In a podcast, Tucker Carlson foolishly claimed feudalism was “so much better than what we have now.” He argued that feudalism is better, because under it, a ruler was “vested in the prosperity of the people he rules.” But feudal rulers destroyed the prosperity of even their more fortunate subjects with pointless wars, taxing them into destitution to fund those wars, and leaving poverty-stricken subjects prone to starvation and hunger-related diseases. William the Conqueror wiped out much of the population of northern England by burning the crops of the restive peasants, resulting in whole villages starving to death.
Carlson’s “romantic view of medieval hierarchy ignores a brutal reality: For most people, feudalism meant grinding poverty, disease, and early death,” notes The Doomslayer. The majority of the people were very poor or destitute, even based on the low standards of their time:
One 17th-century observer estimated that the French population consisted of “10 percent rich, 50 percent very poor, 30 percent who were nearly beggars, and 10 percent who were actually beggars.”… Children fared the worst. Paris…had “7,000 to 8,000 abandoned children out of some 30,000 births around 1780.” These children were then taken—three at a time—to the poor house, with carriers often finding at least “one of them dead” upon arrival.
People were constantly hungry, and starvation was only ever a few bad harvests away. In 1800, even France, one of the world’s richest countries, had an average food supply of only 1,846 calories per person per day. In other words, the majority of the population was undernourished. (Given that the average person needs about 2,000 calories a day.)…There was also a prevalence of intestinal worms, which is “a slow, disgusting, and debilitating disease.”… Sanitation was a nightmare…“city ditches, now often filled with stagnant water, were commonly used as latrines; butchers killed animals in their shops and threw the offal of the carcasses into the streets; dead animals were left to decay and fester where they lay.” London had “poor holes” or “large, deep, open pits in which were laid the bodies of the poor, side by side, row by row.” The stench was overwhelming, for “great quantities of human excrement were cast into the streets.”
In 15th-century England, “80 percent of private expenditure was on food, with 20 percent spent on bread alone.” An account of 16th-century life in rural Lombardy noted that peasants lived on wheat alone: Their “expenses for clothing and other needs are practically non-existent.”… “One of the main preoccupations of hospital administration was to ensure that the clothes of the deceased should not be usurped but should be given to lawful inheritors. During epidemics of plague, the town authorities had to struggle to confiscate the clothes of the dead and to burn them: people waited for others to die so as to take over their clothes.”
Prior to mechanized agriculture, there were no food surpluses to sustain idle hands, not even those of children. And working conditions were brutal. A 16th-century ordinance in Lombardy found that supervisors in rice fields “bring together a large number of children and adolescents, against whom they practice barbarous cruelties … [They] do not provide these poor creatures with the necessary food and make them labor as slaves by beating them and treating them more harshly than galley slaves, so that many of the children die miserably in the farms and neighboring fields.” Such violence pervaded daily life. Medieval homicide rates reached 150 murders per 100,000 people in 14th-century Florence. In 15th-century England, it hovered around 24 per 100,000. (In 2020, the Italian homicide rate was 0.48 per 100,000. It was 0.95 per 100,000 in England and Wales in 2024.
