Hobbies In A Fantasy/Medieval-esque Setting?

Knitting was invented in the middle ages, probably in the middle east.

/aside

Lillith1991 said:

Well of course they are. I'm not saying they didn't exist contrary to what you seem to think Kuwi. I didn't even adress them, though I should have. But even story telling isn't without purpose. All I'm trying to say is that the poor had less outlets of purely entertainment value than the rich, and I don't enjoy stories which ignore that without a reason.

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I guess I'm confused, because all that is just as true today as it was back then.

Is it eye-rollingly unrealistic for poor people today to have hobbies?

kuwisdelu said:

I guess I'm confused, because all that is just as true today as it was back then.

Is it eye-rollingly unrealistic for poor people today to have hobbies?

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No, but poor today is not poor 200, 500, 1000 years ago. Someone from today still has more potential hobbies available than someone from then. Some things we think of as hobbies are ancient and some are more recent, most were at an earlier time a needed life skill.

If I were a fae who could fly with fae specific magic, my hobby would be doing barrel rolls while firing my lasers.

Lillith1991 said:

No, but poor today is not poor 200, 500, 1000 years ago. Someone from today still has more potential hobbies available than someone from then.

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Sure. But miranda's contention was that poor people having any hobbies at all was eye-rollingly unrealistic.

kuwisdelu said:

Sure. But miranda's contention was that poor people having any hobbies at all was eye-rollingly unrealistic.

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I think we must have read it differently then, I read what she said as the clearly high class hobbies included in the OP's list are eye-rollingly unrealistic for a poor person in a Middle Ages type setting.

Lillith1991 said:

I think we must have read it differently then, I read what she said as the clearly high class hobbies included in the OP's list are eye-rollingly unrealistic for a poor person in a Middle Ages type setting.

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A list which includes such high-class hobbies as swimming, nature-watching, and dancing.

kuwisdelu said:

A list which includes such high-class hobbies as swimming, nature-watching, and dancing.

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I never said they were all unrealistic. Some are and some aren't, nature watching and dance for example are completely realistic hobbies. Fishing, raising livestock, sewing, and other things were however basic lifeskills and not hobbies anymore than fishing can be considered a hobby for someone working in there fishing industry today.

(All about England, 'cause I don't know enough about anyone else's history)

The Puritan Work Ethic says that you must always be working, and nothing should ever be done solely for fun. This rather suggests that before the Puritans got together people weren't always working and were doing things solely for fun, the degenerates.

There are records of a game called 'football' from centuries back. Entire villages used to play, and the game would last for several hours. There were several attempts to ban it, which is how we know it existed. The idea that anyone of low station could take what was effectively a whole day off to have fun in caused a lot of outrage in certain circles.

Then you have the bonfire festivals. Most of the nation would be up all night at Midsummer (and a few other nights around the year), having fun. There were harvest festivals, there were spring festivals, there were festivals for yule and summer - and before the Reformation, a lot of feast days on which one wasn't allowed to work even if one wanted to. And most of those festivals involved some form of dancing or other, but not the sort of regimented, mannerly dance of the nobility. Folk-dancing was and is still a custom.

The ordinary folk didn't have as much free time as we do today. Probably. But to say that they had none whatsoever is mis-selling the past.

What they didn't have was much spare money. Tudor tinkers carried trashy novels, which implies that the populace was more literate than we think it was, but tomes of knowledge as you'd need for alchemy, archeology and history were rare (and before the printing press, far too expensive for ordinary people to possess). Travel was a game for the rich, the mercantile or the desperate, and most people never went further than the nearest market. Painting took things most people couldn't get access to in the villages, and the canvas and wide range of colours we take for granted were expensive or nonexistent. Blacksmithing was a trade and a smith wouldn't take kindly to someone else trying to usurp his livelihood and use his equipment. Cooking was something everyone did; scavenging required something nearby to scavenge. Swimming took clean water and lots of it. Gardening was absolutely vital for fresh greens and vegetables for most of the year. Caring for animals was automatically part of your day, because your animals were a good part of your livelihood. Nature-watching was free, though; most people knew more about the local animals and birds than we ever will, simply because they were out among them so much - and because from the birds and other wildlife you could refine your own guesses about things like what dangers were about and what weather was coming.

Mostly, though, it's a different mindset. Travel was difficult to impossible, so you made do with what you could get or grow locally or what you could trade for at market or via travelling traders. Spare time would vary a huge amount by season (and good luck doing anything non-essential during harvest), but it would exist.

ClareGreen said:

Tudor tinkers carried trashy novels, which implies that the populace was more literate than we think it was, but tomes of knowledge as you'd need for alchemy, archeology and history were rare (and before the printing press, far too expensive for ordinary people to possess).

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This made me think of Bevis of Hampton, which came up in another thread. It was a trashy "romance" from the middle ages, and it was quite popular in its day. I assume it was most often recited in verse, but obviously written versions existed, and some folks must have been able to read them.

There were others as well.

http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/salisbury-four-romances-of-england

Regarding books and literacy, I'm currently reading Life in a Medieval City by Joseph & Frances Gies (which uses Troyes, France, circa 1250 as its profile city), and the book devotes an entire chapter to the medieval city-dwellers' hunger for books. Bawdy folktales and books of verse were popular, as well as more scholarly works, and copyists (this was pre-printing press) did a brisk trade. People would rent books as well as buy them, and students, penniless in the way of all students, would rent or borrow books, illicitly copy them, and return them. So reading was definitely a thing the urban middle class had time and inclination for.

Board games as a passtime go all the way back to antiquity--checkers, go, backgammon, and nine men's morris are all very old, and none of them require much financial outlay (draw the board on wood or stone with charcoal, collect a few pebbles, and, for backgammon, carve some dice). Chess is a little more work, but pieces can be carved from waste wood easily enough. Gambling with dice goes back a long way too.

Some things that were essential tasks of daily living could also be hobbies, depending on their application. Raising a vegetable garden added to your food supply; raising a flower garden not so much (although it might generate the odd useful thing--dyes, candied rose petals . . .) Sewing was a survival skill, but embroidery was a decorative optional extra. Raising livestock was a necessity, but teaching a dog (or horse, or pig) to do tricks might have been a hobby. Weaving plain cloth was a necessity, but doing complex patterns or tapestry might have been a hobby. And so on.

Worth pointing out:

Say that it's true that many (most?) of us have an inaccurate, too harsh view of how little free time people of the medieval era had, and what pastimes were available to them.

This is most likely the OP's potential readership as well. Whether they ought to be rolling their eyes, they might, unless the novel really sells it that this works in her world. Whatever the explanation is -- a dole for the unfortunate, magic brooms, magic plows, different classes with some unluckies more strapped into the drudge than others -- there'd probably better be some explanation for how and why the equivalent of today's middle-class leisure-time hobbies can exist?

Because the novel is going to be fighting notions that they can't.

Just to clear this up, as a few people have jumped to conclusions about what I said, I never said that the poor had no hobbies. Or that they had no downtime. That would be silly.

But in a low-tech society, doing housework takes ages. Just doing the laundry takes a week. And while the clothes are drying, the fires have to be looked after, the food has to cooked, the beds have to be aired, the floors have to be swept, the clothes have to be repaired..... all takes a lot more time than it does now. And that's just a few of the things that have to be done.

Of course, poor people had things they enjoyed doing, like singing while they were stirring the laundry. Or listening to someone tell a story while they were sewing.

But what they didn't have is time to sit and do nothing useful. And BTW, it was mostly the men sat drinking in the tavern. Most of the women were were asleep at home, totally knackered from running a house.

Introversion said:

Because the novel is going to be fighting notions that they can't.

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Actually, I should've read more carefully: I see now that the OP is talking about a game, not a novel. I suspect the "belief bar" is set far, far lower there than for a novel. Carry on.

I don't know how strictly you want to define "medieval", and for what part of the world, but: knitting knitting more about knitting.

Now, if you want to get into what a "novel" is and when the first ones were written... I'm a Samuel Richardson girl all the way. You won't get me to agree that there were novels before 1740.

Depending when in the medieval era people slept in two blocks with a bit in the middle of the night for leisure time.

Letter writing, conversation, reading the bible, maybe some needlework and marital relations were some of the "hobbies" practised. Which of those they did would be determined by the amount of light that was available, level of education. Make it far North or South and you can have times of year which are light at night. Most people lived and slept in the hall of the manor house.

Go to YouTube and look up Lucy Worsley "If Wall Could Talk."

I think we are in danger (again) of over-simplifying "the old days", as if the whole of the past was one single era. Or if everyone in a particular period was in the same class. Or if every country had the same conditions as another country at any given point in time.

That's nearly as bad as assuming that the past was exactly the same as the present, except that they didn't have television.

I'm with Mirandshell on this one. My eyes would roll if someone showed me a medieval poor family spending lots of time on hobbies. Or chillaxing. Or reading at a time when most people couldn't read. Or earning enough money singing in a bar or cleaning rooms to cover their living costs.

The best bet, I find, is to choose a period and a place. Decide what class and occupation your characters are. And then do some research. But please please please don't have your peasant characters chillaxing in their doe skin onesies whilst reading Ye Olde Game of Thrones.

Straying a short way from reality can be acceptable if the story needs it. But one of the quickest ways to a bookwall moment is to have a flintstones type re-imaging of modern day life in an olde-worlde settings.

Really?

Ok then, that's me done.

Miss Strawberrii said:

I'm still not sure what takes up most of their time. Sure doing certain things take all day, but I don't think anyone cleaned their house everyday, especially if the're exhausted and a bit lazy. Even nowadays some people don't clean houses all day long. Some poor people might not even care about their beds being made and some may not even have lots of clothes to wash.

Also, it depends in jobs or needs of the current area. If they live in a farmstead, they worked the fields. Then they eat, and maybe one weird person multi-tasks when they eat-reading or something. I do. Or maybe someone worked so hard the previous day and their back gave out and now the're bedridden or chair-stuck. Maybe *they* read, or knitted, or wrote, or whatever.

In the game, society is a bit different depending on location and prevailent of the race. On the snow island in the beginning, celebrations and festivals are common. Main jobs include shopkeeping, smithing, and wood chopping.

I think it just depends.

Some of you are taking this all way too seriously without knowing too much of the world. I just needed ideas is all. Not like an of my characters have a chance to "chillax" when they've got a story to do. D:

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This is a writing board, you know - our first instinct when we see a question is to take it "seriously" and discuss its plausibility/accuracy/"can you sell it to the reader"-ility. Once it's on the boards, the question isn't just for you; it's for everyone who visits and feels they can contribute or learn something. 'Tis the nature of the internet beast.

Even though this is for a game - where, naturally, the emphasis is on entertaining the player rather than building a "realistic" world - I'd suggest you do a little reading on pre-industrial times, and how much work really went into daily life... and how being lazy by today's standards wasn't really an option for most people. Even if you're sore and tired, you still needed to poke up the hearth if you wanted to eat... and meals took longer to make when you couldn't just nuke a plate of nacho leftovers from the fridge. (And, yes, many people - especially women - did clean the house daily.)

Miss Strawberrii said:

I'm still not sure what takes up most of their time.

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To answer this question straightforwardly, for educational purposes and without getting into the question of how much time is left over afterward:

Hunting: requires hours and hours of patiently doing nothing but stalking game. After you kill something you need to gut and dress it, and find a way to haul it home. Then you need to smoke or salt the portion that you can't eat immediately.

Farming: read Farmer Boy or Tess of the d'Urbervilles to get an idea. Plowing, plowing, plowing, marking, planting, harrowing until the crop can hold the field, then reaping and threshing. And haymaking. And training the animals. And maintaining your equipment. And milking the cows and goats, and searching for eggs. You want to eat a chicken for dinner? Kill it, gut it, pluck the feathers, then cook it.

Tending fires: it doesn't take very long to mend a fire, but it does have to be done many times throughout the day. By the way, the fire throws a ton of soot and ash into the air. Anything that is sitting out in your house will need to be cleaned frequently.

Laundry: as said before, a backbreaking and time-consuming process when you have to agitate, wring, rinse, wring, hang and then--because nothing is wrinkle-resistant--press every item by hand.

Clothing: cotton wasn't used for clothing until after the cotton 'gin was invented in 1793. People's clothing was sewn skins, wool, or various other plant fibers, principally nettles and flax.
Wool: besides tending the sheep (shepherd boys and their knitting), you have to shear it, wash it, card it, comb it, spin it--oh wait, you want two-ply yarn? spin the second ply, then spin them together--be washed again, dyed, warp the loom, weave the cloth, shrink it, full it, and then you get to start sewing your garment.
Flax: grow the crop, cut it, let it rot, break it, hackle it, spin it, warp your loom, weave it, shrink it, let it bleach, then you get to start sewing your garment.
And don't forget that there were no synthetic fibers, so things didn't last nearly as long as they do now. I have knit many pairs of socks out of 100% wool yarn. You can wear them for 10-20 total days before they develop holes, which have to be darned. By the way, it takes several hours to knit a sock. Then you have to knit the other one.

Grain: does your community have a water, wind, or ox-driven mill? If not, people are grinding every single bite of grain by hand. If so, they are spending hours transporting the grain and flour in between their homes or storehouses and the mill.

Also, you are cutting firewood or peat, making candles, making soap, baking bread, tending roasts, gathering medicines and dyestuffs, taking veeeeryyy sllloowwww animal-driven trips everywhere you need to go, and struggling with equipment that requires far more upkeep and breaks down far more often than modern materials do. For instant, do your people cook? All of their pots and pans need to be scoured regularly to remove poisonous corrosion. Do they drive wagons? Wheels and axles break constantly. Do they drive the wagons across waterways? Hope there are some nice bridges, or there will be times of year when those trips simply aren't possible.

And all of this assumes your infrastructure is in place. Somebody had to cut and trim the trees, hew or split them, level the ground, build a foundation, build the structure, and maintain a waterproof roof. Ever tried to cut a tree with an axe? It's really a drag. You want stone castles? Lordy be. Let's quarry stone without explosives. Fuuunnnn.

I am ignoring specialty crafts like blacksmithing, glassblowing, and pottery, here. Never mind obtaining the raw materials for them. That bog iron isn't just sitting around waiting for you to smelt it.

In short, there was a lot to do. Really a lot. When the Victorian times came around, being a clerk at a standing desk for 14 hours a day, 6 days a week, seemed like an easy life, compared to living in the country.

And all that Katherine Tree said ^^^ HEAVILY depends on what time period and culture you're looking at.

So, Miss Strawberii, What time period and culture is your game based on?

Because if it's Vikings, for example, then--no leisure reading, no embroidery, no gardening mainly for pleasure, no knitting, few wagons, no lace, no alchemy, no painting (in the artistic sense, they did paint carvings and such), no archeology (that's a post-medieval study), no paper making, origami....

If you chose a different time period and culture the list if leisure activities would change a lot.

Is this game taking place in analogues of all time periods and cultures?


P.S. Katherine Tree, Cotton WAS used for clothing before 1793--Charlemagne had a cotton tunic, frex--but it was extraordinarily rare and expensive. The rest of your summary of some of the vast activities required during pre-industrial time periods is right on.