How "someone else's age was seized," and Why in the old days there were so many old beggars

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Memory is arranged like this: the further the past, the brighter it was, kinder and dearer to the heart. This works not only with individuals, but also with nations. Everyone, for example, is sure that in the old days grandfathers and grandmothers were treated with special respect. But the popular print crumbles, it is worth reading the classics of literature and ethnographers: it was not so simple in the old days with the old people.

Age is honorable as long as you're strong

In a patriarchal Russian family, age did matter. “You don’t dare to tell me, the old man,” it was possible to say not only about outright impudence: the elder established what could be said in his presence and what was not. The Slavophils sang a picture in which a gray-bearded old man who has accumulated special wisdom over the years of his life stands at the head of the family.

In a way, it was. The head of the family was usually a grandfather or even great-grandfather, whose gray beard confirmed and emphasized his status. The oldest woman in the family also appealed to her age, controlling or even pushing others around. Fans of popular prints about the family, describing a clean and harmonious peasant life, paid special attention to the strength and health of the old people. But even if they lived up to a hundred years, natural decrepitude, usual for any person, would overtake them sooner or later. Where did the blind elders, hunched over, with slow legs and poor hearing, who should have been at the head of the family from time to time?

The answer is easy to find in the Russian literature of past centuries - and just as easily it is overlooked. Remember, for example, the story for children, where the old man was kept behind the stove and fed from the pelvis? According to the plot, his son and daughter-in-law were ashamed when the granddaughter began to reason that he would do the same with his parents later. In fact, very few people took shame. Respect for the elderly was very often shown only as long as they were in power, could do the hard work of the village. Losing strength grandfathers and grandmothers were displaced from the place of the main in the family, no one asked their opinions, and they themselves were very afraid to seem unnecessary and grabbed for any small work. There were good reasons for this.

Why are there so many wanderers on the roads

On the pages of old books, old wanderers and old beggars pass endlessly. The former go from city to city and, most importantly, from monastery to monastery, while the latter can ask for alms only in a few villages in a circle or only in one city. These phenomena are two sides of the same coin. Alas, in many villages, when a grandfather or grandmother was recognized as too weak to be useful, the process of survival began.

At best, the old man was served food separately, more meager, and every now and then they asked when he would die instead of eating and eating everything. Such cruelty did not come from natural corruption - life in the villages was an endless struggle for food. Perhaps this is the source of the superstition that a person who has lived for too long "seizes someone else's age" - that is, takes away other people's years of life.

This superstition sometimes led to the fact that the elderly, who had lost their strength and health, were forbidden to enter the "residential" part of the house, behind the mother, the women of the family stopped washing their clothes, the old men had to spend the night in the hallway or on the bench by the door. Women often found themselves in a slightly better position, at least those of them who in their youth managed to weave more canvases for their old age - all young women and girls were engaged in this. The old woman gradually sold the cloth, woven in her youth, and lived on this modest money, buying herself normal food. In addition, the old women often at least somehow, but washed themselves - the old people did not know how to do this and did not even imagine that they could do it.

In the worst case, the elderly were literally survived and kicked out of their homes. They could start walking from monastery to monastery under the pretext of atonement for sins - at many monasteries there were free refectory and guest houses for pilgrims, in which, however, it was impossible to stay for a long time. Others simply began to ask for Christ's sake, without bothering themselves with the appearance of a pilgrimage. Wanderers also accepted alms along the way. So, along the way, the old people found death: from fatigue, malnutrition, illness, bad weather, or wild animals.

It was like this almost everywhere

In pre-Christian times, judging by scraps of information in songs, fairy tales and other recorded folklore, old people who had lost their strength were completely killed - the priesthood forbade gerontocide along with the reigning infanticide, when they got rid of a child in a lean year like an extra mouth. We are talking not only about the East Slavic lands, but also about Europe: in German, French, Scandinavian folklore, you can find all the same motives and plots.

In the German lands, the survival of the elderly by adult children from their homes was so commonplace that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries special agreements were concluded everywhere: according to them, the old people went to some hut not far from their former home, leaving the farm to an adult son, and in return they received a certain amount food, tobacco and tea. At times there was a fierce bargaining over the contracts, and court cases for non-fulfillment of such contracts are also known.

In English families, elderly people who had lost the ability to work for the family were taken to almshouses, to workhouses (if the old people could still perform at least very simple monotonous work). In Scandinavia, an elderly person of sound mind, but having lost his strength, could himself go into the forest in winter: freeze in the snow - death is almost an easy one. There are cases when very old women were burned like witches: after all, you can live so long only at the expense of other people's lives, which you take away with witchcraft.

In the old days, not only the elderly lived differently. What peasant children knew how to do in the old days: Adult responsibilities and non-child labor.