>>279783384
Living as a peasant in the countryside pre-industrial revolution may have been harsh, but living conditions and life expectancies absolutely plummeted for the poor during the Victorian period. A lot of myths about how horrible the medieval period was were made up by the Victorians to make themselves feel better about how horrible they were, pretending that the past was even worse.
Not gonna push back on the servant part, but massive urbanization made it much easier, since your servants weren't coming from the small villages in your fief but the urban mass of poor.
