Because I can't afford to go get a degree in medieval studies I read a book, an introductory text to medieval history/anthropology, called A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock, c. 1295-1344 by Judith Bennett. I read the book because I'm interested in history and medievalism, but I also find myself endlessly fascinated with how ordinary premodern people lived. I can't imagine living in a time before modern medicine, air conditioning, super markets, etc. I recognize that many, probably billions of people living today don't have access to these things, but that's a failure in distribution and therefore a terrible tragedy that makes me angry to think about, whereas in premodern times none of these things existed.
But one thing I found fascinating about this book is that there is one way, and precisely one way, that I find the life of Cecilia Penifader, who lived through one of the worst famines in the history of England and the Black Death, to be enviable: the sense of community. It really throws into sharp relief what socialists mean when they talk about capitalist alienation/isolation when I barely know my neighbors who I've lived next to for years meanwhile I'm reading about a woman who died almost seven hundred years ago who lived in a village with 150-200 fellow peasant laborers who regularly attended feasts and dances and festivals attended by basically everyone she ever knew.
My grandfather, who was born in the early twentieth century, talked a lot about the small farming community he grew up in. Like Cecilia Penifader's village it was about 200 people, though more spread out thanks to land distribution schemes and advancements in agriculture. But to hear him talk about it it was a pretty tight-knit community. Maybe not on the same level as Brigstock in the fourteenth century, but more than anything I've ever known. And today that farming community is a ghost town. A few older people, pretty poor people still live there. The surrounding countryside that used to be dotted by small family farms and their 120 acres have been consolidated into what are, in effect, corporate farms. They're still family owned, technically, and many by families who have been in the region for many years, however those families have become corporations with farming equipment costing millions of dollars used to farm tens of thousands of acres.
Because I can't afford to go get a degree in medieval studies I read a book, an introductory text to medieval history/anthropology, called A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock, c. 1295-1344 by Judith Bennett. I read the book because I'm interested in history and medievalism, but I also find myself endlessly fascinated with how ordinary premodern people lived. I can't imagine living in a time before modern medicine, air conditioning, super markets, etc. I recognize that many, probably billions of people living today don't have access to these things, but that's a failure in distribution and therefore a terrible tragedy that makes me angry to think about, whereas in premodern times none of these things existed.
But one thing I found fascinating about this book is that there is one way, and precisely one way, that I find the life of Cecilia Penifader, who lived through one of the worst famines in the history of England and the Black Death, to be enviable: the sense of community. It really throws into sharp relief what socialists mean when they talk about capitalist alienation/isolation when I barely know my neighbors who I've lived next to for years meanwhile I'm reading about a woman who died almost seven hundred years ago who lived in a village with 150-200 fellow peasant laborers who regularly attended feasts and dances and festivals attended by basically everyone she ever knew.
My grandfather, who was born in the early twentieth century, talked a lot about the small farming community he grew up in. Like Cecilia Penifader's village it was about 200 people, though more spread out thanks to land distribution schemes and advancements in agriculture. But to hear him talk about it it was a pretty tight-knit community. Maybe not on the same level as Brigstock in the fourteenth century, but more than anything I've ever known. And today that farming community is a ghost town. A few older people, pretty poor people still live there. The surrounding countryside that used to be dotted by small family farms and their 120 acres have been consolidated into what are, in effect, corporate farms. They're still family owned, technically, and many by families who have been in the region for many years, however those families have become corporations with farming equipment costing millions of dollars used to farm tens of thousands of acres.