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Medieval Society

A Classless Society

Modern vocabulary is misleading when considering medieval society, so forget about using the word "class". Status and position were not determined by money. You should also forget that social pyramid you probably learned in school some time. You know, the one that has the king at the top, then the nobility, then the merchants, and then the peasants, or variations thereon. This was a society preoccupied with matters of status and standing, but social relations were far too complex to be captured by a simple pyramid. If any physical analogy would apply, it would be a web or perhaps the complex currents of a rocky coastline.

Along with these other preconceptions, toss out your notions of social mobility. We tend to view society as a ladder with only two directions—up and down—by which we really mean richer and poorer. We tend to think we have lots of social mobility in modern society (we don't, though we do have a lot of wealth mobility) and that there was very little social mobility in the Middle Ages. Rather than focusing on the question, you should just forget about it. It's not a very fruitful way of understanding medieval society, as I hope to show.

Our world view is pretty much a product of industrialization. The Industrial Revolution was as profound a shift in terms of social organization as what happened during the Agricultural Revolution, when we shifted from being hunter-gatherers to being farmers, or as what happened when we invented cities. Everything changed.

So let's take a look at medieval society first in its own terms, using its own vocabulary. You will notice in what follows that I use the word "order" instead of "class". I do that in part to emphasize that we have to be careful not to apply modern views about social relations, and I do it in part because that's the word the people at the time used. The word "class" was never used to describe social groups. A variety of words were used, but "order" was a common one.