church can afford having stained glass which would be expensive, I think I can make a decent amount of money to be what corresponds today to middle class. 

DUBNER: Okay. So you’re a middle-class, middle-aged artisan in the Middle Ages.

ŞENOCAK: Yes, that’s a lot of middle. 

DUBNER: That’s okay. That’s why we’re here. What is it like to be a freelance artisan then? 

ŞENOCAK: Well, the thing is, I would have to enter the guild of stained-glass makers. All the trades were very well-organized. Today’s trade unions, they really have their origins in the Middle Ages. So I would have to pay dues to my guild, I would have to be registered as a master of stained glass. And the amount of money I can charge would be regulated by them.

DUBNER: When you read economic history, the economists are usually anti-guild, because they see guilds as monopolistic within their domain. There was actually this famous economic essay about how the Candle Makers Guild were trying to have a resolution passed that forbade the sun from shining at certain times because with too much sunlight, there was less demand for their products. Plainly, that was not quite real, but the sentiment, I think, was legitimate. I’m curious — how would you feel about your guild? Would you feel it’s generally a positive for you and for the rest of society, positive for you and a negative for the others, or maybe even negative for you, because you have to join this guild and pay dues and have your wages probably set as opposed to being a true freelancer?

ŞENOCAK: Well, I’m not inflicted with the laissez-faire ideas of the modern economy, which I consider a good thing. The guild is a very good thing for the people inside it. It’s a very bad, negative thing for the people who are outside because then you cannot find a job — that is, if a freelance stained-glass maker comes to Florence they would not be legally able to work. But the guild has so many benefits. Yes, I do pay dues. But for example, if I ever fall into hardship, if I get sick, they come and help me. There are even religious benefits — all the guild members are expected to pray for one another at a time of sickness and especially after death.

DUBNER: Would you have an appetite for expanding your business? Maybe renting a bigger workshop and hiring people and becoming a big-time commercial person yourself?

ŞENOCAK: Whether I’m some kind of a proto-capitalist? No, I can’t imagine that. I chose the medieval life because it was the simpler one. The more people get into your life, the more difficult your life becomes. I’d rather try to have a small life. I don’t have to deal with too many people. The customers are enough, and my kids and the partner.

Okay, and how about the economic life of Robert, son of Adam, our peasant friend in Hinderclay, England?

SCHOFIELD: A peasant in this period could be relatively wealthy — I mean, not as wealthy as an aristocrat or a major landowner, but within that community, they can be wealthier than others. And for Hinderclay — and Robert, the son of Adam — we have very good taxation data, which places him at or near the top of his own community.

DUBNER: How exactly does Robert make his living, and how has he done so well?

SCHOFIELD: That’s an interesting one. A lot of his activity is to do with production of grain and farming his land, almost certainly with some livestock as well. What’s interesting about Robert from taxation records is he has a a much higher proportion of a single grain than almost anybody else in his community, which suggests he’s probably not involved in some monoculture but is probably buying and selling and accumulating as a grain factor.

DUBNER: Oh I see, so he raises a crop, but he’s also a merchant. 

SCHOFIELD: I think so. 

DUBNER: I see. And what is his grain? 

SCHOFIELD: In this particular part of the country, barley is a predominant crop. People also produce wheat, oats, rye, peas, beans, you know, but the predominant crop is barley, and that’s where a lot of his wealth is held.

DUBNER: And what would you say are the characteristics of Robert that enabled him to become not just a farmer, but a merchant? Is he particularly clever, is he a bit of a bully? Do you think he’s honest?

SCHOFIELD: My sense is he is clever. My sense is that he’s actually — I’ve often used the term “aggressively acquisitive.” I think he’s someone who knows how to maximize opportunity. Some people have that ability, don’t they? And some people don’t. His brother William, the Son of Adam, is also quite well-to-do in the village, but in a more traditional way, and I think that maybe they’ve born into a family that’s relatively well-to-do, though we don’t have the records that allow us to see that. So he probably is relatively well-off in capital terms to begin with. But also knows how to play that, how to use markets, how to advantage himself, and particularly how to use law to support that. When things start to go against him in any way, he’s very quick to turn to law, very quick to actually bring people into court, to sue them, to not give up. I don’t know whether he’s a bully, but I do think he knows what he wants, and is prepared to push hard to get it.

DUBNER: How much land does he have? 

SCHOFIELD: He has something in the region of 20 acres of land. So he may be investing in a nice house, a reasonably nice house. It would be probably a single level, possibly with a slightly raised area above it. There might be a distinction between a living quarters for people and perhaps a space to the other side of it where livestock might be kept.

DUBNER: Are there windows in this house?

SCHOFIELD: In this house, probably more shutters, certainly not glass windows.

DUBNER: And what are the building materials, outside and inside? 

SCHOFIELD: You might be talking about a kind of wattle and daubing, a combination of mud plaster mixed in with straw and things like horsehair, and a wooden frame which you attach that too. A fairly basic stone flooring as well.

DUBNER: What’s the furniture look like?

SCHOFIELD: Wooden furniture, locally made wooden furniture, some of it might be quite ornate. He might copy his lord in the way in which he arranges that living space — so, he might seat himself at the end of a table with his family in relative seniority, closer or further away from him, for example. He might invest in some decent tableware.

DUBNER: Silver?

SCHOFIELD: Possibly not. But good pottery.

DUBNER: How many channels does he get on his television? I’m guessing fewer than five.

SCHOFIELD: Not so many. Yeah, yeah, yeah, probably.

DUBNER: So this lord you’ve mentioned, tell me about him. 

SCHOFIELD: Robert is a villein or a serf, so he’s an unfree peasant, so he technically belongs to his lord.

DUBNER: You kind of buried the lead on me there. That’s a big deal, isn’t it?

SCHOFIELD: Yeah, yeah. But at the same time, he’s in a community that is both free and unfree. So, around him there might be free peasants, and he’s an unfree peasant. But that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s significantly disadvantaged. The relationship between freedom and unfreedom in the medieval village could be almost reversed. Some of the people who hold free land might be relatively poor people holding relatively small plots, whereas the unfree might be relatively privileged individuals, except that they obviously have restrictions on their mobility and so on and so forth.

DUBNER: So if Robert is essentially owned or circumscribed by his lord — what are some of the upsides and downsides of that?

SCHOFIELD: There are some people who say, well, villeinage is actually not an impediment. It’s a safety net. Because the lord cares about his villeins. They are his bread and butter in a sense. He protects them. He doesn’t want to be overly demanding of them. The customary rents they pay are fairly low, and fixed. Others would say that villeinage is an imposition. It’s a restriction of basic freedoms. It means that if you want to marry off your daughter, you have to pay a fine. If you want to leave as a young man, you have to pay a fine. Anything you do effectively is through the permission of the lord. 

DUBNER: Who is Robert’s lord? 

SCHOFIELD: His lord is a monastery. It’s the monastery of Bury St Edmunds, which is a long-established Benedictine monastery, very traditional, relatively hard- hearted, I would say, and clearly gains the antagonism of local people.

This brings us to an interesting and important point: the power of the Church in the Middle Ages. Also: how the criminal justice system worked. 

ŞENOCAK: They would go around and ask people what gossip they have heard. 

*      *      *

We’ve been speaking with two middle-aged scholars of the Middle Ages, about what it would be like to have been middle-aged in the Middle Ages. Phillipp Schofield was describing a fairly prosperous English peasant named Robert, the son of Adam, who is in a sort of captive business relationship with a local monastery. This is early 14^th century. Meanwhile, in 13^th-century Florence, Nesli Şenocak, a historian at Columbia, has imagined herself, living with her actual family from today, and she’s making stained glass for a living. This means that she, like Robert, the son of Adam, was in a financial relationship with the Church. And let’s remember, the Middle Ages were a … very … churchy time. Here is Şenocak:

ŞENOCAK: In the Middle Ages, there is not even a word for religion, really. It’s a modern word. People have this faith, it in many ways determines everything they do — how they rule people, how they work, how they talk to each other, how they write.

DUBNER: Do you think that you, living back then, would be relatively devout? 

ŞENOCAK: Relatively. Not too much.

DUBNER: How central and in what ways was religion central to your family?

ŞENOCAK: It would be central in the sense that my two boys would have to be baptized. And they would be baptized in the cathedral of the city, because when you live in a city, that’s where they get the baptism. We would regularly go to the church and as much as I can find time from my work, I would also try to go to the morning and evening prayers during the weekdays.

DUBNER: What is your relationship to the church — Capital-C church, not the actual parish. How do you think about the Church or God or the saints in relation to your life? 

ŞENOCAK: So, because I live in a city, I would have actually much more access to the capital-C church than someone living in the countryside, because their experience would only be the parish. But I can see the cathedral. I can see the bishop. I think I would feel, as many people did feel then, a little bit angry and upset that they are just far too rich. The bishop has got gold-plated robes and everything. And the cathedral is so big. They eat really well. There might be some resentment about that, that that doesn’t reflect the poor Christ. 

DUBNER: When you think about yourself as this artisan with your family, and let’s say you felt some of that resentment — follow that thought through a bit further for me. When you think about where that wealth comes from, what do you think then?

ŞENOCAK: The wealth of the church really comes from the donations and the wills. That’s how it built up over the centuries. It’s the people that made the institution of church rich. But there is also the fact that the church after the 9th century started to collect tithes, which were taxes, so one-tenth of my income has to go to my parish, which is quite a lot. 

DUBNER: More than the guild fees, probably, yes? 

ŞENOCAK: Yes, I would think so.

DUBNER: And how would you feel about that tithing?

ŞENOCAK: I don’t know. I think I would force myself to think about it as a good religious deed, that at least I’m giving it to the church, and one-fourth of those tithes are supposed to go to the poor. The church is supposed to sustain the poor. So I would hope that the money I’m giving is really going into the good hands. 

DUBNER: Now let’s say your husband comes home from work one day and says “Wow, you would not believe how beautiful the new wing of the monastery is. It looks like it was built for, you know, an Egyptian pharaoh.”

ŞENOCAK: I wouldn’t feel good about that. They are monks. They’re supposed to imitate Christ. They’re supposed to live poor, as poor as they can. I mean, they don’t have to die out of hunger, but they don’t need a luxurious new wing, and that money could’ve gone to the poor. 

DUBNER: Now I want to be fair, I just made that up. What were the monasteries like in Florence at that period?

ŞENOCAK: Well, you know, they were quite grandiose, if I may say.

I went back to Phillipp Schofield, who teaches at a Welsh university whose name I have a hard time pronouncing, so here’s him saying it:

SCHOFIELD: Aberystwyth.

SCHOFIELD: Aberystwyth.

SCHOFIELD: Aberystwyth.

And I asked if his 14^th century peasant friend Robert, son of Adam, was a regular churchgoer.

SCHOFIELD: Almost certainly. This is a Orthodox Catholic country at this stage. The room for stepping outside of perceived appropriate religious practices, it’s relatively minimal. There’s a big debate about, what attendance meant relative to belief. But certainly people do attend, and would expect to attend in a fairly regular way. Also, at different points in your life maybe going on pilgrimage.

DUBNER: Where would a pilgrimage be to? 

SCHOFIELD: Some people go to Jerusalem, some people might go somewhere in Western Europe — but also they may attend pilgrimage within England. 

DUBNER: What does Robert think about God, or how does he conceive God? 

SCHOFIELD: Given that Christian teaching is to be charitable and to love thy neighbor as thyself and so on, I can imagine people paying lip service to that, but certainly from a lot of contemporary commentary — and I think probably Robert would fall into that from my reading of him — people struggle to actually follow it through in their daily lives.

DUBNER: Would he have believed in curses? And was he perhaps on either the receiving or giving end of a curse? 

SCHOFIELD: Really hard to know that from this period because, it’s not showing up in quite the same way in our records. Certainly people talk nastily about each other.

ŞENOCAK: The gossip and hearsay was so much bigger source of information in the Middle Ages than it is now. You would rely a lot on what other neighbors tell you.

DUBNER: And they did it without social media even. 

ŞENOCAK: Exactly. That was the social media — basically gossip and hearsay. That was also the basis of the criminal justice system, by the way. 

DUBNER: What do you mean? 

ŞENOCAK: That’s how they found the suspects. They would go around and ask people what gossip they have heard if a crime has been committed and no one knows who committed it.

DUBNER: But then at a certain point, you tried to gather some actual evidence, yes? 

ŞENOCAK: That would be really difficult without forensic science. If you think about the way the modern criminal justice system works, if there are no witnesses to a crime, what are your fallbacks? Fingerprints and D.N.A. analysis, none of that existed. 

DUBNER: So what do you think the false conviction rate was?

ŞENOCAK: In a place like, Rome or Perugia, which are neighboring places to Florence, the conviction rate was so low. Only 10 percent of trials resulted in a conviction. Ninety percent would be let go, out of the reason that there is not enough evidence to convict them. Because the judges had it on their conscience, if they wrongfully send somebody to execution. So they would have to let them go, if there is not enough evidence.

DUBNER: Was the legal system informed by religious feeling or religious devotion?

ŞENOCAK: Oh yes, absolutely. Judges and the juries would always take an oath, that they are going to follow the procedure, they are going to tell the truth. Somehow people really have taken that quite seriously, especially the judges. You can see that they are cringing not to give in. They don’t want to execute people. They are very afraid that in the other life, God will see them as a murderer if they do that without sufficient evidence.

DUBNER: And then do they conversely assume that if someone did commit a crime but there is no evidence, and the judge doesn’t want to convict, do they assume that that criminal will be punished anyway by God?

ŞENOCAK: It’s not that they think that God will punish them anyway, so let us not punish them. That is not the case. Because they definitely did understand that if you do not hold people accountable, then crime will increase. You do need to deter people.

DUBNER: How is that balance struck with such a low conviction rate?

ŞENOCAK: This low conviction rate belongs to the period where the trial started by an accusation. There are two types of trials. The ones that start basically because I go and say to the judge, “My neighbor stole from me,” and that would start a trial against my neighbor. I would denounce my neighbor myself, but then I would have to prove the guilt.

DUBNER: I see. And the other way?

ŞENOCAK: After 1250s, you get a new trial, which is the basis of the modern trial we have: inquisition trials. The state starts the trial. The state makes a case against the person, based on the public rumors, based on gossip. And then the conviction rate goes higher. People resented that, especially in England, the start of the inquisition trial. They said state has no business interfering into people’s conflicts. It has been seen as an infringement into the rights of the people. 

DUBNER: You mentioned this change came around 1250. There must have been a period where both systems were operating at the same time, yes?

ŞENOCAK: Exactly, very good. In fact, if you go to the judiciaries, which still hold the ancient medieval records, there are two books. There are the Book of Accusations and Book of Inquisitions.

DUBNER: How long did the accusations last? When did that die out? 

ŞENOCAK: Well, that’s a very good question, and frankly, I do not know the answer, but it went on for a very long time. It was considered a right of the people to accuse someone who committed a crime against them.

Let’s talk about dying in the Middle Ages. The people we spoke with at the Renaissance Faire in New Jersey had some things to say about that:

SCHWARZ: I don’t think I would have survived a lot. I’m clumsy, I’m weak, I probably would have broke my back pulling a plow or been trampled down by a Viking invader.

BUTCHER: I would have not survived anything.

CAVALIER: I would like to think I would have survived the Bubonic Plague, but when the hand of the Reaper comes a-sweepin’ across Europe and wipes out a sizable percentage of the population, it doesn’t matter what you did.

*      *      *

Okay, let’s talk about death and dying during the Middle Ages. As we all know, the definitive historical account comes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

Dead COLLECTOR: Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!

Medieval PEASANT: Here’s one!

Dead COLLECTOR: Ninepence. 

Not DEAD: I’m not dead! 

Dead COLLECTOR: What? 

Medieval PEASANT: Nothing, here’s your ninepence!

Not DEAD: I’m NOT DEAD! 

Dead COLLECTOR: He says he’s not dead.

Medieval PEASANT: Yes, he is.

Not DEAD: I’m not!

Dead COLLECTOR: He isn’t? 

Medieval PEASANT: Well, he will be soon. He’s very ill. 

Not DEAD: I’m getting better! 

Medieval PEASANT: No you’re not, you’ll be stone dead in a moment. 

Dead COLLECTOR: Oh, I can’t take him like that, it’s against regulations. 

And here is an actual historian, Phillipp Schofield.

SCHOFIELD: Undoubtedly, death was there. I mean, death is always there. 

DUBNER: Even today, apparently. 

SCHOFIELD: Yeah. Apparently, so I’ve heard. In the second decade of the 14th century, there is a period known as the Great Famine, where maybe 10 to 15 percent of the population died. We can’t really see the total impact of that because the most vulnerable are the least visible. We tend to think of peasant households as being complex and full of generations, but in reality, they probably weren’t, mostly because people didn’t live long enough really for that to happen. Something we don’t know a lot about for this period, but we know about for later periods, is infant mortality. If you had a number of children, then the strong likelihood is you would also have a considerable degree of loss in your life because of that. Violent death is also reasonably prevalent.

DUBNER: And what about medicine in 14^th century England? What happens when Robert, the son of Adam, or someone in his family is sick? 

SCHOFIELD: They have a monastic community, that’s their lord, so they may seek support from their community. There will be an infirmary there. There are things called hospitals, but they tend to be relatively low-scale. Unlike in Tuscany, for example, where this period there are substantial hospitals, here, they are intended to house and support a symbolic number of poor, often the equivalent to the number of the apostles, for example. But you would have people that would travel around offering a range of skills, including some limited medical skill — so, people who are barber-surgeons who might help set an arm or do something like that.

Nesli Şenocak, you will remember, located herself and her family in Florence. This is starting to look like a wise choice.

ŞENOCAK: There were public hospitals in Florence. So if you are really sick and you need to be taken care of, then you can go there. And anybody who volunteers there they will take care of you for free. Still, the healthcare is obviously, compared to the modern knowledge that we have, is much more limited, they just do not know what are the causes of the many diseases.

SCHOFIELD: Antibiotics will go a long way to treat Bubonic Plague, but in the Middle Ages, obviously that was not available. Across Western Europe between 1347 and 1350, possibly 45 percent of the population died. What’s remarkable is how society coped with that. I don’t know how a modern society would cope with 45 percent mortality. But there is an enormous continuity. There’s a lot of contemporary comment and shock and fearfulness, but also, the local records I was talking about record, for instance, repeatedly, “X has died, Y has died, Z has died,” and so on. You get that persistence of normality in the face of something that was utterly abnormal.

DUBNER: Nesli, how about you, living in 13^th-century Florence with your husband and two sons, how do you think about death?

ŞENOCAK: Yes, that’s the big question. I would worry about it, what will happen to me when I die? And If I’m a devout Christian, definitely I would believe in afterlife. So I would try to prepare myself and not leave it to old age, because that’s actually what a lot of people have done, even in the Middle Ages, they lived their youth rather frivolously. 

DUBNER: How old would you expect to live until? 

ŞENOCAK: Oh, that depends on so many conditions, but I would hope that I can live until maybe 55, 60. 

DUBNER: How old are you now, in real life? 

ŞENOCAK: 52. 

DUBNER: I didn’t realize I was speaking with you so close to the end of your life. 

ŞENOCAK: Well, yeah. 

DUBNER: I’m going to miss you.

ŞENOCAK: Well, there will be somebody else in my place doing the stained glass.

DUBNER: No, no, no, I don’t mean your stained glass. I mean, I’ve taken a liking to you during this conversation. When you said 52, I imagined you living easily ‘til 70 or 75. 

ŞENOCAK: No, I don’t think that would that very often happen to ordinary medieval citizens.

I asked Phillipp Schofield if he would have liked to live during the period he studies? 

SCHOFIELD: I think for a short period of time, I’d be interested. One of the things that would be shocking would be the level of casual cruelty. These villages where people are living fairly close to a marginal existence can be harsh places. A woman cropped up in litigation that I was looking at recently, who had been told to return eight hens that she’d purchased from somebody. And he then said, Well, she’s defamed me because she did return the eight hens, but she’d stitched their heads together. I think that hints at a kind of culture that we might find difficult to immediately just settle into.

DUBNER: If you did have that opportunity — I mean, we’re just talking about time travel here now, which is a constant, fascination for so many of us — what are maybe one or two of the most unanswered or perhaps unanswerable questions about that life that you, as an economic historian, would really love to crack?

SCHOFIELD: One I’ve mentioned earlier would be the proportion of the truly vulnerable. What does that society look like if you walk down a street? Do you see in a village people that are mostly doing fine and supporting each other? Or do you see desperation alongside relative prosperity? So it’s not a particularly pleasant angle, but I think it’s an important one, the degree of social inequality is something that our sources don’t really give us full insight into.

DUBNER: And would your main motivation for understanding that be gratitude from a modern perspective or simply empirical verification?

SCHOFIELD: It would mostly be empirical in a sense that I’d really want to know, what are the hidden stories in our history that we’re not picking up? That has its own salutary lessons, of course, for our contemporary society, about how we think of ourselves, and what we miss in our society, and how we ignore those that perhaps that are not as advantaged as others — you know, what are we missing? There was someone called Thorold Rogers writing in the 19th century, who said what he wouldn’t give for a history of the medieval village when so much of our history is wasted on the froth of kings and queens.

And I went back to Neslihan Şenocak too.

DUBNER: At the beginning of this conversation, you said you think you would prefer to live then as long as you could take your family with you. Now that we’ve talked about all these different elements — the economics and the legal system and religiosity and food and etc. etc. — I’m curious how you’re feeling about your choice. You’d prefer to be there then, even though, according to you, you’d only have a few more years of life left? And it sounds like you’re going to spend a lot of that life in church, repenting and so on. Or would you rather stay with us here?

ŞENOCAK: Well, that’s a difficult question because, you know, I have a really nice life here, too. But, for one thing, I don’t see the point of trying to live longer and longer. It’s the same thing, just more. It depends on how I live the life. That might be naive of me, the stress was much less in the Middle Ages. Now we have to deal with a million things. The technology in so many ways has made our life hell. The social media, the emails that you have to reply, electronic banking and taxes that you have to figure out. Also the fact that you don’t have electricity — in many ways, you do get a very good rest. You don’t keep working at night. 

DUBNER: Will you take me with you? 

ŞENOCAK: If you’re ready, yes. Do you think you can do it? 

DUBNER: I don’t know. At the beginning of this conversation, I never would have thought so. But you’re fairly persuasive. 

ŞENOCAK: Yeah, well, I have to be. I teach this. You know, I’m always looking for converts. 

When we first had the idea for this episode — to explore what it would be like to have been middle-aged in the Middle Ages — I thought it might be a ridiculous pursuit. But now that we’ve made the episode, I don’t think it’s ridiculous at all. It’s something I love about history, and historians: they are so good at bringing you into their world that your mind starts racing with comparisons to your own time. The benefits of the modern world are massive; but as Nesli Şenocak pointed out, there are also significant costs.

ŞENOCAK: The more people get into your life, the more difficult your life becomes. And so I’d rather try to have a small life.

How do you think about our time versus that one? Would you want to go back? Under what circumstances? Let us know; our email is radio@freakonomics.com. Until then, take care of yourself — and, if you can, someone else too.

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Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Augusta Chapman, with help from Zack Lapinski; it was mixed by Eleanor Osborne, with help from Jeremy Johnston. Thanks to Nic Neves for field recording at the renaissance faire; he had help from Kim Cupal. Thanks to everyone at the faire who spoke with us, and also the musicians, including Michele Mountain, Matt Schwarz, Jordan Cavalier, and Vince Conaway. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Alina Kulman, Dalvin Aboagye, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Jasmin Klinger, Morgan Levey, Sarah Lilley, and Theo Jacobs. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; and our composer is Luis Guerra.