Unit 8 · Social Class in Europe

Picture a knight kneeling before a great lord in a stone hall around the year 1100. The knight puts his hands between the lord’s hands. He promises to be the lord’s man and to fight for him. The lord promises to protect him. Then the lord hands him a clod of earth or a stick, a sign that the knight now holds a piece of land.

This bond is what historians call feudalism. The lord gave land to a follower. The follower who received it was a vassal. The land itself was a fief. In return, the vassal owed loyalty, advice and usually about forty days of fighting each year. The promise of loyalty was called fealty, and it was sworn on holy objects.

Feudalism grew in western Europe after the empire of Charlemagne broke apart in the 800s. Kings were weak and raiders were strong. Local lords with armed followers kept order where they could. The system was never exactly the same everywhere. Many historians today say ’feudalism’ is a tidy label for a messy set of local customs.

Imagine a village in England around 1250. There is a stone manor house, a church, a mill, and cottages of wood and mud. Around them stretch long strips of plowed field. The lord of the village owns all of it. Historians call this unit of land and people a manor.

Most families on a manor were peasants, and many were serfs. A serf was not a slave. He usually could not be sold away from his family, and he had his own strip of land to farm. But he could not leave the manor without the lord’s permission. He owed the lord work on the lord’s own fields, often a few days a week, and paid fees to use the lord’s mill and oven.

Serfs lived hard lives, but they were not helpless. Villages had customs that even a lord was expected to respect. Peasants took disputes to the manor court. Over time, many serfs bought their freedom or ran away to towns. Life was different from place to place, and some peasants were free farmers from the start.

In a medieval village, the tallest building was usually the church. Its bell marked the hours of work and prayer. Babies were baptized there, couples married there, and the dead were buried beside it. For most western Europeans, the Catholic Church gave life its meaning and its calendar of feasts and holy days.

The Church was also rich and powerful. Bishops and abbots controlled huge estates, often with their own serfs. Almost everyone paid a tithe, one tenth of their harvest or income, to support the Church. Monasteries copied books, ran schools and cared for the sick and the poor.

People inside the Church often argued about its wealth. Francis of Assisi, in the early 1200s, gave up his family’s riches and asked his followers to live in poverty. Critics then and later said some church leaders lived like nobles. Supporters pointed to the hospitals, schools and charity the Church provided.

Around the year 1000, a few church writers described society with a simple picture. Some people pray. Some people fight. Some people work. Each group was supposed to serve the others, like parts of one body. This idea became the three estates.

The First Estate was the clergy, who prayed for everyone’s souls. The Second Estate was the nobility, families who held land and fought as knights. The Third Estate was everyone else: peasants, craftsmen, merchants and later lawyers and bankers. The first two estates were small but held special rights, such as freedom from many taxes.

The picture was an ideal, not a photograph. A rich merchant and a poor serf were both in the Third Estate, yet their lives were very different. A younger son of a noble might become a bishop. Still, the idea of three orders lasted for centuries. In France it shaped law and taxes right up to 1789.

In 1347, ships from the Black Sea docked in Sicily. Soon people in the port were falling sick with fever and painful swellings. Within four years, the disease had swept across nearly all of Europe. People later called it the Black Death.

Today scientists know the cause was a germ called Yersinia pestis, spread by fleas on rats and, some researchers think, from person to person. People at the time did not know about germs. Some blamed bad air. Some saw punishment from God. In many towns, angry crowds blamed Jewish neighbors and murdered them, a terrible crime against innocent people.

Historians disagree on exact numbers. Most say that between about one third and one half of Europe’s people died. Some villages were emptied. Whole families vanished. Survivors faced a world with far fewer hands to plant crops, weave cloth and build walls.

After the plague, a lord in England might find half his fields empty. The peasants who were left knew their work was now precious. They asked for higher wages. If one lord said no, they could move to a manor that said yes. This is a labor shortage: too few workers for the work that needs doing.

Lords and kings pushed back. In 1351 the English Parliament passed the Statute of Labourers. It tried to hold wages at the level they had been before the plague. Many workers ignored it, and many lords broke it quietly to keep their fields farmed.

Anger grew. In 1381, peasants in England rose up in what is called the Peasants’ Revolt. Led by Wat Tyler and a priest named John Ball, they marched on London. The revolt was crushed and Tyler was killed. Yet over the next century, serfdom slowly faded in England, as lords found it easier to rent land or pay workers.

In June 1215, King John of England rode to a meadow called Runnymede, beside the River Thames. Waiting for him were barons, powerful nobles who were furious. John had lost wars in France and squeezed them for money again and again. They had taken up arms, and London had opened its gates to them.

At Runnymede the king agreed to a long list of promises. The document became known as Magna Carta, Latin for ’Great Charter’. One famous clause said no free man could be jailed or have his property taken except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land. The idea that the ruler is bound by law is called the rule of law.

Magna Carta was mainly a deal between a king and nobles. Most of its promises did not help serfs. John quickly got the Pope to cancel it, and war followed. But later kings reissued it, and over centuries people used it to argue that no ruler is above the law. Its ideas later influenced the United States Constitution.

By the 1200s, towns like Florence, Paris, Bruges and London were bustling. Walls ringed markets full of cloth, spices, wool and wine. Many towns won charters from kings or lords that let them govern themselves. A serf who ran to a town and lived there a year and a day could often claim his freedom. A German saying held that ’town air makes you free’.

Inside towns, craftsmen organized guilds. A guild was an association of people in one trade, such as bakers or weavers. It set prices, standards and training. A boy began as an apprentice, living with a master for years. Next he became a journeyman who worked for wages. If he made a fine ’masterpiece’, he could become a master himself.

Merchants grew rich, and some became richer than nobles. Yet they still belonged to the Third Estate. Guilds protected members but also kept outsiders out, and women’s work was often limited, though some widows ran their husbands’ shops. Towns showed that a person could rise through work and trade, not only through birth.

In the spring of 1789, a loaf of bread in Paris could cost more than half a worker’s daily pay. A bad harvest the year before had pushed prices up. At the same time, the French government was nearly broke. It had spent heavily on wars, including helping the Americans win independence from Britain.

The burden fell unevenly. Nobles and clergy were free from many taxes. Peasants paid taxes to the king, dues to lords and tithes to the Church. Educated members of the Third Estate, such as lawyers and doctors, resented being treated as lesser people. Many had read writers of the Enlightenment, who argued that people have natural rights.

To raise money, Louis XVI called the Estates-General for May 1789. A priest named Emmanuel Sieyès wrote a famous pamphlet asking, ’What is the Third Estate?’ His answer was that it was everything, yet it had been treated as nothing. The pamphlet spread quickly and gave commoners a new sense of their own importance.

After the Tennis Court Oath, the Third Estate called itself the National Assembly. It claimed to speak for the whole nation. On July 14, 1789, crowds in Paris stormed the Bastille, a royal fortress and prison. In the countryside, frightened and angry peasants attacked lords’ manor houses and burned the records of their dues.

On the night of August 4, 1789, members of the Assembly stood up one after another and gave up old privileges. Nobles’ special rights, church tithes and many feudal dues were ended. Legally, the three estates were gone. Every French man was now a citizen under one law.

Weeks later, on August 26, the Assembly approved the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Its first article said men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Critics noted it did not give women equal rights. The writer Olympe de Gouges answered in 1791 with a declaration of the rights of woman.

The Revolution did not stop in 1789. In 1792 France became a republic, and in January 1793 Louis XVI was executed. War broke out with neighboring kingdoms. A group led by Maximilien Robespierre took control and began what is called the Reign of Terror. Suspected enemies were tried quickly and sent to the guillotine.

Historians commonly count about 17,000 official death sentences during the Terror, and many more people died in prisons and in fighting inside France. Robespierre himself was executed in 1794. Years later, in 1799, the general Napoleon Bonaparte seized power.

People have argued about the Revolution ever since. Supporters say it ended feudal privilege and spread the ideas of equal citizens and rights. The British writer Edmund Burke warned in 1790 that tearing down old customs all at once would lead to chaos and tyranny. Many historians say both sides point to something real.

In 1700, almost all cloth in Britain was spun and woven by hand, often in family cottages. By 1850, much of it came from huge buildings full of machines. This great shift from hand tools to machines and factories is called the Industrial Revolution. It began in Britain from about the 1760s.

Historians point to several reasons Britain went first. It had lots of coal and iron close together. It had merchants and banks with money to invest, called capital. Its colonies and trade gave it raw cotton and markets for its goods. It also had inventors and tinkerers who kept improving machines.

One key invention was a better steam engine. In the 1760s and 1770s, James Watt improved earlier engines so they wasted far less fuel. Steam engines could pump water from mines and later run machines anywhere, not just beside rivers. Historians still debate how much each reason mattered, and some stress that raw cotton often came from enslaved labor in the Americas.

In 1771, Richard Arkwright opened a cotton-spinning mill at Cromford in Derbyshire. Its machines were driven by a water wheel. Hundreds of workers, many of them children, tended them in shifts. Arkwright is often called a founder of the factory system.

In the old way, a weaver worked at home and set her own hours. In a factory, the owner owned the machines and the building. Workers came at a fixed time and left at a fixed time. Bells and clocks ruled the day. A worker who came late could lose pay.

Factories could make cloth far faster and cheaper than hand workers. Prices of cotton goods fell, and ordinary people could afford more clothes. But many hand weavers lost their living. Some, called Luddites, smashed machines in the 1810s in protest. The government sent soldiers, and machine-breaking was made a crime punishable by death.

Manchester was a modest market town in the mid-1700s. By 1851 it held about 300,000. People poured in from farms, and from Ireland, to find work in the mills. The growth of cities is called urbanization.

Builders threw up rows of cheap houses, packed tightly together. Many families lived in one room or a damp cellar. There were few sewers and little clean water. Diseases like cholera and typhus spread quickly. In the poorest districts, many children did not live to the age of five.

City life also brought new chances. There were shops, newspapers, chapels, and later libraries and schools. Reformers such as Edwin Chadwick, in a report of 1842, showed that dirty water and poor drains caused disease. Slowly, cities built sewers and water systems that saved many lives.

Children had always worked on farms and in family shops. What changed in the factory age was the scale and the pace. In mills, children tied threads and crawled under machines to sweep. In coal mines, some children sat alone in the dark, opening and closing air doors for coal carts.

In 1832, a committee of Parliament led by Michael Sadler heard from mill workers. Many said they had started work at eight or younger. They told of twelve- to fourteen-hour days, beatings for being slow and injuries from machines. Critics then said Sadler chose the worst cases, and historians still discuss how typical they were.

Many parents sent children to work because families needed the wages to survive. Some mill owners argued that work kept children out of trouble. Others, like the reformer Lord Ashley (later the Earl of Shaftesbury), argued that children needed schooling and rest. This debate shaped laws on child labor for the rest of the century.

In a medieval village, a serf was tied to a lord. In an industrial city, a worker was tied to a wage. People who lived by selling their labor for wages, and owned little else, came to be called the working class. By the mid-1800s they were the largest group in Britain’s cities.

Work was often unsteady. When orders fell, mills cut hours or closed, and workers could be laid off with no help. There was no sick pay and no pension. Many families pooled wages from parents and children. Friendly societies, which members paid into each week, helped cover funerals and illness.

Workers built their own culture too. They founded chapels, reading rooms, choirs and cooperative shops. In 1844 a group of workers in Rochdale opened a cooperative store owned by its customers. Many workers also joined the Chartist movement of the 1830s and 1840s, which asked for the vote for all men.

Picture a brick house on a quiet street at the edge of Manchester, far from the smoke. A mill owner lives here with his family and a servant or two. His children go to school. On Sunday the family attends chapel, and in the evening they read novels by the fire. This family belongs to the middle class.

The middle class included factory owners, merchants, bankers, doctors, lawyers, clerks and shopkeepers. They were not nobles, and most did not do manual work. Many valued hard work, saving, education and respectability. They saw themselves as people who had earned their place.

The middle class gained political power as well. The Reform Act of 1832 gave the vote to many middle-class men in Britain, though not to most workers. Some middle-class people gave to charity and pushed for reform. Critics said many ignored the poverty that made their wealth possible.

In 1834, six farm workers from the village of Tolpuddle in Dorset, England, formed a society. They wanted to resist wage cuts. They swore a secret oath together. For that oath, they were arrested and sentenced to be shipped to Australia. Crowds protested, and after about two years they were pardoned. They became known as the Tolpuddle Martyrs.

A trade union is a group of workers who join together to bargain with employers. One worker alone has little power. Many workers together can ask for better pay, shorter hours or safer conditions. If talks fail, they may go on strike, meaning they stop work together.

British law banned unions under the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800, but these were repealed in 1824. Unions slowly grew and became legal and strong later in the century. Supporters said unions gave workers a fair voice. Critics, including many employers, said unions raised costs and limited a person’s freedom to work on their own terms.

After the Sadler Committee, Parliament acted. The Factory Act of 1833 said textile mills could not hire children under nine. Children aged nine to thirteen could work no more than nine hours a day. It also created paid factory inspectors to visit mills and enforce the law. Earlier laws had failed partly because no one checked.

More laws followed. The Mines Act of 1842 banned women, girls and boys under ten from working underground. The Factory Act of 1847, known as the Ten Hours Act, limited women and young people in textile mills to ten hours a day. Over time, rules spread to more industries.

The Factory Acts were debated hard. Supporters said the state must protect those who could not protect themselves. Opponents said the laws interfered with free contracts, raised costs and could hurt families who needed wages. The acts are an early example of regulation: government rules for how businesses operate.

Friedrich Engels was the son of a German factory owner. In the 1840s he worked at his family’s mill business in Manchester. He walked the city’s poorest streets and wrote a book in 1845 about the lives of English workers. He became close friends with Karl Marx, a German philosopher and journalist.

In 1848 the two published The Communist Manifesto. They argued that all history is a story of class struggle, fights between those who own and those who work. Under capitalism, they said, owners of factories profit from workers’ labor. They predicted that workers would rise up and create a society with no private ownership of factories, which they called communism.

Supporters over the years have said Marx and Engels saw real suffering and real inequality clearly. Their ideas inspired labor parties and movements for workers’ rights. The Manifesto ends with a call: ’Working men of all countries, unite!’

Marx predicted that workers’ revolutions would come first in the most industrial countries, like Britain and Germany. That did not happen. Instead, in Britain and elsewhere, workers’ wages rose over time, and many workers won the vote and joined unions and parties that worked through elections.

In the 1900s, governments that called themselves communist took power, starting with Russia in 1917. They seized private property and ruled as one-party states. Under Joseph Stalin, millions were sent to the Gulag, a system of forced labor camps. In China, the Great Leap Forward of 1958–62 led to a famine in which tens of millions died. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge killed or starved over a million people in the 1970s.

Critics, such as the economist Friedrich Hayek, argued that giving the state control over the economy leads to loss of freedom. Some defenders of Marx reply that these states twisted his ideas. Others value his critique of inequality but reject revolution. This remains a real debate, and you can weigh the evidence yourself.

Long before Marx, a Scottish professor named Adam Smith visited a small pin factory. He saw that when ten workers each did one step, like drawing wire or sharpening points, together they made tens of thousands of pins a day. One worker alone might make only a few. Splitting a job into small steps is called the division of labor.

In 1776, Smith published The Wealth of Nations. He argued that when people are free to trade, each person seeking their own gain can end up helping others. A baker bakes good bread to earn a living, and the town gets bread. Smith called this guiding force an ’invisible hand’. His ideas became the basis for free-market economics.

Smith was not only a cheerleader for business. He warned that merchants often plot to raise prices. He also worried that doing one tiny task all day could dull workers’ minds, and he supported public schooling for them. Supporters credit free markets with lifting billions out of poverty. Critics say markets alone leave too many behind.

Otto von Bismarck was the powerful chancellor, or chief minister, of Germany. He was a conservative who disliked socialism. Yet in the 1880s he made Germany the first country to give workers national insurance. Health insurance came in 1883, accident insurance in 1884, and old-age and disability pensions in 1889.

This was a new idea: the government would help protect workers against sickness, injury and old age. Workers, employers and the state all paid in. A system where the government provides this kind of protection is called a welfare state. The insurance itself is called social insurance.

Bismarck’s reasons were mixed. He hoped to win workers’ loyalty away from the socialists, whom he also tried to ban. Supporters of welfare states say they reduce hardship and make life more secure. Critics warn that they can be costly and can weaken self-reliance. Many European countries later built their own versions.