First, the question of scale matters. The household of a small farmer working a holding just large enough to support a family is a simple ecosystem, while the household of a baron was often astonishingly large and complex.

Across cultures, the households of royalty or khans often were nearly indistinguishable from the government itself. (See some definitions of “The Horde,” as the Mongols understood it. Marie Favereau’s The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World has a good section on a khan’s household–see 102-106.)

But the large outpouring of medieval research during the past sixty or seventy years had helped our understanding immensely. Margaret Wade Labarge’s A Baronial Household of the Thirteenth Century is a good starting point, as is Christopher Dyer’s Standards of Living in the later Middle Ages: Social Change in England c. 1200-1520. C. M. Woolgar’s The Great Household in Late Medieval England deserves special mention for not only for its thoroughness but also its beautiful photographs.

For sheer entertainment, Barbara Tuchman’s general history A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century is hard to beat. The book’s close focus on Enguerrand de Coucy VII, one of the richest knights in France, gives us some detailed glimpses of life in an important noble’s household.