Feeding your family through the winter deeply challenged you. You set snares for small animals. A hare, ermine, or muskrats sometimes provided a little meat as well as fur for mittens or a warm cap. To keep from starving, you might poach a deer on the King’s land—dangerous that, a death offense if you’re caught.

You spent winter evenings sharpening your tools and your weapons. You knew that as soon the ice and snow melted and the dirt roads dried enough that the army’s supply wagons wouldn’t bog down in mud, your overlord would call you to join Charlemagne’s troops. You would march away to fight strangers and not return until the shortened days of autumn. You’d probably get home in time to help pick and store late apples, press and jug cider, and join in the harvest feast. If killed—well, you didn’t want to think about what would become of your wife and children without you.

Knowing that priests would accompany the army gives you peace of mind. They’ll hear your confessions of all the bad things you’d have to do as a warrior and forgive you. You dwell unhampered on the glory you’ll win, and the loot you’ll bring home from the war.

During rare summers when the army doesn’t go to war, you join harvesters cutting July hay with a scythe, and binding the grain women cut with sickles. You carry the dried sheaths on your back, or help load them onto a wagon, to take them to the threshing floor. You might wield a flail along with the women tossing flat baskets of grain in the air to free it of chaff.

Like everyone else, you would spin thread as you walked to and from the field or threshing floor. Your wife or daughter, or you yourself, would weave cloth for a new garment.

You might be home for the grape harvest, carrying the heavy baskets of grapes to the vats where barefoot women and girls stomped them to loose their juices for wine. You love to hear them singing and laughing as they stomp.

As a commoner, you court the woman of your choice. You build a small, one-room house, or find a vacant one and renew the thatching of the roof. If you or your father can come up with something her father wants as dowry, you wed. The parents throw a party for the community, with food, music from flutes and drums, and dancing.

Near the end of the festivities, you and your new wife sneak off to your own home. Someone is sure to spot you going. Rowdy friends will make lots of noise outside your door and shout naughty jokes and roar with laughter.

If you were the son of a noble, a royal, or a rich merchant, your father would make a deal with the father of an eligible girl. Both had to feel he was getting the advantage. Whether you loved her, or ever could, might or might not be considered. You would be married by a priest, your union legalized by the church ceremony.