Life in Medieval Times

A Thousand Years in the Middle

When the great Roman Empire in western Europe finally collapsed around the year 500, it left behind a very different world. The grand cities, roads and order of Rome faded, and Europe entered a long period that historians call the Middle Ages, or the medieval period. It lasted for roughly a thousand years, all the way up to around the year 1500.

Why is it called the "Middle" Ages? The name was given by later people who saw it as the time in the middle, between the ancient world of Greece and Rome and their own more modern age. For a long time, people unfairly called part of it the "Dark Ages", imagining it as a time of nothing but ignorance and gloom. But that is far from the whole truth. The Middle Ages were a time of mighty castles and brave knights, of soaring cathedrals and busy markets, of great hardship but also of art, learning and change.

In this book, you will travel back to medieval Europe to discover how society was organised, what life was like for kings and peasants alike, how the Church shaped everything, and how disasters and new ideas slowly changed the medieval world into the one we know today.

The Feudal System

To understand the Middle Ages, you first need to understand how society was organised. Across much of medieval Europe, people lived under a system historians call the feudal system. It was a bit like a pyramid, with everyone bound to those above and below them by promises of land, loyalty and service.

At the very top sat the king. The king was believed to own all the land in his kingdom, but he could not rule it alone. So he granted large areas of land to important nobles, also called lords or barons. In return, these nobles swore loyalty to the king and promised to provide him with soldiers and support when he needed them.

The nobles, in turn, granted some of their land to knights, the trained warriors who fought on horseback. In exchange, the knights promised to fight for their lord. At the very bottom, and making up the vast majority of people, were the peasants, who worked the land. Many peasants were not free to leave; they were tied to the lord's land and had to farm it, in return for protection and a place to live. This linked chain of land, loyalty and service held medieval society together for hundreds of years.

Castles, Knights and Warfare

The Middle Ages were often violent and dangerous, and powerful lords needed strongholds to protect themselves, their families and their lands. So they built castles, mighty fortresses of stone designed to keep enemies out.

The earliest castles were simple wooden forts on top of a mound, but over time they grew into massive stone strongholds with thick walls, tall towers and clever defences. A castle might be surrounded by a water-filled ditch called a moat, entered by a drawbridge, and guarded by a heavy gate. At its heart stood the strongest tower of all, the keep, where people could make their final stand if attackers broke in. When an enemy tried to capture a castle, they laid siege to it, surrounding it and trying to break in or starve the defenders out.

Defending these castles, and fighting the wars of their lords, were the knights. A boy from a noble family trained for years to become a knight, first serving as a young page, then as a squire who assisted a knight. Finally, if he proved himself, he was knighted. Knights wore armour of metal and chainmail, fought with swords and lances, and rode powerful warhorses. They were supposed to follow a code of honour called chivalry, which called on them to be brave, loyal and to protect the weak, though not every knight lived up to it.

The Lives of Peasants

While knights and lords have grand stories, it was the peasants who truly kept the medieval world running. They made up most of the population, and life for them was hard, simple and centred entirely on the land.

Most peasants lived in small villages of cottages built from wood, mud and straw, clustered around a lord's manor and a church. They spent their lives farming: ploughing fields, planting and harvesting crops like wheat, barley and rye, and tending animals such as cows, pigs, sheep and chickens. Work followed the seasons and never seemed to end, from sowing in spring to harvesting in autumn. Much of what they grew had to be handed over to their lord or the Church, leaving little for themselves.

Peasant homes were small, dark and smoky, often shared with animals. Families ate simple food: dark bread, vegetable stews called pottage, cheese, and ale to drink, with meat a rare treat for many. Children worked from a young age, and few learned to read or write. Disease, hunger and bad harvests were constant dangers, and most people never travelled more than a few miles from where they were born. Yet villagers also had festivals, fairs and holy days to look forward to, with music, dancing and games to brighten their hard lives.

The Power of the Church

If one thing touched the life of every single person in medieval Europe, rich or poor, it was the Church. Almost everyone in western Europe was a Christian, and the Christian Church was the most powerful institution of the age, shaping not just religion but nearly every part of daily life.

People believed deeply in God, in heaven and hell, and that the Church held the keys to their souls. The local church stood at the centre of every village, and its bells marked the hours of the day. People went there to worship, to mark births, marriages and deaths, and to follow the calendar of holy days and festivals that broke up the year. The week, the seasons and even the way people counted time all revolved around the Church.

The Church was also enormously wealthy and powerful, owning vast lands and collecting payments from the people. Monasteries, where monks lived lives of prayer and work, became important centres of learning. In an age when most people could not read, monks carefully copied books by hand, preserved ancient knowledge, cared for the sick and poor, and ran some of the earliest schools. Over the centuries, towering stone cathedrals rose across Europe, some taking more than a hundred years to build, as breathtaking monuments to medieval faith and skill.

Towns, Trade and Learning

For the first centuries of the Middle Ages, most people lived in the countryside. But as the centuries passed, especially after around the year 1000, towns began to grow and thrive, changing medieval life in important ways.

Towns grew up where people gathered to buy, sell and make things. Bustling markets drew crowds, and trade expanded as goods such as wool, cloth, spices and metalwork travelled along roads and rivers and across the seas. In the towns lived merchants who bought and sold goods, and skilled craftworkers such as bakers, blacksmiths, weavers, carpenters and shoemakers. Workers in the same trade often joined together in groups called guilds, which set standards, trained newcomers and looked after their members.

Town life offered something the countryside did not: a chance at freedom and opportunity. There was even a saying that "town air makes you free", because in some places a peasant who escaped to a town and lived there long enough could win their freedom. Learning grew too. The first universities appeared in medieval towns and cities, where scholars studied subjects like law, medicine, mathematics and philosophy, often building on knowledge preserved from the ancient world and from scholars in the Islamic world. The growth of towns and learning slowly began to change the medieval world.

The Black Death

In the middle of the 1300s, a catastrophe struck medieval Europe that few people alive could have imagined. A terrible disease, which later became known as the Black Death, swept across the continent, bringing death on an enormous scale.

The plague is thought to have travelled along trade routes from Asia, carried by fleas on rats aboard ships and along roads. Once it arrived, it spread with terrifying speed. People who caught it usually died within days, and there was no cure and little understanding of what caused it. In just a few short years, the Black Death killed a huge portion of Europe's population, perhaps as many as one in three people, leaving villages empty and families destroyed. It was one of the deadliest disasters in all of human history.

The Black Death changed medieval society forever. With so many workers dead, those who survived found that their labour was suddenly more valuable, and peasants in many places began to demand better treatment, more freedom and higher pay. The old certainties of the feudal world were shaken. In time, the disaster helped to loosen the grip of the feudal system and pushed Europe toward new ways of life.

The End of the Middle Ages

By around the year 1500, the medieval world was fading and a new age was being born. Several great changes brought the Middle Ages to a close.

The feudal system slowly broke down, partly because of the Black Death and the rise of towns, trade and paid work. Kings grew more powerful, building stronger, more united nations. New inventions changed everything: the printing press, developed in the 1400s, allowed books to be made quickly and cheaply for the first time, spreading ideas and learning faster than ever before. Explorers set out across the oceans to discover new lands, beginning a great age of exploration. And a flowering of art, science and learning known as the Renaissance was reshaping how people saw the world.

The Middle Ages are sometimes remembered only for plague, war and hardship, and there was certainly plenty of all three. But this was also an age that gave us magnificent castles and cathedrals, the first universities, growing towns and trade, and stories of knights and chivalry that we still tell today. Out of the medieval world, the modern world slowly began to grow.

What We Learned

We have spent a thousand years in medieval Europe, from the fall of Rome to the dawn of the modern age.

We learned how the feudal system organised society into a pyramid, from kings and nobles down to the knights and the peasants who made up most of the people. We explored mighty castles and the knights who defended them, and we shared the hard, simple lives of the peasants who farmed the land. We saw how the powerful Church shaped daily life, learning and time, and how growing towns, trade and universities began to change the world. We witnessed the horror of the Black Death and the slow end of the Middle Ages as a new age began.

The medieval world may be long gone, but its castles, cathedrals and stories still tower over us, telling the tale of a remarkable thousand years.

Want to keep exploring this age? Step inside the fortresses of the era in Knights and Castles, or meet the bold northern raiders and explorers of the early Middle Ages in The Vikings.