Its the 14th century and you’ve had no time to prepare, after you’re done reading this post you are snapped. What do you do?
England is in the midst of the Hundred Years war with France and considering I’m ~193cm and the average height of a man in England in the 14th century is about 171cm… looks like in getting my arse drafted and shipped off to France, to act as some kind of intimidating presence. That is until I have to swing a sword, which my body, that’s used to sitting in an office looking over excel spreadsheets, absolutely can’t do, so I get bum rushed/hit in the face with an arrow and die.
That’s the most likely scenario.
Worst case scenario, considering I don’t speak middle English or Latin, I’m treated as an enemy and locked up in a dungeon somewhere.
I don’t think there is realistically a best case scenario
I’d just like to interject that while traveling was rare in medieval times, it did happen. People usually didn’t get thrown in jail for it, even if they didn’t speak the local language.
Regular people didn’t really speak Latin beyond a few bits of prayer. The lingua franca was a mix of various coastal languages (think of the belter patois in the expanse), but even that was only known to traders.
You’d have a tough time for sure, but wouldn’t necessarily get in trouble.
afaik travel wasn’t even particularly rare, it was just rare that you’d travel very far. Certainly in england it was expected that you’d travel to london or whatever for legal reasons at least like once or twice in your life, and of course merchants existed.
but also a really significant travel no one tends to mention is going on a pilgrimage to jerusalem! to my knowledge most people managed to do it once, and that’s a massive journey to undertake without modern vehicles!
thankfully since religion was so important back then, pilgrims were afforded quite significant privileges like guaranteed free food and housing and iirc travel from anyone, to the point that pretending to be a pilgrim was quite a severe crime.
As an Australian I would struggle significantly unless you were to also transport me geographically.
I would imagine the east coast / tasmania could be interesting. There used to be hundreds of different peoples that are now extinct and we know nothing about. A struggle nevertheless.
Fuck I think I could just vibe with the Noongars, hunting, fishing and sleeping til I died of old age.
Maybe use basic science and chemistry to improve sanitation and quality of life. Not too much, just enough to be regarded as a clever fella, not a warra wirrin bad spirit.
I would teach London children the most obnoxious brain rot slang from today as a laugh.
The butterfly effect of that would be weird because all of our brain rot slang would change then.
Exactly, that’s the fun part. Would it get worse, or swing the other way, having kids talk like uppity old money aristocrats?
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You would be surprised how plentiful food is when there are no people eating it. Fishing with a spear would be easy. So as long as you can make a fire, you shouldn’t starve. But there would also be plenty of animals that would consider you food.
Wash my hands
Now you’re a witch
The definition of succeeding just becomes not dying.
Given the rate at which people would become mentally or physically disabled because of diseases, you could argue it would have a network effect (probably a better term exists): I would have more chances to meet people and influence them, to learn something useful, to accumulate and use wealth for the above, so yeah…
Where do you wash your hands? Hope you brought a big bottle of disinfectant.
Crude soap is easy to make. Wood ash + water + fat. From there you just fiddle with ratios and timing while trying not to burn your skin off with strong alkalinity.
Thanks, that will be useful knowledge to have when it happens to me
It can also just be a fun hobby. Old-fashioned soap making is a very approachable historical craft. (Modern soap making is also very approachable if you’re comfortable handling lye)
Running water would allow for 30% reduction in bacteria, according to some sources.
Also, in that time period soap was known in Spain, France and Italy, and I personally made it in the summer using either olive oil or pork fat.
you can make impromptu harsh soap by just washing your hands with some wood ash, your hands will probably be chronically dry and red but at least you can definitely have reliably clean hands and tools, combined with wearing some thin leather gloves whenever you’re outside the home.
If you’re lucky enough to be middle class you might get easy access to soap and olive oil
Any body of sufficiently rapidly running water should suffice.
That’s 1375.
Not good, not bad. Depends on where you ended up on the globe. There absolutely is civilization, but it’s all kings and Tsars and the like. The English and French Hundred Years War is winding down but the plague really did a number on Europe. Lots of war in India. It wasn’t a great time in the Middle East what with the Crusades and all. The Egyptians are conquering Armenia. The Songhai Emprire is growing in Eastern Africa. Southeast Asia had a lot of conquest and a large kingdom growing, might not have been so bad as long as you landed on the winning side. The Ming Dynasty just started in China.
So it’s not like you ended up in pre-civilization or among dinosaurs or something. There are plenty of people around, but it’s still an age of war and conquest. Your best bet to have a great life would be to ally yourself with a strong leader and give them advancements to help that leader “win”. Of course, if he were defeated, you’d be slowly tortured and killed by the opposing side.
I know thousands of songs. Also, musical instruments like the saxaphone haven’t been invented yet.
honestly this might actually be the best idea, for most of human history people have been absolutely bored out of their minds and sharing news/stories/songs and really any sort of entertainment has been a perfectly legitimate way to get free food and housing.
any of us could almost certainly just live as travelling bards and do side jobs for actual monetary pay, provided you can get over the embarrassment of performing for an audience, and of course learn the local languages and translate the stories you remember.
Oh I think you’re the first person to suggest music! That is a really good idea, provided you don’t die of dysentery of course.
Here are some good time travel stories.
To Say Nothing Of The Dog. In the future, time travel is organized like the Army. The problem is that the actual travel causes a serious case of ‘jet lag.’ All the agents act like they are half-drunk and sleep deprived.
The Big Time. Two alien races are fighting a time war that spans all planets in the universe. Earth is a minor backwater, but the fighting is just as deadly as anywhere else. A few soldiers and entertainers are catching a few moments respite in a R + R center when the War crashes in on them.
Predestination. A man is offered a chance to find and kill the guy who ruined his life. All he has to do is trust the stranger who is making the offer.
I have to disagree with To Say Nothing Of The Dog. Time travel is organized by, and exactly like they would, university historians.
half-drunk and sleep deprived.
I don’t remember that?
But that one and Blackout/All Clear are a great pair. And having looked her up, I see I’ve missed quite a few!
The Domesday Book is pretty tight. Our time-traveling student is trying to get back before the black plague hits her village.
She also has one about the Titanic sinking. Great books, wild rides.
She has won eleven Hugo Awards and seven Nebula Awards for particular works—more major SF awards than any other writer.
Well, I would give you the answer, but since I snapped back as soon as I read the post, I’m now responding what has been 650 years later for me, and I’m too fucking old for this shit a second time. I bypassed getting snapped back this time by just not reading the post and coming straight in to comment.
Now, what will happen if I read the
I’d make some fucking soap.
Do you know how to make soap? I’d want to but I’d have no idea how. If it already existed the hard part will be how to make enough money to buy it, as a software dev I’m not sure I’d have any sellable skills
How to make soap: Mix a fat or oil with a strong base like potassium hydroxide, resulting in an exothermic reaction called saponification.
Where do you get potassium hydroxide from in the 12th century?
Soak wood ash in water.
Thanks! at least I have a plan now, if I were to suddenly appear hundreds of years ago, I’ll probably just die
Kind of. All you need is fat and lye. Some experimenting would need to be done but I’m somewhat confident I could figure it out.
And you could make a living selling it. Assuming you can convince people of its benefits.
you can use wood ash, it won’t be a very wholesome or good soap but it gets the job done and is easy to make. Though of course if it’s easy to make then why would people buy much of it from you?
I think it wouldn’t be too hard to convince people to use it for cleaning off obvious messes, way harder to convince them that “oh you see actually diseases are caused by these tiny creatures you can’t see, but trust me they’re there and my product will get rid of them!”.
Good thing I binge isekai anime
I don’t have the knowledge to survive in the 12 century so either some Native Americans find me and are kind enough to teach me to survive
Or I just die.
1375…
We can work with metals, so we can probably make boilers.
I invent steam power 400 years early.
You’d need metallurgy which was only invented in the process of building bigger naval guns, much later.
The issue was pressurizing the steam, which wasn’t possible in the middle ages. You had no rubber for seals, no steel that would hold, and no tools to drill holes precisely enough.
That’s why the Romans already used steam for simple parlor tricks but it couldn’t be made to do actual work until the modern eraReal science and innovation comes in increments
no rubber for seals
Modern synthetic rubber would indeed be unavailable, but I vaguely recall reading something to the effect that early steam engines used leather seals or something like that.
But yeah, there’s a lot of missing prerequisites for machinery. Even simple rotary power – like from a windmill or waterwheel – would suffer from being incapable of long distance transmission
Re-invent. Your still far too late to be first.
the real trick is to find some appliation for the technology that is easy enough to build that you don’t need later advancements to pull it off, yet useful enough that anyone is actually going to bother doing it.
or like, be really good at marketing
People always think that the spark of invention is all that’s required, ignoring the social and material tinder and kindling that’s required for something to be useful and take off.
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I’ll probably die of dysentery. Just because I know modern hygiene rules doesn’t mean I’ll survive interacting with all the other people who don’t but are used to local bacteria and viruses.
i mean i don’t think it would even be that difficult to just always carry a bar of soap with you and make sure to boil your water and only eat well-cooked food, and wear gloves as often as possible.
sure people would think you’re silly and annoying but that’s a pretty cheap price to pay for not catching terrible diseases.
It would help to at least try doing that, but in practice this would probably be very difficult - it’s likely not possible to always drink boiled water and well-cooked food, and given the possibility of contaminating food and drink after boiling, you might effectively have to prepare all your drink and food yourself, which is logistically difficult given the length of the work days. Diseases also spread in other ways, like smear infections (e.g. on toilets, doorhandles, tools) and airborne infections.
This is probably the most realistic answer. Either you die quickly or you’d wind up, spreading some major contagious disease that nobody has a defense against and wipe out a huge section of the population.
spreading some major contagious disease that nobody has a defense against and wipe out a huge section of the population.
Oof
Lol
How do you think the boobonic plague got started?
Yeah, it was a time traveller
If I snapped you back in time 650 years
2025 - 650 =1375
Its the 12th century
1375 is the 14th century. Which do you mean?
Answering the actual question, nothing good would come of it if my location on earth didn’t change. Being the only white person in rural northern Japan well before Europeans came in the 1500s would probably not be a good situation for me. The language, at least the written one, was very different. Being the Nanboku-chō era, things would probably be not great since it was in the midst of 60ish years of war with two different people claiming to be in charge. I can’t find, at least before my coffee kicks in, exactly what kinda state Mutsu Province, as it was then called, was in at the time.
It’s not 1825 where you are?
Technologically, it does feel like that sometimes, but it would see not.
Yeah, I did it backwards. Like I knew it was the 1300’s but when I said the century, I went back a diget instead of forward.
Well, strictly speaking, if your location didn’t change you’d be transported into empty space. So you wouldn’t have very much to worry about for long.
Heh, that’s specifically why I qualified it as ‘position on earth’.
English would also be unrecognizable in 1375. At a glance, it seems like it was Middle English, which means you’d probably get as much intelligibility with any other English speakers as a monolingual Dutch speaker would have with a monolingual English speaker today. Maybe a bit closer, but still.
Shakespeare was still hundreds of years away.
…Not that any of this would matter to anyone living in North America.
Middle English is certainly difficult to understand, but most words still bear some resemblance to modern English. I think it would probably be more like a native German speaker trying to understand a heavy Bavarian dialect, or at worst a Dutch speaker trying to understand the same.
In my case, I’d probably be OK having studied French and German (and reading things by Chaucer and Gauer). Though French != Norman French, so that may cause some issues.
I become a scribe or accountant, since I can write cursive, do math, and know some Latin.
There was a monastery within walking distance of my home at that time, so that’s where I’d head first.
