Life in a Medieval Village

by Frances Gies

  What Aetheric had initially intended to do with his acquisition we are not told, but he soon found a use for it. Obtaining the king’s permission, he left the retinue and visited Ramsey. There, to his dismay, he found the monastery in a turmoil. The current abbot had neglected the discipline of the monks and allowed them to fall into “error” (the chronicler gives no details). Aetheric entered the chapter “threatening and roaring and brandishing anathema unless they amended their ways.” The monks “threw themselves at his feet with tearful prayers.” In reward for their repentance, Aetheric assigned them the village of Elton “in perpetuity for their sustenance.”12 Thus Elton came to belong to Ramsey Abbey as one of its “conventual” or “home” manors, designed for the monks’ support.

  Danish political power ceased in England in 1042, but the Danish presence survived in many details of language and custom. Danish suffixes—thorpe (hamlet), toft (homestead), holm (water meadow)—were common in the Elton neighborhood, including the names of Elton’s own meadows and field divisions. The local administrative area was Norman (Northman) Cross Hundred, after a cross that stood on Ermine Street in the center of the hundred (district), probably marking the site where the hundred court met in the open air. The hundred was a division of the shire or county, part of a system of administration that had developed in the ninth and tenth centuries. Theoretically containing 100 hides, tax units each of about 120 acres, the hundreds were made up of “vills”—villages or townships. The village represented a physical reality alongside the institutional reality of the manor, the lord’s estate. The two did not necessarily coincide, as they did in Elton. Throughout Huntingdonshire only 29 of 56 villages were identical with manors.13 The village remained a permanent political entity, a territorial unit of the kingdom, subject to the royal government for military and police purposes.

  The Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian invasions had involved mass movements of peoples. The Norman Conquest of 1066 was more like the Roman conquest, the intrusion of a small power group. Where the Anglo-Saxons and Danes had displaced whole regional populations, the Normans at first scarcely disturbed the life of the peasants. Ultimately, however, they wrought an alteration in the social and political system that affected nearly everybody.

  Both the feudal and manorial systems were present in some degree and in some regions of England at the time of the Conquest; what the Normans did amounted to performing a shotgun marriage of the two and imposing them on all parts of the country. William the Conqueror appointed himself landlord of England and deputized a number of his principal followers as tenants-in-chief to hold most of it for him, supplanting the Anglo-Saxon nobles who formed the pre-Conquest elite.

  The great ecclesiastical estates, such as Ramsey Abbey, remained relatively untouched unless they had aided the Anglo-Saxon resistance, as in the case of the neighboring abbeys of Ely and Peterborough. Ramsey was explicitly confirmed in its holdings:

  William, King of the English, to Archbishop Lanfranc and his bishops, and Abbot Baldwin, and the sheriffs, and certain of his faithful, French and English, greeting. Know that I concede to Herbert, Abbot of Ramsey, his sac, and tol and team, and infangenetheof [rights to tolls, fees, and certain judicial profits], in the town and outside, and all his customs, which his antecessor had in the time of King Edward. Witnesses: Robert, Count of Mortain, per Roger Bigod.14

  William’s tenants-in-chief in turn deputized followers of their own. Finding the manorial unit a convenient instrument, they used it where it was already at hand, imposed it where it was not, and effected whatever Procrustean alterations were needed with an unceremonious disregard for the affected locals. “Many a Norman newcomer did not find a manor equipped with a demesne [the lord’s own arable land],” says Barbara Dodwell, or with “villein tenements owing week-work [a tenant’s year-round labor obligation]…but rather a large number of petty tenants and cottagers, some free, some semi-free, some servile.”15 In such a case, the new lord arbitrarily appropriated land for a demesne and conscripted the needed labor. A fundamental Norman legal principle, “No land without a lord,” was enunciated and given substance via the manorial system.

  As William equipped his tenants-in-chief with collections of manors, and they in turn bestowed them on their vassals, a variety of lordships resulted, with a pyramid of military obligations. Ramsey Abbey’s knight services were for unknown reasons light: although Ramsey was the fourth wealthiest ecclesiastical landholder in England, it owed only four knights. The burden of supporting the four, or of hiring substitutes, was shared among certain of the manors.16

  As it turned out, the abbey might have done better immediately to endow knights with estates in return for military service—to create “knights’ fees.” The lack of clear-cut military tenures encouraged knights to settle illegally on abbey lands. Two sister villages of Elton, also bestowed on Ramsey Abbey by Bishop Aetheric, were seized by a knight named Pagan Peverel, a veteran of the First Crusade. The abbey protested and the suit was heard in Slepe, the village where St. Ives was buried and which soon after took his name. The biographer of St. Ives recorded with satisfaction that not only was justice rendered and the property returned to Ramsey Abbey, but that Pagan Peverel was further punished on his way home:

  On that same day, before Pagan arrived at his lodging, the horse on which he was riding had its feet slip from under it and fell three times to the ground…and a hawk which he was holding was shaken from his hand and made for the wood in swift flight, never to return. The horse of the priest who was traveling with him slipped and fell as well, and its neck being broken—although the priest was unharmed—it breathed its last. There was also Pagan’s steward, called Robert, who came in for a more deserved punishment, because…most faithful to his master, he had given approval and assistance to the man’s wickedness.

  Robert succumbed to a serious illness but was cured after praying at St. Ives’s shrine.17

  Twenty years after the Conquest, to the inestimable profit of historians, was compiled the survey known as the Domesday Book, which one historian has called “probably the most remarkable statistical document in the history of Europe.”18 Executed at the orders of William the Conqueror, the Domesday survey undertook to inventory all the wealth of England, to assure efficient tax collection. Consequently, after a long age of informational darkness, a floodlight of valuable data illuminates the English scene. After Domesday, the light dims once more, until almost as suddenly in the late twelfth century written manorial surveys make their appearance, and in the middle of the thirteenth manorial court records.

  Domesday Book records about 275,000 heads of households, indicating a total English population of some one and a half to two million, much above early medieval times (though some scholars think that population was higher in late Roman times). Settlements—homesteads, hamlets, villages—already dotted the landscape. In Yorkshire, five out of six of all hamlets and villages had been founded by the time of Domesday.

  The Domesday surveyors, proceeding from village to village and calling on lords and peasants to furnish them with information, confronted the difficulty that manor and village (manerium and villa, in Domesday’s Latin) did not necessarily coincide. From the village’s point of view, how it was listed in the survey made little difference, and the surveyors simply overrode the problem, focusing their data on the manor. Enough villages are named—some 13,000—to make clear their importance as population centers, however. Churches were given erratic notice, much in some counties, little in others, but enough to indicate that they were now common, if not yet universal, village features.

  Under the abbot of Ramsey’s holdings in Norman Cross Hundred, Elton was listed with a new spelling:

  M. [Manor] In Adelintune the abbot of Ramsey had ten hides [assessed] to the geld [a tax]. There is land for four plows in the demesne apart from the aforesaid hides. There are now four plows on the demesne, and twenty-eight villeins having twenty plows. There is a church and a priest, and two mills [rendering] forty sh
illings, and 170 acres of meadow. T.R.E. [in the time of King Edward, 1042-1066] it was worth fourteen li. [pounds] now sixteen li.19

  The “ten hides” credited to Elton tell us little about actual acreage. Entries in Domesday were assessed in round numbers, usually five, ten, or fifteen hides. Evidently each shire was assessed for a round number, the hides apportioned among the villages, without strict attention to measurement. Furthermore, though the hide usually comprised 120 acres, the acre varied.

  No further information about Elton appears until a manorial survey of about 1160; after that a gap follows until the middle of the thirteenth century, when documentation begins to proliferate.

  Drawing on the collection of documents known as the Ramsey Abbey cartulary, on a royal survey done in 1279, on the accounts and court records of the manor, and on what archeology has ascertained from deserted villages, we can sketch a reasonably probable picture of Elton as it was in the last quarter of the thirteenth century.

  The royal survey of 1279 credited the “manor and vill” of Elton with a total of 13 hides of arable land of 6 virgates each. Originally designed as the amount of land needed to support a family, the virgate had come to vary considerably. In Elton it consisted of 24 acres; thus the total of village arable was 1,872 acres. The abbot’s demesne share amounted to three hides of arable, besides which he had 16 acres of meadow and three of pasture. Two water mills and a fulling mill, for finishing cloth, successors of the two mills that Dacus’s wife had claimed in 1017, also belonged to the abbot.20

  The village scarcely presented the tidy appearance of a modern English village. Houses did not necessarily face the street, but might stand at odd angles, with a fence or embankment fronting on the street.21 The nexus of a working agricultural

  Conjectural map of Elton, c. 1300. Exact location of tofts and crofts (house plots and gardens). and of lanes and secondary streets is unknown. The River Nene is now canalized at Elton; its course in the Middle Ages is uncertain.

  system, the village was a place of bustle, clutter, smells, disrepair, and dust, or in much of the year mud. It was far from silent. Sermons mention many village sounds: the squeal of cartwheels, the crying of babies, the bawling of hogs being butchered, the shouts of peddler and tinker, the ringing of church bells, the hissing of geese, the thwack of the flail in threshing time. To these one might add the voices of the villagers, the rooster’s crow, the dog’s bark, and other animal sounds, the clop of cart horses, the ring of the smith’s hammer, and the splash of the miller’s great waterwheel.22

  Stone construction was still rare in England, except in areas like the Cotswolds where stone was plentiful and timber scarce. Elton’s houses in the thirteenth century were in all likelihood timber-framed with walls of wattle and daub (oak, willow, or hazel wands coated with clay). Timber-framing had been improved by the importation from the Continent of “cruck” construction, a system of roof support that added space to interiors. The cruck consisted of the split half of the trunk and main

  Cruck construction supporting roof of early fourteenth-century tithe barn, Bradford-on-Avon.

  branch of a tree. Two or three such pairs, sprung from the ground or from a foundation, could support a ridgepole, their curvature providing enough elevation to save the need for a sunken floor and to put an end to the long, murky history of the sunken hut. Progress in carpentry permitted the framing of walls with squared uprights planted in postholes or foundation trenches, making houses more weathertight.23

  Roofs were thatched, as from ancient times, with straw, broom or heather, or in marsh country reeds or rushes (as at Elton). Thatched roofs had formidable drawbacks; they rotted from alternations of wet and dry, and harbored a menagerie of mice, rats, hornets, wasps, spiders, and birds; and above all they caught fire. Yet even in London they prevailed. Simon de Montfort, rebelling against the king, is said to have meditated setting fire to the city by releasing an air force of chickens with flaming brands attached.24 Irresistibly cheap and easy to make, the thatched roof overwhelmingly predominated century after century atop the houses and cottages of medieval peasants and townsmen everywhere.25

  Some village houses were fairly large, forty to fifty feet long by ten to fifteen wide, others were tiny cottages.26 All were insubstantial. “House breaking” by burglars was literal. Coroners’ records speak of intruders smashing their way through the walls of houses “with a plowshare” or “with a coulter.”27 In the Elton manorial court, a villager was accused of carrying away “the doorposts of the house” of a neighbor;28 an angry heir, still a minor, “tore up and carried away” a house on his deceased father’s property and was “commanded to restore it.”29

  Most village houses had a yard and a garden: a smaller “toft” fronting on the street and occupied by the house and its outbuildings, and a larger “croft” in the rear. The toft was usually surrounded by a fence or a ditch to keep in the animals whose pens it contained, along with barns or storage sheds for grain and fodder.30 Missing was a privy. Sanitary arrangements seem to have consisted of a latrine trench or merely the tradition later recorded as retiring to “a bowshot from the house.”31

  Drainage was assisted by ditches running through the yards.

  Private wells existed in some villages, but a communal village well was more usual. That Elton had one is indicated by a family named “atte Well.” Livestock grazed in the tofts—a cow or an ox, pigs, and chickens. Many villagers owned sheep, but they were not kept in the toft. In summer and fall, they were driven out into the marsh to graze, and in winter they were penned in the manor fold so that the lord could profit from their valuable manure. The richer villagers had manure piles, accumulated from their other animals; two villagers were fined when their dung heaps impinged “on the common highway, to the common harm,” and another paid threepence for license to place his on the common next to his house. The croft, stretching back from the toft, was a large garden of half an acre or so, cultivated by spade—“by foot,” as the villagers termed it.32

  Snow highlights house sites, crofts behind them, and surrounding fields in aerial photograph of deserted village of Wharram Percy. Upper left, modern manor house, with ruined church behind it. Cambridge University Collection of Air Photographs.

  Clustered at the end of the street in Nether End, near the river, were the small village green, the manor house, and the mill complex. An eighteenth-century mill today stands on the spot where in the thirteenth century “the dam mill,” the “middle mill,” and the “small mill” probably stood over the Nene, apparently under a single roof: “the house between the two mills” was repaired in 1296.33 The foundations were of stone, the buildings themselves of timber, with a thatched roof, a courtyard, and a vegetable garden.34 A millpond furnished power to the three oaken waterwheels.35 Grass and willows grew all around the pond, the grass sold for fodder, the willow wands for building material.36

  Back from the river stood the manor house and its “curia” (court), with outbuildings and installations. The curia occupied an acre and a half of land,37 enclosed with a wall or possibly a fence of stakes and woven rods. Some manor houses had moats to keep livestock in and wild animals out; the excavations of 1977 at Elton revealed traces of such a moat on the side toward the river. An entry gate led to the house or hall (aula), built of stone, with a slate roof.38 Manor houses were sometimes constructed over a ground-level undercroft, used for storage. The Elton manorial accounts also mention a sleeping chamber, which had to be “pointed and mended” at the same time as the wooden, slate-roofed chapel adjacent to the hall.39

  Kitchen and bakehouse were in separate buildings nearby, and a granary was built up against the hall.40 The manorial accounts mention repairs to a “communal privy,” probably restricted to the manorial personnel.41 Elsewhere on the grounds, which accommodated a garden and an apple orchard, stood a stone dairy, equipped with cheese presses, settling pans, strainers, earthenware jars, and churns.42 The “little barn” and the “big barn” were of timber, with tha
tched roofs; here mows of

  Abbey barn, c. 1340, storehouse for the home manor of Glastonbury Abbey (Somerset).

  Tithe barn, for tithes paid in grain, Bradford-on-Avon, with fourteen bays, two of them projecting into porches.

  grain were stored. The big barn had a slate-roofed porch on one side protecting a great door that locked with a key, and a small door opposite. The door of the little barn was secured by a bolt.43

  Under a thatched roof, the stone stable housed horses, oxen, and cows, as well as carts, tools, and harness.44 A wooden sheepfold, also thatched, large enough to accommodate the lord’s sheep and those of the villagers, was lighted with candles and an oil lamp every spring at lambing time.45 Still other buildings included a kiln for drying malt46 and a pound—a “punfold” or “pinfold”—for stray animals.47 Two large wooden thatched dovecotes sheltered several hundred doves, sold at market or forwarded to the abbot’s table.48 Among other resident poultry were chickens and geese, and, at least in one year’s accounts, peacocks and swans.49 On its waterfront, the manor possessed several boats, whose repairs were recorded at intervals.50