How did people get food? How did they get clothing? Why does it seem like the king mattered at all if he wasn't right down the street? How the hell does a society even work without electricity?
I can answer at least one of these aspects. People in the Feudal Era (911-1399) ate whatever they found lying around on the ground. This was reflective of a tendency in Western European Christian communities to conceptualize themselves as spiritual successors to the Biblical Israelites wandering the desert after the events of the Exodus.These Biblical Israelites were fed by a divine provision of a flakelike matter called manna; in the colder climates of Western Europe, the manna feudal Christians believed themselves to be receiving often took the form of unknown berries, stone-fruits such as peaches, animals which had died of natural causes, or oysters.The laissez-faire approach to food safety that was necessary in order to make this catch-as-catch-can food storage system workable resulted in uncommonly high levels of tainted food; this is believed to account for the pungent rates of civil unrest and state-sponsored violence attested in the Feudal era, as well as the statistically disproportionate number of manuscript illustrations that show projectile vomiting.
However, certain demographics were better-positioned to take advantage of an analogue of the modern five-second rule in order to maintain raw-food sanitation. Literate men, such as monks and priests, observed a pater-noster rule where food that had been lying on the ground for less than the time it took to recite the Lord's Prayer in Latin was deemed safe to eat; in England and Wales, women and girls in rural agrarian communities practiced a similar time-restricted pip-rule where a particular dish was safe to eat so long as it was snatched up and consumed in the range of time it took to count yan, tan, tethera, pethera, pip. Due to the expediency of the latter, agrarian women had a longer lifespan than their monastic counterparts, adjusted for the rigors of childbirth and goring by livestock. (As an aside, any woman arraigned in court on a charge of sumptuary misconduct could prove herself to be a shepherdess and thus exempt from certain urban statutes regarding proper dress by counting to five in this traditional Northern English dialect.)
The feudal era came to an end with the reign of King Richard II of England, who invented cooking. Knowledge of the use of fire for cooking was lost during the pre-feudal Dark Ages, and the closest thing to cooked food that the average feudal peasant might have to look forward to would be the massive cauldron of washing on the fire that could be found in every home regardless of social station. As the centuries progressed, other customary models of societal organization took root outside of Northwestern Europe and the British Isles, certain improvements came into use, such as the use of utensils such as spoons and knives to retrieve food which had fallen on the ground. These improvements unfailingly sparked intense theological controversies, and their knowledge was suppressed to the literate classes. Eventually the discovery that certain foods tasted better after they had coincidentally fallen into household fires was transmitted to British scholars and priests. The recovery of burned foods was facilitated by the use of Italian innovations such as the fork. (Forks, however, were mistrusted as a luxurious foreign extension of the hand.)
The late 14th century clerk Richard Maudelyn is believed to have transmitted this information regarding the use of fire directly to King Richard II's ear during one of his annual gyrations across his domain; it is for this man that the petite madeleine cookie is named. Richard retired to his palace at Sheen, where he and his Bohemian bride Anne of Bohemia spent a great deal of time experimenting with substances such as fresh cream, whole nutmegs, and honey. The two incorporated utensils and temperature changes into their approach, incorporating contemporary alchemical equipment, and thereby invented at one stroke both a novel form of creamy sauce and a novel layered dish of aged cheese and noodles. As a high-profile proponent of women's literacy, Anne encouraged her husband to write down their scientific findings for the use of aristocratic wives and widows; King Richard chivalrously obliged her by drafting The Forme of Cury, meaning The Model of Courtesy. The propagation of this text with the explicit approval of both the House of Plantagenet and the House of Luxembourg enacted a massive shift in the dietary habits of the British people; this culinary sea-change from raw food to cooked food swept across all classes and beyond Britain's own borders with massive ramifications for the digestive styles and vernacular gastrointestinal states of Western Europe. This was known as the Great Bowel Shift.
For more on Richard II's invention of cooking, check out The Forme of Cury, transcribed by Middle English alliterative poet Maister Cokes.
"Anne of Bohemia and Vernacular Dietary Literacy", Annis Poudre-Douce
"Thomas of Canterbury and the Floor Oyster", Thomas Spondylus
As the name suggests, feuds were the major motivating force for getting work done in the Feudal era. Indeed, the modern English word 'drudgery' ultimately derives from the early medieval Frankish term de grudgerie to indicate work undertaken in order to spite someone else. In order to obtain the services of guild workers to construct a building, for example, it was necessary to send a servant in livery - that is to say, covered in chunks of liver - to stand outside the guildhall and taunt the members about how poor their skills were and how they couldn't possibly complete the project. This would goad the guild into undertaking the work. In this way, the construction of the medieval gothic cathedrals led to the extinction of several European mammals, including the catoblepas, the leontophone, and the monocerus, due to demand for livers. This in turn led to the creation of the Bayoux Tapestry, as feuds between the textile guilds and the architectural guilds led to a desire to mock the builders by depicting the capture of the last monocerous in thread. Clothing could be acquired by picking up leftover bits of tapestry.
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