Life in the medieval times was the ultimate pyramid scheme. It was also a perilous numbers game in which, perhaps unsurprisingly, the number that trumped everything (except when it didn’t) was one.
In the history books, all of this is more commonly referred to as the feudal system, which was the dominant structure of society in England for some four hundred years, and in continental Europe, even longer.
In this first of three post on this subject, I’ll provide a general overview of what the feudal system was.