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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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...
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.
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...
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.
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. :)
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
morgoths_bane•5h ago
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
actionfromafar•5h ago
wiseowise•4h ago
> moral emotions
…
yard2010•3h ago
inglor_cz•3h ago
Maybe a more sloppy ruler would not invade, instead preferring time-outs with lovers.
pjc50•2h ago
CuriouslyC•1h ago
scott_w•1h ago
pbhjpbhj•27m ago
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.