Life in a Medieval Village

by Frances Gies

  For many village women one of the most important parts of the daily labor was the care of livestock. Poultry was virtually the

  Woman milking cow. Bodleian Library, Ms. Bodl. 764, f. 41v.

  Woman feeding chickens, holding a distaff under her arm. British Library, Luttrell Psalter, Ms. Add. 42130, f. 166v.

  Woman on the left is spinning, using the thirteenth-century invention, the spinning wheel. Woman on the right is carding (combing) wool. British Library, Luttrell Psalter, Us. Add. 42130, f. 103.

  woman’s domain, but feeding, milking, washing, and shearing the larger livestock often fell to her also.

  The biggest problem with livestock was winter feed, the shortage of which was once thought to have provoked an annual “Michaelmas slaughter.” Given the high rate of loss to natural causes, an annual slaughter would have threatened the survival of a small flock or herd.59 The feed shortage certainly played a role in keeping numbers of animals down, but some successful peasants just as certainly overcame the problem. At Bowerchalk in Wiltshire, twenty-three tenants are known to have owned 885 sheep, or 41 per owner; at Merton, eighty-five tenants owned 2,563 sheep, and one is known to have owned 158.60 Individual ownership within a combined flock was kept straight by branding or by marking with reddle (red ochre), many purchases of which are recorded.61

  Among peasants as among lords, sheep were esteemed as the “cash crop” animals. Though worth at best only one or two shillings, compared with two and a half shillings for a pig, they had unique fivefold value: fleece, meat, milk, manure, and skin (whose special character made it a writing material of incomparable durability). Lambing time was in early spring, between winter and spring sowing, so that the lambs, weaned at twelve weeks, could accompany their mothers to graze the harvest stubble of last year’s wheatfield.62 The sheep were sheared in mid-June and the fleeces carted to market, probably, in the case of Elton, to Peterborough, about eight miles away. Medieval fleeces weighed from a pound to two and a half pounds, much below the modern average of four and a half pounds.63

  Pigs were the best candidates for a Michaelmas slaughter, since their principal value was as food and since their meat

  Weeding, using long-handled tools. British Library, Luttrell Psalter, Ms. Add. 42130, f. 17s.

  preserved well. A sow farrowed twice a year, and according to Hosbonderie was expected to produce seven piglets per litter.64 Records at Stevenage, Hertfordshire, for the late thirteenth century show sows producing up to nineteen offspring a year, “a good enough figure even by modern standards.”65 They could be eaten “profitably” in their second year, and supplied scarce fat to the medieval diet.66 Pigs foraged for themselves on the acorns, beechnuts, crab apples, hazelnuts, and leaves of the forest floor. For the privilege, exercised mainly in the autumn, their owners paid the lord pannage, in Elton on a sliding scale of a quarter penny to twopence, depending on the pig’s size.67 Probably pannage was originally a fine for overuse of the limited forest mast, which might deprive the wild boar, favored lordly hunting quarry. Feed for pigs was more of a problem in winter, but might be supplemented by whey, a by-product of the cheese-making process.68

  Unlike sheep, pigs could take care of themselves against predators and so could be allowed to run free. This led to the problem of their rooting in somebody’s garden, especially in winter, leading in turn to numerous bylaws requiring rings—bits of curved wire—in their noses beginning at Michaelmas or another autumn date.69

  Men knocking acorns from oak trees to feed pigs. British Library, St. Mary’s Psalter, Ms. Royal 2B VII, f. 81v.

  Cattle were the most expensive animals to keep through the winter but were rarely slaughtered. Cows gave about 120 to 150 gallons of milk a year, far below modern yields, but at a half penny per gallon not a negligible contribution to a peasant income. Calving percentages were high, somewhat contradicting the theory that cows were seriously underfed in winter.70 Such better-off Elton villagers as John of Elton, Nicholas Blundel, Richard of Barton, and Richer Chapelyn bought grass from the demesne pasture or from the millpond. Other resources included mistletoe and ivy from the forest.71

  Goats, from the point of view of husbandry a sort of inferior sheep, were seldom kept in the lowlands (though the Ramsey manor of Abbot’s Ripton kept a herd), but in mountainous regions could thrive better than any other stock.72 Nearly all the villagers kept poultry. Geese were a favorite, producing, according to Hosbonderie, five goslings apiece per year.73

  The marketing of animals was done mainly before Christmas, before Lent, and at Whitsuntide.

  Villeins, cotters, and free tenants alike, nearly all the villagers spent their days in the fields, manhandling the plow, swinging the scythe or sickle, loading the cart. Not quite all, however. There were also the two bakers at either end of the village, the smith, the carpenter, and the millers and fullers who operated the three mills astride the Nene. Using water power to grind grain was an old story, using it to finish cloth a new one. For centuries fullers, or walkers (whence both English surnames), had done their job with their feet, trampling the rough wool fabric in a trough of water after rubbing it with fuller’s earth, an absorbent clay that helped get rid of the grease. The water wheel now drove a set of beaters that took the place of the fullers’ feet. After the cloth had been partially dried, it was finished by teasing the nap and shearing it with huge flat shears, preparing it for the final step in the process, dyeing.74

  For the gristmill, either the same or another mill wheel was geared to rotate the upper of a pair of millstones, which was pierced to allow the grain to be fed in. Millstones were expensive, sometimes imported from abroad. When a mill was farmed, the steward might cause the millstones to be measured before and after the farm, and the farmer charged for the wear.

  All three mills were under the supervision of the bailiff, who rendered an annual accounting (in 1297 he recorded the fullers as finishing 22 ells of wool blanket cloth for the abbot).75 He sold the multure, the flour taken in payment from the grist mills’ captive customers, who were kept ever in line by the manor court: “Andrew Saladin [fined] because he keeps a handmill to the lord’s damage” and Andrew’s handmill confiscated (1331).76 The customary tenants were permitted to grind their own grain only if the mill was flooded, in which case they were obligated to come and repair it.77 The millers were responsible for incidental income from the tolls paid by those using the mill as a bridge, from the sale of eels from the millpond, from flax grown on its shores, and from the rental of boats and the sale of grass.78

  The bakers’ monopoly was also guarded by the court. Three villagers were fined in 1300 for “withdrawing themselves from the lord’s common oven,” and in 1306 eight, one of whom was excused “because she is poor.”79 Later three villagers were fined for going into the baking business: Walter Abbot, Robert son of the chaplain, and Athelina of Nassington were found to be “common bakers” and had to pay twelve pence apiece.80

  The smith and the carpenter turn up in the Elton accounts

  Mill with eel trap in the stream. British Library, Luttrell Psalter, Ms. Add. 42130, f. 181.

  in connection with repairs to the mills as well as work on the demesne plows and carts. The smith made horseshoes either from “the lord’s iron” or from “his own iron,” and also ox shoes, since oxen were often shod (but neither horses nor oxen necessarily on all four feet). The smith fabricated blades, tanged or socketed, to be fitted with wooden knife handles; and also cauldrons, kettles, cups, sickles, billhooks, saws, and fasteners.81’ His shop in the middle of the village was equipped with tools that dated from prehistory: anvil, hammer, and the tongs with which he endlessly returned the workpiece to the fire. He probably also had the more recently invented bellows. Recorded payments to him from the manor ran from a few pence for shoeing horses of the abbot to four shillings sixpence for repairing the demesne plows.82 Often he collaborated on a job with the carpenter, fashioning a wood-and-iron plow or harrow, wheelbarrow, fork, or spade. The carpenter also a
ppears in the manorial accounts, building a dovecote for the manor house, and repairing the manor’s chapel and granary, the porch of the barn, the mill machinery, and the abbey’s boats used to transport produce on the Nene.83

  A product of collaboration of carpenter and smith, the wheelbarrow, here used to transport a crippled beggar. British Library, Luttrell Psalter, Ms. Add. 42130, f. 186v.

  Other craftsmen probably served the village on a part-time basis. The cotters, jacks-of-all-trades, doubtless developed specializations. The important trade of tanning was apparently not practiced in Elton, at least not on a full-time basis, but an Elton man, son of Richard Dunning, is known to have gone to Hayham to become John Tanner, “a man of means [who] has many goods.”84 Elton villagers probably did some of their own tanning and harnessmaking at home, along with other craft functions. Among the stream of itinerant tradespeople who passed through the village were slaters, tilers, and thatchers, a tinker (“a man to repair brass jars and brass pans”), carters (“two men with dung carts at mowing time” and “two carters carrying stone”), men to “brand animals” and to “geld suckling pigs,” “a woman milking sheep,” “three grooms driving animals into the marsh,” “a girl drying malt,” “a certain excommunicated clerk helping the swineherd in the wood,” and “divers other workmen.”85 Plying trades in the abbey village of Ramsey and in Peterborough, Stamford, and other nearby towns were shoemakers, saddlers, chandlers, coopers, glaziers, tanners, tailors, and other merchant craftsmen.

  The countryside profited in quality of life from the growth of city crafts. As Henri Pirenne observed, the old manorial workshops, with their serf labor, turned out tools and textiles “not half as well as they were now made by the artisan of the neighboring town.”86 At the same time, the flight of craftsmen tended to restrict the village to the uninspiring toil of plow and sickle. To the variety of life of the town was added the lure of freedom. On the Continent the rule had long been accepted that “free air makes free men” and residence in a town for a year and a day erased serfdom. In England servile disabilities were canceled by similar residence in a borough with a royal charter or on royal demesne land. What a man needed in order to take advantage of the opportunity was a skill, not easy but not impossible to obtain in the village. According to J. A. Raftis, emigration of villeins from the Ramsey estate “was a regular feature of manorial life from the time of the earliest extant court rolls.”87

  One village craft was so widely practiced that it hardly belonged to craftsmen. Every village not only had its brewers, but had them all up and down the street. Many if not most of them were craftswomen (virtually all in Elton). Ale was as necessary to life in an English medieval village as bread, but where flourgrinding and bread-baking were strictly guarded seigneurial monopolies, brewing was everywhere freely permitted and freely practiced. How the lords came to overlook this active branch of industry is a mystery (though they found a way to profit from it by fining the brewers for weak ale or faulty measure). Not only barley (etymologically related to beer) but oats and wheat were used, along with malt, as principal ingredients. The procedure was to make a batch of ale, display a sign, and turn one’s house into a temporary tavern. Some equipment was needed, principally a large cauldron, but this did not prevent poor women from brewing. All twenty-three persons indicted by the Elton ale tasters in 1279 were women. Seven were pardoned because they were poor.88

  Life in a village in the late thirteenth century was not one of abundance for anybody. “Given the productive powers of their soil, their technical knowledge, their capital resources and the burden of their rents and taxes, the numbers of peasants on the land were greater than its produce could support,” conclude M. M. Postan and J. Z. Titow, perhaps pessimistically.89 Certainly ordinary men and women, whether free or unfree, could not escape occasions or degrees of want. What the village offered, at least to its landed tenants, free or unfree, was a measure of relative security in return for a life of unremitting labor. Not surprisingly, many longed for something a little easier and a little better. The fabled land of Cockaigne of popular literature was a place “where the more you sleep the more you earn,” and where people “can eat and drink/ All they want without danger.”90

  From the perspective of modern times, the daily drudgery and scant returns of the medieval village appear less the product of the social system than of the state of technology. And even though, like all the social structures that had preceded it, the manorial system was heavily weighted in favor of the ruling class, it was not wholly one-sided. “The manor does not exist for the exclusive use of the lord any more than it exists for the exclusive benefit of the peasantry,” concluded Paul Vinogradoff, one of the earliest of its modern historians.91

  Yet dissatisfaction was inevitable. Protests and minor riots are recorded at numerous places, over labor service, tallage, merchet, the right to buy and sell land, mowing service, and other villein burdens.92 Similar incidents occurred on the Continent throughout the thirteenth century. For the time being, no large-scale movements developed, but the smoldering potential was there. Piers Plowman endorsed the existing order but insisted that it should be based on justice on the part of the lord, a philosophical solution with only limited practical merit. The villein was bound to resent not only his obligations but his status, and the lord could not forever hold him to either.

  8

  THE PARISH

  BESIDES BEING A VILLAGE AND A MANOR, ELTON was one other thing: a parish, a church district. Like village and manor, village and parish did not always coincide. Some villages had more than one church, usually because they included more than one manor. Some parishes, especially in the north of England, included more than one village, indicating that a large estate, with its church, had been fractioned into several villages and hamlets. By the thirteenth century, however, most villages were geographically coterminous with their parishes, so that the village formed a religious as well as a secular community.1

  The parish church, like the village, was a medieval invention, the ancient Romans having worshiped at private altars in their own homes. The thousands of Christian churches built in the villages across Europe in the Middle Ages were the product of two different kinds of foundation. Some were planted by the city cathedrals and their subordinate baptisteries, and formed an integral part of the Church establishment. Others were private or “proprietary” churches, built by landowners on their own property, to serve their households and tenants. The landowner might be a wealthy layman, or a monastery, or a bishop. The church was the owner’s personal property, to be sold or bequeathed as he pleased. Its revenues went into his pocket. He appointed the priest, had him ordained, and paid him a salary. With the settlement of Northern Europe, these private-enterprise churches spread. In England they followed a similar development, and given the sanction of Saxon and Danish kings, acquired the important right to perform the sacraments of baptism and burial. The church tower became a village landmark, and the parish priest, who usually had enough Latin to witness and guarantee legal documents, became a valued member of village society.2

  It is likely that when Dacus reluctantly sold Elton to Aetheric in 1017 and it came into the possession of Ramsey Abbey, the property included a church. Seventy years later, Domesday Book states that Elton had “a church and a priest,” and in 1178 Pope Alexander III confirmed that “Elton with its church and all pertaining to it” belonged to Ramsey Abbey.3

  Of the medieval rectors of Elton, only a few scattered names survive. Thuri Priest was rector in 1160, at the time of the earliest manorial survey; Robert of Dunholm in 1209; Henry of Wingham in mid-thirteenth century; and after 1262 Robert of Hale, a member of a local family whose names occur in the manorial court records.

  Meanwhile the arrangement had undergone a change. The lord still appointed the rector (persona in the extents, hence “parson”), but now he bestowed the parish on him as a “living,” from which the appointee received all or most of the revenues. Although he was always a cle
ric, the rector did not necessarily serve in person, but might live elsewhere, hiring a deputy, usually a vicar, and profiting from the difference between the revenues he collected and the stipend he paid his substitute.4

  In general, a class difference existed between the rectors who served in person and those who merely collected the revenues. The former were typically local men, sons of free peasants or craftsmen, sometimes of villeins who had paid a fine to license their training and ordination. The absentee was more apt to be a member of the nobility or gentry, a younger son who had been ordained and drew his income from parish churches rather than tenants’ rents.

  Certain absentee rectors held several livings simultaneously. Some of these “pluralists” held only a few parishes and supervised them conscientiously; others held many and neglected them. A notorious example was Bogo de Clare, younger son of an earl, who in 1291 held twenty-four parishes or parts of parishes plus other church sinecures, netting him a princely income of £2,200 a year. Bogo spent more in a year on ginger than he paid a substitute to serve one of his parishes, in which he took little interest. A monk visiting one of Bogo’s livings on Easter Sunday found that in place of the retable (the decorative structure above the high altar), there were only “some dirty old sticks spattered with cow-dung.”5