I think that’s a very interesting question which is honestly yet to be determined.
My family line shows up in Ireland some time in the 1640s with a very English name and no story / history.
Our line stayed in Ireland until the famine and then came here.
NJ isn’t Everything, but there’s always been something comforting about having nearby some small mountains, some forests, some beaches, good food, and being surrounded by water on three sides.
(the fishing is Wonderful!)
Based on haplotyping it appears at least my father’s side of the family have been squatting in the Dinaric Alps since at least the Slavic eruption into eastern Europe of the 6th-9th century. Apparently a rather sedentary and incurious folk ;). Then some bug crawled up their butts and both my paternal lines migrated to the USA from Habsburg Croatia several years before WW I.
I don’t know my family’s background beyond the grandparents, but it is most likely that in the 1300s, most people in my family ancestry were in China in the Yuan and Ming dynasties.
Edit/correction: On my grandmother’s side, some ancestors may have resided in the Vietnam/Laos region.
The wast majority of them would have been farming various parts of Norway.
A smaller number were farming parts of Finland and Germany.
Some were also farming in Denmark.
And then there’s the occasional link into registered genealogies of the upper classes, but they don’t really deserve the significance prejudice and biased record keeping bestows on them.
On my father’s side they immigrated from Normandy to England in 1066.
So in the 1300’s in England. To continue on we know.
By the early 1500’s living in the Salisbury England area.
In 1638 one descendent and his wife and 2 kids immigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They had 6 more once they arrived here. I’m talking the ones that reached adult status.
In the late 1790’s one of the descendants moved up to the wilds of Vermont.
On my mothers side no clue more than 3 generations back.
Knowledge of my family back that far is heavily skewed. The few known branches were minor-ish nobles. But presumably the large majority were just tenant farmers.
1300s? Now, if it was the 1200s I could say that one of my ancestors was Emperor of the (Eastern) Roman Empire. But that didn’t last and it was back to being nobles in N. Europe in no time.
Farming was the mainstay in the family until a couple generations ago. I now have just one relative still farming. The most common non-farming people were teachers and preachers. And even those are fading away.
Based on DNA ancestry tests and my parent’s look into genealogy, I can say the following with pretty reasonable confidence:
About half my ancestors were Jews from Eastern Europe and the Pale. Some small portion (the German ones) might have been relatively comfortable merchants, but the rest were probably very poor. In 1300, my ancestors were likely spread throughout Europe, considering how often Jews needed (or were driven) to pack up and go from country to country for their own safety.
Most of the other half were English and Scottish, and probably mostly very poor. There’s a castle and small Scottish town with my surname, so at some point there were likely some nobles in my line, but none that made it to the US. In 1300, these ancestors were likely spread around northern England and Scotland, fighting and farming.
About 1/32nd of my ancestors were West African. In 1300, most of them were probably peasants or slaves in one of the various West African kingdoms/empires of the time.
I may have a trace of Native American ancestry – if so, in 1300 they were probably southeastern (FL, GA, or SC) NAs, and who knows any more details beyond that.
On my paternal grandfathers based on tracing them back into the 1700s, they would have probably beenpeasant farmers & blacksmiths with the men named either Johann & Jacob living in SW Germany. They moved to the Ukraine under Catherine the Great and came to South Dakota in the 1880s.
My paternal Grandmother side, were British and Scottish. Probably peasant framers although the royalty link came from that side side via Prince John of Gaunt. So there was one Duke at that time. They came to the US shortly after the Mayflower. Eventually they came to Oregon on the early wagon trains.
Mom’s side would have been either Danish or Swedish peasants. We don’t know much about her paternal Grandmother. They came to South Dakota in the 1870s.
The bulk of my ancestors were probably farmers in central Europe, plus a sizable contingent who were probably farmers in Italy and another contingent who were farmers in Ireland. There were a few who were hunting, fishing, and possibly farming in the general vicinity of the Great Lakes, and possibly a few more farming in England, or in other parts of Europe or the portions of Africa and Asia near Europe. A small proportion of them were probably some other occupation than farmer (smiths, coopers, wainwrights, etc.), and an even smaller proportion of them would have been nobles or royals.
More detail than that, I cannot say, and I doubt that anyone else can give more detail than that about their own ancestors that far back, either.
In the 19th century, one side was some sort of (very) minor landed nobility in Poland. They fled to the US in the early 20th century when communism was spreading. As the family tale goes, my guy left the land in the care of his trusted servant who promptly sold it to the communists and used the money to open a filling station in Chicago about two blocks from where my great-grandfather had moved. The other side were from Bohemia and I’m sure were all lovely, God-fearing and hard-working people but didn’t warrant an entry in any history books.
In the 1300s, I assume they were all lovely, God-fearing and hard-working people in the greater Poland/Bohemia/Lithuania region doing salt of the earth stuff and dreaming of one day moving to the Windy City.
Well, just my father’s side sort of splits - part was the whole British Isles thing, mainly Welsh, Manx and Scots with a salting of English - they sort of traded kids back and forth through marriage for alliance purposes, but they were never much higher than knights. The other side was from that sort of amorphous area of France, Flanders, Belgium, German and Holland - they did the kid exchange for marriage alliances - it was sort of funny because you see a woman going off to marry someone, and it was sort of round robin and obviously for some sort of political dealing because it was all count/countess level marriages. [We ran into a problem going further back than the 1100s, we hit a dead end on one side when the mother of the bride was simply named as Countess <surname> so we had to simply follow the male lineage back. We did run into about 7 different family groups that more or less traded marriagable age daughters back and forth so we are assuming that Countess X was one of those lineages. Though I suppose she could have been a ‘war bride’ dragged back from somewhere. ]
I will comment that while marriages are named, I will not guarantee that the progeny are that of the married couple, casual bastardy tends to be fairly common in any day and age. Just because [as a bogus example] I [or anyone] claims that they can use church documents of marriage and baptism to follow a winding path from me in the here and now back to <insert name of one of Charlemagne’s Counts> it does not mean that there is a genetic link. The father of Odo’s kids may be Odo’s jester …
Documentary evidence of the Enfield family gets a bit sparse before about 1812, but given what I know of our history in the 19th and 20th centuries, my ancestors in the 1300s could be doing anything from turnip farming to wandering around Italy & The Holy Land because it had better weather than Britain.
One of our distant ancestors is known to have been a knight and a landowner in vaguely the 1100s-1300s, but clearly something happened between then and now as Enfield Manor is a joke nickname and not the plaque on the gate we get to read as the chauffer drives us through it to our country estate in a Bentley.
I seem to remember that the identical ancestor point for Europeans is something like 1,000 years ago, so you don’t have to go back much further and every European had the same set of ancestors.
So, purely speculating based on my DNA testing, my ancestors would have been involved in farming and such in Mesoamerica somewhere in central and northern Mexico during this period…maybe part of the Aztec Empire, or maybe Maya or Pueblo peoples. Or maybe some other group that was conquered by them. In Europe, I suppose some of my ancestors were part of the Spanish ongoing Reconquista while others were being, um, conquista’ed (or maybe they were just fraternizing since I have both Spanish and North African and some ME blood). A wandering Greek and some guys from Eastern Europe must have seduced their way into the mix somehow as well…perhaps right there in the 14th century!
For me, I assume they would have been spread all over Europe (and probably part of the Middle East), from north to south, east to west, doing whatever people did in their respective countries. Each of my grandparents trace back to a different country in Europe, so by the time you get to 1300, who the hell knows?
A very, very distant cousin posted a genealogy website that eventually leads to my paternal grandmother. The earliest ancestor was born about 1096. The earliest reliably-attested ancestor was born about 1306. According to the site, the first ancestor’s son seems to have married well. ‘Beatrix de Gernons, supposed wife of Eynion de Tilston, was a sister of Hugh of Kevelioc, and a great-granddaughter of Henry I Beauclerc, son of William “The Conqueror” and Matilda of Flanders.’ But that was before the first reliably-attested ancestor.
Where did they end up? A cousin of one of my ancestors became Archbishop of Canterbury. The cousin that immigrated to what would become the United States, who had the same name as the Archbishop, was not quite as upstanding:
But all of that is 300 years after the time specified in the OP.
I reckon my Slovak ancestors were busy doing something like mining and being pissed at the Hungarians in the 1300s. And the 1400s. All the way through to 1918 where they continued to be pissed at the Hungarians, but they had their own country, so they could oppress the Hungarians a bit.
Then they came to America to do some more mining here, and the Hungarians came too, so they were pissed at the Hungarian-Americans as well. When they weren’t busy fighting with the Hungarians they were fighting with each other, which continues on to this day.
Also, they made sausage and nut roll. The end.
Pretty much the same for me because of the Mayflower connections on my mother’s side. In fact, all of her family lines came over very early on from the UK and are well documented. My father’s family came from Prussia in the 1840s. Very white-bread. Once you jump the pond for ancestry reasons, things can get murky pretty quickly, however. Claiming specific ancestry to this or that royal without iron-clad documentation is just foolish, although I agree that in general, most all descendants of European stock are likely related to some nth degree to royalty.
Some of my paternal ancestors were German nobility, not sure how far back their nobility goes. The rest were most likely peasants in whatever became Slovakia.
Maternal were in the UK, Scotland and Ireland.
While not infallible, Mormon genealogy is dependable. There’s reasonable evidence that Willie the Conq is a forebear ; I’m sure there are gazillions of folks who are related.
Willie was also called “The Bastard.” Therere are a lot of bastards in my family, so definitely related. 
I also know that many Dopers are distant cousins from the John Howland connection.
These responses are great! I’m sure many of our UK/Irish ancestors hung out together.