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Hucker on Hucker. Good. Perfect.

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You're good.

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Great. Thank you.

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Like me, noblewomen in the Middle Ages don't have many legal rights.

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We're under the control of...

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The Serf in the Middle Ages.

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Take one.

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Terrific.

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We're talking about life in the Middle Ages.

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So do I get to cover nobles in their castles?

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No.

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Do I get to work with a heroic knight in all that armor?

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No.

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I have to do serfs.

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I ask you, name one important thing that serfs did.

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That's easy.

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The serfs kept those knights and nobles alive during the Middle Ages.

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Come again?

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The nobles ruled and the knights fought,

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but that doesn't put any food on the table, does it?

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No.

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The serfs were responsible for that.

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They farmed the land that the knights fought for,

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the land that the nobles ruled.

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In the Middle Ages, wealth and power was all about land.

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And it was the serfs and other peasants

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who made the land valuable by getting food from it.

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Okay, stop right there for a second.

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You said serfs and peasants.

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Aren't they the same thing?

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Well, there wasn't much difference in how they looked,

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but peasants had their freedom.

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Serfs were bound to the land owned by the Lord.

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Like slaves, huh?

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Like slaves, but with some big differences.

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The serfs' main responsibility was to grow food for their Lord,

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but they could grow their own crops, too.

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serfs could also own their own property and a Lord was supposed to protect them

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from raids and robbers and such in fact free peasants sometimes volunteered to

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become serfs because they wanted that kind of protection but once they made

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the decision to be a serf their children and their children's children were born

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serfs and as serfs they had to stay on the Lord's land their entire lives they

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were part of the property but when it came to a typical day a free peasant and

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a serf lived just about the same life and that was well let's start with the

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serf at home there it is home sweet home not so bad for a living room where are

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the bedrooms you're looking at them kitchen same bathroom just step out into

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the yard. Oh. Inside, one of the first things you'd notice was the air. It was thick with smoke

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because a fire was always burning in the middle of the room. The fire was for cooking and for

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warming the place. There was an opening in the roof to let the smoke out, but a lot of it still

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stayed inside. Folks thought the smoke was good for them, though. Just like smoked meat lasts longer,

51
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a smoked surf was supposed to be a healthy surf.

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But seriously, the smoke actually was thought to cure fevers.

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Their smoky clothes also helped cover up body odor,

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since in those days, there was no deodorant.

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Imagine for a minute what it's like living here.

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The frame of the house was made of wood,

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but the walls were made of nothing more than clay mixed with sticks.

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They called it Waddle and Dob. It kept out the wind but not much else. A man could push a spear

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right through it. Homes were built with stone too if stone was a resource and the clay mixture

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served as cement. The roof was made of thatch. That's a mix of straw, leaves, and grass. Looks

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quaint but it was alive with bugs and bats and who knows what else the floor

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was just packed dirt with some straw scattered over it chickens would be

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wandering in and out of the open doorway along with dogs or cats and maybe even a

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pig or two so what was it like eating and sleeping in a home like this let's

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ask the serf and his wife. How would you like it? Every day is full of hard work for everyone in my

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family. We all rise at the first light of dawn. I collect my tools and head out to the fields where

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I spend my day. I work every day except Sunday. We grow grains like rye to bake bread and barley to

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brew ale. Growing crops means starting to prepare the fields as early as February. First,

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we break up the earth, then plow, plant seeds, pull up the weeds, and finally harvest the

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grain. And this is hard work. Imagine harvesting a whole field with one of these. It's very

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sharp but it can only cut our crops an armful at a time most fields are divided into strips

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some strips grow food for surf families each of which produces just enough food for us to get by

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and the harvest from the rest of the fields goes to the lord i work alongside my son

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some of the women work in the fields too but they rarely work the plows because of the strength

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required besides the women are busy doing other jobs I do all the cooking

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gardening weaving and caring for the animals with help from my daughter

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everything that we own everything we wear everything we eat we must make

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ourselves to make our clothes my daughter and I get wool from the

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sheep's coat then we spin it into yarn and weave the tunics and hose for all

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the family in winter we make heavier cloaks from the skin of the sheep we prepare our meals from

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the vegetables in our gardens like beans and peas and radishes much like the fields the gardens are

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laid out in strips one for each of the surf families and the rest for the lord we eat

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chicken and fish on certain days only in one season of the year do we have meat to eat and

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And that's when winter is drawing near.

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In cold weather, we kill and eat most of our cows and pigs.

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There isn't enough food to feed them through the winter.

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There's hardly enough food for us.

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We have our meals on this table, which is basically a board.

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When the sun goes down, we put up the shutters

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to keep out the cold.

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And that makes it darker in here than it is outdoors,

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with just the light of a candle and the fire.

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So at night, and in winter when it's too cold to go outside, there is little to do but sleep.

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And that's not as good as it sounds, because we sleep on a pallet,

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a narrow, hard mattress filled with nothing but straw.

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But there we would sleep and wait for warmth and daylight to return.

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Boy, that was depressing.

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Do we really think serfs from the Middle Ages could speak that well?

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You know, with good grammar?

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Well, I'll let you in on a little secret we really don't know.

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Serfs didn't write books, and the rich and educated didn't see much point in writing books about serfs.

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We can figure out how they lived, but we really don't know very much about who they were.

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There are a few writings that use stories about peasants to teach moral lessons, but that's about it.

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There are some paintings of peasants at work during every season of the year.

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Some of these paintings come from a prayer book called A Book of Hours.

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This book got its name because it contained a prayer for every hour of the day.

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Rich families would have artists paint beautiful pictures in their prayer books.

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But if it's a prayer book, shouldn't the pictures be about religion?

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How come there's all these paintings of serfs working and nobles playing?

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Well, a lot of illustrations from these books do show scenes from the Bible or from the lives of the saints,

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But the people paying for these pictures wanted to see their own lives reflected in the books.

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Nobles at play, serfs at work, to people in the Middle Ages,

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it was all a picture of how they thought God had designed the world.

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So we heard what it was like for the adults, but what about their children?

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Well, that's a good question.

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Let's get straight to the point and find out what it was like for the kids.

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Kids started working light jobs from about the time that they could walk

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There was no school, no choices about what to do when they grew up

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Nothing but the same hard work that their parents did

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By the time he turned 14, a teenage boy was considered an adult

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Taking a full load of duties in the field, like plowing and harvesting

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His sister and the other girls focused on spinning wool and weaving it into clothing

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Or helping with the cooking

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girls also worked as hard as any adult by age 14 their life was to work and

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work they did they worked to raise crops for their Lord and tended his livestock

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at least they could delegate just one member of the family to work the land

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for the Lord that was usually an adult male to ensure the Lord a good harvest

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the rest of the family worked to keep food on their own table oh and there's

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at least one more job the serf had to do. When his lord went to war, a serf might be

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required to fight. But I thought fighting in the Middle Ages was all about knights in

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armor. The knights could fight for fame and glory and loot, but someone had to do the

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grungy work of storming castles or fighting down on the ground in the mud. So in war,

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like in peace, when you needed someone to do the hard, dirty jobs that have to be done,

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the serf was your guy.

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Knights went to war in armor and on horseback.

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But armor and horses were really expensive.

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Not many nobles had the money to equip their ordinary soldiers with anything fancy.

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So serfs walked to war and fought with little or no protection.

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Couldn't they ever get out of this serf thing?

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Yes, there were at least three ways.

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A man could marry a free woman, and that automatically made him a free man.

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He could also buy his own freedom or his family's freedom

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with the money he earned by working trades, like being a blacksmith.

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Or he could just make a run for it.

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If a serf lived away from the lord's lands for one year and one day,

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he was considered free.

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The thing is, in the Middle Ages,

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living as a free peasant was just as hard as being a serf.

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Maybe harder.

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Hey, I'm seeing a great way to get some action into this story.

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Those lords must have always been oppressing those poor serfs and peasants,

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keeping extra work on them, taking away their food, driving them harder and harder.

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Sorry to rain on your parade, boss, but it usually didn't work that way.

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The guys in the castles knew they were nowhere without their serfs in the fields,

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so most of them were smart enough not to terrorize their own serfs.

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Serfs had to work all day, almost every day, but they could usually work at their own pace.

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No taskmasters stood over them with whips.

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Even when the lords required extra work, they sometimes rewarded the serfs with an extra bonus.

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A dinner of meat or fish with plenty of drink to wash it down.

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It's not so much that the nobles were nice guys.

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It's just that they got more work out of their serfs if the serfs were reasonably content.

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So they left the serfs pretty much alone.

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That changed whenever kings or nobles went to war with each other, which happened a lot.

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Remember, the serfs were the key to a lord's wealth,

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so his enemies could hurt the lord by killing or driving off his serfs.

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Listen to this description of what happened during a time of war in the 1200s.

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They plundered and burned all the villages,

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so that you could easily go a day's journey without ever finding a village inhabited

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or a field cultivated.

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Grain was costly then, and meat and cheese and butter, for there was none in the land.

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Pretty grim, isn't it?

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Yes, but if the serfs did all the real work, and if there were way more serfs than there were knights and nobles,

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didn't the serfs ever get together and say, we won't take this anymore?

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Well, very rarely, but it did happen.

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During the 1300s, there were violent uprisings in England, France, and Italy.

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Serfs and peasants banded together, attacked and burned manor houses,

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and murdered whole families of nobles.

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Sometimes they captured and killed churchmen, too.

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Why did all this break out during the 1300s?

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Well, that was the century of a terrible plague we now call the Black Death.

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The plague killed so many people, it changed everything.

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There were fewer serfs to do work,

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so the ones who survived began to demand better treatment and greater rewards.

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There were fewer nobles and churchmen, so the ones who were left tried to impose even stricter rules

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so they could keep things under control. It was a bad mix.

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But most of these uprisings, called peasant revolts, only lasted a few weeks.

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The peasants were too disorganized to hold together for long.

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The knights and nobles were always able to defeat them, eventually.

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But those peasant revolts were rare exceptions.

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Even when life got very tough, most serfs would stick with the old customs and endure.

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Okay, but didn't those customs let these people have any fun?

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Sure they did. They celebrated holy days. You know, holidays.

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We still celebrate our holidays at times and in ways similar to them.

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They celebrated a holiday called Candlemas in early February

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because that's when they could begin to get back into the fields as winter grew less harsh.

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And they watched the weather carefully that day with the saying,

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if candle must be fair and bright, winter will have another flight.

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If candle must be clouds and rain, winter's gone and won't come back again.

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Sound familiar?

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No.

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Well, you're probably more familiar with a legend about a burrowing animal

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that would come from the underground that day to judge the weather.

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Groundhog Day.

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Bingo.

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Another medieval holiday celebrated the first planting of the seeds

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and the coming of spring.

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To celebrate, people stripped a tree of its branches,

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tied ribbons at the top,

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and danced around the tree, winding the ribbons around it.

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Looks like a maypole, so that must be May Day.

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Right again.

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They also played a game that looked a little like soccer,

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and there were wrestling matches and other contests of strength.

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After a harvest, serfs and peasants lit a bonfire

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to celebrate the end of their season of hard work in the fields.

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just as people in farm communities celebrate the fall harvest today another way serfs and

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peasants could have fun was singing songs and telling stories they got the ball rolling on

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one story that's still going strong today let's give them the lowdown on robin hood

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you know robin hood the guy who steals from the rich and gives to the poor

220
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well his story has changed a lot from when people told it in the middle ages

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We're not sure which version came first, but in one of the early stories, Robin was a free peasant who robbed the rich.

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He didn't give to the poor, but that was okay with the audience, as long as he was making life tough for the rich nobles.

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English peasants were very good at shooting the longbow. You may know it as a bow and arrow.

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So it figures that they would create a hero who specializes in the same weapon.

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There were a lot of real-life outlaws during the Middle Ages,

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and no one has ever been able to prove whether one of them was a model for the legends.

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The first writing we have of a Robin Hood story isn't until about 1450,

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but there's a lot of evidence that people were telling stories about him as far back as the early 1200s.

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Wherever they came from, we know Robin Hood stories were wildly popular with peasants during the Middle Ages.

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Then richer classes picked him up, cleaned up his image a little bit,

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and made him their hero, eventually making him a knight forced to hide in the forest.

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Robin Hood was a kind of folk hero to everyone.

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Each class made him what they wanted him to be.

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Maybe that's why his legend is still going strong about 800 years later.

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The Surf in the Middle Ages, take two.

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Okay, let's see if we've got this right.

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Surfs lived and worked on the land owned by a lord

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and were considered part of the property.

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Got it.

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The vast majority of people living in the Middle Ages were serfs or peasants.

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They raised the food that kept knights and nobles alive.

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Okay.

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Serfs lived in single-room houses on the Lord's land.

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The houses were dark, smoky, and often had people and animals sharing the same roof.

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Whew.

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Got it.

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From sunup to sundown, a serf's life was almost nothing but hard work.

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Working to satisfy the demands of the Lord, working to keep food on their own table.

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Got it.

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So, how do we wrap up this serf thing?

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It starts wrapping itself up during the 1300s.

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Remember we talked about the Black Death? The disaster that helped set off those peasant revolts?

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Well, the revolts failed, but the changes came anyway.

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Workers were just too scarce for the nobles to drive too hard a bargain.

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Little by little, one manor at a time, serfs were freed from the obligations that bound them and their families to the land.

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At about the same time, kings and merchants were trying to make those nobles a little less powerful,

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and taking away the serfs was a good way to knock a little stuffing out of the

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nobles who depended on their work. Going from serf to a free peasant wasn't

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exactly like getting a big promotion. Life was still nothing but hard, hard

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work. In fact, some historians think that the serfs in the Middle Ages had it

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better than the peasants who came after them. The old ways didn't change overnight.

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some countries still had serfs all the way into the 17 and 1800s but for most

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of Europe the days when men women and children were nothing more than part of

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someone's property ended even before the days of knights and armor okay that's a

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wrap