Could You Survive Life as a Medieval Peasant?

For most of the Middle Ages, being a peasant was simply what it meant to be a person—around 85 percent of everyone alive worked the land, one hard year away from ruin.

It was rarely the dramatic dangers that killed them, but the harvest that failed, the dues that came due anyway, the small wound that turned bad. Survival was a matter of judgment: what to store and what to spend, whom to rely on, which risks were worth taking. Each scenario drops you into a villein’s shoes over a single hard year. Pick the choice you think gives you the best odds of seeing the next harvest—and find out whether you’d have made it.