Medieval Morons



"Your average peasant had the IQ of an extremely rotten tree stump and the common sense of a very small lump of mud...."

- Top Ten Horror Stories

Medieval people are morons.

No, really. Whenever you see medieval people in fiction, particularly peasants, they will always be depicted as stupid, small-minded, xenophobic, savage but cowardly, superstitious, gullible, and primitive - the Old World equivalent of American rednecks. And of course, all men treat all women like crap all the time.

Thus, time travelers are advised to avoid The Middle Ages at all costs lest they be burned as witches. Or as we call it, The Dung Ages.

This trope was popularized by the Enlightenment due to the "Medieval Stasis" trope, their perception on the world after Rome as a post-apocalyptic, war-ridden, anti-intellectual dystopia, and how they saw themselves as paragons of progress recovering the glory of the classical world. Of course, reality is more complex than that. Medieval people were just as intelligent as any other person in any moment of history, but they simply did not have the accumulated knowledge that people from later periods could more easily gain, and they had to spend most of their time surviving, as such they were only capable of applying their intellect to the things they knew, which actually resulted in some clever uses of rather primitive technology.

Compare: Humans Are Morons.

Film
"King: Put them in the iron maiden. Bill and Ted: Iron Maiden? Excellent! *Air guitar* King: Execute them! Bill and Ted: Bogus."
 * Bill and Teds Excellent Adventure. No matter where they went in history, no matter which historical figure they abducted, nobody really seemed to care that they'd fallen out of the sky in a phone booth and absconded with Beethoven. That is of course until they ended up in medieval England, where they were Also subverted in the fact that neither Bill nor Ted are the sharpest knives in the drawer...

"Dennis (peasant): We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week, but all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs, but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more major..."
 * Monty Python and the Holy Grail both showcased this ("We've found a witch; may we burn her?") and averted this:

""Don't touch that! Your primitive intellect wouldn't understand alloys, and compositions, and... things with... molecular structures...""
 * According to the Aluminum Christmas Trees article, anarcho-syndicalist communes did actually exist.
 * But they were usually religious in nature and tended to get conquered, with the exception of a couple in Italy which developed into Republican city-states.
 * Army of Darkness saw the zombie-fighting hero Ash thrown back in time with a chainsaw in one hand (or, as one hand) and a shotgun in the other. The peasants were not amused, though they were rather impressed with his "boomstick".


 * And again, Ash is often shown to be on the dimmer side of the various characters around him, not understanding such simple concepts as "When the mage-guy tells you you need to say something exactly right, you need to say it exactly right."
 * The peasants from the movie Just Visiting. Upon seeing the displaced villain from the present time, they gaze at him with stupid wonder while wielding crosses. They flee in terror when the phone they took from him starts ringing.
 * in the original, the temporally shifted heroes utterly destroy a van, thinking it to be a devil-powered cart driven by a Saracen.
 * They do that to a VW Beetle in the remake.
 * Subverted in The Navigator. While the time-displaced villagers are understandably disoriented and frightened by much of what they encounter—and when it's a construction site full of mechanical earthmovers, who could blame them? -- they make quite a few reasonable deductions and plans, within the limits of their knowledge and faith.
 * Played straight In The Name Of The Rose, the film version. Everyone but the narrator and the hero William of Baskerville is a moron or a fanatic or both.
 * Averted in Luther (the biopic of Martin Luther that is). Medieval -- well, Renaissance -- people are shown as having an obviously advanced civilization with impressive infrastructure like cathedrals, palaces, and printing presses, as well as amiable customs (like nailing opinions up at a public place), not to mention jurisprudence and theology based on arguments going back centuries and recorded in gobs and gobs of books which impeccably trained scholars have to wrestle with. There are also clever politicians who know how to do their job. Some, particularly the lower classes, are gullible and easily manipulated, but it is no different from later times in that respect. The only thing really to get past is the idea of a society based on religion and the force used to repress dissent, and religious people at least can sympathize with the former if not the later even if they don't agree.

Literature

 * Averted in Michael Crichton's Timeline. In this book, the time travelers are often outwitted and outmatched by the natives. A consistent theme is that while the time travelers possess modern knowledge, they do not have the skills to survive in the more primitive environment.
 * Of particular note is that Crichton specifically details the natives' sanitation practices. Lack of awareness of bacteria did not prevent them from attending to hygiene, averting the stereotype of "living in filth".
 * A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is a major offender. Of course, it was new when Mark Twain did it (making this Older Than Radio), and he was trying to portray the evils of aristocracy. Still, it's exaggerated and unhistorical, with most of the characters just generally acting Too Dumb to Live. He was also satirizing the excessively poetic and romantic portrayals of Arthurian legend that were popular at the time—by pointing out that, had Arthur and his knights actually behaved as they were typically portrayed, they would have had to have been absolutely childlike morons.
 * Subverted in the Poul Anderson novel The High Crusade. A high tech alien empire is brought to its knees by a 14th century English army. The Medieval characters naturally view things through a Medieval lens (the aliens are initially mistaken for demons), but are very capable and clever. In fact  by the end. Unfortunately, the movie played this trope nearly completely straight.
 * Poul Anderson further subverted this trope in his short story "The Man Who Came Early", in which the titular man Trapped in the Past fails to impress medieval Icelanders. They aren't even particularly fazed by his handgun.
 * Subverted in the book 1632, in which the doctor of a time-displaced modern American town has to consult with his "downtime" counterpart. It becomes clear that the "local" doctor not only doesn't use leeches and ground bat's wing, but has a medical library in nearly a dozen languages (English being one of them) (all of which he speaks fluently, against the US doctor's... just English). The high school history teacher who is also present breaks down laughing and says "you didn't actually think you were smarter than him, did you?"
 * In addition, although they have their initial fears, the medieval early modern characters are extremely quick to recognize and appreciate American technology instead of writing it off as witchcraft and even logically deduce why it cannot be magic.
 * Of course not. It is transdimensional Eldritch Abominations toying with spacetime for their inscrutable amusement. You didn't actually believe in witches did you?
 * Truthfully, the leads in the story (even by Eric Flint's "Middle man" policy) are simply incredibly smart/intuitive, even by modern standards to the point it can come quite unbelievable and tend to adapt with incredible speed to change. This can be Justified that they had come from living in a literal Hell and explained by Gretchen Richter as "There are worse things than going insane."
 * Averted in George Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. We don't see that many peasants, but those we do are just people. Some are smart, some are stupid, most are fairly level-headed. In The Sworn Sword, Dunk even tells Egg (who is royalty) to be respectful to them. They might not be able to read or argue about the politics of the realm, but they know when to plant their crops and how to deliver a calf.
 * And then there are the members of the aristocracy like Littlefinger or Tyrion who could possibly be smarter than anyone ever.
 * Taking place as it does in a quasi-medieval mishmash of an era, Discworld plays around with this trope quite a bit. That said, even towards the more peasantry, circa 1400 mindset parts, people tend to just be people.
 * In The Sword of Truth one of the morals is "People are stupid" and boy does it show. From the first book, there's a crowd of people being moved to tears by Michael's impassioned speech about the evils of fire. The Mud People, despite living for generations in a place where it rains all the time, have somehow never figured out how to make roofs that don't leak. And there's the group of peasants sent by Darken Rahl to attack Zedd on the belief he's a witch. First he tells them the term is warlock. Then he talks the angry mob into having a brainstorming session about all the terrible things warlocks can do until they get scared and give up.
 * Mostly avoided in the TV series Legend of the Seeker, based on the books.
 * In the Time Scout series, this is how downtimers are initially portrayed, but the portrayal becomes more nuanced and positive as the story progresses.

Live Action TV
"Random Townsperson: "Why good morning Prince Edmund." Prince Edmund: "G'Morning PEASANT.""
 * Subverted in the Doctor Who episode "The Awakening," with a 17th century farmboy named Will Chandler, who, while illiterate and only just aware of what year it is, proves to be quite bright.
 * This trope is present in Blackadder, but makes it clear that people in all time periods are equally moronic.


 * Similarly present in Maid Marian and Her Merry Men, where Marian and the Sheriff are the only characters with two brain cells to rub together.

Video Games

 * The Orc and Human builder units in Warcraft III are a shining example of this trope, if the lines they speak when clicked are any indication (the humans have a Cockney accent while the orcs have a You No Take Candle speech pattern). They even have the Human Peasants occasionally using the Monty Python quote above...
 * Given the cultures involved both believe heavily in advancement by merit (and face serious manpower shortages), it's possible that the only people who get jobs as laborers are the ones too incompetent to do anything else.

Web Comics

 * During the "Storm Breaker Saga" from Sluggy Freelance it's debatable whether this trope is in play, or if it's just another display of everyone in Sluggy Freelance being some sort of idiot.

Western Animation

 * Time Squad. In one particular episode, they manage to quickly convince Copernicus to stop being a farmer and write about how the Earth moves around the sun, he promptly agrees and goes to research under the basis that "That sounds important!" only to be seen in the end of the episode running back to where the Squad had just gone, screaming, "Wait! I forgot to ask! WHAT IS THIS 'SUN'?!"
 * The "what is this 'sun'?" line likely was more poking fun at the area they showed him to be farming in, looking grey, bleak, and a few bits of brimstone away from Mordor. Probably closer to The Dung Ages, though the first line would still be this trope.
 * Parodied in Futurama. characters from The Future commonly refer to the 20th century as "The Stupid Ages."
 * Leela even tells Fry that being a drop-out of a 20th-century college means nothing in their time, so Fry ends up enrolling in a college in order to drop-out properly.

Real Life

 * Nutritional deficiencies in the general population could lead to other forms of mental retardation and physical disability, especially during times of famine and hitting pregnant women (and their unborn children) in particular; for example, during the Middle Ages in Europe, there was an epidemic of cretinism in parts of the Swiss Alps due to iodine deficiency, and the effects of both lead and alcohol poisoning were unknown at the time. All this could possibly have led to substantially lowered IQ and developmental disabilities.
 * It's also been shown that the average intelligence level is rising, so a few hundred years back the average intelligence level was lower, though perhaps not to the extent seen in fiction. Also, this wasn't a blanket increase; it seems to be concentrated in those with the lowest IQs, "and negligible in the top half." There seems to be no effect on those with very high IQs. And this is not an increase across the board with the tests: it is limited to certain subtests. In fact, the average scores in some subtests have decreased slightly (though overshadowed by large increases in the scores of other subtests).
 * Leadership and occupation in medieval societies were much more dependent on random factors, like what family they were born into. In today's industrialized countries, people are generally are able to seek qualifications and apply for jobs they are talented in and that follow their interests. Therefore, in the everyday working world, the people you run in skilled positions are more likely to be competent and skilled.
 * As might be expected real life was a zig-zag. Early Medieval Europeans had a rich cultural tradition and could be remarkably innovative. At the same time they were not quite plugged in to the general information processing system of the great empires and city-states between the Mediterranean and China. The breakdown of political order led to something like a Mad Max type situation in which the different tribes and principalities were scattered about aimlessly and in which there was often a positive disincentive toward improvement. For instance a Roman emperor wants his roads kept in good order because it will let him send troops to a crises point; a baron has to little territory to gain such advantage and might simply be giving invaders a quicker route. At the same time there were a number of remarkable monarchs that were geniuses by any standard, the Catholic Church provided an administration to replace the Roman Empire. An intelligent and aggressive middle class was forming. And contact with the East would soon reopen as early as the 1000 AD. Furthermore, even in the lowest times, Medieval rulers always at least knew they had a lot of work to do building civilization up.
 * Medieval peasants would certainly have looked like idiots to many of us because they were, kind of, not urban. And certainly not twenty-first-century city dwellers. On the other hand they knew plenty of things most people are not called upon for today, such as predicting weather, keeping vermin off their crops, getting a harvest without agricultural machinery, etc. Not to mention how to cache goods when a passing army or just a rent collector is too near. They did not have what we would call quality education or even what a Medieval Scholar would call such (which by the way, wasn't to bad though sometimes a little impractical). They did know how to survive in their environment, at least the ones that did so.
 * Likewise Medieval Nobles were good at Game of Thrones style chessmastery. Knights were pretty good at single combat though their tactical skill in large battles was mildly off. Strategy was actually better than tactics because communications and organization were often poor whereas getting a handle on where to march, when, and why was a complex matter but fundamentally based on understanding geography and politics better than the other guy and a rather simple army could be used in sophisticated ways. Merchants knew how to predict prices somewhere where they did not have real time intelligence, how to move goods hither and yon. And how to think of elaborate schemes of organization and corporate law. Craftsfolk would have known how to turn out products by hand tools without availing themselves of standardized mass production (though even the precursors to that were known in places like the Venetian navy yard).