I don’t envy the historians; they don’t get to make things up and fill in the gaps in what they know. And there was a lot going on. The Falcon built on dozens of sources to get a sense of what it was like to live in the first two decades of the 14th century. The people who chronicled the doings of the age worked with expensive parchment and quill pens. It was slow work. Everything hand copied. And time was hard on parchment. And the chroniclers—the educated monks and academics who could read and write—did not spend that time and energy copiously documenting the lives of bakers and cobblers. What we know of this social strata is fragmentary.
Hopefully, the book will give the curious a real sense of the age. It was not actually a bad two decades in Europe; people were relatively well off, despite the challenges. They didn’t know that in another twenty years or so the Black Plague would arrive in deadly waves every 11 years or so and kill off a third of the entire population of the continent. And then the Hundred Years war of succession between France and England brought war and famine.
If there is enough interest in the sources used to build the world of the Falcon, I would be happy to pull together a bibliography.