4 Surprising Awful Sides Of Life As A Medieval King

3 Then It’s Straight To Church With You. Probably To Listen To A Sermon About Incest.

At 8 in the morning, so around the time when normal modern people are still washing out the coffee (that they had to throw in their faces to wake up) from their eyes, most medieval kings would be attending morning mass. You know, to get them all warmed up for the evening mass they were also expected to attend. And on Sundays and Catholic holidays, of which there is, conservatively, 365 per year, there might be an additional, extra-long mass that you, as the defender of the faith, can’t exactly skip. 

What can you expect from a medieval sermon, though? Mostly talks about whom you can’t or cannot bang. And when.

While the Church really wanted people to go forth and multiply, they didn’t want it to happen on a Sunday, cause that’s the Lord’s Day and that would be like banging on your dad’s birthday. It’s just not right. Thursdays and Fridays are also out because that’s when you’re supposed to be preparing for communion. One of those Catholic holidays? The only thing your royal-down-crown should be doing then is shriveling up in shame over what a massive sinner you are. And in case you were wondering: no rubbing your dick between someone’s thighs to get off. The Church was VERY specific on that. Meaning that it had to be happening pretty regularly. And you’ll get to hear aaaaaaaaall about it. But you will probably hear more about incest.

Marrying your first cousin or anyone else in your extended family was a great way for royals to retain control of land holdings and fortunes, which they kept in the family by, well, keeping it in the family. And it’s not like the priest would call you out directly during sermon, but the Church during the early medieval period did spend a lot of time convincing believers to avoid boinking people you could go halfsies with on a Grandma’s Day present. 

Interesting fact: Some researchers credit these teachings with creating smaller, nuclear families instead of huge extended ones. They even go further and link it to the rise of individualism in Western society. But that’s probably not what you will be thinking about during those long sermons. Instead, you will mostly be wondering why the priest keeps glancing your way when he’s telling the congregation to keep their hands off their hot cousins.

2 You’re Going To Have To Pass The Weirdest Laws Ever

After Church, your day of work will officially start by accepting supplicants, talking to your council, and signing things into law. You’ll probably want to pay attention here. By and large, the legacy of a king is the laws he passes. And you might think you'll know not to sign your name to anything that would make you one day appear more unhinged than a badly put-together Ikea door. Yeah, well, George the First probably thought that his legacy was safe, too, and now he’s the guy who said that all pigeon droppings belong to him. And now you’re picturing him with madness in his eyes, hugging a pigeon-defiled park statue while yelling “Miiiine!”

True, he wasn’t a medieval king, and the law made sense (during the 18^th century, pigeon droppings were a rich, free source of potassium nitrate, a key component in making gunpowder). Many medieval kings made similarly rational decisions that now make them look like a bunch of weirdos. For example, in 1349, Edward III banned football in all of England while making archery practice mandatory.

Again, he had good reasons because, in his days, “football” was really just a lawless, town-spanning brawl between two massive mobs with a pig-bladder ball that was primarily there for plausible deniability, like keeping a baseball glove in your trunk next to your bloodied-up bat. As for archers, England simply needed more of those after the Black Death killed close to HALF of Europe’s population. So Eddie was totally justified in his decisions. Yet some people are still picturing him with his underwear on his head, shooting footballs with arrows cause that’s the way the king game goes. 

So, what do you think YOUR kingly legacy would be? Will you, like Alfred the Great, go down in history as a guy who decreed that “If at a common task a man unintentionally kills another (by letting a tree fall on him) the tree is to be given to the kinsmen”? (To be fair, they WOULD need the material for the coffin.) Will you, like Edward II, make stealing dead whales and dolphins a crime? (Interesting how that law only applies to slippery animals with blowholes. Very interesting.) Or maybe you will make all wild swans the legal property of the crown, like what happened in England in the 12^th century? Fun fact: That one is still on the books.

1 Your Life Will Most Likely Be Painful And Your Death Horrifying

So after a day of, we don’t know, proclaiming that anyone who sees a redhead must run naked through the square while yelling “The hedgehogs are to blame!”, you might finally get some leisure time before church in the evening. Your choices are limited to the three Fs: feeding, fornicating, and forcing your best mathematicians to invent the internet faster. Just be sure you don’t overdo it on the first one, OK? William the Conqueror (1028–1087) liked to eat, and now he’s dead. COINCIDENCE?

There is more to this story. Later in his life, the main thing Willy liked to conquer was whatever was considered a delicacy in France back then. So, definitely something delicious and cruel to the animal. One story says that his gut grew so large, it got punctured by the pommel of his saddle while the king was riding on, one would assume, some kind of massive direhorse. Needless to say, this ended up killing him, and due to a whole bunch of different reasons, it took weeks for William to be interred. By then, his already oversized body bloated so much, the king couldn’t fit into his stone sarcophagus. When his pus-balloon of a body was being forced into it, his stomach allegedly burst, releasing a terrible, noxious gas. Dealing poison damage from beyond the grave. A warrior to the end.

The story may just be legend, but awful things DID keep happening to royals’ bodies, hundreds and hundreds of years after William’s death. After she died, Queen Anne (1665–1714) was “so swollen with dropsy,” she had to be interred in a giant square coffin. Charles I (1600–1649) was beheaded and then had his head stitched back onto his body so it could be put on display to prove that the guy was definitely dead. Which sounds a bit counterproductive to us, but we’re not going to argue with the people who ordered it. They sound nuts. Incidentally, the surgeon responsible for re-heading Charles likened it to “stitching the head back on a goose.” We just REALLY wanted you to know that.

So you’ve probably already made a mental note to finally eat right and exercise and, who knows, maybe the thought of turning into a Poison Blob after death will finally help you stick to a diet. But you can still get sick, and as a medieval king, you may not get the best medical treatment. One, because it may not exist, like with Alfred the Great, who spent 20 years living with what was probably Crohn’s disease because nobody back then knew what that was. Two decades of abdominal pain and severe diarrhea, which his most learned men probably tried to cure with mercury dick-enemas or something.

There may also be cases where people won’t be too eager to figure out what’s wrong with you, if they think whatever illness you’re dealing with is a punishment from God. Henry IV suffered either from leprosy or really bad psoriasis, which medieval writers saw as the result of him beheading the rebellious bishop Richard Scrope in 1405. And even if you die somewhat peacefully, history may just decide that, nah, that’s too boring, and you get (incorrectly) remembered, like king Edward II, as the dude who died from having a red-hot poker jammed up his ass.

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Top image via Wiki Commons