Beginning 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 metropoli ....

Middle of Essay
.... 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 or more lords was comfortable. Whatever the technicalities, the lord was the main consumer of the village, meaning he was in control of the profits. The 13th century manor, of ....