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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. -
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 ‘councilors’, where most of the male inhabitants could vote.
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The large-scale witch-hunts and collective paranoid response to the stereotype of the evil witch are not medieval, but rather an early modern phenomenon, found mostly in the 16th and 17th centuries. There were some witch trials in the Middle Ages, and these became more widespread in German-speaking lands in the 15th century, but those doing the prosecuting were almost always civic authorities rather than ecclesiastical ones.
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When people talk about ‘the Renaissance’, they usually mean the very self-conscious embrace of classical models in literature, art, architecture, and learning found at the end of the Middle Ages. This is usually taken to be one of the ways in which we moved from ‘medieval’ to (early) ‘modern’ ways of thinking.
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It may be the case that the majority of medieval people – particularly those who lived in the countryside – rarely traveled very far from where they lived. But that would be the case with quite a lot of people in much later ages also.
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Much of the public culture of the Middle Ages was shaped, or at least informed by, Christianity. But there were also some quite curious customs, usually tolerated by the church, but which may have had older roots.
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In fact, you almost certainly didn’t get married in church: those who wanted their marriage ‘solemnized’ would usually do so at the gate to the churchyard. But in any case, couples didn’t need a church, or a priest, or the banns being read, or any other religious paraphernalia.
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We tend to think of literacy as one thing, but in fact, it combines various different skills, of which the physical act of writing is only one. For much of the Middle Ages, working as a scribe – writing – was seen as a kind of labor, and was not something that tremendously clever, important people like theologians and intellectuals would bother doing themselves.
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The Middle Ages famously features great examples of extreme religiosity: mystics, saints, the flagellants, mass pilgrimage, and the like. But it would be wrong to assume that people were always very focused on God and religion, and definitely wrong to think that medieval people were incapable of sceptical reflection.
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Most people probably know this already, along with the fact that Viking helmets did not have horns. Both are bits of Victorian myth-making about the period, along with the idea that the lord had the right to sleep one night with any newly-wedded woman.
