Yesterday morning, before the Mariners beat the Diamondbacks 6-1, the highly-anticipated (by me) city-building/strategy game Manor Lords released on early access. The game puts the player in the role of a minor medieval European noble and tasks them with building a self-sustaining town. Players have to grow the town while fending off starvation, rebellion, bandits, and rival nobles. The release has me, perhaps predictably, thinking about medieval towns and how they operated. And believe it or not, dear reader, the Mariners provided a pretty good example tonight.
The first thing to understand about medieval European society is that towns existed in a very rigid class structure with extremely limited social mobility.