My village is going to have a feudal lord but the lord is a remote power center. Perhaps represented by a baliff who comes around to collect taxes and adjudicate legal disputes. The lord isn't seen much but his presence is always felt.
More immediately there's going to be a local headman and council to run things on the day to day basis. We're going to have the better off peasants to fill these roles. The whole set up has the sanction of tradition but not in law. If you grow up in this village, you know these people run things and that's just how it is.
The other certain power center will be religious. Here's where we get into the fantasy aspect of the game. We're dealing with a world in which divinity has demonstrable power - power to heal, harm, bless, scry, etc. You'd have to be insane to oppose it. So the clergy will have more of a role than just exhorting the people to be good. Blessings and damnations are a large stick to rule with.
It is unlikely such a power center will be left on its own to possibly counter the secular power center, so religion will be intertwined with the feudal power in some manner that they share power. In a village there may be a local clergy, probably drawn from one of the more prominent families (one of the few who can afford to educate their children). Our cleric is responsible for a small shrine supported by the village and makes money on the side by educating the children. Smaller villages, hamlets, and thorps won't have their own clergy so they will either come into ours for religious purposes or our cleric will ride out to them.
The village cleric will have to answer to (and is somewhat protected by) a larger church. His immediate superior will doubtless be centered in the town that houses the local lord, and he may even be part of the lord's court. Our local cleric won't have much hope of advancing beyond his station.
In addition to the 'official' religion, there will be the itinerant preachers and religious crackpots. Plus, in keeping with the Normans and Saxons theme I have for this place, we can throw in an 'old' religion, suppressed but practiced in secret; its influence is still felt in the village in any manner of local customs and superstitions.
That's it for tonight. I'm tired.
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Now in this world will the church be actively searching and destroying the hidden religion to keep its power in place? Or simply satisfied to be on top. It could be interesting to play with the idea that the "evil" religion is actually a LG deity.
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