Rural Life
“Medieval scholars described themselves as pigmies on the shoulders of the Greek intellectual giants ... but they, and everybody else not involved in raising food, were more like giants on the shoulders of the hunchbacked peasantry.”
― Fantasy Wargaming, chapter 1
The average person is a serf — society is overwhelmingly rural. Even in cities and towns, there are constant reminders that rural life is not far away — pigs in streets and vegetable gardens behind houses. Serfs are not free, and cannot leave their village, marry, or do almost anything else without permission of their lord. In pagan areas, the serfs are replaced by thralls, a class of slave that is quite similar. Even free peasants have to work brutally hard, long days six days a week.
Fields are held communally — farmers do not fence off “their” field from others. Instead the produce of the field is divided by the rows of crops. The lord owns the produce from the lion’s share of the rows, with serf families each having tenant’s rights to a row or two. Free peasants, if prosperous, might even own their rows outright. The serfs have to work their lord’s rows first, then their own. Poor serf families have rights to no rows, and have to hire themselves out as labor to other farmers (most often the lord, who has so much land that he is always in need of labor, even after his serfs fulfill their obligations to him). Peasants usually plow with oxen— horses are considered a luxury item. Generally, multiple households have to pool their animals to assemble a plowing team.
Peasants live in one-room huts with thatched roofs. Farm animals sleep inside with the family (if possible, in a second, semi-separated room), to keep them from wandering, to keep the house warm, and to give parasites such as lice and biting flies something to bite other than people (they mostly prefer animals to humans). Floors are dirt, but strewn with rushes and straw, including fragrant plants, that are changed frequently. Beds are made of straw, on the ground, and frequently infested with lice and bedbugs. Other furniture is rough and easily put out of the way, to allow room for people and animals to sleep. Windows are narrow and without glass (which is hugely expensive). They can be closed with wooden shutters.