The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century

by Ian Mortimer

  There are formal schools in most towns but only for the minority. Cathedrals, Benedictine monasteries, nunneries, and friaries normally have schools attached to them. Others are associated with city churches, and it is from such establishments as these that the clerks and the clergy and the undergraduates of Oxford and Cambridge are drawn. The cost of a formal education can be as much as 10d per week per pupil—far too expensive for most parents. For villeins it is totally out of the question, as the parents would have to pay an additional fine to the lord of the manor for sending their child away. The minority who, at about the age of fourteen, do matriculate to one of the two universities can expect to study first the Trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and then the Quadrivium (arithmetic, music, astronomy, and geometry) for their liberal arts degree. But there are no more than a few hundred resident members of each university at any one time. Formal education is a rare privilege.

  Given that only a small minority go to school, you will be mildly surprised by the number of people who are literate. You have probably been told at some time that only priests can read and write. That was true for England in about 1200: in those days the ability to read was legally synonymous with being a clergyman. But at that time manorial courts did not keep records, most bishops did not keep registers, and few great estates issued any documentation other than charters. Now in the fourteenth century things are very different. The proceedings of every manor court are recorded in detail, and so are the extent and customs of almost every manor. Every bishop keeps a register. Every great estate and major landowner employs a series of clerks. Every judge has his clerical staff, and so does every sheriff, escheator, and coroner. Most wealthy merchants keep accounts of some sort. By 1400 even churchwardens are recording their income and expenditure in account rolls.9 All the professional men in a city—physicians, lawyers, scriveners, surgeons, and schoolmasters—can read and write, and maybe as many as 20 percent of other tradesmen are also literate. As for country areas, manorial clerks, parish clergy, and parish churchwardens form a literate core. When lists of the most reliable freeholders in a rural area are drawn up, literacy is often noted, revealing that many of them are literate.10 Villeins do not feature in such lists, the majority being unable even to recognize their own name, let alone write it. Despite this you should reckon on a male literacy rate of 5 percent of the adult population in rural areas, and 20 percent in urban areas.11 By the end of the century these are probably significant underestimates with regard to certain towns and cities.

  Knowledge of the Wider World

  Another myth often repeated in the modern world is that ordinary medieval people never travel more than five or six miles from their homes. As you will suspect from the masses pouring into towns on market days, this is not correct. It is true that most villeins do not travel more than a few miles from their manor, on account of their bond to their lord, but freemen can—and do—travel much farther afield.

  Consider the position of a prosperous franklin who wishes to marry his six or seven sons and daughters to boys and girls of similar status. He will probably have to consider families outside his own parish. Nor will all the suitable families be in one single adjacent parish.

  In this way, within a generation or two, one family is spread across a wide area. Each member of the family will end up visiting different market towns and passing on information about what is available in each place to his kinsmen. In one large village you may have three or four such families, and their pooled information about towns and political changes will be quite extensive. They will collectively know all the towns in every direction for a range of twenty or thirty miles. They will also know many of the most influential individuals. Thus a complex network is built up through kinship, friendship, and trade. Furthermore, when members of these families travel, they stay with their relations. Thus they keep in touch with their second and third cousins, thereby securing a mutually supportive network of contacts and places to stay.

  Now consider the social responsibilities of the above franklin’s family. Let us say one of his brothers is chosen to be the lord’s manorial bailiff. That will entail him traveling between his manor and the steward of the lord’s estates, who could be anywhere in the kingdom, traveling with his master. Perhaps the franklin has another brother, a friar, who travels between the towns and villages preaching. Or a mariner. Perhaps they have a cousin who acts as the township constable for a year. This will require him not only to travel around the manor and to the adjacent manors but also to attend the hundred court and the county court, which could be twenty or thirty miles away. If the mother of all these men was from a family which held a portion of a manor, they may well have kin among the esquires in a nobleman’s household, traveling up and down the country. In this way information networks are extended far beyond the original manor.

  As soon as you start to think of all the many different activities which entail travel, you realize that freemen regularly travel distances of ten or twenty miles or more. Freeholders of land worth more than forty shillings can vote for the county’s parliamentary representative, and that entails a journey to the county town. The clergy of the diocese have to travel long distances for the ordination of priests or the trying of ecclesiastical cases. The royal justices and their clerks and servants move around the whole country, and, wherever they hold court, they draw in hundreds of local officers and accused men and women. Many people travel about the country on pilgrimages. Add those members of monasteries and noble households who have to oversee the running of distant estates, and you realize that travel is not just common, it is almost unavoidable.

  A good example is the business of proving a will. Executors are required to swear their oath and prove the will in a particular ecclesiastical court. Thus they might have to travel to any one of several courts: the bishop’s consistory court, an archdeaconry court, a special or “peculiar” court of a church official, or the court of the archbishop of Canterbury (at Lambeth). The lack of any public transport system is not an excuse for not attending. Nor is distance. When a man who lives on the border of Devon and Cornwall dies, leaving property in each county, the executor of his will has no option but to make a journey to Exeter and back, a round trip of about eighty miles, taking several days. If a man dies leaving property straddling the boundary between the dioceses of York and Lincoln, a journey to Lambeth will be necessary (a round trip of about three hundred miles). Official business forces men and women to travel, even if they would never do so for pleasure.

  What do English people know about what is going on abroad? Here again practicalities come into play. When Edward III leads an army across France in 1346, the fifteen thousand men he takes with him are drawn from all parts of the kingdom. You can say the same thing for the armies sent to Gascony (the English kings’ feudal lands in southwest France), or those summoned to fight in Scotland by all five of the fourteenth-century English kings. Those men from the south of England who march to Scotland visit many different towns, meeting many different men and women along the way, and hearing dozens of regional accents. No fewer than thirty thousand Englishmen cross the Channel to join in the siege of Calais in 1346–47, according to the official payroll. These men do not just find themselves whisked off to start fighting; many have to march two or three hundred miles from their homes just to get to the point of embarkation, bringing them into contact with many fellow soldiers from all over the realm and allowing them to see many places on the journey and spread whatever news and stories they have to tell.

  Information about events overseas is carried in a variety of ways. First there are regular links between the English clergy and the pope. English clerks and messengers regularly travel all the way across France to Avignon or Rome, coming into contact with people from all walks of life along the way, from innkeepers to monks and lords. A significant number of Englishmen go on long-distance pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela, Rome, Cologne (the shrine of the Three Kings), and the Holy Land. These travelers simi
larly bring back their knowledge of the wider world. Thousands of Englishmen take part in the crusades in Prussia and Lithuania, or the crusade to Nicopolis; to do so they have to travel vast distances, meeting people from many different kingdoms. Then there are those letters sent to and from the king, containing news which is circulated around England by men coming and going from court. Messengers from France and Spain arrive regularly, partly on account of Edward II’s wife being the daughter of the king of France and his cousin being the king of Castile. Edward III has much business with his kinsfolk in the Low Countries. Two of his sons marry Castilian princesses and one weds the daughter of the duke of Milan. Richard II marries a princess from Prague (Bohemia) and Henry IV’s sisters are queens of Castile and Portugal. One of his daughters marries the king of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark in the early fifteenth century. England might be situated on an island, but it is far from being cut off.

  Another means of obtaining international news is via sailors and traders. Mariners sailing from King’s Lynn and Boston know their way around the shores of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and the Baltic states. English merchants are permanently based in Copenhagen and Danzig (modern Gdansk); a few merchant adventurers have even made their way into Muscovy (as the Grand Duchy of Moscow is known). The duchy of Aquitaine is the inheritance of the king of England, and most of England’s wine comes from Gascony, so sailors leaving Plymouth are familiar with the route down to Bordeaux. There are many and frequent sailings between the south coast of England and the Low Countries, especially to the great Flemish cloth-working cities of Bruges and Ghent, which import huge quantities of English wool. There are the German trading cities of the Hanseatic League, with which London merchants also do business. England might not be the most important trading nation in Christendom, but its economic links do reach from Ireland and Portugal to Constantinople and Moscow.

  What does all this mean for the ordinary person? It depends on where he or she lives. Those in the towns and villages along the main roads between London and the major ports—especially Dover—are familiar with foreigners and merchants coming and going on a daily basis. But probably everyone in England knows someone who has fought in Scotland, Ireland, France, Spain, or on one of the Prussian crusades in eastern Europe. There can be no one who has not had direct access to the travelers’ tales told by soldiers. So when Geoffrey Chaucer pipes up about a knight taking part in battles in Lithuania, Prussia, Russia, Portugal, and Turkey, most of his audience will be familiar with the names of these places and know how far they are from England, even if they have never seen a map. And when he starts talking about the Dartmouth sea captain who knows all the harbors between the Baltic and Cape Finisterre, and each inlet in Brittany and Spain, his audience understands; everyone has heard of the famous Sir John Hawley: pirate, merchant, and eighteen-times mayor of Dartmouth. Even Chaucer’s references to Syria and Asia find a place in the medieval idea of the world. Henry IV—a man who has been to Jerusalem as well as to Vilnius, Königsberg, and Danzig—corresponds with the king of Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia).12 Edward III entertains the son of the “king of India.”13 In 1400 the emperor of Constantinople visits England in person, bringing a group of Greek Orthodox priests from Byzantium. So it may be said that, while many villeins never travel far from their own manor, most people have some idea of what goes on beyond the seas, even if they have not left England in person.

  Understanding what lies beyond the borders of Christendom is a completely different matter. No one in medieval England has ever been to China or India. World maps do mention the Chinese—they call them Seres on account of their wearing silk—but knowledge about Asia is so scanty that it can hardly be called knowledge at all. The ancient confusion of India and Ethiopia—which originated with Pliny the Elder in the first century AD—persists.14 As a result of a forged twelfth-century letter, many people believe that there are in fact three Indias, fabulously wealthy countries ruled by a Christian prince (Prester John). India is accordingly considered synonymous with Asia, and, in its most extended form, is thought to cover half the globe. Such misunderstandings are not helped by the theories of monastic revisionists who do not themselves travel beyond the cloister and who suggest on the basis of theology that the eastern shore of India lies only a few days’ sailing westward of Spain.

  Although most people do know that the world is a globe, they do not think about the logical consequences of this—that one could sail to China westward from England, for example.15 This will not be attempted until Columbus’s voyages in the next century. People know that the landmass of Asia, Africa, and Europe is surrounded by a great ocean, but they understand that on the other side of this ocean—and thus on the other side of the world—there is a fourth continent, called the Antipodes, or Terra Australis Incognita (”the unknown southern land”). Men cannot go there because it is too hot. There live fantastic races like the Sciopods, who have only one large foot. When in need of relief from the heat, Sciopods lie on their backs and shelter in the shade of their feet. Alongside them in the Antipodes live more than a dozen fabulous races.16 These include the Antipedes (people whose feet point backward), Amazons (women with a single breast), Cynocephales (men with the heads of dogs), Panoti (men with elephant trunks for ears), and Blemmyae (headless people whose faces are embedded in their chests).

  Even knowledge of our own side of the Earth can be vague. Some of the fabulous races from the southern continent are confused with the inhabitants of far-off places like India and Ethiopia. Other domestic races are invented, such as the Ethiopian Troglodytes (swift-footed but dumb cave dwellers) and the Wife-Givers (men who encourage everyone who passes their way to sleep with their wives and daughters in the hope of securing presents). Some races in Asia are supposed to eat their parents, fattening them up in their twilight years before serving them up as a ritual feast. The widely believed authority John Mandeville states that on the East Asian island of Sandin, if a man is sick and the prognostication is not good, the remedy for his malady is for his family to suffocate him, and boil and roast his body, and then feed him in a festive dinner to all his friends and relatives. 17

  The problem is that not all such knowledge is wholly wrong. In East Asia there probably are cannibalistic communities. There are black people in Ethiopia (although they are not black from having been roasted by the sun, as the contemporary encyclopedias state). Geographical experts will tell you that there is a large island off the coast of India (which we know as Sri Lanka). Very good, you might think, until the same informant adds that Sri Lanka has two winters and two summers every year, and that dragons and elephants are common there. Elephants, yes, but dragons? Nor is this all: on the way home from Sri Lanka you will come across unicorns and phoenixes and any number of fabulous creatures. Perhaps the unicorn is a vague traveler’s tale of the Indian rhinoceros? Perhaps the dragon is a vague memory of a man-eating saltwater crocodile? It is impossible to tell. Fourteenth-century Englishmen do know what elephants and crocodiles look like. Exeter Cathedral has a fine elephant carving on one of its misericords, and Henry III even kept an elephant at the Tower of London in the thirteenth century (it lived three years). As for crocodiles, Bartholomew the Englishman has written a description of one: “his bite is venomous, his teeth are horrible and shaped like a comb . . . if a crocodile finds a man by the edge of the water, he kills him if he can, then weeps over him, and finally swallows him.” But it is fair to say that Englishmen know little for certain of the wider world. The only thing you can be sure of is that their understanding of what lies beyond Christendom is part fact and part fiction, and it might as well be all fiction considering no one can tell one part from the other.

  Discerning Minds?

  The lack of distinction between fact and fiction with regard to distant countries is understandable, but it should alert you to a wider failure to distinguish between the real and the fabulous. At times it seems that medieval people pride themselves on the quantity of their knowledge, not its quality or correct
ness. Well-educated and intelligent individuals are fully aware of the shortcomings of this attitude. Some have read the works of John of Salisbury, where it is noted that if three churches all claim to have the head of John the Baptist, at least two of them must be wrong. Chaucer similarly refers to many relics as “pigs’ bones.” And yet most people are not remotely bothered by such issues. Huge distances mean they do not have to deal with the problem of John the Baptist having three heads, and, by implication, the problem of the Church circulating untruths. For almost everyone, the principle of divine providence explains everything. Things are as they are because God has determined that that is the way they shall be—even to the point of John the Baptist having three heads.

  For the man and woman in the medieval street, the real threat to providence is not rationalism but the work of the Devil. In some parts of the country flocks of crows are seen as the Devil’s agents. In others, Celtic speakers are shunned as speakers of the Devil’s words. Merely invoking the Devil’s name is thought to turn milk sour or make fruit taste bad. Everywhere you go you will hear stories of when the Devil came to the parish or visited so-and-so’s land or came into the church and drew the body of a recently deceased witch out of her grave. Interestingly, national disasters are not generally seen as the Devil’s work but rather are portrayed as messages from God. When a terrible storm strikes the English army on Black Monday 1360, killing many men and horses with giant hailstones, it is interpreted as a divine intervention and a call to negotiate a peaceful settlement to the war. Similarly the Great Plague of 1348–49 is widely seen as a divine judgment on mankind’s wickedness, in much the same way that God caused the Flood to wash away the sinfulness of Noah’s world. The chronicler Thomas Walsingham even goes so far as to claim that the Peasants’ Revolt is the work of God, divine punishment for Londoners’ sinfulness. If you actually see the Essex and Kent peasants murdering indiscriminately, killing the archbishop of Canterbury, and assaulting the king’s mother, you might disagree.