Maybe a weird/stupid question. Today we have mass media, and any new law/political scandal that happens reaches almost everyone instantly. Previously, radio broadcasts. Before telecommunications, information could go around presumably by letters, word of mouth, etc. Before even any of that, how would entire populations in, for example, the 11th century find out about new laws that were passed in their country, or if their country was going to war, and was it ever possible to communicate this fairly quickly (that is, within a week or two?)
In: 1822
They didn’t, kingdoms at the time were highly decentralized. Word would be taken to the local lords and then relayed to the population by the local lords.
Lords would be the one chiefly being informed of what was expected of them and then they would enforce the new laws on their people.
Outside of that 80% of the day to day stuff would be decided by the local lord, the local lord was simply required to obey his king if needed and to raise taxes.
A town crier, also called a bellman,[1] is an officer of a royal court or public authority who makes public pronouncements as required.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_crier
In general, the entire population didn’t need to know about most things. As far as things like war/raising of armies etc – feudalism. The feudal lords were obliged to raise armies (and feed and equip them), and they did so – if you were a tenant farmer living in say East Anglia, one day someone from the local earl would come and announce in the village that X number of men are to be equipped for the army by whichever day. You didn’t really need to know why either….Laws being passed etc – similarly, feudal lords had a duty to collect taxes and ensure administration of laws; assuming that central governments had some sort of diffusion mechanism (by horse messengers, if not directly, at say diet/parliament sessions), you’d rely on the hierarchy to diffuse the laws down.
Simple, they didn’t and they didn’t need to. You might be used to a strong central government, but medieval rulers weren’t like that.
You had regional nobility, who handled local affairs. Local lords were responsible for collecting taxes and enforcing laws. They were highly independent for the most parts.
It took months to gather vassals and their retinues for war.
It’s not that information couldn’t travel fast. Dude on a horse could travel pretty fast.
But the number of things directly controlled by the central government was pretty small in that period.
They had local barons, dukes, knights etc who would receive the orders or instructions from the king and then carry them out. It was all about delegation.
Further to other answers, important stuff such as a new king would be proclaimed at every town’s market place by messengers sent out from the court.
They could take a while to reach outlying towns. The current king was proclaimed in Edinburgh three days after his accession, as that is how long a rider on fast horses would have taken to get there from London.
The various tiers of aristocracy below the monarch didn’t just happen to be there. They owed their land and titles to agreements with the current monarch – albeit some were powerful enough or had alliances between them that the monarch couldn’t simply “un-Lord” them without risking a civil war. But gist is – the monarch bestows these lands and titles on a combination of loyalists and people with enough clout the monarch needs to come to some sort of agreement with. Lots of power brokering. In exchange these various members of the aristocracy administer their lands under the loose direction of the monarch, have to put on a public stance in favor of the monarch (doing otherwise would be treason, which ends up with somebody losing their head) and collect taxes for the monarch accordingly, and if the monarch goes to war these guys best rustle up a fighting force and go support the monarch. Obviously the higher up members of the aristocracy had large territories also, so had sub-tiers of aristocracy to manage progressively smaller territories until you had manageable chunks.
At the same time you also had the Church as a counterbalance to the more powerful members of the Aristocracy. The monarch appointed the more senior members of the church (and often from families of loyalists) and then those folks recruit a clergy who’ll make sure that everyone in the land turns up to Church on Sunday to hear about how the monarch was bestowed upon their land by God and is akin to God’s hand on earth and that failure to support the monarch was a grave sin and an affront to the almighty. This largely is outside the power structure of the aristocracy, so the monarch has this non-stop propaganda machine to reach the populations who might otherwise be swayed to superior loyalty to their local lord.
Again there was a lot of powerbrokering with the Church also, and a rift between the Church and Monarchy was also something that could result in war.
Messengers on horseback. Signal fires. Ships. Town criers. Town hall meetings. Gatherings. Royal tours. Homing pigeons.
Certainly a lot less information got passed around and more rural parts of a country might miss even the biggest events. Heck even in modern times in some arse backward end of Siberia there was a single farmstead with one very elderly lady who managed to sleep through all of CCCP and was quite surprised in 90ies to learn that there is no tsar anymore.
In general it wasn’t that much of a problem, what did a king care if some crofter didn’t hear the latest palace gossip? It’s not like elections hinged on it. Knowing what was going around the world didn’t have the same importance it does today.
For information the state actually did want to get passed around there were town criers who were pretty much just yelling the information on the town square or whatnot. Who heard, heard, who wasn’t around maybe got the information second or third hand, maybe not, didn’t really matter anyway.
And governance was not really centralized quite the same way anyway. Higher echelons of nobility were terribly distant and abstract for your typical serf, their concern was the local landed knight or manor lord who demanded their servitude. That is who made their laws and enforced them in practice. Kings law was for those actually able to take their complaints to court and that certainly didn’t include the lowliest peons.
Town criers are a thing.
Hear ye hear ye hear ye!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_crier#%3A%7E%3Atext%3DA_town_crier%2C_also_called%2Cmakes_public_pronouncements_as_required.?wprov=sfla1
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