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-UE
Comments
Glad we got that sorted out. :B
Quite frankly, I'm comfortable in my own time period, where gender roles are a comparatively minimal issue and we don't have to spin thread by hand, and we don't rape and banish men because they like to do womanly things.
Actually, I've just realised that was ambiguously worded. I meant that people tell me their legal horror stories, not that they ask me for mine.
-facepalm-
As Anne pointed out, it's a case of when and where. As a general rule, the smaller the community, the better your rights are probably going to be at baseline level. Remember that we get a lot of our perspective of what life was like through the auspice of English medieval history, and what applied to England didn't apply everywhere. For instance, my studies of the Holy Roman Empire reveal it to be a bit more meritocratic than I have previously expected. Certainly a peasant (farm labour worker) couldn't be expected to get far in life, but a non-peasant commoner had a decent chance at picking up a trade and running with it. Many swordmasters of mainland Europe were, in fact, commoners. Soldiers, priests, swordsmiths, armourers, ect. could all get reasonably easy access to training. So that's just one example.
It's interesting to note that the Crusades played with class a bit, too. Many people who had previously not been knights earned or were otherwise given knighthoods, albeit without lands. So they were sort of "petty knights". They didn't have the wealth or power of an established noble, but they had the social place and were trained in the fighting skills. Many monks and priests, for instance, ended up taking up the sword and going on Crusade. Likewise, many firstborn noble sons who had everything to inherit chose lives of chastity and poverty as a Holy Order knight, so it shot both ways.
While we've certainly advanced in many, many ways since then, I do feel that contemporary media does exaggerate the failings of the time somewhat. After the 19th century romanticised version of medieval Europe wore off, media essentially hit reverse and thrust itself into the opposite extreme rather than looking for balance. Keep in mind that we're talking about the entirety of Europe over a period of over one-thousand years, from the fall of Rome to the Early Modern period.