April 12

What is Feudalism?

In our class, we’ve started our new Social Studies unit on Medieval Times. We began yesterday with picking roles out of a hat. These would form our new groupings in our class seating arrangement, too. They would also ‘play’ in our classroom over the course of the unit. For instance, the Queen would be the first to line up and the peasants would line up last.

The roles to be picked were Queen, Knight, Lady or Lord, Peasant (Serf). This simulates the Feudal System in the Medieval time period. To demonstrate the inequality of the system, we used Smarties. The Smarties represented the harvest that the peasants would have reaped for the season.  Each person started with 10 Smarties. The peasants have to pay for their protection and land by giving 6 of their smarties away to a Knight. The Knights would give some of their Smarties to the Lords or Ladies, and finally, the Lords or Ladies would have to give some Smarties to the King or Queen. By the end, the Queen had the most amount of Smarties and the Peasants had the least. 

Not everyone was too impressed that the Queen had more than they did, but that’s how it was in Medieval Times.

This is a good video that demonstrates the system and is easy to understand:

Grade 3/4s:  What do you think of your ‘role’ in the Feudal System? If you could change your role, what would it be and why?


Posted April 12, 2017 by MrsS in category Science and Social Studies

2 thoughts on “What is Feudalism?

  1. Elliott

    Hi its Elliott
    I love my role of being Queen!But if I was a peasant I would like to be a lady instead of the queen

    Reply
  2. Chantelle

    I think peasants should get all the money because they do all the work. Also I think I would either want to be a Queen or a lady or maybe even a knight.

    Reply

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