It sounds like it was a chaotic situation, obviously, but how much would life have changed for the lower levels of society during the succession crisis and subsequent civil war? I'm sure it kind of sucked for the ruing classes. Hearing it described as a time when "men said openly that Christ and his saints were asleep" makes it sound like a dystopian hellscape, but on the other hand, I would assume the general situation for a peasant, i.e, mostly just working and occasionally being levied into the army of some lord or another, wouldn't be terribly different from any other period of time from the era.