The Dark Ages get a bum rap. Take mediaeval medicine, for example. Nowadays, most health dollars are spent on people over 65. But in those days, dying from old age was virtually unknown thanks to the popularity of herbal medicine. Fortunately we can find those same Dark Age remedies today at our local pharmacies. There was no chiropractic, but you could get adjusted on the rack if you annoyed the local authorities.
Sometimes you got sick because you had too much blood. Did you spend hours in the Emerg? No. You just sent for the leeches. And there were no controversies over vaccinations, because there were no vaccinations, no lineups, no kids crying. Yet strangely a third of Europe did perish from the Black Death between 1347 and 1352. So if your children mouthed you off, the Black Death might take them off your hands because they were obviously full of the Devil.
Your child birth survivors didn’t have to go to school because they were already home-schooled in the knowledge that the earth was both flat and the center of the universe! Parents got that knowledge from the Church, which was the Fox News of the Middle Ages.
Criminals were the Spawn of Satan, not coddled like today. If your kid was accused as a pick-pocket, you took the rest of the family to his public hanging. There was always a good audience on hand with lots of pockets for surviving family members to pick. But if he was mentally ill, they just drilled a hole in his skull to let the evil spirits out. Then they hanged him.
Speaking of swingers, there was so much more sex in the Middle Ages. Keeping up the population in these times was a Herculean task that saw no shortage of volunteers! Your time was short and the nights were long. So you partied like it was 999, which it actually was. And because the magic all happened in the one-room hovel, the kids got their sex-ed from their parents, not from some dorky educator.
Unlike today, those parents married until death did them part. Ironically very few people of the Middle Ages ever became middle-aged. So there was hardly enough time to get sick of each other. But you did marry in your teens, like Juliet at fourteen, which today would put Romeo on the Sex Offender Registry.
Thankfully there was no smoking. The closest you came to exposure to smoke was when the Church was roasting some Smoking Hot Chick as a witch. Little did onlookers know that they were witnessing the birth of Global Warming, and the inspiration for that Platters’ hit, “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”. And no chance of resuscitating the victim, as smoking was forbidden within twenty meters of a hospital entrance.
Why “Burn, baby, burn”? Our witch had survived after being tossed into the drink in a straight jacket by concerned citizens. It was a known fact that water repels witches. Anyone who has taken their mother-in-law to the beach has witnessed the truth of this ancient wisdom.
Yes, it was an exciting time to temporarily be alive, when every day mattered. The Dark Ages?
No, the Golden Ages!
