Both our kids went through a period of complaining about “rules.” They thought they were stupid and uncalled for didn’t make any sense and they shouldn’t apply to them. I tried to explain that as long as they lived in an organized society, rules and laws were necessary — they couldn’t just do as they pleased — their actions had an effect on other people.
I guess we all go through that thought process from time to time. From “No Parking” zones to “No Smoking” areas to the amount of water a toilet can use when it’s flushed…. it sometimes seems as if our society operates under too many rules and regulations. Sometimes it sure seems like it’s getting worse — I don’t remember so many rules in the past.
But — if you go back even just as far as the middle ages, virtually everything was regulated, and the regulations often varied according to social class. Take weddings for example — where the nobility could invite 48 people to their weddings, but servants or day laborers could only have 32 guests. And the wedding banquet or reception had to start promptly at noon in summer or at 11 a.m. in winter.
Just look at some of the “crimes” and the punishments that were imposed…
If a husband allowed his wife to rule the home or hit him, his fellow villagers would come to his house and remove the roof.
The poor soul who fell asleep in church was forced to wear a heavy wooden rosary and stand by the church door before the service for a number of the following Sundays.
Fines were imposed for going to a fortune-teller or wearing a dress of more than two colors or arriving late for a wedding or serving meals or wine to guests after a baptism or being on the street at night without a lighted lantern.
In England a court sought to reduce competition among bakers by fixing the price of bread. It stipulated that fluctuations in the price of wheat would determine not the price of bread, but its weight. The statute also fixed the price of a gallon of ale according to the price of wheat, oats and barley. (The practice of adding extra bread to each loaf to avoid punishment for selling underweight bread is thought to be the origin of the “bakers dozen” — where, if a dozen loaves were ordered the buyer would, in effect, receive 13.) Bakers who sold loaves of bread that were too light for the advertised size were placed in something called a “bakers cage” or “bakers chair,” a seesaw device that dunked the baker in a pond. The number of dunkings was determined by the difference between the wrong weight and the right weight.
Today, it’s daunting enough to have to ask the father of your partner for their child’s hand in marriage. This practice is done out of respect — the answer given doesn’t decide your future, and you can still get married, even if the father doesn’t give his blessing. This wasn’t the case in the middle ages. Your rank in society played a big role in medieval life, especially for those at the bottom of the pyramid. Peasants and serfs working and living under landowners essentially had no freedom. A man wanting to get married not only had to get the father’s permission but also their landowners’s. For a woman it was even worse. If her husband died, the landowner could force her to marry another man in a relatively short amount of time.
So, the next time you are late to a wedding, or let your wife beat you up, just be happy you live in the 21st century…..
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