Part 1 of Essay
is about archaeological discoveries from the Middle Ages. The author, Frances Gies, uses details and descriptions to help her auidence visualize how people worked and lived seven hundred years ago. The village is a very small town, or as we would say, a metropolitan suburb. The population consisted of farmers rather than ....

Part 2 of Essay
.... It was a place of bustle, clutter, smells, disrepair, and dust, or in much of the year mud. It was far from silent! Every village had a lord, but only rarely was he in residence. A resident lord was usually a petty knight. The old feudal theory of lordship as a link in the legal chain of authority running from serf to monarch had lost much of it's substance. However, as far as the village was concerned such legal complications hardly mattered, anymore than whether the lord was great or small. A village with two o ....