A village is a settlement in which, throughout Europe, the largest number of people lived. Based on where the village was located and when it was created, the inhabitants in it were completely different. Some villages were more like cities, while many were in a worse situation.
In the Middle Ages, villages were often created at the intersection of roads. These were both small from 9 to 11 houses, and quite large 45-55 houses. Remote farmsteads in mountainous areas were also not uncommon; they served as a transit point for merchants. The end was marked by the growth of human settlements. Sometimes villages grew into entire cities.
Due to territorial and climatic conditions villages were also very different. In northern Europe there was a rather cold climate, and houses were built low, mainly from trees coated with clay, which retained heat well. Only shutters were installed on small windows. There was always a hearth and stove inside the house, but the rooms were rarely separated; there were cases when the owners lived under the same roof with their livestock. Interestingly, until the 15th century, a house was considered a movable property and could easily be removed and moved to another location.
The picture changed dramatically closer to southern, warmer Europe. Wooden buildings were erected along the perimeter of a square or rectangle, leaving a courtyard between them, which was sometimes covered with a canopy. Grain or hay was stored under such sheds. Around them, living quarters were built under one roof, spreading throughout the entire building. This was the case on the Apennine or Iberian Peninsulas. The houses were built from rods coated with clay, under which there was a stone foundation. There were granaries in the mountains for storing grain. Two-story houses began to be built much later and were found only among wealthy peasants. The first floor, sometimes called the basement, was used for household needs, while the owner lived on the second floor, the rooms were clean and well-groomed. High buildings were built around mountain villages stone wall, due to which they looked like small cities. Residents completed their military service and at the same time worked on the land. The church and the spring were in the center of the village; people came to it to find out the latest news and, of course, water.
The lands on which the peasants worked were surrounded village from all sides. These were fields, arable lands, gardens, vegetable plantings and much more. Further on there were areas for grazing animals and forests.
The plots on which the peasants worked were different in appearance and shape. In one case, each peasant was allocated a strip of field, marked with boundary stones, he sowed one crop, cultivated it and harvested it. In mountain settlements, the peasant was given a plot of land, which he could dispose of at his own discretion. The lands around the village were divided according to their purpose into: arable, lands for gardens, lands for grazing animals, between which a low wall was built.
In each village, an intra-village community was created, which included all the men of the locality who had reached the age of majority. At meetings of such a community, everything was decided controversial issues arising when following the rules fishing, adopted sanctions if livestock crossed the boundaries of other people's plots. Village community could not exist without constant control. It required solving such problems as: inheritance matters, construction of a common mill, division of property, approval of crops. In the mountainous regions of Spain and Scandinavia, peasants living in villages, were free, so there were more similar settlements here. The village could belong to a lord or a monastery, and in case of litigation, representatives could be present at it. Villages could be of three types: with free and dependent peasants, and mixed. If the village was mixed, then on its territory there were fields of both the lord and free peasants. If disputes arose, then at the trial the lord, due to his personal qualities, either obeyed the opinion of the majority or proved that he was right. If the lord had good oratorical qualities, he could win in an obviously losing situation.
History lesson in 6th grade
Goals: introduce you to the features of life in a medieval village; highlight the signs of subsistence farming.
Planned results:
subject: learn to explain the essence and characteristic features subsistence farming; study and systematize information from various historical sources about the life and everyday life of peasants; apply the conceptual apparatus of historical knowledge and techniques historical analysis to reveal the essence and meaning of events and phenomena;
meta-subject UUD: independently organize educational interaction in a group; determine own attitude to phenomena modern life; formulate your point of view; listen and hear each other; express your thoughts with sufficient completeness and accuracy in accordance with the tasks and conditions of communication; independently discover and formulate educational problem; choose means of achieving the goal from those proposed, and also look for them yourself; predict the result and level of mastery of the material; determine new level relationship to oneself as a subject of activity; give definitions of concepts; analyze, compare, classify and summarize facts and phenomena; to form the basis of semantic reading of educational and educational texts;
personal UUD: generate motivation for self-improvement; comprehend the social and moral experience of previous generations.
Equipment: diagram “Reasons for uniting peasants into communities”; textbook illustrations; multimedia presentation.
Lesson type: discovery of new knowledge.
Lesson progress
I. Organizational moment
II. Motivational-target stage
A medieval French proverb says: “You can’t cut the skin once, you can’t cut it twice.” Who is it talking about and what does it mean? Let's discuss this in class.
III. Updating knowledge
— When and how did the peasants of Europe lose their freedom and land?
—Who formed the class of dependent peasants?
(Students' answers.)
By the middle of the 11th century. established in Europe social order, which modern historians call feudal. Power in society belonged to the feudal landowners. The vast majority of the population were dependent peasants. It is them that we will talk about.
- Suggest what questions we should consider in our lesson.
(Students formulate lesson goals using the Colored Leaves technique.)
Announcement of the topic, educational results and progress of the lesson (presentation)
Lesson topic: “Medieval village and its inhabitants.”
(Introduction to the lesson plan.)
Lesson Plan
- The master's land and peasant plots.
- Feudal lord and dependent peasants.
- Peasant community.
- How the peasants lived and worked.
- Subsistence farming.
Formulation of problematic questions for the lesson. Why was the life of peasants in the early Middle Ages very difficult? How were medieval serfs different from Roman slaves? Why was the dominance of subsistence farming inevitable at this time?
IV. Work on the topic of the lesson
1. Lord's land and peasant plots
“There is no land without a lord” - such a rule existed in the Middle Ages. The whole earth by the 9th-10th centuries. was captured by feudal lords. Fields, forests, meadows, even rivers and lakes became their property. A feudal patrimony, or estate, arose.
(Work with a dictionary.)
Patrimony - hereditary land ownership of a feudal lord.
Estate - a feudal lord's farm in which dependent peasants worked.
Let's commit virtual trip in time and get to know the medieval village and its inhabitants.
Slide 1. In front of you is a feudal estate. The master's courtyard, and later the castle, was surrounded by a fence, and later by a wall. Here there was the house of the feudal lord and his steward, barns for storing grain and other products, a stable, a barn, a poultry house, and a kennel.
Slide 2. Arable and other land in the estate was divided into two parts: the master's and the peasant's allotments. The harvest from the master's fields went to the owner's barns. Working on his farm, the peasant fed himself and his family. With his oxen and his own tools, he worked both the master’s field and his own allotment. Forests, meadows and waters were seized by the feudal lords, but the peasants also used them.
Exercise: In your notebooks, graphically depict the feudal estate.
(Students complete the task.)
2. Feudal lord and dependent peasants
Problematic question. What do you think, under what conditions did the feudal lords provide dependent peasants with the opportunity to use the land?
(Students' answers.)
For the use of land, dependent peasants had to bear duties, that is, perform forced duties. The main duties were corvee and quitrent.
Exercise: Working with the text of paragraph 2 § 11, fill out the table.
Exercise: read the historical document and answer the questions.
Historical document
“The peasant Vidrad has a full plot of land. He gives for it one pig, a pound of flax, 3 chickens, 18 eggs; annually carries half a cart of grapes in May and October; delivers 5 carts of manure from his farm; 12 times he brings armfuls of firewood (the size of the armful is indicated); bakes bread and brews wine. According to custom, he grazes pigs in the forest for a week. For three days every week throughout the year, he cultivates a plot of the master's field (the size of the plot is indicated). During the harvest, he harvests the crops on it, and during haymaking, he mows a haystack, and works on the manor’s estate. And his wife must weave canvas clothes. Instead of military training, he works with a cart and oxen from May to August." (“From descriptions of the possessions of one monastery.” XV.).
— What duties of Vidrad constitute corvée and quitrent?
— What types of corvée do Vidrad and his wife serve?
— Do you think life was easy for the peasants?
— Why were the peasants forced to obey their feudal lords?
(Checking the completion of the task.)
— What types of peasant dependence in the Middle Ages do you know?
— How do you understand the expression “land-dependent peasants”?
— Why was the situation of personally dependent peasants especially difficult?
(Students' answers.)
3. Peasant community
Peasants in the Middle Ages were united into communities.
Exercise: Working with the text of paragraph 3 of § 11, explore and name the reasons that forced the peasants to unite into communities.
(Checking the completion of the task and drawing up a diagram.)
Reasons for uniting peasants into communities:
The peasants decided important issues which concerned all members of the community: when, what and where to sow, when to harvest
- Equally distributed plots of land, creating equal conditions for farming
- Maintained peace and order in its territory
- She was primarily in charge of economic affairs
- Monitored the observance of traditions and customs
- Helped the poor pay taxes
- Was looking for criminals
- She took care of peasant widows and orphans
- Hosted celebrations and games
- Sought to limit feudal duties and arbitrariness of masters
4. How the peasants lived and worked
— How did peasants live and work in the Middle Ages?
Exercise: listen to the story and make an outline.
Additional material
Long before dawn, a peasant family rises. Today you need to serve your corvee in the master's field. The time has come to plow and sow. The peasant's wife lights a fire in the hearth: striking flint against flint, she strikes a spark and fans the tinder. As the fire flares up, it illuminates the pitiful surroundings of the hut.
Peasant housing is a house made of local stone, logs or poles, coated with clay and covered with straw or reeds. Small windows, covered with rags, hay or bull's bladders in cold weather, let in little light. Smoke from the fire comes out through a hole in the ceiling or through an open door, but a lot of it remains inside the room, smoking the walls and ceiling. The entire furnishings consist of a roughly hewn table, benches along the walls, a bed, and a chest in which holiday clothes acquired over the years and passed on from generation to generation are stored.
The mooing of a cow and the clucking of chickens can be heard. While the oatmeal soup is being cooked in a cast-iron pot suspended on an iron tripod chain, the peasant woman goes to the second half of the hut - she needs to clean up after the cow and chickens. After all, all last winter livestock and poultry were kept indoors with people.
Meanwhile, a peasant in the yard is harnessing a pair of oxen to a heavy wheeled plow. Only recently did he manage to make it, and he had to pay the village craftsmen in grain for the ploughshare, knife and wheels. But a pair of oxen will not pull a plow into the field; three pairs are needed. Therefore, we have to turn to our neighbors for help.
While father and mother were doing household chores, the children got up. The peasant woman is in a hurry to feed them: today she has to go to the workshop to weave linen for the master.
Finally, all the work is done, and the family sits down on benches at the table. Use wooden spoons to scoop the unsalted oatmeal soup out of the bowl. There is no salt, you have to pay dearly for it. And the stall with flour is empty - there is not enough grain until summer. Having refreshed themselves with a meager breakfast, the peasants go to corvée.
All day long, from dawn to dusk, the peasants work on the master's field: some plow, others sow, others graze the master's livestock. A heavy wheeled plow can plow the soil deeply and turn over a layer of soil.
Only late in the evening do the peasants return home. Having dined on the same oatmeal soup, the peasant family gets back to work...
Autumn has come. The Lord's bread has already been harvested and bound into sheaves. The peasants are in a hurry to clean up their strip: heavy rains are about to begin, cold autumn winds are about to blow. And so a lot of grain had already fallen off, a lot of it was pecked by birds. Without straightening their backs, the whole family reaps ears of grain all day long and ties them into sheaves.
But what is this?! Why did everyone flinch, as if they were afraid of something? There was the sound of a hunting horn, barking dogs, whooping and whistling. A cavalcade of smartly dressed horsemen appeared on the field. Today guests arrived to the owner of the estate, and the owner decided to amuse them with hunting. Without making out the road, they rush across an unmown field. The gentlemen look with contempt at the bowing peasants - their destiny is labor, humility, patience. The peasants are still powerless to do anything, but their hearts are full of anger and hatred.
On this day, many peasants had their masters destroy part of the fruits of their hard labor. The indignation of the villagers knew no bounds. Without saying a word, everyone rushed to the main village square in front of the church - a community gathering always gathers here. You can see indignant faces, clenched fists, eyes burning with anger. When it becomes impossible to endure, the peasants act as a whole community, and then things go badly for the masters.
- The gentlemen do whatever they want with us! - exclaims the young peasant. - They buy and sell like cattle, they beat with whips!
Everyone talks about their grievances and humiliations. One peasant complains that after the death of his father, the manager took a cow to the master's yard; another says that he had to give up a quarter of his property in order to obtain the master’s permission to marry his daughter to a serf from a neighboring estate.
“These are ancient customs,” the old men try to reassure the young people. - It has long been established that when transferring an inheritance, the master must give the best head of cattle - this is the right of the “dead hand”. And for the loss of a worker, the master must pay a marriage tax.
- We have to run. After all, you can’t break a butt with a whip,” says the young family farmer.
“We have nowhere to run,” they answer him. - Gentlemen have seized land everywhere. We must fight!
From that day on, the community members began to work worse at corvee labor, sometimes even refusing to serve corvee labor and pay quitrent. The destruction of the master's bread occurred more and more often. One night the master's barn caught fire, and in the morning everyone knew that the young peasant, who had spoken passionately at the gathering, had fled the estate. The master equipped armed servants on horseback and with dogs in pursuit of him. Two days later, the beaten, tortured fugitive was brought to the feudal lord's trial. The inexorable master is himself both a judge and an accuser. Give him a hundred lashes, put him in chains and throw him into a pit - this is the sentence. The servants furiously attacked their victim and dragged him to the stable to beat him with whips. Then the brutally beaten peasant was thrown into the dark basement of the manor house and chained to the wall. The next day he died from beatings, and no one was held responsible for his death. Although the master by law does not have the right to kill his serfs, he can punish as he pleases.
The death of the peasant filled the cup of patience. The alarm sounded from the bell tower of the village church - this is the signal for gathering. "To the master's court!" - a cry rang out. Having hastily armed themselves with whatever they could - stakes, axes, pitchforks, scythes, the peasants in a discordant but menacing crowd moved towards the feudal lord's house. The master's servants tried to repel the invasion. But the bravest of the attackers approached the wooden fence with torches and, throwing branches, set it on fire, smashed the gate with a large log and entered the master's yard. The gentleman and his family could not be found: at the very beginning of the siege they managed to escape through the second gate. The rebels unleashed their wrath on the cruel servants.
But a few days later the feudal lord returned with the soldiers of his neighbors. The massacre of the villagers began. Participants in the uprising were interrogated under torture, several leaders were hanged, and many were brutally flogged. Everything seemed to go on as before. But the gentleman remembered well the lesson given to him by the peasants: he no longer dared to oppress them as cruelly as before. And in order to avoid a new uprising, he established the amount of duties for each peasant household - this was recorded in special local books. Now peasants could devote more time to their farming. Gradually, land cultivation and tools improved, and yields increased. But after a while the gentlemen forgot about the fear they had experienced and again increased the oppression...
(Checking the completion of the task.)
5. Subsistence farming
— How did the peasant provide himself with clothes, shoes, furniture?
-Who made the tools?
-Who built the house for the feudal lord?
—Who provided the feudal lord with everything he needed?
— What is the name of such a farm?
(Work with a dictionary.)
Subsistence farming - a type of economy in which products and things are produced not for sale, but for personal consumption.
- Indicate the two main reasons for the dominance of subsistence farming by filling in the blanks in the sentences.
1. Technique agriculture..., so the harvests were... .
2. All estates produced..., so there is nothing....
(Checking the completion of the task.)
V. Summing up the lesson
— Why was the life of peasants in the early Middle Ages very difficult?
— How did medieval serfs differ from Roman slaves?
— A medieval French proverb said: “You can’t cut the skin once, you can’t cut it twice.” Who is it talking about? What is its meaning?
— Why was the dominance of subsistence farming inevitable at this time?
(Checking the completion of the task and summing up the lesson.)
VI. Reflection
— What new did you learn in the lesson?
— What skills and abilities did you practice?
— What new terms did you get acquainted with?
— What did you like and what didn’t you like about the lesson?
— What conclusions did you draw?
Homework (differentiated)
- For strong students - §11, answer the question: have elements of subsistence farming been preserved in the modern village? If yes, which ones?
- For intermediate students - §11, draw up a diagram of “Duties: medieval peasants.”
- For weak students - §11, questions and assignments for the paragraph.
Medieval village and its inhabitants
1. The master's land and peasant plots. In the Middle Ages there was a rule: “There is no land without a lord” (in in this case- Mr.). By the 9th-10th centuries, all the land in Western Europe was seized by feudal lords. Fields, forests, meadows, even rivers and lakes became their property. A feudal patrimony, or estate, arose - the economy of the feudal lord, in which dependent peasants worked.
In the center of the estate there was a manor's courtyard, surrounded by a fence, and later a castle. Here was the house of the feudal lord and his steward, barns for storing grain and other products, a stable, a barn, a poultry house, and a kennel.
Arable and other land in the estate was divided into two parts: the master's and peasant's allotments. The harvest from the master's fields went to the landowner's barns. Working on his farm, the peasant fed himself and his family. On his oxen, with his own tools, he cultivated both the master’s field and his own allotment.
2. Feudal lord and dependent peasants. For the use of land, dependent peasants had to bear duties, that is, perform forced duties.
The main duties of dependent peasants were corvee and quitrent. Corvée was all the free work of peasants on the feudal lord's farm: they cultivated the master's arable land, built and repaired his house, barns and bridges, cleaned ponds, and caught fish. The peasants had to give the owner of the estate a quitrent - a share of the products of their farm: grain, livestock, poultry, eggs, lard, honey, as well as products they made: linen, leather, yarn, and in some cases money. Upon entering into inheritance, the son of the deceased was obliged to give the master the best head of cattle.
In order to force the peasants, who usually owned their farms hereditarily, to regularly bear their duties, the landowners needed power over them. They had the right to judge the people who lived in their domains and who were land-dependent peasants. For failing to hand in a quitrent on time, for poor work in the corvée, the peasant was summoned to the feudal lord's court; judges could impose a fine or other punishment (judicial dependence).
The most difficult situation was for the personally dependent peasants. Most often, the descendants of former slaves not only did not own their land, but were personally unfree: without the permission of the master, they could not leave the village, sell or transfer their plot to other people, or go to a monastery. The feudal lord could demand additional work from this peasant. If the daughter of this peasant married a person from someone else's property, her parents had to pay a ransom to the feudal lord.
3. Peasant community. The peasants were united into communities, which were primarily in charge of economic affairs. Village arable land was divided into plots (strips) that made up peasant plots. So that the community members had equal conditions for farming, strips of land were cut out for peasants in different places, creating a “striped land”, when they had to move through the plots of their neighbors and even the master’s. After the harvest, the arable land turned into a common pasture, and all the village residents drove their livestock to it. For this reason, community members began and finished field work at the same time and sowed the fields with the same grain crops. Gathering for a village gathering, the peasants decided where and what to sow, when to start the harvest. In addition to arable land, the estates had land: meadows, forests, lakes and rivers. Partially they belonged to the lord, but partly the land was owned by the community. The gentlemen took away communal lands in every way for their own benefit, prohibiting peasants from using lakes and forests. The feudal lords demanded that the peasants grind bread at the master's mills (and not at home, using hand millstones), for which they took special taxes. All this worsened the situation of the peasants.
The community maintained peace and order in its territory and searched for criminals. She helped the poor pay taxes, took care of peasant widows and orphans, preserved customs, and held festivities and games.
The peasants as a whole often resisted the master when he tried to increase the usual amounts of duties.
Sometimes peasants refused to work for their masters and set fire to their houses and barns. Alone and in entire villages, they ran away from cruel masters and settled on empty lands. With his stubborn resistance peasant communities sought to limit feudal duties and arbitrariness of the masters.
4. How the peasants lived. Villages at that time usually numbered no more than 10-15 and only very rarely reached 30-50 households. In each yard, in addition to the dwelling, there was a barn, stable, barn and other outbuildings. Adjacent to the yard was a personal plot: a garden, a vegetable garden, a vineyard.
Peasant house Most often they were built from wooden poles coated with clay, from logs or local stone, covered with straw, turf or reeds. When a fire was lit in the hearth, the smoke came out through a hole in the ceiling or through an open door, due to which the walls were black with soot; A lot of time passed before they learned how to install stoves with a chimney. Narrow windows without glass were covered with wooden shutters at night, and in cold weather they were covered with transparent skin made from bull's bladder.
The furnishings of the house consisted of a roughly hewn table, benches along the walls, and a chest for storing festive clothes: they were acquired over the years and passed on by inheritance. They slept on a wide bed or on benches covered with mattresses stuffed with hay. Household items and various utensils were stored in the house: grips and ladles, tubs and buckets, water barrels, washing tubs, sieves, baskets, a hand mill, a spinning wheel, and a small loom. Food was cooked in a cast iron pot, which was suspended on an iron tripod over the fire in the hearth. Agricultural implements, a cart, and harness for draft animals were stored in the barn.
The usual food of peasants was boiled grain or porridge, beans, turnips, onions and other vegetables, edible herbs, and less often they ate meat, fish and cheese.
Posted on ref.rf
But Europe did not know potatoes, corn, or tomatoes at that time. I didn’t know sugar either - honey replaced it. Drinks and wines were prepared from honey, grapes and berries, and various types of beer were made from barley. The gentlemen ate more abundantly and variedly; constantly ate meat, cow's (butter) butter, and expensive fish; Spices (pepper, cinnamon and other seasonings) were abundantly added to food; therefore, a lot of wine and beer were consumed. The clergy also did not disdain intoxicating drinks. It was in monasteries in the Middle Ages that they learned to make strong tinctures and liqueurs using 80-100 herbs. The recipes for their preparation were kept secret.
5. The labor of peasants. Unlike slaves, peasants respected their hard work and highly valued hard work. When choosing a bride or groom in a peasant family, the greatest attention was paid to the skill, dexterity, hard work and ingenuity of the future family member. They tried not to become related to the lazy and inept. The beauty of the bride or the personal feelings of the newlyweds were rarely taken into account.
Peasants cultivated the land most often with the same tools that they inherited from their fathers and grandfathers. Usually they plowed with a light plow, which only furrowed the earth without turning over the layers. The plow was pulled across the field by a team of oxen, and rarely by a horse. The soil was loosened with a harrow or rake. When the harvest ripened, the ears were cut with sickles. They threshed with sticks or wooden flails, and then the grain was winnowed, tossed in the wind with a shovel. Grain, if the master allowed it, was usually ground in a hand mill, which consisted of two stone millstones. The peasants themselves built houses and made furniture, peasant women processed food, spun, weaved, and sewed rough clothes from flax, wool, and leather.
The peasant economy was dominated by small livestock: sheep, goats, pigs. There were few oxen and cows, as there was not enough food for them in winter. The peasants kept chickens, ducks, geese, and pigeons on their farms.
The harvests were low: the grain received was approximately 3 times more than was sown. A third, or even almost half of what was collected was left for seeds, part was given as quitrent to the lord and 1/10 of the harvest was given to the church. The harvest depended not only on the efforts of the peasant, but also on the weather. Even minor frosts and droughts destroyed the crops, and then a terrible famine set in, lasting months and even years. Many died of hunger, and there was even cannibalism. Infectious diseases carried thousands of weakened, exhausted people to their graves. In the first centuries of the Middle Ages, the population of Europe hardly increased due to high mortality. And only from the 11th century, thanks to the improvement of the climate and the plowing of new lands, the population began to increase noticeably, thousands of new villages and hamlets appeared.
6. Subsistence farming. The peasants provided agricultural products and handicrafts not only for themselves, but also for their master, his family, servants and guests. In the estates, feudal lords set up entire workshops: there, courtyard craftsmen made weapons, horse harnesses, and craftswomen made fabrics and clothes. Thus, everything extremely important for people’s lives was produced on the estate itself.
Neither feudal lords nor peasants needed to buy almost anything. They usually had to purchase imported salt and iron, exchanging them for food from traveling traders or at fairs. In order to have money to buy weapons and luxury goods, the feudal lords tried to sell part of their food reserves or force peasants to pay rent in money by selling their products and products. But it was not easy to do this - after all, in all estates they produced approximately the same thing. Therefore, feudal lords rarely had cash, while peasants had almost none.
The economy was subsistence, that is, products and things were produced not for sale, but for personal consumption.
Medieval village and its inhabitants - concept and types. Classification and features of the category "Medieval village and its inhabitants" 2017, 2018.
Medieval villages were located around the castle. One feudal lord could own up to several dozen, or even hundreds of villages, along with their inhabitants and land. Participants in the war were sometimes awarded land and one village for special services. These were the smallest feudal lords. And the average feudal lord owned several villages and their inhabitants. All land belonging to the feudal lord and suitable for cultivation, as well as pastures, were divided into two unequal parts: the larger part, of course, was the lord's, and the smaller part was the peasant's. But all this land had to be cultivated, naturally, by the peasants themselves. But the rural community could also use the meadows, forests and ponds. Each family in the village had its own plot of land in the field, a small house, a yard with a vegetable garden, as well as simple tools, working and livestock and poultry. Working in their field and on their farm, the peasants provided themselves with everything they needed, but they had to give part of the products produced to their feudal lord, that is, pay quitrent. In addition, they were obliged to work in the master's fields (corvée). And the feudal lord, in turn, paid taxes to the state treasury with the products of his natural economy.
State reserves existed in order to maintain the army (the Middle Ages - a time of continuous wars), trade, exchange goods, stock up in case of crop failures and famine, and build objects for general use. Thus, material well-being in the country was provided mainly by peasant labor. In a medieval village belonging to the average feudal lord there were, for example, twenty to twenty-five households. Each family, except adults, has five to six children of different ages. In fact, children in the family were born every year, but often died in infancy, either from some disease, or from carbon smoke (in winter, houses were heated in a black way, that is, without a chimney), or from an accident, or during epidemics .
Each family in the village, in addition to working on the land and troubles with livestock, also had some kind of craft. The village always had its own blacksmith, its own potter, its own beekeeper, its own carpenter, etc. Thus, people united in a rural community could collectively provide themselves with almost everything they needed within the boundaries of their village. Of course, rural residents went to buy (or exchange) some goods at the market in the city, for example, salt, metal products, threads, needles and sometimes fabrics. Although the village community could also establish the production of simple, coarse fabrics. To do this, of course, it was necessary to grow flax and hemp, process the raw materials, build a loom and teach two or three girls to work on it. Linen made of flax and hemp was bleached in wood ash, thoroughly rinsed in a river or lake and spread out in the sun so that it would burn out to its final whiteness. All women and girls from childhood were taught to sew simple clothes, cook food, spin wool, and knit.
Peasants all year round were busy with work. From morning to evening in the warm season, men and teenagers worked in the field or garden, preparing hay and firewood for the winter. Sometimes they set aside time for fishing in order to pamper the family with delicious fish and stock up on it for future use. The peasants did not salt the fish, because salt is a hard-to-find and expensive product; it was dried and smoked. And in the evenings and in winter, each peasant also worked on his craft. The carpenter made simple furniture and carts. There were craftsmen who made wooden utensils. The potter carried out orders for clay products: bowls, jugs, barrels. The blacksmith, who usually lived at the end of the village, was an almost mystical figure: he worked by the light of the fire, at his special furnace, heated the metal red-hot and turned it into an axe, a horseshoe, a knife, a nail... All the unfortunate people ran to him, who needed to have a tooth pulled out to get rid of unbearable pain. After all, the blacksmith had forceps that were suitable for this dental procedure.
The children in the village were also useful members of society. The girls picked berries in the forest, babysat their younger brothers and sisters, and pulled weeds in the garden. The boys tended livestock, fished, and carried water from a river, lake or well to water the garden. Caring for water all year round fell on the boy’s shoulders. In the village they could sometimes afford a small cheese factory. If a peasant sets out to stock up on cheese for the winter, he will give dairy products from his personal farm to a skilled cheese maker, who will fulfill his order. From time to time, conflicts arose between peasants in the village. If they could not resolve them on their own, people turned to their feudal lord. He had the right to examine cases related to the life or economy of his peasants, fine them, and punish them with additional work. The feudal lord had no right to judge for serious crimes. And conflicts did not happen very often. People, as a rule, protected peace and well-being in their community.