Life In Medieval England

Conditions for most people outside of the lucky 2-3% that made up the aristocracy of England (remember……it was still England. Great Britain didn’t come into existence until the start of the 18th century) were very tough. Diet by today’s standards was poor, often lacking both sufficient calories but also the nutrients you require to maintain good health. Fruit and vegetables would have been very rarely eaten during the winter months. This poor diet, combined with a chronic undernourishment (not enough calories), meant that they were much more likely to fall ill and when they did, they lacked the strength to fight off the illness meaning many simply died where we today would not even have fallen ill. The need to store food (remember….no fridges !) also meant that in lean years, with poor harvests, millions were forced to eat food that had been kept for many months meaning they were often eating food that had already developed fungus and ended up doing more harm than good.
In addition, the physical conditions most people lived under were, to say the least, pretty squalid, particularly if you lived in any kind of town. Food waste, human and animal excrement, damp, rotting animal carcasses and a lack of fresh water meant that roads were little more than open sewers and with no pavements, you pretty much walked in everything. In addition, constant exposure to the elements, a lack of dry and clean clothes and sufficient warmth in winter meant that diseases that we nowadays worry little about like typhus, tuberculosis and plague, were a constant problem, spread very quickly and thus killed in large numbers. If that wasn’t bad enough, soap and hot water were almost universally unavailable to poor people thus appalling skin conditions were common. Without the ability to clean yourself regularly and with constant exposure to filth, infection in wounds was a very common source of illness and death, and rats, attracted by the discarded food, virtually guaranteed that disease would spread quickly. 
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The physical nature of the lives people led, plus the violence of the medieval period meant that cuts and more severe injuries were common. The germs emanating from the filth and muck their clothes would have been covered in, plus the need to use your hands when they were invariably filthy (most people did a manual job), meant that even the small cut, anywhere on your body, could quickly become infected. Without antibiotics to fight the infection, death was often not too far away.

Disease was common in the medieval period because of the squalid conditions people had to live in. The lack of sufficient calories and nutrition in their diets meant they were far more likely to both fall ill and be unable to fight off the disease.