As a defense of medieval society, I see where this is going, but a lot of the details of the defense are just wrong. Just a couple examples: "Foreigners. I can

As a defense of medieval society, I see where this is going, but a lot of the details of the defense are just wrong. Just a couple examples: "Foreigners. I can read about far-away places in a book or look up a street-view picture of a city on the other side of the world. I live in a multicultural city. I'm not so much tolerant as apathetic, but that's good enough (and might even be better; tolerance implies tension). Anyway, forget all that. Ignorance and fear all around." We often think about how the educated spoke Latin in addition to their local language. But on top of that, many commoners were bilingual. There was a fair amount of movement of people between France, Scandinavia, Ireland, England, Scotland, just as one example. With that, came a sharing of culture, artistic style, literature, and so on. Elements of this shared culture can be seen from the Black Sea all the way to Ireland. "The person of the monarch was literally sacred - divine matter" - Compare this claim, for example, with the story of England (https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/story-of-medieval-england-from-king-arthur-to-the-tudor-conquest.html https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/story-of-medieval-en...). Actually, the opposite is closer to the truth: the king was not held sacred and was almost continually under attack from the lower nobles. "Neither speech nor assembly nor the commonest transactions of life are free." - This would depend in large part on where you were. In Ireland or Scotland, this was certainly not true. In England, customs taxes didn't come about until the second half of the Middle Ages.