The relative weight of each ingredient differed widely (and often wildly) from place to place. Still, there were some markedly regional tendencies. The Roman traditions were strongest in Italy, while those parts of Europe only lightly touched by the Romans were more prey to non-Roman, Germanic traditions. In places that had never been part of the Roman world, like Scandinavia, both Roman traditions and the veneer of Christianity could be spread rather thin. The Roman Catholic Church was formally accepted throughout Western Europe but, in practice, the clergy’s actual influence depended on the local strength of bishops and how much attention the region received from the Papal establishment in Rome.

Unlike the Roman Empire with its centralized government, feudal Europe was a decentralized world where local rulers were lords, in fact as well as in name. Particularly in the early Middle Ages, the will of the local barons was primary and the power of kings nominal outside their immediate holdings. It was a society crudely divided into three estates: those who fought (the warrior nobility), those who prayed (the churchmen),³ and those who worked (the vast majority of the population—mainly serfs who were tied to the land and a minority of free peasants.) This was a world quite different from the days of the Roman Empire. There were few cities and most were small, weak places in the early centuries. Once-mighty Rome, which during the third century boasted a population of over a million, fell during the Dark Ages. Its permanent population dwindled to around 50,000, and this persisted until around the eleventh century. At the same time, Paris was little more than a collection of shacks by the side of the River Seine.

Science, medicine and literacy were markedly less common, at least during the so-called “Dark Ages,” or about the first five hundred years of the feudal period, than during Roman rule. While concrete had been an accepted building material in the Roman Empire, the formula was lost and not rediscovered until the Renaissance. Book production during the length of the fifteenth century had reached 4,999,161 for Western Europe, while in the entire seventh century the area produced only 10,639 volumes with none recorded for Central Europe, Bohemia, Germany, Austria—almost half were from Italy.⁴ Of course, things were not necessarily “dark” for the common people of the time. Most continued to be born, live, love, farm and die more or less as their ancestors had. If their life was very hard, so had it been for their ancestors. Most historians no longer like to use the term “Dark Ages” with its judgmental connotations. This early period of feudalism was given this label because it suffered, in scholar’s minds at least, in comparison to the glories of Rome. Moreover, historians who are so wedded to written sources find it frustrating that at least until the ninth century ad there was little written documentation to work with. As one prominent French historian has proclaimed in frustration, “We are victims of our sources!”⁵ He went on to argue that if “a century is mute, as was the case from the fifth century to the eighth century and also of the tenth century, it has a bad reputation and we call it ‘black’—the Dark Ages, as the English say.”⁶

Before turning to the focus of this work—the common people—a look at the two dominant classes of nobles and church officials is useful. The nobility was a warrior class who enjoyed a military monopoly of force. They may have claimed God’s blessing but the bottom line was they had the best land, with most of it protected by professional killers (knights). These knights possessed armor, swords, lances, trained war horses and so on. A peasant farmer with a club or sharp knife was seldom a match for one of these professionals. While the local baron provided the peasantry with protection in the event of invasion, it was in reality more often protection against the very knights sworn to protect them. Try to imagine a society with little effective central government, where power and wealth went to those who had the arms and the will to seize and keep the land.

The warrior elite was made up of those who had once been little better than local thugs. Over time, however, they began to develop rituals and ideology (known as “chivalry”) that allowed them to see themselves as part of a God-ordained aristocracy. Still, their status was based on naked force. When not at war, they trained for war. When not training directly for warfare, they relaxed by engaging in sports. To the nobles, most sports meant killing something … hunting deer or boar, using trained birds of prey to kill other birds. They sometimes entertained themselves and even the commoners by torturing bears, chaining them to a fixed place and then setting dogs on the luckless creature. It is important to remember that the nobles thought little more, sometimes less, of the peasantry than the animals they hunted.

Even should an average European have thought to resist this secular oppression, and as time went on more and more did just that, they would face another obstacle: the Church. By the Middle Ages, Christianity had already become institutionalized as the tool of power and the powerful.⁷ Anyone who dared rebel against the status quo risked death not just in this world but also a sentence to hell in the next; any revolt against secular lords was condemned as an attack on Christ himself. The common people were told constantly that there was but one path to Paradise … and that was through complete, unquestioning obedience to God’s instrument on earth—Holy Mother Church.

This is far from saying that the Church was an entirely religious or spiritual organization. The Church helped organize countless aspects of society and the economy that in more recent times have become the province of government or corporations. This included caring for those of the population who were lepers, organizing popular fairs and entertainments, acting as a diplomatic service between feuding warlords, providing what education there was and preserving ancient knowledge, as monks copied manuscripts by hand in their monasteries. In more populated urban enclaves, the Church, while fiercely condemning prostitution, took responsibility for organizing the female sex workers into houses (frequently Church-owned); when advancing age reduced the women’s market value, it was the Church who found them a retirement position in a religious community or as a clerical house servant.⁸ Of course, if, as was often the case, the male clients of these houses felt compelled to atone for their sins by donating to the Church, so much the better.

Despite the official imposition of celibacy on the clergy, priests and other male clerics often entered into relations equated by the Church with fornication. As one recent study noted, “long-term stable sexual relationships between clerics and women remained common across Europe during the Middle Ages.”⁹ Many unmarried women were forced to turn to domestic work and “the servants of priests could easily have found themselves coerced into sexual relations.”¹⁰ Still, the relation between clerics and the women they slept with remains complex. Laywomen typically depended on their lovers for food and shelter while nuns retained “their own social networks and living situations within their religious houses during the relationships.”¹¹ Even if the evidence suggests there were seldom truly happy endings for women involved with male clerics, their experiences were much more diverse than scholars may have thought.¹² Given the common practice of priests taking women as partners, sanctioned or not, it is hardly surprising that Reformation leader Martin Luther would so quickly decide to allow his clergy to marry.¹³

Of course, we can never know how much the common people believed what the Church preached to them, although the amount of sincere belief no doubt varied greatly from one time to another. Yet we know that long before the Reformation, there were people interpreting Christianity in a manner far different than Rome’s. The Catholic Church had a name for these dissenting believers: heretics. A heretic was one who challenged the practices and the dogma of the Church, and were thought to be a danger to Christian unity and the power of the high clergy. The institution dedicated to dealing with these heretics was called the Inquisition. The first medieval Inquisition began in 1184 and was directed against a group known as the Cathars who were predominantly situated in southern France.¹⁴ While members of this group regarded themselves as good Christians, the Church most decidedly did not. At first, the Pope’s emphasis was on peaceful conversion, but this was a failure in all but a few isolated cases.

Having tired of persuasion, the Papal establishment ordered a full-scale crusade against the said-to-be spiritually wayward Cathars. For over two decades at the beginning of the thirteenth century, armed forces under the direction of the papal appointed representative waged unrelenting and cruel war against the so-called “heretics.” The fighting that took place inevitably included unspeakable massacres where little effort was made to distinguish between Cathar and faithful Catholic. Asked how to tell heretic from loyal child of the Church, the papal legate is reported to have said, “Kill them all, the Lord will recognize his own.”¹⁵ Along with mass slaughter running into the tens of thousands, many taken prisoner were blinded or otherwise mutilated. It may have taken decades, but the organized Cathar heresy was finally destroyed, at least on the surface. It lingered on for a century and some of their views would reappear in changed form in future protests against Rome. The Cathars were a case study in how difficult it was for even the most powerful institutions to rid themselves of firmly held beliefs among the average Europeans.

There is evidence, however, that Cathars may not have been so much advocates of some toxic theology but were, rather, radical Catholics who demanded more reform than the Roman Catholic Church was interested in undertaking. Charges of falling into eastern dualistic error were leveled at the heretics as needed, a handy excuse and a doctrinal error outlined in the theology textbooks used at the great school of Paris¹⁶ How much more convenient it was to charge political opponents demanding radical reform of Church institutions with spiritual crimes, than to actually confront their political critique of the powers that be.¹⁷ Brutal, fierce, savage physical force proved more useful in defeating critics than reasoned debate.

However, the Cathars’ treatment at the hands of the Church did not prevent other heresies from arising out of popular opposition to the Church and the feudal order. Sometimes these were massive movements, that prefigured the Reformation. But often, the Inquisition hunted down isolated groups and individuals who were thought to have strayed from the one path to salvation. In truth, the Inquisition may be seen as a tool to target those who thought differently or were viewed as a threat to the feudal lords. In many cases, such as that of Joan of Arc who was tried and executed by her English enemies, the charge of heresy was convenient politically. At times, inquisitors enriched themselves with the confiscated property of those they condemned.

Enriching themselves was something beyond most ordinary Europeans. What was life like for the common people? By occupation, they were artisans, blacksmiths, merchants, musicians, but most of all, they were peasants. Members of the farming class and ignorant of nearly everything but agriculture, something like 75 percent of the peasants were serfs bound to the land. Not slaves but not quite free either, the serf was bound by an elaborate set of obligations to the lord and master. The lord owned the land and for his generosity rarely demanded more than three days a week unpaid labor, and as much as 25 percent in other taxes, along with periodical forced donations for, or participation in, wars.¹⁸ Of course, the Church demanded its dime as well (10 percent). Even the few more fortunate city dwellers had little influence or security. As economist Adam Smith commented in the eighteenth century, during “the barbarous times of feudal anarchy, merchants, like all the other inhabitants of burghs, were considered so little better than emancipated bondsmen, whose persons were despised, and whose gains were envied.”¹⁹

The life of the common people was not only harsh, it might appear even shocking to contemporary eyes. As many as one woman in ten died in childbirth²⁰ while 25–30 percent of babies arrived stillborn.²¹ Even children born healthy spent the first five years of life prey to serious and often deadly diseases. While it is difficult to calculate the survival rate of children, the fact that in Europe’s cemeteries a fifth of those interned seem to have been under the age of seven suggests a fearful toll.²² There is also the often-ignored issue of sexual exploitation. One need not agree with Laura Betzig, who argues that of every 100,000 people living today over 99,000 carry genes from ancient rulers,²³ to admit to widespread sexual predation on the common people. In the feudal period, peasants were subject to jus primae noctis, or the right of the lord of the manor to have intercourse with a peasant bride on her wedding night. How often or widespread this right of the first night was practiced is a matter of considerable debate, as jus primae noctis could be waived for a cash payment. What remains clear is that this custom was symbolic of the feudal lord’s power over his serfs.²⁴