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Peasant Info

The first relationships people had were with their own families. In medieval European families, most kids lived with their father and mother and brothers and sisters. Because people died young from diseases, a lot of kids also lived with other relatives, or just with an older brother or sister, because their parents had died. Most kids never knew their grandparents, who had died before they were born.
In the Middle Ages, hardly anyone went to school. Kids worked in the fields, or took care of younger brothers and sisters. A few children, usually from richer families, were given to monasteries or abbeys to be monks and nuns, and these children were sometimes taught to read and write. The children of very rich men and women sometimes had tutors at home.
Teenagers, around the age of twelve or thirteen, often went out to work for somebody else. Sometimes they worked for their neighbours, helping to plow the fields or take care of babies or animals. Sometimes they worked for richer families, as servants, as Chaucer did, for instance. Or they were apprenticed to learn a skill like weaving or blacksmithing. Many teenagers lived with the people they worked for.
Most peasants rented land from a richer man or woman who owned a big estate. They owed their landlord or landlady rent, and also a lot of other obligations. The peasants had to go toward with their landlord if there was a war, and they had to work a certain number of days every year for their landlady. Often peasants had to give their landlord or landlady a certain number of chickens or a certain amount of honey or spun wool or firewood every year. Even peasants who owned their own land often had some of these obligations to the nearest powerful person. In exchange, the powerful person was supposed to protect the peasants from invasions and from the king, and give them food when there was a drought, and enforce the law (which was mainly whatever he or she said it was).
Each of these powerful people, in turn,...