In the year of our Lord, 700. I need to keep this diary up. Much has happened since I last wrote. But before I get to all the details I want to explain to you how my village is run. Long ago my great ancestor Tiberius told of a kingdom in which all those who lived in the kingdom had a say in how it was run. This is not the case now. Here I will describe how life on this manor and all manors work.
| First, our form of government is called Feudalism. The way feudalism functions is a person who is higher in social class gives land and protection to a person of lower social class in exchange for their work and loyalty. I live on a manor, which is run by a noble, Princess Milicient. On the manor, I make metal goods and weapons and armor for the knights. All of the people on the manor help each other in different ways. I help my knight and my noble by giving them food and metal goods. My knight helps me by giving me protection. My noble helped me by letting me stay on her land and giving peasants like me laws and structure. |  The pyramid of feudalism. |
 An example of a manor. | Everyone in the manor has something to do because we all depend on each other to make things work. We all have different jobs that benefit us and others. The manor depends on me for supplies made out of metal and even my knight’s armor and weapons. I depend on the farmers for food. I get my food from them and my husband, who is a peasant as well. I also depend on the knight for protection and the noble to keep things structured. Even though many things work well, some things are very different in the manor. My home is very small and it is made out of straw and mud. It’s so small it can’t even be compared to the size of my lord’s castle. But still, I live on this manor because I need a place where I have protection and resources. If I were to leave the manor, I would be devastated and I would try to get into another manor as fast as possible. |
| Some of the rules in feudalism are absolutely unfair and I don't like them at all. The 1/10 rule is a tax where peasants like me have to give one tenth of our pay and goods to the person above us in social rank in our manor. It impacts me pretty negatively and it annoys me because I have to do so much work but then I don’t even get all of the credit for it. I work so much harder than the noble here but they are still much richer than I'll ever be. As a peasant, I hardly have any rights and I don’t like the ways laws affect people like me. I’m so low on the social hierarchy and it makes me upset sometimes about how poor my living conditions are. I don't understand how it could be perceived as a good idea to make some people so rich that they don't know what to do with all of their money and then have some people who can hardly pay for bare necessities. I feel like the nobility on this manor don't even want to help peasants like me because we're so disgusting and low to them, but they wouldn't understand how hard life is for us. |  Peasants farming on a manor. |
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