The Role Of Peasants In The Middle Ages

The Middle Ages, while seemingly simple, was a very complicated time period specifically in terms of religion. For peasants in particular, religion was everything because it is all that they had. During the Middle Ages, the Church encouraged people to go on pilgrimages to holy places, known as shrines. People were encouraged to go to these shrines and pray so that all of their sins would be forgiven and they could go to heaven. For any person in the Middle Ages, going to heaven was a big deal so naturally people would do anything to get to heaven. One of the many pilgrimages that peasants went on was the veneration of the Virgin Mary which was detailed in a book entitled Peasant Fires by Richard Wunderli. In this particular pilgrimage, there
Since so many people had died, the demand for labor had increased and benefited the economy. While the change in labor demand and economic gains, not everyone benefited equally. Peasants experienced a wide range of effects depending on if they were considered to be a prosperous peasant, landless peasant, or simply a poor peasant. In the case of prosperous peasants, they had to hire workers so that their lands could be attend to, but at the cost of having to pay them higher wages. Landless peasants, who simply sold their labor to whoever needed it, prospered because they had nothing to lose and everything to gain. The lives of poor peasants was somewhere in between the lives of prosperous peasants and landless peasants. If one were to assume that all peasants were living a better life, that wouldn’t be the truth. The reality is that people during the Middle Ages did not live the same lives nor did any specific event help improve or worsen their lives. This is an important distinction to make considering the background of Hans Behem, the basis for the pilgrimage, and how the pilgrimage became so successful
As the period of the Middle Ages was moving forward, more people began to become literate as a result of the increasing amount of educational opportunities for people within universities. Those who had been able to receive an education in a university had a different understanding of God and miracles than the uneducated peasant. Educated medieval people believed in the law of nature and that God and that “God does nothing contrary to the laws of nature-which by definition of a miracle-but is directly responsible for everything that happens even if it goes against normal expectations” . In general, education during the Middle Ages was very difficult but the establishment of universities in France and across Europe did help people to be able to read and understand the bible as a means to establish their own interpretations and beliefs. Education made a difference in people’s lives and we can see that through Hans Behem and the