Being In The Army During The Middle Ages

Soldier

Being in the army is a tricky and hazardous occupation at any point in history, and to be one during the middle ages was no exception. Whether you were in the ranks of a Saxon shield wall or bogged down in a marsh with arrows pinging off your armour, the outlook was fairly bleak. Unless you were a noble, and therefore worth more alive than dead, you couldn't be certain you'd make it back to your village with all your limbs still intact, let alone your life. Although there were chivalric codes of conduct and rulers that could be fairly lenient, if their breakfast had agreed with them, there wasn't much in the way of a Geneva convention in the medieval period. During the battle of Agincourt in 1415, Henry V ordered the slaughter of several
A serf was little more than a slave that was chained to the land of a lord, who pretty much owned them and who could get them to do anything they wanted. Although the definition of a serf differed from country to country, with some having more freedom than others, life was pretty harsh. Living in abject poverty with only meagre amounts of food for you and your grubby family, the life of a serf was taken up with long hours of back breaking labour before you died, probably at a young age of plague, famine, or something else equally tedious. As serfs where at the bottom end of society they often felt the brunt of the ups and downs of medieval life. They were the first to die of cold during the mini ice age of the 15th century and the last to know about dynastic feuds when marauding knights burnt down their farms, as the noblemen who were meant to protect them hid behind their stone keeps. Being poor is tough and even more so in the middle
Or, if you were a woman who refused to marry the local swine heard, a nunnery. Here you could live out your life shuffling about, not talking or enjoying yourself in peace and harmony. Apart from having to wake up at 5am everyday and spending all the time that you weren’t praying either labouring or copying manuscripts, life in a monastery seems like a good life. The only problem with this is that monasteries and nunneries were often built out of the way from the rest of society, so that the people inside couldn’t be tempted by the brothels and ale houses. All well and good apart from the fact this meant you were vulnerable to attack. In 793 AD the monks of Lindisfarne found this when, to their great surprise, their priory was visited by a group of Vikings, who hadn’t heard of this Jesus chap and promptly began slaughtering them all. On top of this, monks often wore hair shirts or painful metal straps as a sign of penitence, so that not only were you being hacked at by hairy Norsemen, but you were also