Middle Ages

I have been captivated by the Middle Ages for months now. First, reading a battered paperback copy of Crichton's Timeline that my aunt passed along to me  in late summer of this year. Thankfully, the excellent eight-part mini series Pillars of the Earth came out at the same time that I was reading Timeline, so I was immersed in the early Middle Ages for about two months, reading the one story and then watching another.

When I went back to North Carolina's High Country for my birthday at the beginning of October, I needed another good book to read and I figured I would pick up the sequel to Pillars, another Ken Follet epic called World Without End. I've been thinking about why this time period interests me so. I am amazed at how hard life was back then. If a peasant mother died and the family was too poor to get a milking cow or a milking goat, the baby would die for lack of milk. You couldn't just feed a baby formula the way you would today. Even if the baby lived, chances were pretty high that it would succumb to some sort of illness, a pox, measles, anything. Peasants had little rights and I can't believe that there was a time where people were serfs, told what they could grow and if they could marry.

I can't imagine how there were enough hours in the day for women to cook food, let alone gather vegetables from a garden, or keep a home clean. There are many references in the book as to how important it was to have storage of good crops for off times, when the weather would be too dry or too wet. I can't believe that a farmer was so beholden to luck; luck of weather, of soil conditions, war or peacetime, insect swarms or blight. How can it be that a prosperous farmer could have a wet summer or too much winter damp and lose everything and remain penniless? Reading these novels, I think I've come to appreciate that for everyone back then, death was almost always at the doorstep. Life was precarious and full of power struggle. How easy life in the modernized Western world is now.

Maybe I'm drawn to this time period because of all the competing powers; the Church, townspeople, merchants, serfs, lords, kings, countries. In a world where even a king could be destroyed by a bishop, and a good farmer could lose everything after one blighted year, every moment of life was precious and miraculous.