Most medieval Europeans never saw a castle siege or a university lecture. The great majority, perhaps nine in ten people, lived and worked in the countryside, and their labor fed everyone else. The setting for many of their lives was the manor, the basic unit of rural lordship.

Lord and land

A manor was an estate held by a lord, who might be a knight, a baron, a bishop or a monastery. Part of its land was the demesne, the land the lord kept for his own use, and the rest was held by peasant households in return for rent and services. Much of the demesne was worked by those tenants themselves, who owed the lord a set number of days of labor each week, plus extra "boon work" at harvest.

Peasants were not all alike. Some were free, paying rent and able to leave. Others were serfs, called villeins in England. Serfs were unfree: they owed labor, could not leave the manor without permission and paid fines such as merchet when a daughter married. Serfdom was not slavery. Serfs had families, homes, land and customary rights that courts recognized, and they could not be sold away from their holdings. Ancient-style slavery itself was fading in western Europe. Domesday Book, William the Conqueror's great survey of England in 1086, recorded about one person in ten as a slave, but within a few decades the category had almost vanished from English records.

Open fields and new tools

In much of northern Europe villages farmed great open fields divided into long strips. Each household held strips scattered across the fields, so that good and poor soil was shared out. Decisions about when to plow, sow and harvest had to be taken together.

Two changes raised output. The first was the three-field rotation: one field sown with winter grain, one with spring crops such as oats, peas or beans, and one left fallow. Compared with the older two-field system, it kept two-thirds of the land producing each year instead of half, and the peas and beans enriched the soil. The second was the heavy plow, with a moldboard that turned the soil over, which could break the heavy clay soils of northern Europe. It needed a large team of oxen, often more than one family owned, which again pushed villagers to cooperate. Later the padded horse collar let horses pull without choking, and water mills ground grain across the countryside.

With more land cleared and better methods, Europe's population roughly doubled between about 1000 and 1300, though all such estimates are rough. Forests were cut, marshes drained and new villages founded. Peasant houses were usually built of timber, wattle and daub under thatched roofs, and in parts of the north families shared them with their animals in winter. Most people ate bread, pottage and ale, with meat a rare treat.

Village institutions

Villages largely ran themselves within the limits set by lords. The manor court met regularly to settle disputes, enforce customs, punish petty offenses and record land transfers. The reeve was a villager, usually chosen by his neighbors, who organized work on the lord's land. He had to keep his neighbors working while living among them afterward, a delicate job.

The parish church stood at the center of village life. Villagers were baptized, married and buried there, and the church collected the tithe, a tenth of each household's produce, to support the priest and the parish. Church festivals marked the farming year, and saints' days gave rest from work.

Women did much of the work: tending animals, gardens and dairies, spinning, and joining the harvest. In England, as the historian Judith Bennett has shown, brewing ale for sale was largely women's work before the Black Death, and court records are full of "alewives" fined for breaking rules on price and quality.

Peasants were not passive. They bargained over rents, went to court against lords, fled to towns or new lands, and sometimes rebelled. Their world was hard and unequal, but it had its own law, customs and solidarity.

Worked example: the court rolls of Elton

Elton, a village in Huntingdonshire in England, belonged to Ramsey Abbey. Records of its manor court from the late 1200s survive, and historians have used them to reconstruct village life. Entries like these appear again and again: a woman fined for brewing and selling ale against the assize; several men fined for doing poor work at the lord's harvest; a man paying a fee for permission to marry off his daughter; neighbors fined for letting their animals into the lord's grain; a land transfer from a widow to her son.

Read the list with the level's ideas in mind. The fines for poor harvest work show labor services being enforced and quietly resisted. The marriage fee is merchet, a mark of unfree status. The ale fines show women's commercial work. The land transfer shows custom protecting family holdings. And the court itself, with villagers serving as jurors, shows that even unfree peasants took part in running their community.