Clergy and peasants

The clergy (first order). The Catholic Church had its own laws, owned land given by rulers, and could levy taxes, so it did not depend on the king. At its head was the Pope in Rome; bishops and clerics guided Christians across Europe, and most villages had a church where people gathered on Sundays.

• Not everyone could become a priest: serfs, the physically challenged and women were barred, and priests could not marry.
• Bishops were the religious nobility: like lords, they had vast estates and lived in grand palaces.
• The Church was entitled to a tithe, a tenth of everything peasants produced each year, and received gifts from the rich for the welfare of their souls.
• Church and feudal life shared customs: God was addressed as 'Lord', just as a vassal addressed his master.

Monks and nuns. Some deeply religious people chose to live apart in communities called abbeys or monasteries (from the Greek monos, someone who lives alone), often far from towns. Famous ones were founded by St Benedict in Italy (529) and at Cluny in Burgundy (910).

• They vowed to stay in the abbey for life and spend their time in prayer, study and manual labour such as farming. The Benedictine rules said, for instance, that monks should rarely speak, own no private property, and never be idle.
• Unlike the priesthood, this life was open to women as well as men: men became monks, women nuns, usually in separate houses. Like priests, they did not marry.
• Monasteries grew from 10 or 20 people to several hundred, with large estates, schools and hospitals, and helped develop the arts. Abbess Hildegard of Bingen was a gifted musician.
• From the thirteenth century, friars chose not to live in a monastery but to travel from place to place, preaching and living on charity.
• By the fourteenth century, writers such as Langland (Piers Plowman) and Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales) mocked the ease and luxury of some monks.

Church and society. People kept some older beliefs and customs alongside Christianity. Christmas (25 December) replaced an old pre-Roman festival fixed by the sun; Easter replaced a spring festival fixed by the moon, which is why its date moves. Villagers who once toured their lands at that festival kept doing so, now calling the village a parish. Overworked peasants welcomed 'holy days', and pilgrimages to shrines were an important part of Christian life.

The peasants (third order), the great majority, supported the other two. They were of two kinds:

• Free peasants held their farms as tenants of the lord. Men owed at least forty days of military service a year. Families had to work on the lord's land, usually three days a week or more, called labour-rent, and do other unpaid work: digging ditches, gathering firewood, mending fences, roads and buildings. Women and children spun, wove, made candles and pressed grapes for the lord. Kings sometimes imposed a direct tax, the taille, on peasants only; clergy and nobles were exempt.
• Serfs (from 'to serve') farmed plots that belonged to the lord, gave him much of the produce, and also worked his own land without wages. They could not leave the estate without permission. The lord held monopolies: serfs had to use his mill to grind flour, his oven to bake bread and his wine-press. The lord could decide whom a serf married, or bless the serf's choice for a fee.

England. The Angles and Saxons had settled England ('Angle-land') in the sixth century. In 1066, William, Duke of Normandy, defeated the Saxon king. William I had the land mapped and divided among about 180 Norman nobles, who became his chief tenants and had to supply him with knights. They in turn gave land to knights, but could not use them for private wars, which were forbidden in England. Anglo-Saxon peasants became tenants at various levels.