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My response part 1

Its anachronistic to speak of social/ political conservatism and liberalism in their modern senses until the late 18th century at the earliest, as both ideologies have their origins in the debates surrounding the enlightenment project and its actualisation in the French Revolution i.e. Edmund Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France" (1791) vs Thomas Paine's "The Rights of Man" (1791 - 1792). Furthermore, a lot of seemingly socially liberal elements in the past are actually quite deceptive. For example, Ancient Greece and Rome might seem quite liberal in terms of their tolerance and celebration of male homosexuality. Such a perspective, however, is false because the ancients had no for "straight" or "gay" - Classical Greek and Latin only conceived of sexuality in terms of positions i.e. in Latin, irrumator meant "one who presents his penis for sucking", catamitus meant "young male prostitute", "Exoletus" meant active partner and so on. It was considered disgraceful for a free born male citizen to take a passive role in such same-sex activities i.e. in all affairs between free men, such as the man-boy affairs that were seen almost as a social duty in ancient Athens, only mutual masturbation was acceptable - penetration and fellatio were forbidden because they were seen as unnatural and degrading for any free man to be on the receiving end of. Household slaves and enslaved prostitutes were different - so long as the slave wasn't critically injured, a master could do what they wanted and the slave could not complain. With women, what mattered was that fulfilled their gender roles by being passive i.e. the Roman poet Martial criticises Philaenis, a woman with a very large clitoris, for how she "b***ers boys, and crueller than a lusty bridegroom, deflowers 11 girls a day" - its her refusal to be passive, not who she's sexually attracted to that's offensive to him. I'm sorry if I've gone on a bit of tangent, but I gave this example to show how when we look at past societies in their own terms, we really can't make straightforward claims about how progressive and liberal/ backwards and conservative they are. For more on this, I'd highly recommend reading "The Whig Interpretation of History" (1931) by Herbert Butterfield, who works with the example of the Reformation - he critiques the approach of previous generations of historians, who had interpreted the Reformation as a cosmic struggle between the protestants, who were supposedly on the side of religious liberty and freedom of intellectual inquiry, and the catholics, who were supposedly on the side of superstition and religious/ intellectual oppression, by pointing out that not only is such an approach to the religious developments of the 16th century demonstrably wrong, it also imposes an anachronistic framework onto the period i.e. the protestants only advocated for religious liberty in so far as it lead people towards what they believed to be the Christian truth, and if protestant countries like England and the Netherlands ended up more religiously tolerant by 1700 than say France or Spain it was because Protestant sects multiplied like crazy, due to the freedom to interpret the Bible in vernacular languages (as opposed to the Latin Vulgate Bible of Medieval Catholicism), to the point that imposing any kind of orthodoxy on everyone was impossible.

My response part 2

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Ok, let's at last get back to medieval society. Now the Medieval period if conventionally defined as being from the Fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century (many historians, following Peter Brown, argue for a late antiquity stretching up to the 7th - 8th centuries, and a few, mainly French historians like Robert Fossier and Guy Bois, argue for it stretching up to the end of the 10th century) to the Renaissance/ the Reformation (a few historians, like Jacques le Goff and Peter Raedts argue that the real end of the Middle Ages happens in the 18th century with the enlightenment, the industrial revolution and the American and French revolutions) is a roughly 1000 year period. Society anywhere in Europe in 1500 was very different to what it had been in 500. Social structures and values also varied quite a lot all over Europe. For instance, whilst structures of rural lordship had developed over almost all of Western, Southern and, increasingly, Central Europe by 1100, the Scandinavian and Icelandic peasantry remained legally free (not being subject to the jurisdiction of a manorial lord) and highly autonomous, governing their local affairs through their own peasant assemblies, into the 16th century, and similarly for most of East Central and Eastern Europe the infamous systems of serfdom that existed there didn't develop until after that Black Death, around the same time that Western Europe (England, Wales and Catalonia in particular) were doing away with serfdom, i.e. in Russia, peasants prior to the 15th century simply paid tribute to the cities (where the nobles and merchants lived) and were otherwise able to go about their own affairs in their often quite isolated communities, with serfdom only developing there from 1450 on when tighter control of the peasantry was needed to fuel military expansion against the surviving Mongol khanates. Social values varied hugely as well. For example, across Europe and across the period it was considered not really dishonourable at all for a man to father an illegitimate child (for women, as in previous and subsequent eras, the double standard existed) though from about 1100 illegitimacy came with many legal disabilities, especially regarding the inheritance of property and titles (i.e. William the Conqueror, the son of Duke Robert of Normandy and his mistress Herleva, could still legitimately acceed to the thrones of Normandy and England yet his grandson Robert of Gloucester, one of 11 bastards King Henry I of England, had to sit back while his half-sister and cousin battled each other for the right to rule England and Normandy in the 1140s). Yet in Wales, illegitimate children faced no legal disabilities so long as the father acknowledged them, and in Gaelic Ireland it was considered dishonourable for a man not to acknowledge anyone claiming to be an illegitimate child of his, and so the households of Irish chieftains and lords became filled with boys and young men who were there on the basis of often quite clearly fabricated claims. We might think that the Church was quite a conservative force, when actually for much of the Middle Ages it was quite a radical one, as reflected in say the transformation of marriage. Until the 11th century, marriage changed little from how it had worked in pre-Christian times, being governed in the South by Roman law and in the North by Germanic and Celtic tribal customs. Clerical celibacy did not exist then, though the Apostolic ideal had always been there St Paul had, after all,msaid in his epistles that a Bishop was a sober man with one wife. But then in the 11th century the church, as part of a general drive towards reform in that period (I'd highly recommend reading R.I Moore's "The First European Revolution, 970 - 1215" as its a very good overview of this period) , tried to clamp down on clerical marriages and make marriages across Catholic Europe conform to the ideals found in the works of St Paul, Augustine and the newly developing corpus of canon law - as freely consenting, monogamous, exogamous, reciprocal, indissoluble and life-lasting. This definitely took time i.e. the marriages of priests were condemned by Norman Bishops (the church still was quite decentralised at that point) at synods in 1064 and 1080, but in the Normans newly conquered kingdom of England it was still allowed i.e. the father of the great Anglo-Norman chronicler, Orderic Vitalis, was a priest who had married an English woman, living in Atcham in Shropshire, but by the 1130s clerical marriages were condemned all over Europe by the budding papal monarchy (though historians debate whether they survived through the entire medieval period in remote areas such as North Wales, much of Norway and Sweden and the Pyrenees). Marriage took even longer to reform and some of the reforms the church suggested were absolutely impossible to implement in practice (i.e. forbidding marriage within 7 degrees of kinship - you couldn't marry anyone closer than your seventh cousin - was highly impracticable for the marriages of kings and the upper nobility after a certain point so at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 the Church reneged and from then on said instead that you couldn't marry anyone closer than your than your fourth cousin). Yet by the 13th century, divorce was almost impossible without permission from the Pope (compare to how in the 9th century, a king could easily repudiate his wife if she was infertile/ menopausal) which is how we get to Henry VIII's "Great Matter" with Catherine of Aragon in the late 1520s) and the most essential component of marriage was freely given consent of the spouses which created what John Gillingham has called a "lover's charter" which would be taken advantage of, famously, by Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville in 1464, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn in 1533 and (in fiction) Romeo and Juliet. Though, royal and aristocratic marriages were still largely arranged and driven by political concerns, we do have cases of women successfully refusing marriages at their own volition i.e. in 1193, Agnes of Hohenstaufen refused to marry King Philip Augustus of France (very sensibly, given how scandalously he had treated his second wife Ingeborg of Denmark, repudiating her on a false claim of incest after spending one night with her) and in 1245 Gertrude of Austria turned down the hand of Emperor Frederick II (whether it was because Frederick had been excommunicated by Pope Innocent IV or because she really wanted to marry Prince Vladislaus of Bohemia we'll never know). It is heavily debated whether attitudes towards homosexuality hardened in the later medieval period - John Boswell in his book "Christianity, homosexuality and social tolerance: Gay people in Western Europe from the beginning of the Christian era to the 14th century" has argued that homosexuality was generally tolerated until about 1150, from which point clerics and secular rulers began to condemn and persecute it, though this claim has been controversial both with Christian conservatives and with other LGBT historians.

My response part 3

So how did medieval people respond to the notion of progress in the abstract. Many medieval intellectuals welcomed change - “Not only is it proper for the new to change the old, but if the old is disordered it should be entirely thrown away, or if it conforms to the proper order of things but is of less use it should be buried with reverence” wrote Arnold of Regensburg around 1030. But most medieval intellectuals would seem quite conservative to us. The Florentine poet Dante Alighieri, a pioneer in Tuscan vernacular lyric poetry, was fundamentally disillusioned with his own times, and longed desperately to return to what he perceived as the lost golden age of universal peace and harmony of the Augustan era Roman Empire and the purity of the early Christian Church. William Caxton, who introduced the radical new media of the printing press from Germany and the Low Countries to England in 1476, complained in his preface to the first printed edition in English of Ramon Llull's "Book of the Order of Chivalry" in 1483 that the gentlemen of his own his own age were not as virtuous as the were in the time of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table or, more recently, in the time of Edward III and the chivalric heroes of Froissart's "Chronicles." Reform and innovation tended to look to past precedent i.e. during the reform of the English Church following the Norman Conquest, Archbishop Lanfranc (an Italian who had a monastic career in Normandy) tried to subordinate the Archbishopric of York, held at that time by Thomas of Bayeux (a Norman priest), to Canterbury in 1070 - 1072, claiming through use of letters of Gregory the Great (pope at the time the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons began) and passages from Bede's "Ecclesiastical history" to claim that this had always been the correct custom. This was of course based on dubious historical evidence - Bede died in 735, before the Archdiocese of York had properly been formed and the letters of Gregory the Great's may well have been forgeries (as the great medievalist Sir Richard Southern demonstrated many decades ago), but through this appeal to antiquity, albeit an almost completely phoney one, such a radical reform was justified. Similarly, the development of the aristocratic code of chivalry over the course of a long 12th century was, as Richard Southern (him again) put it "a secret revolution" for though it changed warfare and aristocratic culture dramatically it was from the moment of its take off envisioned as something that had existed in all civilised societies i.e. in 1176, Chretien de Troyes wrote “Our books have informed us that the pre-eminence in chivalry and learning once belonged to Greece. Then chivalry passed to Rome together with the highest learning which now has come to France. God grant that it may be cherished here, that the honour which has taken refuge with us may never depart from France … of Greeks and Romans no more is heard; their flame is passed and their glowing ash is dead.”