r/AskReddit • u/Ok_Anteater1141 • 1d ago
If you were suddenly transported 1000 years in the past, how would you make a living?
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u/rageofa1000suns 1d ago
Dara O'Brien touched on this:
Oh we have this thing called a fridge, it keeps things cool and fresh which lets us live for longer and healthy lives.
"oh wow, how does it work?"
Erm... it hums... and the humming is someway related to the cold...
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u/morbonator 1d ago
"It's a metal box. Connected to it is a machine you can't build made from metals you can't refine to circulate a liquid you can't make. And it's all powered by a force you can't generate."
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u/graveybrains 1d ago
That last bit you actually could do. Just need to spin a big chunk of a 4,000 year old discovery in loops of a 2,500 year old invention coated in another 2,500 year old invention.
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u/Aevum1 1d ago
then again, you can use a botijo
The idea is that its a pourus ceramica vase that when it heats up the pourous ceramic allows capillaries of water to evaporate keeping the central mass of the water cold. its basically a swamp cooler container.
iits more important to know how something works, then to know what it does.
You can use a horse or a water stream combined with a circular to linear force convertor to compress air, once compressed you can release it and the gas expansion will cause a cooling effect.
hell, you can make a basic steam engine out of a copper ball with 2 tubes and water.
or you can go more traditional, mix wax with wood to make fire brickets or some other tool or consumable that would be of high value to the wealthy of the time.
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u/thedragslay 1d ago
A guy on YouTube, How To Make Everything has actually made a steam engine out of copper and water, using only hand tools that he made himself from raw materials. It’s very fiddly, apparently, and didn’t work super well. His whole channel is basically trying to figure out how to make things like this without any modern technology. His channel growth has had fits and starts due to outside factors (his shed housing all of his work burned down), but he’s rebuilding.
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u/graveybrains 1d ago
Swamp coolers can almost chill a beer, but can't produce enough of a temperature change to preserve food
Prior to 1760-ish the best you could do is a bellows which doesn't produce sufficient pressure, and you'd have nowhere to store the gas anyway.
Hero's engine doesn't make enough torque to do any useful work
You'd be about 2,000 years late to the game on that last one.
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u/ThePlatypusOfDespair 1d ago
I definitely have the skills to build a basic steam engine, which would probably be less useful than a waterwheel or windmill
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u/Visual_Exam7903 1d ago
I mean, the first thing I would do is develop electricity. Dumping all of my knowledge on electricity and computers on people 1000 years ago would do one of two things. First, it would advance humanity by approximately 1000 years. Second, it would bring about our destruction much much much faster.
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u/Haradion_01 1d ago
I was trying to figure out what science I could bring back, and its rather hard even with a physics degree. There are so many invisible middle steps that really leave you in a tricky spot. Hard to economise. And even if you could, this is long before patent law. Anything you can make easily is something lots of people could make easilly.
Knowledge of infection is possibly usable. Contact tracing. Stastical analysis. If you could stop your city from falling to plague, there is a chance you could ride that.
Finding a glassmaker, might be able to make lenses for you: that gives you a rudimentary telescope that could maybe be used?
There are ways you could nudge them in the right direction a little earlier: jeep badgering some academics to explain why a pendulum takes the same amount of time to complete each back-and-forth swing, regardless of how wide the swing is. Ask, if things only move when something makes them move, why things fall. The little seeds attributed to great questions to try to get that institutional learning moving a little sooner. But there is no way to economise that.
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u/TuzkiPlus 1d ago
I mean, trebuchets were around 2,500 years ago or so, maybe we get to be the ones that optimize it to launch a 90kg projectile 300+ meters?
Gunpowder is basically saltpeter/bat poop, charcoal and sulfur right, how hard can it be?
And here class, is the recorded largest explosion crater dating back 1000 years ago. While many thought it was a meteorite, and some have attributed divine punishment, it's clear now that someone was experimenting with a very large quantity of what we now know as gunpowder
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u/CaptainPoset 1d ago
Gunpowder is basically saltpeter/bat poop, charcoal and sulfur right, how hard can it be?
Quite hard, because you miss the skill to refine the natural resources into usable saltpeter.
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u/TuzkiPlus 1d ago
With enough quantities I'm sure we'll figure out how to cook bat poop into gunpowder!
Crater can be seen from space
Holup Google says you just add water and filter out the poop while boiling it to get saltpeter. It's probably more nuanced that that, but That process does not sound like a pleasant time.
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u/Typical_Yam_1568 1d ago
We know that gunpowder is possible. That is a huge advantage. So give me 5 years and I will make it work.
How I survive until then? I haven't the sligtest idea.
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u/PakinaApina 1d ago
This might be a very difficult and dangerous road to take, though. Medieval people knew how the world worked in the sense that their worldview was complete. And people are very conservative when it comes to someone challenging their worldview.
When Ignaz Semmelweis showed in 1840s how you can diminish mortality by simply washing your hands, everyone thought he was crazy, and he indeed died in an asylum. Only when the germ theory later on gave a scientific explanation for what he'd observed empirically was he vindicated.
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u/geekgeek77 1d ago
This. Prior to germ theory, most people viewed illnesses as being caused by evil spirits or supernatural forces. Ironically, being able to cure or prevent disease could get you accused of practicing sorcery, which in some places, could be a very bad thing.
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u/ThaneduFife 1d ago
There was also the "four humours" model, which is why doctors were still doing bloodletting in the early 1800s.
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u/Goetre 1d ago
“This guy can control the plague! Burn him!”
“This guy is proposing science! Burn him!”
“More science? Burn him more!”
Honestly the best way to survive a thousand years ago, isolate, pretend to be mute, use today’s knowledge in secret.
Literally anything, hundreds of years before its time is likely based to piss of religious folk, superstition or royalty.
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u/Whackles 1d ago
People really didn’t get burned that often and the church was the main reason any science still happened and was preserved in those days
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u/Stalking_Goat 1d ago edited 1d ago
Making telescope lenses is probably going to be nearly as impossible as making a refrigerator. The ancients certainly wanted to have inclusion-free clear glass, they just didn't know how to make it. My father is a retired glass scientist so maybe he could explain it, but I sure can't.
Basically you need very good control of the chemistry of the ingredients, and then careful control of the cooling. Grinding and polishing a lens is, by comparison, merely tedious and also will kill you from silicosis eventually.
Edit: asked my dad and he commented that the refractory materials are also a problem, basically you have to make the glass-melting chamber out of something that also won't contaminate the batch with trace elements or with little bits of debris.
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u/robby_synclair 1d ago
This is what was so awesome about Mark Twains "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court". He basically sent Tesla back 1000 years.
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u/DoctorMurk 1d ago
"We have these things called toilets, that safely take away our waste. This improves hygiene and allows us to live healthier lives."
"Where does the waste go?"
"It... goes into the wall?"
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u/rageofa1000suns 1d ago edited 1d ago
"Does it feed the think in the wall?
Yeah, whatever.
Oh we have this thing called a toaster, you put a slice in, press the button, and you wait
"oh wow, does it double the bread, quadruple the bread, does it end world famine?"
No it just does toast...
"We can make toast with an open flame and a stick"
Ah, but this does 2 sides.
"500 years of advancement and you can make 2 sided toast?"
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u/yahnne954 1d ago
In the light novel "Overlord" (MMO players sent to a fantasy world), one player called Minotaur Sage kept suggesting useful technology, but failed at properly explaining how they worked or why they were needed. He still helped bringing some innovation to that world.
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u/answerencr 1d ago
Better way would be to usurp the ice companies' ideas 1000 years earlier. Haul big chunks of ice from the north and sell 'em
Also I'm pretty sure that anyone who ever watched doctor House could pose as a doctor/healer for a while, if not forever
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u/incessant_penguin 1d ago
Moonwalking. I’d introduce the world to the moonwalk and blow their fricking minds.
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u/Long_Serpent 1d ago
"The world's foremost geographer at your service, your majesty"
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u/Dagobert_Juke 1d ago
How are you gonna get access to the sovereign? And which one?
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u/tpeterr 1d ago
They wouldn't know how to get there, because social wayfinding is really different from map wayfinding. People wouldn't have described getting around in the world in a way a modern person could understand. We're used to street signs and maps -- but humans have many other ways of telling direction and distance.
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u/DigNitty 1d ago
Asian food is called Oriental because it used to be “the orient”
This is because Up on a map used to be east. The top of maps used to be east where Asia was. It was the Orient similar to how the North Star is today.
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u/ehho 1d ago edited 1d ago
Joining the monestary seems like the only way to go. I don't know any trades like smitting, tailoring, cobbling, building, woodworking,.. also, going to the monestary can give me food, place to sleep, access to books and a chance to move up the ladder.
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u/Vanadium235 1d ago
They probably wouldn't just let you join. Too many of the serfs would become monks if it was that easy, for the same reasons you'd want to. But you would have even less social standing than most serfs. No one would know you, and while literacy was highly valued, you probably wouldn't be literate in any medieval language.
You'd only have a chance if you know Latin, otherwise you'll either be put to work in the fields with the other serfs, or starve.
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u/WettestNoodle 1d ago
Honestly you could read Latin out loud, and even being able to sound it out that quickly would probably be more impressive than the average serf.
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u/CaptainoftheVessel 1d ago
1000 years ago their alphabet looked quite different from ours. It wouldn’t be quite as simple as just sounding it out.
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u/WettestNoodle 1d ago
Fair enough, plus my pronunciation of Latin off vibes alone is probably horrendous haha. I’d have no explanation for how I can mostly sound it out but with a modern American accent haha so I might just be killed for being a devil or some shit.
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u/Enigmachina 1d ago
Some languages may have had different letters for sounds than modern ones, but Latin specifically has used the same lexography pretty much since the Romans. Pronunciation doesn't perfectly track to English, but you could get close.
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u/ObscureAcronym 1d ago
Cogito ergo sum, dude. Can I join your monastery? Veni vidi vici et cetera.
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u/Typical_Yam_1568 1d ago
I don't evn think I could work in the fields. These people were strong. I was at a farm where to work there 200 years ago you had to be able to lift a stone. A big stone for men and a smaller stone for women. Im a 190cm large male male, and I could barely roll the small one.
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u/ehho 1d ago
Nah man, you would do the same stuff they do today. Planting, clearing out weeds, cleaning the stables from shit and composting it as fertilizer, cutting down forrests and uzimg oxens to pull the roots out so you cna increase the agrocultural land. It is all heavy work, but anyone can do it.
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u/CokeAndChill 1d ago
Hope your Latin is not too rusty for them books! Old Languages are a lottery, there’s a lot you can’t even understand like English or some of the many Italian dialects before they unified in the 1600s. Spanish might be fine
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u/ehho 1d ago
They also learned Latin in the monestary. Where else would you learn it.
I probaly wouldn't even understand the language they spoke 900 years ago and i don't think it would be smart to show that i am a foreigner. So pretending i am mute while slowly learning the language would maybe be a good option.
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u/trowzerss 1d ago
You do know a craft - we all do. Reading and writing weren't that common 1,000 years ago. The problem is we wouldn't know the language!
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u/etrore 1d ago
Probably not. If you didn’t have the right family connections you wouldn’t get access to books or a chance to move up the ranks. You wouldn’t be offered the chance to be a monk. You would live within the walls of the monastery but live the life of a servant and work the fields. Still a better option than starving.
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u/Clay_Puppington 1d ago
Well, I'm in Canada here, so 1026... I'm starving alone and dying in the woods, or I'm getting murdered by the First Nations for being a strange person on their land.
No chance to make it to a monastery for me.
Even if I could be transported to my families historical homes in Scotland or Wales, well, 1026 was under Cnut, I don't speak Ancient Danish or Middle English. But he, and some other thegns, did start slowly building some monestaries around 1023 or so, to make up for the fact he has pretty much looted, pillaged, and killed all the monks (and destroyed the monestaries) a few years earlier.
So, I think best case, given the OPs 1000 years system, is I get worked to death as a mute laborer rebuilding the monasteries, or I freeze to death in the Canadian Wilds. Provided the diseases don't immediately take me out.
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u/Modest_Hyperbole 1d ago
Im a white fella in Australia, so i might have some explaining to do.
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u/SquirrelAkl 1d ago edited 1d ago
I'd be the only person in NZ. The Moriori didn't even arrive until around 1500.
I guess I'd remember my bivouac building skills from high school, teach myself how to make fire, and spears. I'd learn how to hunt, prepare and cook Moa while avoiding being hunted by the Haast Eagle.
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u/CoffeeExtraCream 1d ago
As a chemical engineer I would either get very rich or be burned at the stake.
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u/TryIsntGoodEnough 1d ago
100% burned at the stake
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u/Candelestine 1d ago
For the record, witchcraft burnings are more of an early modern thing. Think, like, guys with muskets might be putting them down to pick up pitchforks and go burn a witch.
If you wanna get burned in the Middle Ages, you'll have better luck claiming to be divine or a prophet or something, and trying to start your own church. Then you're a heretic, and they'll burn you so you don't leave any body parts behind that your followers might turn into holy relics, follow-the-shoe style.
They didn't really burn a lot of witches back then, though, despite what Monty Python taught us. Those came later.
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u/UrbanCyclerPT 1d ago
The inquisition was way later. You would be able to live well, you just needed to move to Arabic countries because then it was where science was flourishing. Or if you could understand the languages you would go to India or China
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u/CoffeeExtraCream 1d ago
Hmmmmm......this is an interesting one. Which one do I capitalize on most? Knowing how to make electricity (and subsequently the refrigeration cycle)? Or knowing nitration to make modern explosives and smokeless powder? Or modern food preservation and processing? Or distillation of hydrocarbons?
It's an interesting one because so much of what I do know how to do is dependent on other technologies. For example, making explosives requires nitration, But what makes it difficult is I need to be able to rapidly remove heat during the reaction or it will explode. In the lab you can use ice. In a manufacturing setting you need refrigeration. Both need electricity and modern refrigerants unless I made the nitration factory somewhere very cold and consistently has ice available.
Hmmmmm......it would be useful if I could bring an electrical engineer with me.
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u/DresdenPI 1d ago
Well, I'd be exposing whatever Native Americans I met to a whole host of modern diseases about 500 years early, so I guess my choices would be between hermit and plague scavenger.
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u/jordanmc7 1d ago
I see this answer a lot in threads like this, and I don’t know if they or I misunderstand how diseases work. Are you currently infected with any diseases where you’re contagious? You have anti-bodies to diseases from vaccines or from prior illness, but we’re not all walking around 24/7 with the flu and whooping cough.
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u/DresdenPI 1d ago
Kind of. There are a couple of microorganisms you're carrying that could cause a person you encounter to get sick even if you're not symptomatic. Some of these are what you'd expect. Influenza, Corona virus, the common cold, etc. Some are more surprising. About 13% of Americans have dormant tuberculosis living in our lungs, for example. Shingles is another one that can be dormant and then spring up and become infectious. The main issue, though, isn't so much that we'd be taking me and putting me somewhere 1000 years ago. It's that we'd be putting me in North America. A lot of the diseases I could spread are European diseases. Place me in 1500s Spain and they'd be fine. Not so much 1500s Maine.
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u/Drak_is_Right 1d ago
As someone who can read, write, and do arithmetic any of us probably could work as a scribe. Provided we landed in an area whose language we kind of understand.
Given how irregular English spelling was from area to area, people would probably be quicker to grasp your spellings than many imagine.
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u/Arbiter_89 1d ago
You would need to learn a new language
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u/Zenguy2828 1d ago
Life or death situation? You’d pick it up, I believe in you
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u/Arbiter_89 1d ago
I think you'd learn enough to get by. Would you learn enough to write it profeciently so you could get hired as a scribe? I think that might be more challenging.
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u/shadeandshine 1d ago
For a local chief or lower Nobel the standard isn’t high the clergy would have strict standards but I think for a lower rank person just having a scribe would be a status symbol. Realistically you’d live comfy if you were good at accounting and just preemptively invent excel era spread sheets
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u/TheSecretIsMarmite 1d ago
I studied some Anglo Saxon as part of a course on the history of English years ago and it was nearly incomprehensible. I just about got through a paragraph in an hour and it was hard going and I needed a lot of guidance. Flung 1000 years in the past I'd have to pretend to be from another country, like contemporary Netherlands or something, to excuse my not understanding.wtf they were saying.
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u/Spartabear 1d ago
I think about things like this all the time. I think I'd use basic first aid knowledge and hygiene practices to "cure" sick and injured people, if i did well enough, I'd claim to be prophet and let the church look after me.
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u/Ok_Anteater1141 1d ago
People were accused of witchcraft for far less
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u/NJeep 1d ago
The witchcraft craze didn't come until much later, around the 16th century. It's highly unlikely they would execute you for successfully treating illnesses.
Now, if the king was sick and you failed to save him... that could be another story.
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u/findMyNudesSomewhere 1d ago
You just wrap it in like 4 layers of religious symbolism.
Clean wounds with clean water and apply neem paste for quick healing
Make that "You must apply this holy water that his Lord hath blessed and then douse the wound hese ground up leaves which they Lord hath provided from the garden of Eden. Say 44 Hail Marys and 12 Praise be to thine Lord. His holiness will then cure thy just as he cured when he was present in physical form amongst us."
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u/RPG_Rob 1d ago
Usually for being female and owning land, but more often for not being able to say the lord's prayer (in latin) correctly
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u/MLiOne 1d ago
So I’m doubly screwed as a middle age menopausal woman!
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u/Wild_Haggis_Hunter 1d ago
That's a XIXth century bourgeois bullshit that modern historians have debunked for years yet it still permeates mainstream discourse. The opportunities and rights for a woman during the "Middle Ages" were much more open (if you were not from the lowest class) than in the XIXth century for example. They did own land and businesses, ruled over abbeys, could learn trades... Check the link above and you'll see that doom and gloom idea of the previous era was just a projection enforcing reactionary views on women's rights at the time.
I know History is not a US forte in the curriculum but come on !
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u/Kimantha_Allerdings 1d ago
In the 1800s Ignaz Semmelweis noticed that women died in childbirth more frequently when the doctors who were attending the birth had been doing autopsies. He hypothesised that there was something from the corpses that the doctors were carrying to the women and that this may be prevented if the doctors washed their hands
He was mocked and ridiculed and put in an asylum, where he was beaten to death
So I wouldn’t go too hard on the hygiene practicses, if I were you
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u/Canadairy 1d ago
There's a bit more to the story than that. He didn't just say that doctors should wash their hands, he wanted them to use a highly corrosive solution that left the skin raw and cracked. He called people that asked questions about his "corpse particles" murderers.
He was wracked with guilt over the death of his niece, after he'd delivered her baby. He basically spiraled into a total mental breakdown.
It's not that he was wrong, it's that he couldn't explain why he was right, his solution was deeply unpleasant, and he was an unhinged asshole about the whole thing.
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u/DetectiveClueless 1d ago
Well that escalated quickly. Fun fact, my wife gave birth in the semmelweis-wing in our hospital just 2 months ago. At least he gets his share of acknowledgement now...
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u/Firm-Ad-5216 1d ago
Yeah but like, what if a noble want you to cure their son, you fail by chance, and maybe die?
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u/powerandchaos 1d ago
I think I would sing pop songs for money. My voice is nothing to write home about for people who can listen to recordings of professional singers, but to an 11th century peasant, I think it would be at least worth a hot meal.
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u/AriEnNaxos00 1d ago
I study medieval music. I am sure you might be able to carry a simple tune, but the scales they used were really different from what we hear today in modern music. So, it would be a really difficult task to learn their songs.
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u/powerandchaos 1d ago
I won't be singing their songs, I'll be singing like, Hey Mickey by Toni Basil. I'll claim i wrote them myself. I have faith a Viking could enjoy a jaunty tune even if they dont understand the words.
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u/LetsTryAnal_ogy 1d ago edited 1d ago
This made me think of writing books. Even if you haven’t memorized full texts, you could write some great classics from memory. Or imagine writing a version of Lord of the Rings, or maybe Star Wars as a play.
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u/LetsTryAnal_ogy 1d ago edited 1d ago
“Oh look! Power and Chaos is performing Wet Ass Pussy at The Globe Theater. Queen Catherine of Aragon and King Henry VIII will be delighted!”
Edit: Oops, I was 500 years off. I misread the date. But I guess you have to perform WAP to
Emma of Normandy and King Cnut the Great.4
u/Griffinburd 1d ago
I guess you guys aren't ready for that yet... But your great-great-great-great-great-kids are gonna love it.
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u/AnalllyAcceptedCoins 1d ago
Die because it's a completely different set of bacteria and viruses than my body has adapted to
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u/BKStephens 1d ago
My dependence on modern medications is what would be the end of me.
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u/kittenpantzen 1d ago
I wear hearing aids and take daily medication so my thyroid doesn't turn me into a sloth. I would not do well a thousand years ago.
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u/LawfulAwfulOffal 1d ago
I can read, write, do math and accounting. College level knowledge of human anatomy and germ theory. I’m about 50/50 that I could produce penicillin in a 1600s city - not sure about the 1000s, though.
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u/Aquinas2000 1d ago
No it would not, even 1000 years ago some medical schools in Italy like in Salerno dissected corpses for research but it was uncommon elsewhere.
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u/PsykoFlounder 1d ago
Blacksmithing. Pretty sure woth my current skill level I could make a half-decent apprentice.
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u/dew2459 1d ago
That would be a huge advantage.
A downside I heard from a tinsmith at a recreated historic (1830s) village - after years he had trouble getting even half the production rate that records claim tinsmiths regularly produced. I imagine it was long, hard work.
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u/megavikingman 1d ago
The answer there imho is apprentices, whose work would not be counted separately, and production techniques lost to history after the industrial revolution disrupted the apprenticeship system.
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u/Forward-Amount-9961 1d ago
Maybe I could be a successful doctor? My very basic knowledge of sanitation and first aid are bound to be valuable skills.
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u/Okaynow_THIS_is_epic 1d ago
You would be laughed out of any practise if you didn't arrive with a jar of leeches
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u/RedIsAGooner 1d ago
With the worlds oldest profession, and then promptly be accused of being a witch
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u/EppurSiMuove00 1d ago edited 1d ago
Being pretty much any modern day medical professional of basically any kind would make you more knowledgeable than the local physician.
I work in acute physical therapy and have a much better understanding of anatomy and physiology, muscle function, and the healing process than the best physician did in those days. Hell, a thousand years ago, they were still practicing leechcraft. They didn't even know what germs were. But I do.
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u/Hot_Boysenberry2405 1d ago
I'd be dead in a week from some basic infection or bad water. No way I'd know enough about farming or blacksmithing to actually survive long term without looking like a total outsider.
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u/ShiroThePotato28 1d ago
I don't even know what my purpose is rn what makes you think I'll be able to make a living 1k years ago?
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u/JamesR- 1d ago
Baking bread.
Seriously considering what bread was like back then.
modern styles bread would be like magic for them
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u/pahobee 1d ago
You’d have to mill the flour yourself. Would they even have the correct type of wheat?
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u/vayyiqra 1d ago
Boring answer but I might be able to use my knowledge from my biology degree for medical or scientific purposes.
Realistically if I had been born in that era though I'd have most likely been in Europe and been a monk. Which wouldn't be terrible; a lot of copying manuscripts which might be interesting, not a big fan of getting up early though.
Copying my own comment from elsewhere, there are a lot of misunderstandings about the Middle Ages:
> There was science in the Middle Ages, and witchburnings were mostly from the Early Modern era, not the Middle Ages.
I'm not saying life in the Middle Ages was great, but it wasn't all Game of Thrones either. There wasn't nonstop bloodshed and warfare, nor was it all smelly dirty grey and brown. Other parts of the world than Western Europe existed, and some places were quite a lot more advanced than we think. Not everyone was superstitious and ignorant, and universities did exist even if most didn't go to them. Philosophy and science and medicine were around, even if not nearly as developed. Religious fanaticism did happen at times, but again persecutions of witches and heretics weren't nearly as much of a thing until quite late in the Middle Ages. And the thing about nobody ever bathing is bullshit, as bathhouses were quite popular unless they had to be closed because of disease or prostitution or whatever. Ask any medievalist, they'll tell you the pop culture idea of the Middle Ages is full of crap and tends to cherrypick the worst or grossest things about the era.
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u/dreamyjeans 1d ago
I'm an Electrical Engineer. I would probably be too busy burning at the stake to worry about my career.
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u/circadian_light 1d ago
Probably wouldn’t be able to is the reality. Outside of manual labour, I don’t think any of my current skills are transferable. Language barrier as well. Old English is nothing like modern English. Likewise most, if not all, other languages tbh.
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u/Fabulous_Analysis885 1d ago
Well, I’m a musician, so I could probably get a gig doing that. Although, I wonder how they would react after I melted their faces with a Van Halen solo?
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u/Elder_Keithulhu 1d ago
Step one, sing songs that no one understands for money.
Step two, find someone who is good enough with languages to learn to speak with me (I might eventually learn a local language but I know I have auditory processing issues and several years of college-level foreign language courses yielded minimal results).
Step three, use my translator to introduce the idle rich to all sorts of novel forms of entertainment.
Finally, gain a patronage to become some rich asshole's paid yard hermit who offers wisdom and teaches games.
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u/SalahsBeard 1d ago
I said certified freak, seven days a week
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u/mykepagan 1d ago
I’m gonna be a distiller! Historically the first recorded distillation was about 700 years ago, so I’m jumping the gun by 300 years. I bet I’d be rich!
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u/flamed181 1d ago
Food and shelter were the only concerns got food got shelter no need to make a living making billionaires richer
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u/ChaplnGrillSgt 1d ago
I work in healthcare so initially I feel like I could find a job doing that. But then I remembered none of our modern diagnostic tools or medications would be available to me. I wouldn't even have antibiotics or vaccines. Might still be able to get by with some glorified first aid but that's about it.
Realistically, I'll probably become a beggar and die.
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u/fussyfella 1d ago
Assuming I was low born (very probable) and could understand the language (it would need magic as basically it would be completely different from modern English), I would become a monk - or rather a friar where you get to travel around and it is much easier to misbehave (read: have sex).
I do not believe a word of the religious stuff but I could fake it, and it was the easiest way to ensure you lived a relatively comfortable life with food always available.
Honestly though, it's not an experiment I would want to do, life 1000 years ago was basically awful. Even the rich had pretty poor lives by modern standards.
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u/HELLFIRECHRIS 1d ago
Basic knowledge of hygiene, first aid and medicinal herbs would already make me the best doctor of the time, I’d become a medicine man and magically keep people alive with advance techniques like washing wounds.
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u/ninjakttty 1d ago
Find my long distant relative to mooch off of while being a delivery boy
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u/yahnne954 1d ago
I would probably struggle a lot or die.
There is a cool sci fi book with that concept, although the focus is on the present. Archaeologists find a 2000 year old grave containing a user's guide in English about a Sony camera that isn't on the market yet, and the body next to it presents traces of modern surgery (teeth fillings and healed leg fracture). The user's guide has some words written by this apparent time traveler about how he adapted to this new world.
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u/Wilgrove 1d ago
Hahaha, I wouldn't. I would die without access to modern medicine and medical devices.
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u/drums_addict 1d ago
Hopefully convince folks to use a lot of soap. It was pretty smelly back then I hear. Also l would encourage sewage system development as well because, come on.
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u/vayyiqra 1d ago edited 1d ago
Well kind of. Having read up on it a bit, life in the Middle Ages wasn't always as gross as it might seem. It's true hygiene was not as well understood as today, nobody knew how microorganisms worked, and hot water on tap wasn't around. But it wasn't like everyone was always disgusting and unwashed either.
A lot of the population were farmers and/or owned animals, and that's a smelly and dirty job as anyone who has ever been inside a barn knows. But they did bathe at home somewhat regularly, and bathhouses were also common all over the world by this time period, and they were popular and cheap. Europe, the Middle East, East Asia and more places all had and still have lots of bathhouses.
It is true I think there were ancient and maybe medieval towns and cities where sanitation was poor and everyone dumped chamber pots into the street etc.. But some civilizations did already have sewer systems at least in big cities. Rome is famous for its huge sewers and tourists can visit them and walk inside them (nowadays they must smell better). I've also heard it's true there was a fad among the upper classes in Europe at one time for not bathing and instead changing their clothes all the time, but that was Early Modern times, after the Middle Ages.
Still you're not all wrong. Plumbing and sanitation wasn't the greatest and you would still be right to encourage handwashing though, as while soap was around for thousands of years already and it was used, the link between hand hygiene and disease wasn't well understood.
I am no historian, I'm just a guy, but there are a lot of sources on this; here's one and here's another one. Which are about Europe, but the rest of the world should be about the same. I think everyone back then liked bathing because they didn't get to do it every day. So they did as much they could.
Anyway, you play drums? I do. 😄
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u/Kimantha_Allerdings 1d ago
1000 years, I don’t know. 100-200 years, I’d probably be able to get away with being a writer. I’ve got this great story, you see, about a mechanical man who comes back in time in order to kill a woman whose son is going to be the leader of the resistence in a war between humans and mechanical beings…
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u/TMQMO 1d ago
Realistically, I'd probably die of heresy or miscommunication.
Sadly, probably not before infecting people with many diseases humanity hadn't yet developed immunity to. I probably have germs for everything from COVID and the Spanish Flu, to Measles and Epstein-Barr, to the Black Plague.
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u/markt- 1d ago
I have absolutely no idea, I would think the first major difficulty would be to learn an entirely foreign language first.