As a noble or church leader, you are an overlord. You wear fine linen and wool garments embroidered or trimmed with ribbons, and own several changes of clothes. You live in a stone house, probably with thatched or slate roof, and slate or flagstone floor. Your house has several rooms. In your main room, a central fire burns in a circle of stones or on a raised hearth. Charcoal braziers and wall hangings warm other rooms. In winter, straw carpets the cold stones, as it does the dirt floor in commoners’ houses. At least twice a year, your servants sweep out the soiled straw, scrub the flagstones, and strew the floors with new straw, or with green rushes and wild flowers.

Your servants cook for you, tend your garden, gather wild raspberries, feed your chickens, milk your cow, make your clothes and do your laundry. Village people have to work one to three days a week in your fields, yet somehow tend their own crops and animals and do all those things servants do for you. You, as a person of rank, act as judge in a manor court, check with the steward who looks after your house and lands, and lead your overlord’s soldiers. You send some of your people to do your workdays for him.

An overlord draws upon the lords of his manors for soldiers for himself and for the king’s army. Summertime is wartime, so the young, healthy men go away to fight. They’re gone during the hay and grain harvests, and for picking, drying and storing summer’s vegetables and fruits. Women and oldsters work in summer harvests. The soldiers may come home in time to help pick grapes and late apples. They mound earth over rows of carrots, endive, leeks, and parsnips so they won’t freeze in winter.

If you are a priest, you dress modestly, but you hold an important village or palace position. Mass and church events are the only entertainment, except for May Eve, Midsummer’s Eve in June, and the harvest feast in October.

People must go to church or pay a fine. At Christmas, you go to Midnight Mass, and feast afterward. No one gets or gives gifts, nor decorates a tree.

If you are a bishop, you live in a palace, have many servants, collect tithes from every parish to add to your wealth and Rome’s. You eat well even while commoners starve in mid-winter. You may own up to 60 manors. Each manor owns at least one village, perhaps several. The peasants pay taxes in the form of work, animals, or crops to their manor overlords, who pay taxes to their overlords, counts, bishops, abbots, or abbesses. Everyone has an overlord. Even the king is subject to the Pope. Acting as head-of-church in his kingdom, the king chooses bishops. Everyone has to pay a ten percent tithe to the church.

If you are an important bishop, living in a fine palace, your estate is enormous, with from several manors to as many as 60, each with a village or several. Your kitchen may have a fireplace, even a raised hearth like Charlemagne’s. You do no manual labor, but manage your domain or a church empire, plus your own estate.

Your authority over your subjects’ morals stays unquestioned but they do not always obey. As a bishop or count, you sometimes have to try them in ecclesiastical court or manor court and impose harsh penalties.

In some counties, a convicted thief gets his hand cut off, in others he forfeits his life. King Charlemagne is trying to make the same penalties apply for the same offenses in every county and diocese, but not having much luck.