Last edited Tue Apr 10, 2012, 11:44 PM - Edit history (1)
To be perfectly accurate, people living in both the Middle and Dark Ages used the term "Middle age" as the name of their times, for a completely different reason than we do. It referred to the times between Christ's Ascension and the Second Coming. So, I use the terms interchangeably even though I know there's a huge difference between the High Middle Ages and the Dark Ages, but the latter was the beginnings of the feudal system that reached fruition in the former.
You have to expect a fiction writer to simplify the system for the modern reader, who is not going to earn a degree just for the honor of reading a writer's fiction. For one thing, if you think lawyers have made everything complicated today, law was just complicated in the Middle Ages, and required plenty of lawyers.
The main social difference between then and now is the concept of individual rights and liberties. People in those systems from top to bottom were born into a network of social obligations, vassal to lord, lord to vassal, lord to king, and vice-versa. The society was made of a network of these, and it would take a Pope to release somebody from them, and it did take a Pope in the case of Leonardo da Vinci.
I'm skeptical that the people in England are all descended from the upper classes. For one thing, genealogists would have been able to determine this long ago, and it would now be common knowledge, impossible to miss. For another, surnames like "Miller," "Baker" and "Smith" would be extinct in England if that were true. You should look at compelling, novel observations critically.
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