The European Middle Ages Social Hierarchy

The Middle Ages

The boss of the my boss is my boss

Like today, some people lived better than others in the Middle Ages. In fact, very few had a better life than the rest of them. It was all based on wealth (like today). But unlike today, when basically everybody could get rich with proper attitude, tools, and luck, in the Middle Ages, one should have been born into a wealthy family. Access to power and money was limited to a few people. The social hierarchy of the Middle Ages was very different from our contemporary hierarchy and was based on the amount of land someone owned.
Here is the simplified social tree:

The King
He was the head of the state, the boss of everybody else, had the most power, and was the richest of them all. His mom and dad were usually kings and queens, too, and the same was true about Grandpa and Grandma.
Some kings were better than others, and a few of them declared themselves Emperors, which is a bigger, fatter king who ruled over more than one nation.
The king was the boss of the barons, the lords, and the peasants. Sometimes, in some places, they were the boss of the bishops, too.

The Bishops
These people were chosen from within the church. They were once priests but advanced to administrative positions. It looks like they are mainly remembered as tax collectors, which, like today, nobody likes. They ruled over dioceses and were the bosses of all the priests and monasteries within a diocese. They were very rich, and often, they grew powerful and influential.

The Barons
Barons were people who received a tenure, or fief, from their boss, the King. At first, they were knights, and the King gave them a piece of land as a reward for their bravery in a battle. Then, they ruled over that piece of land, acquiring all the agricultural products, selling them, and making money. If one was raised to the noble rank of baron, then their children would be barons, too.
Over the centuries, some barons grew so powerful that they didn’t want to work for the kings anymore and made their own state so they could, too, be bosses.

The Lords
The Lords were people who rented land from the barons (who were given land by the king). So, barons were the lords’ bosses. A baron could be the boss of many lords.
The lords had the peasants work the land for them. They were not as rich as the barons, and many of them lived a simple life, but they had a better social status than the peasants. And they could advance to be barons if they did well in battles and killed a lot of enemies.

The peasants
The peasants were the lower people in the European Middle Ages hierarchy. They made up the majority of people. They lived a simple life, and they worked hard for their bosses, who were the lords. In exchange for their hard work, they usually got bread and beer. They had a very small piece of land that the lord had given them so they could have some other food besides bread and beer. The son of a peasant was a peasant, too, and there was no chance that such a son would, someday, advance to a lord position.

So, between or within these social classes, there were other positions held by people chosen within that respective class. These positions were mainly administrative jobs with little or no influence over the system.

Historians have a name for this European Middle Age Hierarchy: it is the cold Feudal System Or Feudalism, where a feud is a piece of land given to somebody in exchange for some sort of service. The Feudalism system of the Middle Ages is, though, more complex, and I may describe it in other articles.