How was life different in high Medieval England from life in high Medieval France?

How was life different in high Medieval England from life in high Medieval France?

in medieval England they speaked english

in medieval France they speaked french

>in medieval England they speaked english
No.

Middle English, autist

We know from extensive manor court records that the english peasant was able to argue his case for anything with precedent. You might be near the bottom of the heap, but the law was the law and applied to the lord as much as the serf. This prompted an early sense of pan-class national identity.

English women had more autonomy, able to visit the market unaccompanied and even indulge in trading.

The english were also the champions at spit roasts and the envy of continental europe in this regard. (See 'Tales from the Green Valley' youtube)

England was a bit more mercantile than France. France's feudalist system was a bit more rigid

Smoked Eel and Hops for dinner instead of penises.

Why couldn't they do this France

England, and France especially, were not homogenous places.

For example, regarding who seems to oppose these traits to what happened in France, I have to add that the satus of women, of serfs and peasants, and the functionment of most institutions, were different from one province to the other.
Normandy had customs that were more favourable to women, Provence had written law instead of customary law, the Kings domain's officers were likely less partial against peasants than local lords...

Aye I humbly concede this and my post reads as biased but I don't have sources for French peasant life, I could only offer one side of the argument.

Lands in Northern France had higher yields of wheat and more viticulture. Wine was a tad cheaper in France. IIRC Some regions in France switched to horse ploughs before the English did but I might be mistaken.

Some regions of France had no serfdom or abolished it earlier than England.

Places like Flanders and Northern France were really urbanised and industrial. England less so and Southern France even less in some places.

Southern French cuisine was a lot more Mediterranean and their lifestyle may have been a bit more joie de vivre.


All in all its pretty hard to make a direct comparison because France was so diverse back then. Gascony is located in modern France but it was ruled by a guy who happened to also be the English king. In Toulouse and Marseille or Brussels they didn't speak French. Britanny was another odd duck and frankly the area that would later become Burgundy wasn't anything like Ile de France either.

You had rich stern northerners who rebelled every so often and laid back poorer southerners who were subject to raids from the Mediterranean.

PS, forgot to mention that by 1180 Provence, Dauphine and Hainaut weren't even French yet.

They weren't part of the kingdom, but can we really say they weren't french ?

They were French, but not part of France, for the purpose of this thread, they're not England

Well that is what I am getting at, France wasn't the 19th century nation state we know now.

The people in Marseille didn't speak French and didn't belong to the French kingdom. In fact I know one anecdote from a statesman in Provence who threatened to disown his son if he spoke French.

For that matter asking what Gascony, Flanders or Brittany were is also hard. They had strong regional dialects or even distinct languages and their political alignment was England more often than France.

>it's another Anglo misuses the word "Empire" episode

No one said empire retard

The French sustained themselves on watery onion soup, while the muscular BritGODS ate hearty feasts of roast beef

Why did the French live in such poverty compared to the English?

quality post user

can't we say the same about regions in england?

To a degree but less so.

England was more centralised government wise and the difference between someone from say York and someone from London was way less pronounced. They could also speak the same language, appeal to the same court etc etc.

The same can't be said about the Welsh, Cornish and Scots though.