What you can learn about medieval Europe if you focus on peasants
There are a lot of misguided beliefs about the Medieval period arising from a popular Gothic/Romantic revival in the 19th century. The period became known by another name - "the Dark Ages" - and was seen as dark, mysterious, and primitive. That completely got wrong what the Medieval period really was - the transition from Roman imperial rule to early-modern European states, and a small industrial revolution in technology including agriculture and navigation.The popular view of all-powerful, romantic nobility and dumb peasants also comes from this mischaracterization. In reality, the period's instability after the Roman empire fell really made kings and nobles more akin to local warlords playing at Roman customs, and there were exceptions to the rule like prosperous city-republics. Peasant life was also sophisticated, rational, and complex, completely attuned to local weather and crop cycles. A good blog series goes into detail about this here:https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...The important thing to realize is that no matter how difficult it was, how long ago it occurred, and how foreign the customs were for a certain period, people are still people. They have emotions, worries, good days, and struggles. If you take things in perspective and empathize with the people that preceded you on this world, history will lose a lot of its mystery.