Top all-time · #13389
Sarah Woodbury
Personal blog · sarahwoodbury.comhistorywriting
Sarah Woodbury's personal blog at sarahwoodbury.com covers history and writing. Since 2017, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 6 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-28, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers cite Sarah Woodbury's posts as sources on pre-modern history, including life expectancy, height, the word 'gotten', and descent from Charlemagne. Comments link them without judging the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Hi there! I'm Sarah, and I write novels set in medieval Wales!
What Hacker News says?
Before the industrial revolution, most people worked in agriculture. If you look at life expectancy in those ages it's pretty grim. Usually no one would live to be 45. I can't vouch for the following, but it seems like something a reasonable person would write: http://www.sarahwoodbury.com/life-expectancy-in-the-middle-a...
Comment linking /life-expectancy-in-the-middle-ages/
on “As California’s labor shortage grows, farmers replace workers with robots”>age old problem of people getting married way, way, way too young If it was a problem, why did so many societies choose that path back then? Lower overall life expectancy and the prevalence of disease required you to play a game of probabilities with reproduction. Say you want four adult children. According to one source, 50% of children died before adulthood back 500 years ago [1]. So, you must plan to have eight…
Comment linking /life-expectancy-in-the-middle-ages/
on “The U.S. Divorce Rate Has Hit a 50-Year Low”Related reminder: "Everyone is a descendent of Charlemagne" or "After a couple of millenia, every human is related." https://www.sarahwoodbury.com/were-all-descended-from-charle... https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article/info%3Adoi%2F1... https://github.com/pannous/hieros/wiki/paradoxon
Comment linking /were-all-descended-from-charlemagne-and-related-to-each-other/
on “Yo mama's mama's mama's mama: our understanding of human origins”New Englander here. Gotten is normal vocabulary. If it's not used in British English, then it's probably a feature of North American English, since most North American linguistic differences are snapshots of common features of 16th-17th century British English that somehow ossified over here. Edit: It appears my conjecture was correct: https://www.sarahwoodbury.com/on-the-use-of-the-word-gotten/
Comment linking /on-the-use-of-the-word-gotten/
on “Canada's Carney called out for 'utilizing' British spelling”This is not true. While the extremely low life expectancies are indeed mostly a result of high infant mortality, and the maximum life expectancy was comparable, people that reached adulthood still died substantially younger than today. For example amongst english aristocracy that made it to 21, the average lifespan was early 60s for most of the period from 1200 to 1750. The average age of death of English kings from…
Comment linking /life-expectancy-in-the-middle-ages/
on “Scientists find humans age dramatically in two bursts – at 44, then 60”This surprised me, as I'd heard otherwise. Per https://www.sarahwoodbury.com/how-tall-are-you/ , "the average height of people who lived in the 9-11th centuries was comparable to ours today. It then declined slightly during the 12th through 16th centuries, and hit an all-time low during the 17th and 18th centuries – when those doorframes were made."
Comment linking /how-tall-are-you/
on “Fuggerei: the world’s first public housing (2022)”