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The Daily Life of a Medieval King

https://www.medievalists.net/2025/07/medieval-king-daily-life/
126•diodorus•3d ago

Comments

morgoths_bane•5h ago
This was a great article, thank you for sharing! I love learning about the medieval ages, I particularly enjoyed this part of the article: "Christine de Pizan explains that an ordered life is an essential condition for any form of ruling: ‘Political science, supreme among the arts, teaches man to govern himself, his family and subjects and all other matters according to a just and appropriate order. Likewise, it is to be the discipline and the instruction to govern kingdoms and empires"

This is a fantastic site, thank you for sharing. Also I must ask, is your username based off of the ancient historian Diodorus Siculus? If so, that's super cool!

joules77•5h ago
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.
actionfromafar•5h ago
Ruling by golfing. Well, it is pretty consistent in that regard.
wiseowise•4h ago
> Donald Trump, the Ayatollah and Putin

> moral emotions

…

yard2010•3h ago
Same goes for Muamar Kadafi and Aladin Aladin
inglor_cz•3h ago
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.

pjc50•2h ago
Donald Trump is incredibly ill-disciplined by even his own degenerate standards.
CuriouslyC•1h ago
From all accounts the disciplined one is Susie Wiles, and Trump is like boss baby.
scott_w•1h ago
He only said "essential," not "sufficient."
pbhjpbhj•27m ago
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).

Fascinated to know your answer.

dontTREATonme•5h ago
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.
ralfd•4h ago
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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_VI_of_France

pjc50•2h ago
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)

pyrale•1h ago
> e.g. Richard Lionheart spent more time out of England than in it

To be fair, most of his prize holdings were also out of England.

gherkinnn•1h ago
> 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.

rtsil•5m ago
The article says the depiction may reflect idealization, and is also a deliberate inspirational portrayal.
agys•4h ago
Nice morning routine: at 10am a little glass of wine and stringed instruments playing the sweetest possible music.
Cthulhu_•3h ago
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.
nottorp•3h ago
"He drank clear and simple wine, light in colour, ** well cut ** ". It's right there in the original medieval article.
ygritte•3h ago
Speaking of which, do you know what "well cut" means in this context?
AquilaWing•2h ago
It refers to diluting your wine with water
mrits•47m ago
I never heard the term "cut" outside drugs that often involved putting something stronger but less expensive in
rtsil•2m ago
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.
coffeecantcode•1m ago
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.

doctor_blood•2h ago
https://leslefts.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-great-medieval-wat...
braza•3h ago
> 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?

dan-robertson•3h ago
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)
LudwigNagasena•1h ago
The correct metric is probably something like Actual Individual Consumption.
mihaic•1h ago
> someone in the 5th percentile of wealth

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.

fmbb•1h ago
https://www.who.int/news/item/24-07-2024-hunger-numbers-stub...

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.

rtsil•7m ago
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.

raincole•2h ago
https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/43292/what-was-t...

> 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...

gampleman•1h ago
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).

[1] https://acoup.blog/2025/07/18/collections-life-work-death-an...

bluGill•37m ago
how much of that early eeath was poison or in war?
rcxdude•26m ago
Given their position, kings and other members of a warrior elite generally would likely have downwards pressure on their life expectancy from that.
anovikov•21m ago
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.
em500•2h ago
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.
walthamstow•2h ago
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.
pjc50•1h ago
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.
samlinnfer•1h ago
Kangxi emperor being disguised as a commoner in some kind of undercover boss scenario is a common trope.
bmn__•30m ago
https://allthetropes.org/wiki/King_Incognito
pjc50•1h ago
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.

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.

pjc50•57m ago
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).

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.

defrost•43m ago
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.

Added: Monastery herb gardens often had quite the range, eg: https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/inspire-me/blog/ar...

VilleO•24m ago
Also willow bark was chewed as a painkiller because of the acetylsalicylic acid it contains.
antonvs•39m ago
> 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.

ben_w•25m ago
> pickling, salting

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. :)

mik1998•10m ago
There's nothing intolerable about pickled vegetables. I eat them all the time
eviks•17m ago
> 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

dm319•3h ago
I'm curious to know if it was boring.
verisimi•2h ago
Yeah no internet. You'd be bored.
motoxpro•3h ago
Sounds about like a manager at any large-ish company. Not in a disparaging way, just interesting.
twalichiewicz•3h ago
https://archive.is/XnX1g
khazhoux•2h ago
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.

pyrale•1h ago
How many secretaries, go-to people, etc. do you have?
scott_w•1h ago
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.
lucianbr•1h ago
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.

mseepgood•1h ago
Delegation is key
DrNosferatu•2h ago
He did that much in the morning, after getting up, on an empty stomach??
pavlov•1h ago
> ”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.

OJFord•1h ago
Any collectible really? It's just that jewels (they're minerals, Marie!) used to be a more common one.
begueradj•1h ago
Nowadays, 13 years old boys saw more naked women than any medieval king saw during his entire life.
mseepgood•1h ago
So he only did four hours of actual work per day.
achenet•34m ago
much like members of the original affluent societies, hunter-gatherers

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

LightBug1•11m ago
Sounds about right for average office worker. WFH had its benefits too.
teleforce•18m ago
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.

[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...

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