Feudalism was an economic system designed to keep people permanently in their own class, their own caste. A serf had no hope of ever accumulating enough wealth to escape serfdom. Even for a freeman, the likelihood of owning land was small, since all land was owned by the king, nobility or the Church. It’s not easy for someone in the United States, a free-born citizen of a representative republic, to understand feudalism. I learned about feudalism in school but didn’t really get it. A book that helped was Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. I was in 8th or 9th grade when my dad suggested it to me, so you middle-schoolers/high-schoolers are ripe to enjoy it. As an American citizen, Mark Twain was troubled by the class system that still hung around Europe in his time (Twain’s book, Huckleberry Finn, helped turn people against slavery in the U.S.). He used humor to promote a point of view, to change people’s minds. Twain lived and wrote over a century ago, so (let’s not cancel Mark Twain) please forgive any lapses into unwokedness. A Connecticut Yankee isn’t a happy book, but it is funny. You’ll love it. I enthusiastically recommend it. Click on the link to get started—https://www.gutenberg.org/files/86/86-h/86-h.htm
John Manders' Blog 
A well written invitation encouraging young minds to delve into Midieval Society and ostensibly apply it to today’s society (“The Boss,” did suggest the likelihood of overthrowing a Monarch was least likely in Russia). How far removed from the disequibrium of Feudal Societies is America today? This, not merely some vague historical anomaly, should drive our public schools to not simply recommend this book be read, but demand it! It deals even more appropriately with slavery. And specifically with the phenomenon of the privileged looking down upon (rather he suggests the nose points upward) the oppressed. Both Lincoln and Dr. King sought (after addressing the obvious) to change the slavery inherent in unbridled Capitalism… in the North. Finally, Twain addresses the most insidious and odious evil of that society- and the most difficult to address: The Church. I suggest any authoritative body exalted by dogma to possess some endowment granting them legitimacy in controlling our society represents a threat to our Liberty (manhood). We revere our Founding Fathers, as the mythology and legends go unchallenged until, perhaps, Graduate school. And the virtual infallibility of the Constitution they arrived at remains as sacred and unimpeachable a codex as the Bible itself. Let’s not kid ourselves, Twain merely scratches the surface- but in so effective a way, silly fools like me simply bow before his statue in absolute awe if the Master.
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Thanks, Steven! You make me want to read Yankee one more time!
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