>>507892160 Normies have trouble comprehending a society so vastly different from their comfy little 21st century suburban shithole.
A high medieval age peasant, depending on the geographical location, could reasonably expected to speak 2-3 languages and possibly even more regional dialects, as there were no big melting pot cultures caused by easy mass communication and travel. The guys two valleys away might have spoken a completely different language. Your lord might have spoken a different language. The itinerant merchant, your only source for some tools might have spoken different one. Merchants themselves could have been reasonably expected to speak 4-7 languages, depending on their coverage, especially if they traded by sea. A simple route for a Hansa merchant might have took him over a half dozen languages and several language groups without even leaving the Baltic sea. If you wanted to do anything scholarly , you needed to be fluent in Latin and Classical Greek. The Court might have spoken an entirely different language than the vernacular. Later, French became the language of diplomacy. People often put effort into learning the languages of neighboring hostile countries, as some knowledge of norse or arabic or turkish might have turned an event from a raid into a trading mission.
Its hard to understimate how important the spoken word and just talking were back then. If a stranger wandered into a village, he could have reasonably expected a warm bowl of food and a place to sleep in return of the stories he told because random people wandering around was the internet of the time and the ONLY way to get news. You HAD to speak and communicate constantly, especially in societies where literacy was not as common. There were no mass media to be informed from, no newspapers, no posters, no fliers, nothing. The only way you learned anything, if another human told it to you.