Quote Originally Posted by Tellos Athenaios View Post
Well High Medieval and to a lesser extent Late Medieval, more or less. Eventually of course the newly settled places became starting points for launching ventures further away. As a rule of thumb anything in Germany called -dorf (or -dorp in Dutch) is very likely the result of this expansion, all the old Dutch polders were built this way, for instance.
Well, before or after the Black Death?

Even so, the fact that serfs could be tempted away from their lords' estates doesn't make their lives "crap" it just means they were at the bottom of the tree and there was room to move up.

I'm not saying it was a wonderful life in rural idyll, but I would think medieval serfs were better off than people during the industrial revolution. For one thing, they appear to have lived longer - Church records for most of the Middle Ages show people marrying in their early to late twenties, 26-28 being the most common irrc. That tells us that people weren't in a desperate hurry to breed and get their children to adulthood before they died.