Reviewing “The Grim Old Days” by Chelsea Follett

REVIEW: The Grim Old Days by Chelsea Follett

The Lady’s Not for RETVRNing

Few people today in the developed world would look forward to moving into a home with no toilets or visiting a medical clinic where hand-washing was a foreign concept. Even fewer, I suspect, would be interested in starving to death inside a besieged town or seeing their young children die of scarlet fever. Yet there seems to be an alarming number of people today who claim that living in times when those things were common would be better than living in the 21st century. Worse yet, they claim to want to influence contemporary society so that it is more like those previous times.

Luckily Chelsea Follett, a Cato Institute research fellow and author, is here to set the record straight. Her new book, The Grim Old Days: An Introduction to the Preindustrial Past, provides an exhaustive inventory of the facts of everyday life, from ancient times up to the 19th century. From birth, childhood, and education to housing, food, work, old age, and death, virtually every aspect of life that one can imagine was worse in preindustrial times. The political philosopher Thomas Hobbes originally coined the phrase “poor, nasty, brutish, and short” to describe the experience of life in a state of nature, prior to the formation of civilization itself, but much of that description applies just as well to life before the last couple of centuries.

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A book covering such a vast span of time — most of recorded history — might seem to be an impossible task, but one of the compelling insights of The Grim Old Days is that material conditions for most people on the planet hardly changed at all during that period. There were certainly different cultural practices in different times and places that made non-trivial differences in the standard of living, but if you look at, for example, the graph of GDP per capita (i.e., how well-off humanity was in economic terms over time), it was virtually flat until very recently. The jump up in living standards that economist Deirdre McCloskey calls “the great enrichment” is a new and unprecedented phenomenon. The average human born in 1800 (a subsistence farmer) had more in common with the average human born during the time of Christ (likely also a subsistence farmer, or a slave) than either did with anyone born in the 20th century.

And that shared experience of the past was unpleasant — not just, as if often acknowledged, by the standards of the present day, but by many of the people who had to endure previous centuries themselves. Housing stock, for example, was extremely poor by modern standards, with vermin and harsh weather frequently intruding through openings in walls, windows, and roofs, and with little comfort or privacy that we associate with feeling “at home” today. Chelsea quotes many observers from previous centuries (mostly from the middle or upper classes) lamenting the extremely poor state of habitations by the average laborer as shockingly bad, barely above the level of animals in some places.

The mental image some cottagecore fans have of a small but cozy house with a fire in the hearth, sentimental decorations, and a well-groomed cat sleeping on a rug has more to do with prosperous late-Victorian times than the distant past. It certainly is not, as such scenes are sometimes described, “medieval.” The presence of windows with actual glass is enough to falsify that classification. Actual small farmhouses in pre-modern times were likely to be dark, dirty, smoky, and shared with a variety of invasive insects and small mammals (and even filled with grunting livestock and their manure on cold nights). Popular celebrations of Western cultural heritage like Renaissance faires, while plenty of fun, should not be taken as authentic cultural presentations.

And most houses weren’t just small and smelly — they were also devoid of most of the implements of daily life we take for granted. Even relatively prosperous people who lived in early modern times — say, Englishmen in the lifetime of William Shakespeare — routinely left wills that listed the disposition of every item in their household, down to individual pieces of furniture, clothing, and kitchen utensils. This was not because they were, as now, detailing the destination of cherished family heirlooms like grandmother’s wedding ring, but because that short list of items was literally everything they owned. And that was the case for people well off enough to have hired someone to prepare their wills in the first place — the poorest wouldn’t have bothered. It was a Marie Kondo fever dream for those aspiring to minimalism, but certainly not what most people today would consider a comfortable existence.

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Even the categories of life that modernity lovers might imagine had some advantages in previous centuries were still pretty unpleasant. Chelsea really drives the point home in her chapter on sleep. Surely, in a time with no motorized vehicles or TVs or streetlights or subwoofers, we all would at least have slept soundly through the night? Definitely not. Antique medical books (their cures frequently of dubious value) were full of remedies for troubled sleep, with early writers making frequent references to disturbed rest — both for obvious physical reasons like aches and pains, but also for reasons of melancholia or mania, psychological conditions that would likely be diagnosed as depression or anxiety today.

Even more quotidian barriers to sleep abounded. Bedbugs, fleas, mice, and other pests were extremely common and almost impossible to get rid of, even in the homes of the rich. For people who actually were poor, beds themselves were a luxury, with ordinary people in medieval and ancient times often sleeping in a sack of straw or wool on the floor — which were also generally infested with unwelcome visitors. Homes rarely had the kind of sound (or heat) insulation even the cheapest habitations boast today. It was common for conversations and the sounds of everything from fighting to lovemaking to be easily overheard from one home or set of rooms to another.

Intrusive noises from the neighborhood and down the street so frequently kept people up that early cities passed local ordinances limiting nighttime activities. A medieval city resident didn’t have to worry about loud music playing from a passing car stereo, but he might be driven to distraction by a coppersmith who decided to spend the wee hours hammering pots and kettles in his workshop (metalworking was such a clatter-inducing trade that its practitioners were often completely deaf by middle age). Chelsea highlights one even darker anti-noise ordinance: in London, in 1595, a law was passed preventing men from beating their wives after nine o’clock at night. This law, by the way, was entirely focused on keeping the noise level in the city down, not as a means to prevent women from domestic abuse.

Given all of these examples — and many more — it’s all the more perplexing that we have modern pundits and writers claiming that we need to RETVRN to the lifestyle of previous centuries. During a 2025 episode of his talk show, Tucker Carlson said that “Feudalism is so much better than what we have now. Because at least in feudalism, the leader is vested in the prosperity of the people he rules.” The frequency with which common people died of violence during war and starvation during drought, to the apparent indifference of their local hereditary rulers and warlords, seems not to trouble Carlson’s judgment. Prosperity during the days of feudalism — for the rulers — often had as much to do with conquest and violence committed alongside their fellow warriors as it did with the productive day-to-day agricultural labor of their serfs.

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But preindustrial nostalgia is in no way a right-wing-only phenomenon. Plenty of hippies, socialists, and assorted left-wing primitivists would like to see an abolition of modernity as well. In the world of degrowth economics, less is more. Chelsea’s colleague Marian Tupy wrote in 2019 about the controversial premise that preindustrial times were actually more prosperous than today, a perspective championed by Jason Hickel of the University of London who believes that people “lived well” without much monetary income because they had access to common land and wildlife resources. Marian correctly points out that preindustrial material deprivation was, in fact, very real. Other historians have also pointed out that raw materials and resources that were laborious to gather and process were much less valuable than products today, which are often higher in quality and easier to obtain with the help of modern technology.

Ultimately, the question of whether the old-timey days were superior is an easy one — would anyone today voluntarily agree to live in the way that people did in 1500, or 1200, or 800? The answer is emphatically no. With the exception of an occasional historical-living documentary, no one in the 21st century is volunteering, much less demanding, to go back to the preindustrial lifestyle. Even people who champion “off-the-grid” living are unlikely to use rushes covered in rancid pork fat for lighting or poultices packed with animal dung as medical treatments. They don’t want their local prince telling them which religion to follow or their parents telling them who they’re allowed to marry. With the exception of trafficking in slaves and practicing horrifying animal cruelty, most of the aspects of medieval life are entirely replicable for modern people — the fact that no one actually embraces them should tell us everything we need to know about the alleged superiority of pre-modern times.

P.S. I also interviewed Chelsea about The Grim Old Days for Episode 197 of Free the Economy. The video of our conversation is below.

Source: Human Progress