Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Morrow" data-source="post: 2278298" data-attributes="member: 27012">Out of curiosity, how many times have you walked between two towns in your life?  Can't you spare the time?This definition of the word "serf" from Merriam-Webster might point to an even bigger problem than time or will:"A member of a servile feudal class bound to the soil and subject to the will of his lord."They weren't free to just do whatever they wanted.  Serfs were slaves to the land.And let's not forget that they don't have oil or gas furnaces for heat, gas or electric cooking ranges, electric lights, refrigerators, grocery stores, washing machines, bicycles, automated looms, tractors, combines, etc.  You might want to watch one of those BBC/PBS shows that takes some modern people and puts them into roles from an earlier period in history (e.g., the American frontier, a British manor house, etc.) and see what those people go through.  You don't spin thread and weave cloth, you don't have new clothing.  You don't chop wood, you don't have a fire.  You don't slaughter and process the pig, you don't eat meat or much of it goes bad.  You don't plow the field or harvest the grain, you starve.  Oh, and don't forget an absence of antibiotics and vaccines (combined with a, well, Medieval understanding of infections and diseases) that can turn even a minor injury or tooth abcess into a life-threatening situation.  By the way, I know one woman who wrote a master's thesis that defended the idea that the Roman slaves had a better standard of living than the Medieval serfs that replaced them.While historians certainly spin the evidence from time to time, the conditions of past eras really were pretty abominable by today's standards.  Unless you really want to give up clean running water and modern plumbing, heating and air conditioning, antibiotics and modern medicines, abundant food, and a whole host of other things that you probably take for granted, I doubt that you'd really to live in any other era.  Heck, I'm not sure that most people would really want to go back to the way things were in the 1970s and I certainly know that I wouldn't want to go back to the Depression, when my parents grew up.</blockquote>

Verification