We read history books,

We do not eat them.

Me, via NightCafe

So, this idiot meme seems to be going around social media again:

Sent by a fan who wanted to see me get worked up. From some form of social media.

Horse. Puckey¹.

There were no internal combustion engines during those times. Everything ran on horsepower (Probably mostly personpower², ox-power and donkey-power — horses were expensive.) Here's a hint: you can't just put Bessie in a barn and ignore her for a day. You have to feed and tend to your animals. Every. Day.

Heating the house and cooking did not rely on that nasty natural gas. You chopped wood³. There wasn't a grocery store where your food just came off of the shelf pre-packaged and mostly processed.

Milk didn't show up in a bottle -- you got your butt up and you got it from the source. Eggs didn't show up in a carton, you went and got them from the source. You want bread? Wood. Fire. Flour. Water. And you make it by hand.

Want any kind of meat with your meal? Oh, do I have bad news for you⁴.

Water did not come into the house by pipes -- your arse went and got it from the well. Or the river.⁵

On top of all this, your average Medieval peasant actually worked two jobs. One was to keep his family fed. The other was work that paid his rent to his lord⁶. No, you didn't hand him a gold coin -- you went and worked his farm⁷; and when you were done for the day, you went and worked your farm.

And you want to know the really fun part of all of this? The part absolutely no-one is talking about?

Proto-Socialists should probably get the fainting couch ready: Those Holidays (Feast Days) were religious⁸. You didn't sit at home in your recliner, you got up and went to church. And you either got really fervent about it, or you made sure all of your neighbors⁹ thought you were really fervent about it.

Yeah, those neckbeards frothing at the mouth over only working 150 days a year? Tell those same neckbeards that they get to earn those 150 days out of the year by 100 days (minimum) of sitting their arses in a pew¹⁰ and making like really good Christians (or else¹¹), and watch their think-pudding explode.

Sigh. Is there some vital nutrient missing from the modern diet that can only be found in history books? Or is it the roughage?

Ah, well.

Ian

1. Which has to be shoveled up and moved, by the way.

2. I’d’ve said “people power”, but I can already hear the neckbeards getting all starry-eyed and lathered up.

3. Which wasn’t in your back-yard. It was off in a woods that someone else owned. And you carried the wood back.

4. Worse news for the chicken/ pig/ cow, but that’s not the point.

5. Walkies!

6. Technically, he didn’t own the land either, he was renting it from the King.

7. The desmesne — pronounced ‘di-MAYNE’. Bloody French.

8. At a time when religion was Srs Bizniss.

9. If you think the Stasi was bad, it didn’t have a pinch on having the local Karens deciding you were Religioning Wrong.

10. Only after the 14th Century, though. Prior to that you stood on a cold, hard stone floor until the priest decided he was done.

11. And while some of the flak the Church catches for being … enthusiastic is warranted, there are a lot of recorded instances of the Church putting the brakes on your neighbors getting extra-curricular and going “off the reservation” — as we used to say — on suspected heathens.