Why Medieval Teenagers Were Absolutely INSANE | Boring History For Sleep

Medieval England is remembered for its knights and cathedrals, its kings and its castles, its long ages of faith and labour. But there is a corner of that world we rarely stop to picture: what it was actually like to be young in it. For the medieval world had no idea of the teenager at all, no long, sheltered, protected adolescence such as we now take for granted. Children left home at ten or twelve to labour among strangers, bound as apprentices or sent into service; the young worked hard, married young, and, when they gathered together in their boisterous bands, drank and brawled and caroused and caused the respectable folk of the age no end of worry. They ran wild at the festivals of misrule, played rough and dangerous games, and earned a reputation for wildness that the anxious elders complained of in words that sound remarkably like our own. Growing up in the Middle Ages was, in short, a stranger and wilder thing than we ever imagine. In this video we wander gently through the surprising world of medieval youth, told softly and without alarm, as a calm and drowsy journey into a vanished age. Discover why children left home so young, what the long years of apprenticeship and service were really like, and why so many of the young ran away to seek their fortune in the towns. Learn about the boisterous youth bands and the festivals of misrule, the wild students and the rough games, the courtships and the coming-of-age, and the ancient, oh-so-familiar worry of the old about the wildness of the young. Then settle back, let your eyes grow heavy, and let the long, gentle story carry you off to sleep, grateful, perhaps, for the gentler youth our own age has come to enjoy. Resources: Medieval Trades (Apprenticeship and the Young) – World History Encyclopedia – https://www.worldhistory.org/Medieval... Training Children for Work: Apprenticeships – Encyclopedia.com – https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/... Lord of Misrule – Encyclopaedia Britannica – https://www.britannica.com/art/Lord-o... Growing Up in Medieval London – Barbara Hanawalt The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England – Ian Mortimer Sleep well, and rest easy — the wild young of the medieval world are long grown old and gone now, all their wildness long since passed into the quiet of the deep past, and you are safe, and warm, and well.