YES it is bad compared to now, yes many people were not free or experienced terrible discrimination and horrors (whether they were slaves or serfs or half-free, or women, or jewish or rroma communities, etc.)
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But Europe was a big place, full of people with differing opinions. We don't get to hear those opinions because most people go unrecorded. The regular folks, not the lords or monks whose words have survived.
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So small communities would have very likely had varied opinions (and this would have changed over time too) over different groups of people. And these would have differed depending on culture as well.
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It's why I really hate a lot of media which professes to be "historically accurate" (and never is. ever.) because it's always this awful, violent time where women are only ever victims, wives, mistresses who get shunted to the background, gay people are villains
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the outsiders are the Moors/Saracens/other group from outside Europe that are horrible slaving barbarians that rape women and hate everything you stand for.
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We never get to see Jewish or Rroma communities, or a bunch of nuns that arm themselves and hire mercenaries over leadership of the abbey, or hell even the widespread homosexuality that seemed to be actually not that maligned in the early medieval period (compared to later)
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And even though it was judged to be a sin, the punishment was penance, not death. The later medieval period saw execution and castration as punishment, although again gay people existed and others knew they existed.
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End of conversation
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A lot of the things people think were so awful about the Middle Ages were actually early modern- witch hunts, elaborate tools of torture etc. I think people partly want to distance themselves from this so they push it beyond modernity.
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