How do you know that? From the way you're talking about "taverns" and "elders" it sounds like you've read a lot of fantasy books and not a lot of history. You're projecting an invented past for polemical reasons, because you have no evidence either way.

Sorry to come at you so hard, but I see this behavior so commonly and it drives me nuts. I sometimes suspect that if you polled people on what aspects of contemporary society were novel and which were not, most people would have a less than 50% hit rate. Because what drives the categorization is ideology.