Life of a Peasant essays

Life of a Peasant essays When you think of the Middle Ages you think of Kings and castles, knights in shining armor saving the princess, and savage warfare to coincide with horrible diseases and plagues taking lives. For the most part that was true, but we are forgetting about the majority of the population, otherwise known as the commons. These people can easily be compared to you and I living in these times. The peasants were not a part of the noble class or associated with the clergy, but just lived plain and simple lives and tried to get by with what they had. In those times they did not have a lot. Since all of us would be considered peasants in those times, I am going to take us back to that era and compare the life of a peasant to our lives now. From the day they are born all the way to their death. I will go over the different types of commoners, go over how they grew up, what they ate, and even what they did for fun back in those days. Childbirth in Medieval times were much of the same as they are now. I say this in the biological way only of course. Birth was not in the hands of a physician, but entirely up to a midwife. The only reason there would be a doctor there is if there was a pathological complication. The setting for childbirth was different as well. All of the childbirths would take place at the home, as compared to 2hospitals in todays times. Hospitals were predominantly used for long-term care for the poor. Another huge difference in childbirth was the risk to the mother. The closest estimate of childbirth deaths was about 14 deaths for every 1,000 childbirths. This is very high in modern standards. In 1988, Nigeria was reported to have a rate of 8 deaths in every 1,000 births, which was unusually high even for a Third World country.(Singman,McLean p40) The first formal event that an infant had to go through was the ceremony of baptism. This...