It is the early 9th Century Kingdom of Wessex. A unified kingdom of England is still a century in the future.

You are a commoner, a serf, a helot, a menial. Take it easy, I’m just showing off my vocab, relax. All I’m trying ta say is that you are a nobody.

Europe is a dark and treacherous place in a dark and treacherous time. The roads are covered in horse shit and the most common sound is the squelching as folk step on it. There is no Home Depot to sell you ‘horse shit shoes’.

The history that we usually study doesn’t tell us about the world that folks like you, shit shoveling ornery dumb folk, live in. Instead, the history we read is actually the biographies of famous men, of monarchs and the battles they fought. So if your dad happens to be king, chances are good you’ll be in the history books and I’ll be reading about who you fucked and who you married and stuff.

But you’re a serf, say a cobbler or a stone mason. It is 800AD or thereabouts. You don’t know it but you live in what later historians will call the ‘Dark’ a.k.a ‘Medieval a.k.a ‘Middle’ ages. No offence, but it is a period in history that is marked by a decline in economic, intellectual and cultural order and an increase in conflict, subjugation and anarchy.

Let’s just call it the Dark Ages. I like it. Sounds dystopian (which it in fact was), but feels sexy.

Although historical ages change gradually, historians pinpoint the trigger for the beginning of the Dark ages at 476AD, when the last Roman Emperor of Roman blood, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed by the barbarian Goth, Odoacer. That is the date when “Ancient Classical Greco-Roman” changed to “Dark” ages. It will remain dark for a thousand years.

You were born somewhere just beyond the first quarter, three centuries into the onset of the Dark Ages, around 770AD.

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Medieval society is organized in three social orders, known as the ‘Three Estates’. Foremost are those who rule and fight – the First Estate. The Second Estate are those who claim to be God’s reps on earth, ie: the clergy. The Third Estate comprises of those who work their asses off – folks like you.

The ones who fight are supposed to protect the others from invasions, while the clergy are expected to protect everybody from committing sins. Finally you, the peasants, are there ta serve, to make the lives of the First and Second Estates comfortable through hard unrelenting labor. You and your kind constitute 95% of the population

One great leveller is literacy. You are not the only miserable idiot who can’t read and write. Almost all, including most nobles, are illiterate. Literacy is not yet a priority. Rise in literacy and enlightened debate will happen but that is still 700 years ahead, in the future. That age shall get the monicker, “The Renaissance”, the age of enlightenment.

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You, my friend, are at the very bottom of the food chain. Your ruler is King Beorhtric of Wessex. It’s a Germanic name, his ancestors having crossed the Channel from Ghent in present day Belgium.

King Beorhtric’s wife, Eadburh, is a piece of work, a promiscuous, debauched woman. In a year or two after marriage she’ll poison hubby dear accidentally in an inebriated state, while attempting to poison a dinner guest. Both, the guest and Beorhtric, will die. In panic, she will cross the Channel in flight and arrive at the court of the great Charlemagne, who will take a shine to her but she will ruin it all by choosing his son instead.

Slighted by the rejection but sagely, Charlemagne will nevertheless gift Eadburh a convent in Francia and she’ll become an abess but that won’t last too long either. She’ll be caught blowing an English refugee in exile and be permanently banished by Charlemagne. Eadburh will eventually die a pauper begging in the streets of Pavia, in Italy.

But that is all in the future. Right now, Beorhtric is king and he owns everything, the land and every damn thing on it. As the only son born into the ruling family, he has inherited all the titles, lands and income of the family. This practice, known as ‘primogeniture’ – the right of succession to the first born male child, is believed to be the only way to retain the ruling family’s legacy and power.

King Beorhtric doesn’t have any siblings but if there were any, they would be sent into the Catholic Church as monks and nuns. This step is taken to ensure that none of the siblings try ta stage a coup. But don’t fret. Those siblings, though now a part of the Second Estate, would still wield enormous power. They would be given enough assets to be able to lead luxurious lives. As members of the Second Estate, they would fuck with you psychologically while the members of the First Estate screw you physically.

The king doesn’t know you or give a fuck about you. You’re an asset to be exploited every which way. In times of peace you’ll harvest the crops and when war looms, you’ll be swept up, put inside a ‘cog’ and transported across the channel ta fight.

The king has divided up the land into “fiefs”, parcels of land that range in size from vast duchies down to tiny plots of land given to a single knight, called a knight’s ‘fee’. To manage each fief, the king has installed a “vassal” or “Duke”, who is a trusted crony, a cousin or a relative through marriage. In return, the vassal has pledged his loyalty to the king and the soldiers to fight an invasion or to participate in one.

The vassal in turn hires reeves(overseers) who supervise serfs like you while you till and harvest the land. Every thing is accomplished by hand and yours is hard, back breaking work. You keep 10% of the harvest and pass on the rest to the vassal who keeps 30% from which he pays the overseers and sends the remaining 50% to the King.

Everyone has a lord. Yours is the reeve, a large violent brute of a man that you cannot trifle with. He is a shit shovellor too like you but slightly better off since he doesn’t have to do all the actual toil. The reeve is beholden to the vassal, who has the power of life and death over not only you but your whole family. He says whom you should marry and whom you shouldn’t. If he takes a shine to your sweet, pink-cheeked wife and forcibly takes her to bed, there’s nary a thing you can do about it.

The vassal is in turn beholden to the king in exactly the same manner as you are, to him. And the king can fancy anybody’s wife, the vassal’s, the reeve’s or even your’s. This is before Magna Carta, a charter of human rights that will become law two centuries from now. Not that it will benefit you in even the remotest manner.

The Magna Carta is going to be a set of laws created by the English King John, a universally disliked asshole. It will give greater freedoms to “freemen”, a misleading term that means only the barons and dukes. Magna Carta will have provisions for serfs too, but don’t hold your breath, they will be vague and impossible to enforce.

Right now, whatever your lord says is the law.

What can I say? Had you been born in my country of birth, India, at this very time in history, you would be living in prosperity in a land of plenty, governed wisely by “philosopher kings” of the Chola Dynasty. Instead here you are, shovelling shit in England.

You were born in the wrong place at the wrong time, is all.

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Hovering over everyone and everything is religion and that is Christianity, administered by a murderous continent-wide criminal enterprise known as the Catholic Church. The head of the Church, the Pope, is all powerful and even your king has to bow to his demands. Even though your king is the ruler, the Pope runs a parallel, equally powerful government inside the kingdom and that parallel government is headed by an archbishop, a very powerful guy indeed.

It will be another 700 years before a roly-poly overweight guy, crowned King Henry VIII, will get pissed off with the Catholic Church because it won’t allow him to divorce his current wife and marry a voluptuous lady-in-waiting he has been fucking. He will start his own brand of Christianity called the Church of England.

Jeeze, imagine founding a church just for access to fresh pussy.

Getting back to the here and now, there is a new religion going around, Islam, which is nothing but a beta version of Christianity. It uses the same basic storyline, the same prophets, the same archangels and the same lies as Christianity, but it has gone a little further. It has added to it a knockout punch, a threat, which says, “either you are with us or you are dead”.

Islam’s laws are so strict that you are scared ta even take a pee, lest you get your head chopped off for not peeing as per strict Islamic rules. I am not kidding. They even have a prayer that you have to recite before a fuck and another after a fuck, which you have ta recite in a ritualistic bath while cleansing your richard of the “filthy residue” of sex.

With all the insanity around you, the prospects of a happy, peaceful comfortable life for you are dim, see what I mean?

There are and will be great rulers in your time, who come in and steady the ship for a while and fade out – Justinian, Alfred the Great, Canute, Charlemagne, Richard the Lionheart, William the Conquerer, to name a few. But what they accomplish will not make any difference at all to your wellbeing.

Alas, you live inside a universe parallel to that of the elite who decide your fate. In your universe, invasions, sexual assault and bonded labor are the norm.

You are the medieval man.

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Stay tuned for a glimpse at your tawdry life, in Part-2.