Each social stratum owed loyalty to the higher rank above, a system of vassalage where the more powerful protected the weaker in return for service, labor, produce, and goods. In the Middle Ages, knights on horseback were part of this vast vertical system of patronage, of service and protection, of exploitation and oppression.
Below the nobility and the knights, smaller groups of artisans and craftsmen existed, and below all came the masses: the laboring poor, almost exclusively agricultural and producing the foodstuffs to feed the nation with an occasional surplus for export and trade.
Popular novelists have kept alive a romantic view of feudalism: of brave knights out to slay dragons, fight wars, and save damsels in distress. In reality, the masses–the peasants and serfs–had few if any rights.
Illiteracy was the norm, not the exception. Medical practices were crude and even barbaric compared to today. Bleeding a patient was a common remedy for all kinds of ailments.
Not ever having been given a chance for education, the masses remained ignorant and superstitious and often given to vile prejudices and violent passions. During the Middle Ages women were sentenced to death for being witches.
This custom, too, crossed the Atlantic Ocean and laid the foundation for the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 in Massachusetts, where nineteen women and one man were put to death for witchcraft and sorcery. The ideas of the First Amendment–religious freedom for all–would be nearly a century too late for these twenty victims.
Meanwhile, the English lords of the manor lived quite well in castle or rich baronial estate, with huge dining rooms where splendid feasts could be served on gold and silver plate. Servants were dressed in the finest livery.
Good wines, expensive spices, and fine silk imported from far-off lands might well be in evidence, to distinguish the lifestyle of the high-born from the ordinary and the poor.
For the masses, housing was deplorable, sanitation nearly non-existent. Periodic epidemics occurred that took the lives of hundreds and even thousands of people. In 1348-49 the Black Death, or bubonic plague, swept across Europe, drastically reducing populations by as much as a third.
Wars between regions, between nations, between religions, and even between social classes–as in peasant rebellions against wealthy landlords–were quite common.
There was almost always a war going on somewhere; the periods of peace are relatively short and few in number compared to the frequent wars that occur in nearly all European nations.
One of the major grievances that Americans held against kings in general is that they constantly involved their nations in wars not to the benefit of the people and which often would bankrupt the national treasury.
It was one of these very conflicts–the French and Indian War–that set in motion the dramatic events that led to the American War of Independence.
In the Age of Monarchy the theory of government was relatively simple: the King ruled by Divine Right and there was no one that could check his power. Republican and democratic habits of thought were not yet present.
Anyone speaking in favor of such broad freedoms for the masses might have been seen as a madman or heretic, lunatic or traitor, to be imprisoned and possibly tortured to force a confession of guilt before being executed.
Men like Miguel Servetus and Giordano Bruno were put to death–burned alive–for their intellectual sins.
Even the great scientist Galileo was warned by the Holy Roman Church that he was headed for a painful end (he was shown the instruments of torture) unless he recanted his blasphemous view that the sun and not the earth was the center of the solar system—he decided to confess “his error” and thus was allowed to live.
Had he not recanted, he would have been tortured and put to death for maintaining the scientific theory (universally regarded as true today) that the earth was a planet in orbit around the sun!
Respect for diversity–for differences of opinion, for freedom of speech, and for the sanctity of a person’s conscience–was not yet a written guarantee anywhere.
Throughout the feudal period and even into the early modern era, the status of women was not particularly pleasant: a woman could not own property, she could not vote, and she had few opportunities to voice her own opinion or go against the decisions made for her by the men in her life: father, husband, minister, landlord.
In some places, as in Russia, there was a custom of the right of the first night: when a woman married, the landowner or his son would be the first to have conjugal privileges on the first night (the son of the landowner could invoke his right to sleep with the bride before her husband).
In times of war with armies marching across the land–often pillaging for food and supplies as they traveled–the entire population of a region suffered more than usual.
The lot of women, never easy in the first place, worsened considerably with the appearance of an invading army. Even if a woman were beaten by her own husband, she had no recourse to law or court since legal protection for her did not exist.
Both the Church and society felt that marriage as an institution was distinct from any other situation where laws governing individual protection might hold sway—within marriage, since it was the woman’s duty to obey her husband (no matter what kind of man he might be) it followed that he had the right to chastise and punish her any way he saw fit when the occasion demanded. She remained under his control and at his mercy, for better or worse.
Natural calamities also broke up the journey from cradle to the grave: drought, floods, storms; famine and starvation; blistering heat and freezing cold; crops lost to bad weather or locusts (insects) or some other calamitous misfortune; but always the peasants owed the lords of the land a certain amount of produce (of grain, especially) no matter how little they themselves might have left.
No matter how bad the year, the lord received his share first. This sometimes led to starvation for the peasants or death due to diseases brought on by a lack of adequate nutrition.
Under feudalism rent could be paid in kind (in food and goods) or in labor and military service. Only much later, under the emerging capitalism system, did a money economy replace this arrangement. The agricultural workers—peasants–owed military service to their landlords, usually 40 days a year.
They were also sometimes conscripted into special building projects that involved strenuous physical labor requiring the strong backs of many men. The peasants and serfs, men and women, were born into a certain lowly station in life and did not expect to rise above it.
They were taught it was ordained by a higher power that they were to be poor, to labor for others, and to suffer. Still, if they were pious enough and meekly accepted their lot, there was a chance they would get to heaven when they died.
The English monarch ruled as he pleased, and it was when he was most arbitrary and unjust that the people felt their resentment and anger most sharply. Yet there was little to be done: the arbitrary rule of a despot is dangerous to oppose, enforceable as it was by soldiers and courts, by spies and professional perjurers.
Impoverishment was the lot of the masses, and they had no choice but to suffer in silence or risk grave consequences. Ideas of rights, equality, justice, freedom, dignity—this was an unknown language that belonged to the future and not of their own time.
Continued in Part 3: “After the American Revolution: Liberty!”
