10 Ch. 1 • Medieval Legacies and Transforming DiscoveriesThe clergy had many roles, serving as priests, teachers, judges, nurses,
landlords, and chaplains. But they could only be tried in ecclesiastical courts,
and, in the evolution of the modern state, their status as a group apart would
come into question. The secular clergy (that is, priests who did not belong to
a specific religious order) ministered to the population as a whole. Most of
the secular clergy were as poor as their parishioners, but bishops generally
were from noble families. The regular clergy included hundreds of thousands
of monks and nuns living in monasteries and convents according to strict
religious rules, cut off from the outside world by their vows (and in some
places legally considered dead).
Nobles owned most of the land, with their status and income stemming
from this, as well as from their military functions. Noble titles connoted
superiority of birth, and noble families usually intermarried. Nobles were
not supposed to work but were to stand ready to defend their monarch and
the interests and honor of their families.
Peasants, who made up about 85 percent of the population of Europe in
1500, lived in villages or in small settlements on the lands of nobles, depen
dent on the latter for protection in exchange for labor. Peasants had no legal
status, with the exception of those (for the most part in Western Europe)
who owned land. In some places, they were considered barely better than
animals by the lords who oppressed them and the clergy who told them their
lot in life was to suffer in anticipation of heavenly rewards.
Villages or, within towns, parishes formed the universe of most Europe
ans. Local solidarities took precedence over those to the rulers of states,
whose effective reach in many places remained quite limited. Many villages
were, for all intents and purposes, virtually self-governing; village councils
decided which crops would be planted on common land and set the date