Five hundred years ago, in the 1520s, most people on Earth were farmers. They worked with their hands, ate what they grew, rarely traveled more than a few miles from where they were born, and had no electricity, running water, or germ theory. Yet daily life was not the unrelenting misery we sometimes imagine. Work was seasonal and interrupted by frequent holidays. Diets could be surprisingly varied. And people who survived childhood often lived well into their fifties or beyond.
How Long People Actually Lived
The headline number for life expectancy in this era is startling: boys born to English landowning families in the medieval and early modern period had a life expectancy at birth of just 31.3 years. But that figure is deeply misleading. It is dragged down by catastrophic infant and child mortality, not by everyone dropping dead at 30.
In England around this time, roughly 175 to 300 out of every 1,000 babies died before their first birthday, depending on the decade and social class. Some estimates for the poorest families push infant mortality even higher. If you made it past those dangerous early years and reached your 25th birthday, you could expect to live to about 50 or 51 on average. Plenty of people reached their sixties and seventies. Old age was rarer than today but far from unknown.
What People Ate
Bread was the foundation of nearly every meal, for rich and poor alike. Grains also went into beer (the everyday drink, since water sources were unreliable) and thick porridges. Legumes like peas, beans, and lentils filled out the plate. Root vegetables including turnips, carrots, beets, and parsnips were staples, along with cabbages, onions, leeks, and garlic. In milder seasons, people grew lettuce, parsley, endive, and other greens. Fruits like apples, pears, plums, cherries, and figs appeared when available, and nuts were a valued source of fat and calories. Honey was the only sweetener most people ever tasted.
Meat was highly prized. Cattle, pigs, and sheep were the main sources, supplemented by chickens, geese, wild birds, and deer when hunting was permitted. Fish provided another important protein source, especially during the many religious fasting days that prohibited meat. Eggs and cheese rounded out the diet for families who kept livestock.
Calorie counts varied enormously by season and social position. Some estimates for earlier medieval peasants suggest daily intake could reach well above what we consider normal today, since heavy manual labor demanded it. But the quality of those calories was another matter. Vitamin C was chronically scarce, especially in winter. Women of childbearing age frequently suffered iron and calcium deficiencies, worsened by repeated pregnancies. Shortages of protein, B12, and folic acid were common among the poorest families living mainly on grain and vegetables.
The 1520s also sat right at the beginning of an enormous shift in global food. Maize, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, squash, and various beans were just starting to travel from the Americas to Europe, Africa, and Asia along trade routes. By the 1530s, some of these crops had reached the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans. But in 1524, almost no European had ever seen a potato or a tomato. Those foods would take decades, even centuries, to become everyday staples.
How Much People Worked
The popular image of medieval and early modern peasants toiling from sunup to sundown every day of the year is wrong. The workday nominally stretched from dawn to dusk, which meant sixteen hours in summer and eight in winter. But within that span, work was constantly interrupted by meals, rest breaks, a customary afternoon nap, and midmorning and midafternoon refreshments. Actual productive labor averaged somewhere between 8 and 9.5 hours per day, depending on the source.
More striking is how few days per year people worked. Holiday and feast-day leisure probably consumed about one third of the year in medieval England. Farmer-miners in the 1400s and 1500s worked roughly 180 days per year, totaling around 1,980 hours annually. Manorial records from the 1300s show servile laborers putting in only 175 days. During periods when wages were unusually high, laborers sometimes worked as few as 120 days, earning their customary income and then simply stopping. Whole peasant families in some estimates spent no more than 150 days on their land. For comparison, a modern full-time worker in the United States logs about 1,800 to 2,000 hours across roughly 250 working days.
This does not mean life was leisurely. The work itself was grueling: plowing fields behind oxen, hauling water, threshing grain by hand, cutting wood. And “days off” still involved cooking, mending, tending animals, and other household labor that never stopped. But the rhythm of life was far more varied than a modern nine-to-five schedule, with intense bursts of activity during planting and harvest and long stretches of relative quiet in winter.
How People Slept
Sleep looked nothing like the solid eight-hour block we aim for today. Across preindustrial societies, from Europe to Africa to South Asia to Latin America, people commonly practiced what historians call segmented or biphasic sleep. You went to bed shortly after dark, slept for several hours (your “first sleep”), then woke naturally around midnight. You might spend an hour or two warming yourself by the fire, talking, eating a small meal, or simply lying quietly before drifting into your “second sleep” until dawn.
This pattern was so universal that cultures on every inhabited continent had specific terms for “first sleep” and “second sleep” in their own languages. The Tiv people of Nigeria, the Sinhalese of Sri Lanka, and the Woolwa of Central America all used these phrases as natural markers of time, the way we might say “mid-morning.” Waking in the middle of the night was not insomnia. It was simply how humans slept before artificial lighting made it possible to stay awake long past sunset.
How Tall People Were
Skeletal evidence from archaeological sites across England shows that men in the 1400s through early 1600s averaged about 173 to 174 centimeters tall, or roughly 5 feet 8 inches. That is only a couple of inches shorter than the modern English average. Height is a useful proxy for childhood nutrition and overall health, and this number suggests that, at least for those who survived to adulthood, nutrition was not as dire as we might assume. (Data on women’s heights from this period is less complete, since early collections skewed heavily toward male remains.)
Medicine and Disease
If you fell seriously ill in the 1520s, your options were bleak by modern standards. European medicine was still built on a framework inherited from the ancient physician Galen, which held that the body contained four “humors,” or fluids, and that illness resulted from an imbalance among them. The primary treatments were designed to remove whichever fluid was thought to be in excess. Too much blood? A physician or barber-surgeon would open a vein and let you bleed. Too much bile? You would be given a powerful laxative to purge it. Timing mattered: doctors consulted astrological charts to determine when the moon was in the correct position for bloodletting.
Infections, broken bones, and childbirth complications killed people who would be easily saved today. Syphilis, which had spread rapidly through Europe after the 1490s, was treated in the 1520s with guaiacum, a hard wood imported from the West Indies that was believed to cure the disease. It did not. Battlefield medicine was slowly evolving as new weapons created new kinds of wounds, but surgery without anesthesia or antiseptics remained horrifying and often fatal.
The major infectious diseases of the era, including plague, smallpox, and typhus, could devastate a city or region but tended to move unevenly, following trade routes and population corridors rather than sweeping uniformly across a continent. A village might be wiped out while a neighboring one was spared entirely. In the Americas, European diseases were beginning to reach Indigenous populations in the 1520s, though the full demographic catastrophe in many regions would not arrive until the 1600s.
The Shape of an Ordinary Day
For the vast majority of people, life 500 years ago was local, physical, and shaped by the seasons. You woke before dawn, possibly from your second sleep. If you were a farmer, which most people were, your morning began with tending animals, fetching water, and stoking a fire. Breakfast was bread, perhaps some cheese or porridge. Work in the fields or workshop continued until midday, when you stopped for a substantial meal. An afternoon nap was customary. More work followed until evening, when supper was eaten before dark.
Entertainment came from church festivals, seasonal fairs, communal meals on feast days, music, storytelling, and drinking. The church calendar dictated the rhythm of the year far more than any government. Sundays and the dozens of saints’ days scattered through the calendar were days of rest, and they added up to a remarkable amount of time off.
Travel was rare and slow. Most people walked everywhere. Roads were rutted dirt tracks that became impassable in rain. News traveled at the speed of a horse or a merchant’s cart. The world beyond your village or town was largely a matter of rumor. Literacy was uncommon outside the clergy and the upper classes, so information passed orally. You knew your neighbors intimately and might never meet a stranger from more than 20 miles away.
Life was harder, shorter, and more physically painful than what most people in wealthy nations experience today. But it was also slower, more communal, and punctuated by far more rest and celebration than the Industrial Revolution would later permit. The people who lived it were not primitive versions of us waiting for progress to arrive. They were navigating a world with its own rhythms, pleasures, and logic.