What did they call the middle class in the Middle Ages?

Answer 1

1st Answer:

Middle class is a modern idea and the term really started after WW2 when the men came home from the war and had the GI bill to go to school, open businesses, invent things, and build the factories. In 410 AD people were rich or poor. Nothing in the middle.

2nd Answer:

One of the most important movements of the Middle Ages was the Rise of Mercantilism, which is also called the Rise of the Middle Class.

Aside from clergy, there were three classes in the Middle Ages, the poor serfs, the rich nobles, and a nameless group of people who were neither poor nor noble. They didn't have the term "middle class," but they also did not have the terms "Early Middle Ages," or "Byzantine Empire." The fact that they did not have the terms does not mean these things did not exist.

The nobility of the whole Middle Ages, from the start to the end, bought the best things they could buy. They did not want to make their own clothing, they wanted the best clothing makers to make their clothing from the best cloth. And the same is true of food, furniture, horses, falcons, jewelry, entertainment, advice, and so on. These things were not purchased from serfs, but from specialists in manufacture or trade. These specialists were more highly regarded, and were paid more than serfs, and were of a different group.

In the Middle Ages, the people we might call middle class were often identified by where they lived, rather than according to a separation of nobility and serf. They nearly all lived in towns or cities, and so they were called bourgeoisie, or town folk. Serfs were mostly agricultural and lived on farms. The nobility depended on farms to provide their knights with horses and their families with income. So there was a real separation between the town folk and either of these groups.

The poorer of the middle class were freemen who provided goods and services. These were different from the rural yeomen, because they were not farmers. They included anyone who owned a business or who hoped to own one. Butchers, bakers, street vendors, chandlers, shoe makers, carpenters, masons, weavers, potters, people appointed to be guards or gate keepers, and so on, were in this group. The young ones who were industrious and saved their money were eventually able to marry well with people of similar skills, hopes, and interests. Husbands and wives often worked together, and raised families of children who started young into the same businesses.

Wealthier people were those who required more education or who bought and sold more expensive items. These people included lawyers, physicians, Accountants, stewards, various people in higher appointed offices of governments. They also include dealers in silk and spices, jewelers, and money lenders. In many cases, such people rivalled the nobility for wealth, and this caused a certain amount of friction, especially in the cases of money lenders, who the nobility could be in debt to, and could resent.

Many of the people of the middle class needed to be educated well beyond the needs of the common serf. And this was true for both men and women. Since the business of a merchant required keeping inventory, maintaining notes on customers, keeping track of accounts and prices, a merchant very often needed to be literate and able to do simple arithmetic. Since men often travelled, got sick, or died, women had to be able to take over the businesses. And so women in this group were educated as girls, just as the boys were.

The spread of Arabic numerals, which greatly simplified mathematics, created a demand for education in the skills associated with them among young and old alike, and so new schools arose to fill the need. These schools were called Abacus Schools in Italy, but similar schools existed elsewhere. They taught reading and writing in the vernacular along with arithmetic and other skills for business. They appear to have been coeducational.

The people who were skilled craftsmen and merchants began to from guilds very early on. In fact some of the guilds of the Middle Ages appear to have been founded before the fall of the Roman Empire, and the stone cutters' and glass makers' guilds are very likely to have been from that period. Guild membership spread to crafts and trades that were centered in cities and towns. The groups that were not involved included laborers, even those who were skilled, who worked on the manors, such as cheese makers or black smiths. But minstrels, cobblers, candle makers, and many other groups had guilds. The guilds protected members form competition and regulated prices. But they also protected the customers by maintaining standards on quality.

The fact that men could die or be incapacitated young made the guilds consider the issue of women as members. Many guild allowed women to be members, and even masters. In this way, if a man died, his wife could support the family by carrying on the family business. Some guilds required the widow to hire a journeyman to oversee quality of the business. Later on, guilds put together trust funds to maintain widows and orphans of members, and possibly because of this, guilds became more and more closed to women as the Middle Ages drew to an end.

In many towns, guilds combined into groups that actually controlled the governments. Republican cities called communes arose, beginning as early, perhaps, as the 6th or 7th centuries. These communes were not feudal, even though they may have been in feudal countries. Sometimes they had nominal feudal lords, but often they did not. They entered into treaties with each other, usually without any regard for national borders, and became very powerful. In time, some of the guild leagues rivaled nations for power, and the Hanseatic League actually entered into treaties with various countries, had its own military forces and conducted its own wars.

The middle class arose from both the nobility and the serfs, and bridged the gap between the two groups in their family ties. Many members of the middle class were from families that were freed or ran off the manors and established themselves in town. The laws of many places said that a serf who ran away was considered free after a year passed. The temptation for serfs to become free was largely offset by the fact that the middle class did not get the same levels of protection and security that landed serfs did. There was no guarantee of a job or place to live for the middle class. Nevertheless, some serfs did run off start new lives in towns.

Another source of middle class people was the nobility. Today there are a number of things people do not understand about the relationship between feudal lords, nobility, and commoners. If you were a member of the immediate family of a feudal lord, you were of the nobility. A knight was a member of the nobility, but was not necessarily a feudal lord, and so his children might not be members of the nobility. In England, anyone who owned a manor was a member of the nobility. But children were not members of the nobility if their parents did not have manorial estates. So if a son of a lord moved to town and set up shop as a cloth merchant, as the father of Thomas Becket did, his children were not members of the nobility.

Also, the highest lords were peers, but anyone who was neither in the immediate family of a king nor a peer was a commoner. So most knights were both members of the nobility and commoners.

Answer 2

In the Middle Ages, the concept of classes was very strong, but the term did not yet exist.

There was a middle class, but it did not have a name, beyond being called commoners. The problem with this is that the middle class, as we know it, is the class between the labor class and the wealthy. In the middle ages, commoners included everyone who was not a member of the royalty or peerage. And so a commoner could also be a member of the nobility, but just not a peer, just as today, the grandchildren of Queen Elizabeth II are technically commoners. But a serf, who was definitely not middle class, was also a commoner.

So the middle class consisted of commoners, but only those commoners who were not nobility and not simple laborers. There were always members of this group, from the very start of the Middle Ages; they just did not have a specific name associated with them that I can find anywhere until fairly recently.

Nevertheless, the rise of the middle class was one of the most important trends of the Middle Ages, and one of the most important causes of the Renaissance.

There are links below to articles on commoners.

Answer 3

well they were the middle class but you had different types of middle classes like the lords,bishops, earls, abbots and barons. Knights were what they called the the lower middle class.

Answer 4

Artisans and merchants who lived in towns and were not bound to a feudal lord.