If you lived in Aachen in 796. . .
Commoners lived in a dirt-floored, thatch-roofed one-room houses tucked among Roman ruins. Imagine you are there:
Your only source of light is fire—sun by day, moonlight, starlight, firelight and candlelight by night. You build your fire on a stone slab in the center of your one room. 
Your house’s walls are made of stones that you and your friends scrounged from old ruined Roman buildings. Or you saved yourself back-breaking stone lifting and built your house faster of wattle and daub. You set posts in the ground, filling between them with woven willow or hazel wands, and plastering and filling the gaps in the weaving with a mixture of mud and cow dung. When this daub dries you white-wash the outside walls with a lime and water mix, if you can afford it.
You cook your meals in an iron pot hanging over a your fire. The hearthstone stores heat and releases it when the fire goes out at night. You eat oat or barley porridge, or a stew of illegally poached meat, plus carrots and parsnips, cabbage or kale from your garden, and wild greens in summer. If you have a chicken, it probably lays only three or four eggs a week in spring, fewer in summer and fall. It doesn’t lay any eggs in winter. To add more nourishment, you stir the egg into your porridge when you have one. You struggle to live through each February. You call it the “starving month”. Your family has eaten all the hams, salted meat, and dried fruits and vegetables you stored last summer and fall. While you still have grain, you make porridge. 
Perhaps you grind edible birch and willow barks to eke out your grain. Many of the wild animals you hunted in summer are now in hibernation, or have gone to warmer places. In a hard winter, you trap a few small animals, fish through ice holes, and forage for famine food—acorn and beechnuts the pigs missed last fall and hazelnuts hidden by squirrels. In a long, hard winter you may grind edible birch and willow barks to make the porridge go farther.
By winter’s end, you’ve burned most of the firewood you stacked up in the fall. You must ration what’s left and go into the woods through cold and snow seeking dry wood to cook your meager meal and warm your house a little.
Your bed is a pile of straw in a corner. You sleep in all your clothes in winter, naked or in one garment in summer. Your pillow is a bag or pile of rags, perhaps with feathers from your chicken when it molted or wild birds’ cast off feathers.
Winter evenings you and your family gather around your small central fire, holding your hands out to it for warmth, telling each other stories, mending clothes or knitting by its light and by feel.
July, when last year’s grain has been eaten and this year’s not yet ripened and harvested, is the “hungry month”. At least, you’re warm, and in summer, you can gather greens, grasses, roots, and berries, trap rabbits, and net birds.
