You are lucky to be alive. Your brothers and sisters may have died before they reached two years old, and few have lived beyond the age of five. (Vaccinations would not be invented for a thousand years. Many people died of tuberculosis, flu or pneumonia, measles, whooping cough, or diphtheria. Many died or were crippled by polio or rickets. All these are diseases we can prevent or cure now.)

All children who survive work from the age of three—rock the baby’s cradle if it has one, or carry the little one around, gather wild greens with your mothers (your father may have one, two or three wives). You fetch and run errands. You learn to spin, weave and knit by the age of five. When you are six, you can spin the thread and knit your own mittens.

You and your friends play some games children still play 1300 years later—hide and seek, tag, and Red Rover. You have few toys if any, and no story books. Only monks can read and write. Charlemagne is making big changes, though. He has ordered all priests to learn to read, and started schools even girls can attend. He collects the folktales and music of the Franks and dreams of a time when every child can read. Nobody has to give up the idea of marrying and become a celibate monk to learn reading, writing, math, and Latin.

Child, man, or woman, you go naked in summer to save your clothes. Practicality trumps modesty. There are no stores, only weekly or seasonal village markets. To get a garment, you must weave or exchange work with a weaver for cloth, and then make it into a dress, tunic, or shirt, or knee-length pants. As a commoner, you make your cloth of nettle fibers, and you gather the nettles (ouch!), soak them until they rot (stinky!), dry them, card out the non-fiber stuff, and spin fibers into thread. Not counting soaking time, it takes a month’s work to make a garment. All people—men, women, or children—spin when their hands are not busy doing something else. For a winter cloak, unless you own your own sheep, you trade something of value for fleeces. You card wool, spin thread, and weave your own cloak. Well made and wrapped with pennyroyal and lavender against summer months, it lasts your lifetime.

        Your personal religion blends folklore, runic lore, and the Roman Catholic Church’s teaching. Nobles and royal folk speak and understand a sort of slang “Latin” with some Frankish or Gaulish words in it. It’s close enough to Church Latin that they can understand the priest at mass, but that’s an awesome mystery to you commoners.

        You believe in and fear demons, witches, wicked trolls, and magical dwarves. You may wear a cross or worship a saint’s relics in the church, but you also have faith in your runes. You pass winter evenings telling the old tales the brothers Grimm drew their stories from, and believe them true. They are, after all, not so very different from real life as you see it.

The “trolls” you might encounter while traveling are outcasts or dismissed soldiers turned bandits. The dwarves may be real, but no more magical than you are. Fairytale dwarves may have been inspired by real, small people whose footprints travelers find in the hills, though the little people are rarely seen, like the Kobolds in Royal Spy. The giants of the stories that your parents or your 8th Century grandmother tells may have been pure imagination, or inspired by footprints of someone like our Pacific Northwest Sasquatch.