The daily life of a medieval king
130 comments
·July 17, 2025BXLE_1-1-BitIs1
Abdul Azziz al Saud, founder of Saudi Arabia, received supplicants on a near daily basis as all his subjects believed they had a right to bring their complaints to him.
In the early years of his reign, he was involved in military campaigns to expand his kingdom.
teleforce
The author is Christine de Pizan, an Italian-born (Venice) French court writer [1].
Fun facts, Christine married at the age of 15, now will be considered by both Italian and French law as an illegal underage marriage. The marriage was, by all accounts, a happy one [2].
She had 3 children from the marriage to Etienne du Castel, (a royal secretary) for about ten years, remained widow after her husband's death.
Christine was Catholic and is often presented as one of the first feminists in history.
[1] Christine de Pizan:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_de_Pizan
[2] Biography of Christine de Pizan, Medieval Writer and Thinker:
https://www.thoughtco.com/christine-de-pizan-biography-41721...
projektfu
And at the age of 12, the king (then dauphin) married his 12-year-old cousin, Joanna.
Etienne was apparently 8 years older than Christine.
dartharva
Why is this a "fun fact", and why did you feel the need to point out she was "happy" in an underage marriage? Why is her marriage even relevant here?
For the sake of HN's guidelines (to assume good faith) I am assuming this was just you being curious and oblivious to the unintended undertones of your comment, but I'll humbly suggest going over it again. It can easily be taken in its worst interpretation, especially considering current affairs.
whamlastxmas
It’s a fun fact because it’s different from current society, and it’s nice to highlight that something now viewed as abuse was not, at the time for her specifically, a traumatic situation according to her public records. Obligatory “just because it wasn’t traumatic for her doesn’t mean that wasn’t overwhelmingly the case for others”
braza
> His meal was not long, for he did not favour elaborate food, saying that such food bothered his stomach and disturbed his memory. He drank clear and simple wine, light in colour, well cut, and not much quantity nor great variety. Like David, to rejoice his spirits, he listened willingly at the end of his meal to stringed instruments playing the sweetest possible music.
For me, the most curious thing here would be to know if a person in today's world in 5th percentile in wealth (i) would have (i) a larger life expectancy than a king in the 15th century, (ii) more food security, and (iii) more life opportunities.
Every time that I hear those stories from medieval times, as soon as I become fascinated by their tales and so on, I imagine how hard it would be to live there, even as a king.
Does someone know any reliable sources about that kind of comparison?
ramses0
I've made it a hobby to compare my current standards of living to "When would this be kingly?" We've traded down so much on quality of products (and sometimes: quality of life) but making a conscious decision to "live like a king" in a lot of cases isn't that hard.
Simplest example? Indoor plumbing: Boom, 15th century king.
Silly example? I got my wife seven silk pillow cases one year as a Christmas gift. A bit spendy, but instantly "living like a king".
We don't have "the royal kitchens", but do have Door-Dash. We took a tour of a castle somewhere in Canada (probably Craigdarroch) and they had a bunch of sitting rooms and reading nooks with extra lights and stuff... Steal Those Ideas! You too can live like a king, you just have to rewind a century or two, and be strategic about the luxuries you pick.
athenot
I love this! It's really a mindset of taking seemingly common things that we take for granted, and reconsider them under a fresh look to appreciate how amazing they actually are.
pjc50
I remember many years ago the Economist pointed out one of the Rothschilds died young of something that would have been readily solvable with penicillin, but no amount of money could get you something that didn't exist yet.
I'm going to go with a cautious "yes" to the first: the ages at death of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_monarchs are not great.
"No" on the second (king is never going to have to worry about food security, that's for the peasants)
And "life opportunties" .. bit of a divide by zero situation. As king, you technically have all the opportunities. But you can only do things which actually exist at the time. And you're bound by the social and religious conventions of the time, which you mess with at your peril. Doing so worked for Henry VIII but not for the various Georges. See, for example, the controversy over whether James 6 might have been gay.
pjc50
Addendum: food security was assured, food choice was very restricted by modern standards. Remember the medieval period is pre-Colombian exchange, so no potatoes, no tomatoes, no peppers. Some spices, but a different range to what modern palates are used to. No refrigeration either, so you're limited to seasonal availability. In the winter that means you're eating a lot of root vegetables and bread, even if as king you're guaranteed a supply of fresh meat and fish (from the royal holdings dedicated to producing it).
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forme_of_Cury
This is where you get the memes about shocking medieval Europeans with a time travelling bag of Doritos: both the bag and its contents are completely impossible items for them.
Worth noting that durable items could be shipped long distance - precious metals, gems, textiles - but foodstuff shipping was more limited to high value density stuff like spices and the European wine trade.
Speaking of wine: no modern stimulants. No coffee, no tobacco, no weed, no cocaine, no opiates. No painkillers, no anasthesia. For all those situations, you have one option: alcohol.
A huge number of critical historical decisions were taken by people who would fail a brethalyser.
antonvs
> No refrigeration either, so you're limited to seasonal availability.
Well, except for food preserved via pickling, salting, drying, smoking, fermenting, sugaring, and confit. Which makes for quite a long list.
Plus, various foods like grains, root vegetables, onions, and even apples could be stored for months using proper techniques. They didn't have the luxury we have of not paying much attention to how we store things and just replacing them when they go bad, so they became quite good at this.
Telemakhos
I don't know where the "no painkillers" meme comes from, but opium's been around forever and is among the easiest drugs to harvest: just lightly score the poppy seed pod and collect the latex. It was as known and available in the middle ages as in the ancient Greek world.
https://www.neurology.org/doi/10.1212/WNL.92.15_supplement.P...
Alcohol, though, is great for dissolving opium into an easily ingestible potion, whence one gets dwale or laudanum.
dmurray
> Addendum: food security was assured, food choice was very restricted by modern standards.
Not by the standards of the world 5th percentile, as in the question posed. The 5th percentile today is mostly subsistence farming and doesn't have access to imported foods or own a refrigerator (though there probably is one in their local village, and they may well own a mobile phone).
psunavy03
> A huge number of critical historical decisions were taken by people who would fail a breathalyzer.
[citation needed]
The idea that historically people went around hammered because the water supply was poor is a myth.
prmoustache
It doesn't work for everything but clove act as a decent local painkiller. I once broke a tooth and cloves in my mouth made me go through the day until my appointment to the dentist.
The taste wasn't so fun though.
defrost
Quite a few precursors to modern stimulants though, there were many Solanaceae (nightshade) variations in Europe, from harmless through high to deadly. Papaver somniferum (opium poppy) got about the place quite a bit (according to archaeologists at least.
Hemlock and henbane were both used as painkillers and dulling agents .. up to unconsciousness and death, depending on dosage.
Added: Monastery herb gardens often had quite the range, eg: https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/inspire-me/blog/ar...
null
IAmBroom
Controversy... yeah... Historians have seen the mountain of evidence think one thing, and people ignorant of history who think he had something to do with their favorite version of the Bible know The Lord wouldn't have chosen a gay "author".
He wasn't gay, but his many male lovers might have been. :D
KineticLensman
> Doing so worked for Henry VIII
Apart from his painful, smelly leg ulcers that he had to tolerate for years
raincole
https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/43292/what-was-t...
> For England, including the Kings of Wessex from Æthelberht on (the first I could find a birthdate for), and the Kings of England up to Edward IV, whose reigns extends to 1483 (and consequently into Modern Ages, if we take the usual date of 1453 - the fall of Constantinople - as the end of the Middle Ages), I found the average age of death of monarchs to be 44 years. (http://ideias.wikidot.com/reis-da-inglaterra-na-idade-media)
Life expectancy is longer than that in even the poorest countries today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...
gampleman
And very very importantly, this is taking the death ages of kings (i.e. people who lived long enough to actually become monarchs) compared to life expectancy at birth (i.e. people who lived long enough to be born).
Given that until roughly the 1700s infant mortality was brutal (according to [1] fully 50% of children died before reaching adulthood), this comparison becomes even starker, since average life expectancy of a crown prince at birth would be far lower (somewhere in their 20s).
[1] https://acoup.blog/2025/07/18/collections-life-work-death-an...
psunavy03
This "average life expectancy in the ancient world" thing is nothing more than an illustration of when to pick the median over the mean because the data is skewed by outliers.
rcxdude
Given their position, kings and other members of a warrior elite generally would likely have downwards pressure on their life expectancy from that.
bluGill
how much of that early death was poison or in war?
anovikov
Except kings very frequently died for "good" reasons: being killed in battle, or by political opponents, or during hunting accidents, or victims of coups, or beheaded. As a leader, you lead your subjects into all kinds of battles and take all kinds of risks and today's politicians don't do that anymore.
IAmBroom
Richard II starved to death. Voluntarily. After signing over his crown to someone he had previously banished. While in prison.
thesuitonym
Couple of points on life expectancy: If you made it to age 15, it was likely you'd live to be 60-80. Life expectancy wasn't lower in the past because people died earlier, they just died as children at a much higher rate, but there are some important caveats. In King Charles V's day, a simple cut that today we would not even think twice about could prove fatal from infection. Add to that the common plight of royal families being extremely inbred (I'm not sure if this was the case for Charles V) and it is actually likely that most people alive today, regardless of wealth, would likely live longer than him.
Now, when you compare a low wealth person today to a peasant from the medieval era, if you remove child mortality, they likely had a similar life expectancy, although again, the modern human is more likely to have access to antibiotics, regardless of wealth--as others have mentioned, they just didn't exist back then.
mistrial9
> a simple cut that today we would not even think twice about could prove fatal from infection
maybe .. most mammals do not get infections from an ordinary cut.. it is humans that are uniquely weak that way
source: retired medical surgeon
ainiriand
My cat almost died from an infected wound from the bite of another cat, so maybe it depends on the wound.
em500
Not that I have any direct knowledge, but I think a real king (either medieval or modern day) has a huge number of constraints on life opportunities. They have a lot of nominal wealth, but probably also too many obligations and duties (real or perceived) to just say, the heck with it, I'm going to be a full time traveling musician or rock climber or some such.
walthamstow
We've seen this recently in British and Japanese royal families. Some people just don't want it, and to get a normal life they have to leave the monarchy.
pjc50
This is reminding me of folk tales where the king, prince or princess disguises themselves and goes among the commoners, but I can't name a definite example of the trope at the moment.
dan-robertson
I assume someone in the 5th percentile of wealth is going to have very negative wealth which is only really possible in developed countries, eg an American medical student or a doctor who is part-way through paying off their loans, or someone suffering from massive credit card debt / car loans. (I think this isn’t really what you were thinking of though. I think the poorest people in the world still live, in many ways like medieval peasants except with much lower infant mortality and somewhat net food security)
fmbb
https://www.who.int/news/item/24-07-2024-hunger-numbers-stub...
Hunger worldwide has been getting worse for the last quarter century or so.
733 million people don’t have food security. I think about 5-10 million die every year from starvation.
In medieval times there were famines, but they were caused by there not being enough food to go around due to disease or bad harvests.
Today millions of people starve even if there is no bad harvest or animal pandemics.
gjm11
> Hunger worldwide has been getting worse for the last quarter century or so.
That doesn't appear to be true. E.g., following links from the WHO page you cite gets me to https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/39d... ...
where Figure 1 shows hunger consistently decreasing from the start of the graph in 2005 to somewhere around 2014, at which point it plateaus for a while and then starts increasing somewhere around 2019-2020.
My recollection is that by 2005 where that graph begins, hunger had been consistently decreasing for quite some time, but a bit of googling hasn't found anything that quite answers that question. I did find https://www.jstor.org/stable/40572886 (looking at data from 1930 to 1990) whose publicly-accessible abstract says that "the proportion undernourished has been in decline since the 1960s and that the absolute number has also declined in recent years".
So I think the truth is not "hunger has been getting worse for the last quarter century or so" but something more like "10 years ago, hunger had been improving for about half a century; the improvement stalled for about 5 years and over about the last five years it has been getting worse".
(Which is still bad news, as far as the present state of things is concerned, but a rather different sort of bad news.)
rtsil
And malnutrition isn't only about lack of food, it's also about mediocre quality of food:
> Similarly, new estimates of adult obesity show a steady increase over the last decade, from 12.1 percent (2012) to 15.8 percent (2022). Projections indicate that by 2030, the world will have more than 1.2 billion obese adults. The double burden of malnutrition – the co-existence of undernutrition together with overweight and obesity – has also surged globally across all age groups.
Obesity will soon, if not already, become a major public health disaster in poor countries.
HKH2
Well giving people food doesn't solve hunger problems because those people just breed.
Why doesn't Africa have more farms and infrastructure?
jajko
> I think about 5-10 million die every year from starvation.
That's an outrageous claim you need to back with some hard facts, otherwise patently untrue.
mihaic
> someone in the 5th percentile of wealth
I find the percentile measure terrible to technically mean 95% of the population, but is often colloquially understood the other way around. It's like German numbers, when people say five and forty to mean 45. The general population rejects needless complexity.
psychoslave
The general population cultivate disagreement on every matter it can afford to.
LudwigNagasena
The correct metric is probably something like Actual Individual Consumption.
biophysboy
You might be interested in "A Distant Mirror" by Tuchman
crabbone
With how many times you find: "horse and man fell to the ground", and "he smote him such a buffet", and "armed himself at all points", "hauberk covered in blood" and so on... I'd think that life expectancy wasn't exactly great...
Wasn't Arthur alone responsible for the untimely death of like a dozen kings? :)
ChrisMarshallNY
That's a fascinating treatise.
It also paints Charles in quite a good light. I assume that she wrote to please, but it also sounds like he was a genuinely good king.
I have heard that the best form of government is an absolute monarchy, and the worst form of government is an absolute monarchy.
adsteel_
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time...."
- Winston S. Churchill, 11 November 1947
Ishxnxibz
Says the the indebted drunkard who moved mountains to ensure WW2 was as bloody as possible. He benefited heavily from how malleable democracies are for a coordinated elite.
We’ve known since Socrates giving everyone the right to vote is chaos.
dontTREATonme
I always question how accurate these types of accounts were. Even if she wrote this after his death, his successor obviously wouldn’t look too kindly on it being disparaging.
pjc50
It reads a lot like those instagram/magazine profiles of "I get up at 7am and eat healthily" (author actually gets up at 9am and eats junk food on most other days).
Worth noting that this is a relatively immobile king. Various other kings spent a lot of time on:
- hunting for sport
- military campaigns (e.g. Richard Lionheart spent more time out of England than in it)
- assizes (mobile courts)
- summer residences (Versailles is a huge, late example of this, but lots of monarchs around the world have had holiday homes of one sort or another)
pyrale
> e.g. Richard Lionheart spent more time out of England than in it
To be fair, most of his prize holdings were also out of England.
gherkinnn
> To be fair, most of his prize holdings were also out of England.
To be fair, he wasn't really English and didn't speak the language either. It wasn't until Henry IV (reign 1399 - 1413) that a post-invasion King's mother tongue was English. Most people don't realise that for over 300 years the (language at) court was Norman French.
ralfd
Btw: The successor was “Charles the Mad” who is known for mental illness and psychotic/schizophrenic episodes and had to be placed under regency. So maybe she also wanted to give an example how a sane King normally ruled.
rtsil
The article says the depiction may reflect idealization, and is also a deliberate inspirational portrayal.
pavlov
> ”After this rest period, he spent a time with his most intimate companions in pleasant diversions, perhaps looking at his jewels or other treasures.”
Men don’t spend a lot of time looking at jewels anymore, but I guess the modern equivalent would be hanging out with your buddies having some beers and admiring your fancy car.
OJFord
Any collectible really? It's just that jewels (they're minerals, Marie!) used to be a more common one.
agys
Nice morning routine: at 10am a little glass of wine and stringed instruments playing the sweetest possible music.
Cthulhu_
Little has changed, except it's coffee and Spotify for me. Keep in mind that back then, wine / beer were an important source of clean drinking water, and it would often be low alcohol.
doctor_blood
FergusArgyll
"One should not eat until his stomach is full. Rather, [he should stop when] he has eaten to close to three quarter's of full satisfaction. One should drink only a small amount of water during the meal, and mix that with wine. When the food begins to be digested in his intestines, he may drink what is necessary. However, he should not drink much water, even when the food has been digested."
Maimonedes Human Dispositions 4 (Trans. by Eliyahu Touger)
dang
Discussed once here:
The great Medieval water myth (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9031856 - Feb 2015 (71 comments)
nottorp
"He drank clear and simple wine, light in colour, ** well cut ** ". It's right there in the original medieval article.
ygritte
Speaking of which, do you know what "well cut" means in this context?
mrits
I never heard the term "cut" outside drugs that often involved putting something stronger but less expensive in
sharkjacobs
I was always fascinated by the detail that Odysseus plows his own fields, and what that means about being King of an island in mythological Greece
jcalx
Not specifically about kings but — I recommend The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer, for a very thorough look at daily life in this era.
More specifically about kings, ACoUP has a great writeup [0] on royal legitimacy and the various purposes of the king's court in the context of my favorite medieval shenanigans simulator, Crusader Kings III.
[0] https://acoup.blog/2022/02/18/miscellanea-thoughts-on-ckiii-...
game_the0ry
From the looks of it, a medieval king spent more time with his subjects that a typical US congressman spends with his constituents -- rather, they tend to spend more time at dinner parties with lobbyists and donors. In fact, the only time I here from my congressional rep is when I get texts asking for more money.
naniwaduni
The time spent with lobbyists and donors most certainly gets totaled in for this purpose.
GuB-42
Much lower population, and you had to see the king in person, travelling at walking speed. It means the king could afford to listen to the comparatively few people who get to him.
Among these people are probably a good number of what would be called lobbyists today.
HEmanZ
Medieval kings were a lot closer to mafia dons, in scope of government, role in government, and strength of position than any kind of politician we have in the western world today.
This is less historical record than medieval propaganda piece. I get that it was written as such but even the article at the beginning pretends it’s an accurate representation of what the king got up to and then towards the end tacitly admits it’s an idealized representation of how a king should behave. This basically brings into question all of the actual details. Did he go to church every morning ? Maybe it was deemed proper that he did but as the king he just skipped it - we’ll never know.
Likewise listening to commoners- maybe this was done for show with some well cleaned up subjects every so often , or maybe it was a genuine practice , we don’t really know.