They weren’t all knights or serfs or clergy
Although certain medieval writers described their society as divided into ‘three orders’ – those who prayed, those who fought, and those who laboured – that became an increasingly inaccurate picture from after about 1100.
The population of Europe increased hugely across the 12th and 13th centuries, with cities and towns getting much larger. Paris grew about ten-fold (and London nearly as much) in this period. In the cities, people had all kinds of jobs: merchants, salesmen, carpenters, butchers, weavers, foodsellers, architects, painters, jugglers…
10 medieval dates you need to know
Medieval misconceptions: 12 myths about life in the Middle Ages – busted
And in the countryside, it was not at all the case that everyone was an impoverished ‘serf’ (that is, ‘unfree’ and tied to the land). Many peasants were free men – and women – and owned their own land, while others who were to some degree ‘unfree’ in fact bought and sold land and goods, much like other free men.
There certainly were poor, oppressed serfs, but it wasn’t a universal condition.
2
People had the vote
Well, some people at least. Not a vote for national, representative government – because that really wasn’t a medieval thing – but a vote in local politics. In France, in the 12th and 13th centuries and beyond, many towns and villages were run at a local level as a commune, and there were often annual elections for ‘consuls’ and ‘councillors’, where most of the male inhabitants could vote.
A more complex form of election and government was used in the city states of north Italy, with more tiers of elected officials. Women could not usually stand as officials, nor vote, but some of them were noted in the agreed charters of ‘liberties’ that French towns proudly possessed.
3
The church didn’t conduct witch hunts
The large-scale witch-hunts and collective paranoid response to the stereotype of the evil witch is not a medieval, but rather an early modern phenomenon, found mostly in the
