Where was the balancing point?

I just got back from the fourteenth century. I listened, consecutively, to Ken Follet's "The Pillars of the Earth" and "World Without End." They seem to be fairly logical presentations of life in those times. There were no safety nets for anyone, it seems. If you were a serf tied to the land, your fortunes depended on your lord. If you were a lord, your fortunes depended on your king. And how kings came to their positions seems to have been a mixture of politics as nasty as today's, who your family was connected with, and what promises you made to whom. The focus of both books of course was on the priory of Kingsbridge, with its monastery, building the cathedral, adding the nunnery and the hospital. The time spread is over two hundred years. In today's terms, I can see all those events taking place in ten or twenty years. The community religious life fascinates me - perhaps because it winnows out the distractions of family life and social activities and concentrates solely on God. Convent and monastery life was not perfect of course, people are people, and in those days you didn't always wind up as a nun or monk because you had a calling for it - you may have been an extra son or an unmarried daughter or widow with nowhere else to go.
I'll never know who my ancestors of the fourteenth century were - over seven hundred years, everyone with an British background, or European background for that matter, will have many ancestors in common. What impresses me is that all of us alive today are descendants of people who survived backbreaking work, poor nutrition and abysmal medical help, long enough at least to reproduce. Of course they lived shorter lives, but think of a world that was not crowded with people, where so much was still undiscovered, where the land could be so beautiful and unspoiled.
I know it is romanticism to wish for a time in which life was not beset with the noise and static of bad news 24/7, people everywhere, and a lot of them nasty, and a bewildering array of things that must be done. I know the life of long ago was much more tenuous and security fragile or nonexistent. Still......
Where did we pass that point of balance where life is safer and longer for many, versus the time when all the world could be God's garden, even though you might be a serf with a short and painful life.
When did we pass that balance point, and did anyone even notice?