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?
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.
650 years ago, the place I live was inhabited mostly by the Ojibwe (a Native American people), so I suppose I’d try to find some of them and try to convince them to not kill me and let me stick around long enough to learn their language. Then I could teach them some of my knowledge. Maybe by the time the Europeans come along they’ll be a bit more prepared.
If I can’t find anyone, I don’t like my chances of surviving for any significant amount of time. Maybe I could make it a few weeks foraging for food and fishing or something, but realistically I’ll probably end up starving.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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)
Any body of sufficiently rapidly running water should suffice.
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
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!”.
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
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.
I’d use my knowledge of history, politics, psychology and science to become an influential advisor to powerful lords and help them conquer the world in exchange for living in luxury.
so all those genocides weren’t enough, you want a repeat with you at the helm?
Prophecy some major upcoming events, subsequently market myself as a saint, grab a comfy church position, sell indulgences, profit. Works in pretty much any era.
You can name some upcoming events between 1375-1376 that would get you enough fame to make a living, off the top of your head?
How well do you know 14th century minutia? That can end up being a very long con if the next thing you remember is like the general lines of Joan of Arc’s whole deal in 50 years or whatever.
Nah, just say the plague will ravage the land, war will last for another seventy years, and you’re the only hope of salvation - that pretty much sums up the late 1300s. Then just get your followers off the battle lines, adopt a bunch of cats to keep the rat problem at bay, and practice basic sanitation and isolation - what we learned during COVID.
Within a couple of years, yours will be the only thriving community. Play your cards right, stay peaceful, prosperous, and show deference to the church and you’ll be pretty much set. Might even wrangle a sainthood if you play your cards right.
/s to all this of course… most likely I’d just use my extensive knowledge of porn and poetry to try and charm a noblewoman to take care of me.
Prophecy some major upcoming events, subsequently market myself as a saint, grab a comfy church position
Or be burned on a stake.
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.
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and if you manage to evade physical harm, sickness will surely catch up with you. the black death was not a ‘one and done’ pandemic. it lingered and persisted here-and-there for centuries after the widespread pandemic (known today simply as ‘the plague’) that claimed 50m+ lives, including half of europe’s population at the time
Yeah, this. I have medications I need. When the pair of contacts in my eyes fall out eventually, I’m functionally blind. All that aside, I’d probably starve quickly since I don’t know how to make weapons
and other humans haven’t made it to where I live yet in 1375nevermind, I’m high. The humans that are there would probably kill me on sight though.I’d probably look around for a couple days and then when I got super hungry just find a cliff to jump off.
Get to smelting!
You would die. There are many, many examples of explorers from “advanced” civilizations getting shipwrecked or stranded in an area where primitive hunter-gatherers live. Unless they are saved by the hunter gatherers, they are doomed, despite their knowledge of science and technology. Joseph Henrich talks extensively about these examples in his book, “The Secret of Our Success”
Check out this video to get an idea -> https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jaoQh6BoH3c
ah yes the famous hunter-gatherers of the 14th century…
considering the modern population distribution, the vast majority of people would end up in places that were large urban areas even back then.
Yes, but what about you?
