Medieval Peasants Were More Important Than Monks And Knights - Essay Example

Daily lives of the three social classes explain their relative significance in medieval society. Peasants belonged to the lowest social class and were despised, despite their contribution to society and their direct help to members of the higher social classes. Even though peasants were not entitled to large pieces of land, they had an opportunity to own land from their respective lords. They could offer labor as a price for ownership and this meant that as long as a peasant could work and be motivated towards land ownership, they could own as much land as their efforts could allow.

Consequently, the peasants could meet their needs from land ownership, especially with respect to basic needs and this established significant equivalence between members of the social class and members of higher social classes. . it activates in the absence of the monks and the knights while the monks and the knights could not offer labor into some of the society’s economic activities.1 Understanding the roles that the monks and the Knights played in the society also explains the relative significance of the peasants over monks and knights.

Core objectives of the monks, as their three main vows suggest, were to ensure eradication of poverty, to ensure chastity, and to ensure obedience. Unlike the peasants who offered labor in an almost capitalistic scope and therefore ensured production of goods and services towards their master’s desired volumes, the monk's economic activities focus on eliminating poverty but not wealth creation. These factors identify more economic significance peasants than the monks because the monks economic activities were limited to “necessary supplies of vegetables and grain”.

2 The monks’ other points of focus, chastity, and obedience, are also secondary needs and this identifies more significance of the peasants in resource creation towards meeting people’s basic needs. The monks’ areas of operation were also limited to monasteries while the peasants contributed to a wider scope of the society. Lives and functions of knights were also limited to the lives and interests of the noble class and not on the community’s basic needs. members of the social class focused on wars that their lords fought and spent most of their times preparing their weapons and keeping themselves fit to defend their lords from possible attacks and to attack enemies as deemed by the lords.