People's outlook on the future was very much conditioned by the dismal recent past.
Positive changes were taking place at the end of the fifteenth century that began to dislodge the firmly implanted belief that people had no control over their destiny. These changes took some time to take effect, however. At the time, French society was still organized along feudal lines, with power in the hands of nobles and the church. Their lands were worked by peasants, mostly serfs who could not leave their estates and were forced to lead slave-like existences. Europe, however, was poised on the brink of the Renaissance, a period in which people would gain a greater sense of human achievements of the past and of the potential of humanity to shape its own destiny.
Feudal France. Feudalism was a political and economic system that was common in Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth century. Under this system, land was controlled by a small number of powerful individuals. The large peasant class was forced to provide services, dues, and an oath of allegiance to the landowners in exchange for the right to farm parcels of the nobility's land.
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