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In the High Middle Ages, people were organized into a social order in which everyone knew his or her place. These orders were arranged by function—laboring upon the land, praying, or fighting. There was little room in this social order for those who resided in towns and engaged in the increasingly important activities centered around trade. After the year 1000, advances in agricultural techniques led to an increase in population growth. Trade also quickened, and was accompanied by the growth of cities. The nobility constructed fortified houses across Europe and resisted the centralizing tendencies of kings. The prosperity of the age was accompanied by a flowering of intellectual life. The church also gathered strength and began to exert authority over secular matters. Resistance to this interference led to criticism of the church. The church responded by making some reforms and repressing its critics. The growing threat of the Muslim empire led to a call for the crusades by the church, and many Europeans traveled to far-away lands in defense of Christianity. Learning ObjectivesIn Chapter 8, students learn that medieval society was divided into three orders: those who prayed, those who fought, those who labored about the technological developments, chief among them water mills, that changed human labor after 1000 about the urban and commercial revolution that accompanied a doubling of Europe 's population, and its social, political and economic consequences about the rise of guilds and communes about the place of Jews in medieval urban life about the importance of trade fairs how urban wealth supported the creation of new architecture styles and buildings on a large scale about the increased demand for education in urban centers about the development of professional training in fields like medicine, and the ways in which women, Jews, or other groups were treated and increasingly excluded by these professions about the impact of the development of chivalry on feudalism about the efforts of kings to centralize their monarchies how the Spanish kings undertook a re-conquest of Spain from the Muslims about the Magna Carta as a feudal document that nevertheless limited the power of the monarch in England how the holdings of the English monarch in France complicated international relations in Europe about the various tensions between church and state, including the Investiture Controversy in the Empire and the Thomas à Beckett affair in England about the reform of the church under popes like Gregory VII and Innocent III about the origins, course and outcome of the Crusades how a grassroots desire for reform of the church led to movements like those of the Waldensians, Franciscans, Poor Clares, and Dominicans, and why the latter three were embraced as orthodox while the first was deemed heretical |