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Quality Of Rural Life During The Middle Ages

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What makes rural life unique? What draws people out of the countryside into urban life? While both were difficult places to live in during the middle ages, they still hold drastic similarities and differences in lifestyle for the lower class. This essay will focus on living standards such as employment, housing, religion, disease and health and how they contributed to a good or poor quality of life for peasants throughout the medieval period.
Work in the middle ages was very limited and laborious for the low class. A high proportion worked in the agricultural sector as shown on “The Luttrell Psalter” where peasants worked on farm land using ploughs and horses on Sir Geoffrey’s estate. However, these images can be described as a romanticised …show more content…

Contents of chamber pots were emptied onto streets which were washed down into the rivers by rainfall. This shows that water sources such as wells or springs would have been polluted meaning no fresh drinking water available which would have increased diseases in urban areas. Beggars were seen as social victims and abandoned as disease was viewed as a punishment from God for sins. Towns were always populated with an abundance of vermin, like rats. This high population contributed to the outbreak of the plague and the close proximity in which people lived caused it to spread quickly. The bubonic plague had the highest death rates at 70-80% of those infected in comparison to septicemic and pneumonic. The plague caused painful swellings, discoloration of the skin – hence the name “Black Death” – and lungs filling with fluid. It was also spread by the fact cemeteries were running low on space and bodies had to be thrown into fields, ditches and streams which contaminated water supplies. This shows that in urban areas the “toxic mix of filth, noise, rats, fleas, terrible stench emanating from streets filled with raw sewage and garbage” made urban life predominantly more susceptible to diseases. Because of this lots of children had a short life expectancy as these conditions brought on bone diseases, smallpox, tuberculosis, dehydration and

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