A., population declined following the Black Death, villages shrank in size, with some crofts being consolidated while others were aban- doned.20 Archaeological evidence suggests that the late-fourteenthcentury response to decreased population was to replan villages by replacing the ad hoc arrangements of the thirteenth century with coherent, planned layouts. At Wawne in Yorkshire such change is well illustrated. In the Midlands extreme changes in village plans were, perhaps, more difficult because in the fourteenth century the crofts were raised on platforms of earth piled up from the ditches surrounding them and from the roadway. Their general plan shows more or less rectangular crofts with sunken streets winding between them. As yet, archaeological evidence is too limited for us to know how often villages changed plans or locations.21
Excavations of manors, castles, and churches have shown that these were often built on the site of peasant, houses and that entire villages or substantial portions of them were moved to make way for new structures. Nor did the new locations remain permanent even for manor houses and churches. At Wharram Percy a manor house built at the end of the twelfth century was soon abandoned and a new one built on the other side of the village. By the end of the thirteenth century yet another manor house was built and a village green added to separate it from the village. Thus the village was redesigned twice in the century. The village of Northolt shows similar changes to accommodate a lord.22
Among the other controls that lords exercised over their peasants was the right to raze their houses and relocate them. It was not a trivial imposition, for over the generations of family occupation much loving care and manure would have been expended on making the croft garden highly productive. The loss of such investment might have been more significant than that of the insubstantial houses. No comprehensive explanation has been given for village relocation. The lords had clear title to the peasants' crofts, so that it was within their power to move them. But why would a lord enter into village planning? Contact with some of the newly planned towns may have influenced country elites' taste and aroused a desire to have a more aesthetic surrounding for their new dwelling.23 Considering the extent of village self-governance that is present in bylaws regulating field use as well as interpersonal relations, however, it is possible that the villagers were consulted or even relocated at their own instigation. At Wawne, for instance, villagers may have wished to make a new start in a new location following the devastation of the plague.24
Village greens were often a feature of newly laid-out villages, but their prevalence before the fifteenth century is not known. Villages such as Hinton-on-the-Green were named for their open area, but may have received such an appellation because of the rarity of greens. Atte Green, however, was a common surname, deriving from the proximity of the family's residence to a green.
Village greens evoke such a nostalgic picture of peasant life that it is disappointing to learn that they were not routine features. When they were present, coroners' inquests show that they played a large role in village life. Women came to the well to get water in pitchers and buckets, and children of all ages played there. A little boy of three went out on a Sunday afternoon in June to play with the ducks grazing on the green and fell into a pit.25 On a Sunday in June 1356 John Waryn went to watch an archery contest at Brune in Lincolnshire, that was being held on the church green and was killed by a stray arrow.26 Greens were the sites of dances, drinking, and the inevitable drunken brawls.
Although even a brawl is more picturesque imagined on the green, social interactions of all sorts could equally well take place on dusty or muddy village streets. The streets could be very wide, quite a different picture than we experience in medieval cities. In the clay areas of the Midlands some sunken roadways were over forty feet wide and five.feet deep. Road surfaces themselves were twenty feet wide and were drained by ditches on either side. Ditches could be as much as eight feet wide and three feet deep. Complaints about the condition of the highways and streets were frequent in all court records. The potholes were so large that a cart hitting one could overturn and spill out both driver and load.27
The broad streets provided ample room for social interactions. Among rural homicides 30 percent occurred in streets or highways. In accidental deaths greens are rarely mentioned, but streets and highways were the location of 6 percent of the cases. For twenty-year-old Christine and her friend Nick the street was a place for courtship as they walked along, joking together and throwing Nick's knife in its sheath back and forth.28 Children such as Agnes, the two-year-old daughter of William Wrythe of Fordam, played with other children, jumping over ditches along the streets. Other children's street games included throwing balls back and forth, throwing stones into the water, and shooting with bows and arrows. One seven-year-old girl even found the street a place to sleep on a June day, but she was run over by a cart.29 For their parents the streets were places to work and meet each other and exchange news. Adults, too, had games in the street. Joan, wife of William Shayle,* and Thomas Prat, Jr., were "playing at wrestling" in June 1353 when his knife came out of the sheaf and stabbed her in the stomach.3o
Bodies of water were as important a feature of villages as were the streets, and equally dangerous. Drowning accounted for 34 percent of all accidental deaths (1091 cases). Rivers were the most common place of these drownings, but ponds, ditches, and wells also reckoned among the sites. The communal well and the ponds on the green have already been mentioned as village features, but closes had wells, ponds, and ditches as well. Pits dug for marl, peat, latrines, water collection, and so on were common. Ditches draining highways and streets in the Midlands and draining fields in fenland were deep enough for people to drown in. The fens also had marshland with considerable standing water. Rivers and streams crisscrossed the countryside. In Lincolnshire the daring boys and young men crossed by pole-vaulting, but boating was more common. Punting was every bit as dangerous in the Middle Ages as it is for the unwary tourist on the Cam today. People got the poles caught in the muck on the bottom and made the wrong choice, clinging to the pole instead of letting go and staying with the boat. On the larger rivers, such as the Humber in Lincolnshire, seaworthy boats had to be used, and in Bedfordshire and elsewhere smaller boats provided transportation. Robert, son of Robert Dolle of Milton Ernest, was at William Passelewe's house at Bromham and after lunch (shortly before midday) he got into a small boat, intending to cross the Ouse and return home, but he fell out and drowned. On the coastal areas the sea was an important and routine feature of life, providing food and salt. One Lincolnshire boy, aged one and a half, was by a salt pan eating a boiled egg. He wanted to dip the egg into the salt pan, but it slipped out of his hand. He drowned trying to retrieve it.31
Each village had a church that was also an institution of village contact. We cannot know how routine church attendance was for peasants, but the coroners' inquests give some glimpses of everyday worship. At vesper services on a stormy Sunday in January 1362 John Syger, eighteen and Katherine Bony, sixty, were at church praying when a large tree was blown over in the wind. It fell on the church and dislodged stones that fell on the worshipers, killing the two mentioned.32 Attendance at Sunday church services might be assumed, but religious observance appeared to be more regular. For instance, Alice, mother of Agnes, daughter of Nicholas Wellester of Stanford, had been heating water in her home on Thursday after Epiphany in 1385 when she heard the church bells ring for the Eucharist. She put down a container of boiling water and ran to church. A dog followed her, running, and knocked the bowl over on her one-and-a-half-year-old daughter.33 The church bells were a symbol for villages. They marked the time of day, announced services, and signaled events of joy and sadness for parishioners.
Churchyards contained the graves of departed parishioners, but they were often an alternative to a green or the green was in front of the church. It was not uncommon for a tavern to be located next to the church. At Croscombe in Somerset the churchwardens' accounts indicate that the tavern was a fund
raiser for the parish and that private celebrations and church ales were held there to the profit of the church.34 Other villages also had taverns near the church, for Hawisa, wife of Alan Hardy of Tost in Lincolnshire, took an earthen bowl to the tavern by the church to get her husband ale for supper.35
Most taverns, however, were in private homes. As we shall see, village women took an active role in brewing, but the taverners named were most often men, such as John of Belling, who kept a tavern in Cambridgeshire, or William Proudfoot, a taverner in Wakefield.36 But Simon le Prestisman and his wife, Agnes, took their ale at night at Christiane le Hunestere's house in Edworth.31 Whoever had a quantity of ale could put up a sign-a staff with a garland or some such symboland sell ale. Both men and women drank at taverns after the day's work was done and brought home ale to drink with meals.
The villagers were convivial people frequently spending time in each other's homes and sharing a drink or a meal. For instance, on January 5, 1270, Adam of Banbury had a number of his friends for dinner at his house, but one guest did not reach home safely. In March of the same year Simon and Richard, the sons of Hugh Fisher, went to dinner at their sister's house and returned late at night, discovering a scandal in a haystack on the way home.38 On feast days, such as Christmas villagers met in each other's houses, leaving their children together while they went off to church and then returned for a feast.39
We are used to planned towns where the alignment of houses either provides for maximum privacy and isolation from neighbors or encourages greater communication and interaction. Although peasants sought out social contacts with each other in streets, homes, churches, taverns, and village greens, they apparently did not feel the need to locate their houses in such a way as to encourage communication. Archaeological evidence indicates that until the end of the thirteenth century house sites were frequently moved around the crofts. Most of the earlier houses were located in the center of the crofts; later ones were built at the sides of the road and even facing it.40
No examples of medieval villages survive, and so their physical environment must be recreated from archaeological and record evi dence. It is doubtful that if one did survive, we would describe it as picturesque. The wide streets could not be called broad avenues, but rather large trenches below the level of the houses. The climate was damp, and became colder and wetter in the fourteenth century, so that mud was a continual problem. Only in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were cobbled stones used for streets. Houses were low, impermanent, and scattered on their lots among various outbuildings. The only substantial structure would have been the church and a manor house, if there was one in the village. It is little wonder that the church was a focal point for the community; it was often the only structure that lasted from one generation to the next.
Although the villages and hamlets were not picturesque, they were filled with lively activity during the daylight hours. The houses, as we shall see in the next chapter, were uninviting, so that as much as possible people did their play and daily routine out of doors. Villagers knew everything about their neighbors and for good or ill became involved with them in borrowing, looking after their children, and helping them with housework or fieldwork. The usual frictions of living so closely with others involved them in slanders, trespasses, assaults, and even homicides with their neighbors.
Reading the coroners' inquests, one can easily imagine this world of neighbors as a noisy one with a bustle of activity. Children ran among the crofts at play, although by the age of ten they might be herding geese or animals. Babies cried in cradles by the hearth. The usual barnyard noises of pigs, sheep, poultry, horses, and oxen filled the air. Carts rumbled through the village when the streets were dry and occasionally got stuck in the mud when it rained. A village smith might be clanging away. During the daytime women dominated the village streets, fetching water, washing clothes, calling to children, and working about their closes. The men contended that their wives spent their time drinking at the tavern and gossiping while they were away at fieldwork, but, as we shall see, women's work was no less strenuous for being largely confined to the village. The peasant communities were not sleepy villages by any means.
The distinction as different as day and night was very apt for these communities. Without the ambient light to which we have grown accustomed, nightfall brought impenetrable darkness. The moon and stars provided the only light, but with frequently cloudy weather, this source could also be obscured. Nights could be very dark, and even for people who were not returning drunk from a tavern or dinner party, crossing ditches and rivers was treacherous. It is not uncommon to read in the coroners' inquests of people groping in the dark for a log or plank over a ditch and falling in. When the sun went down, the nights could be horribly cold in winter, and poor vagabonds froze to death in ditches. In the inclement summer of 1351 a girl of seven died of exposure in a June tempest, and in August a pigherd died of the cold. In June 1388 a drunk man was coming home from a tavern on a Friday night when he fell into a furrow and was found dead from cold.41
Night brought other terrors as well. One man went out to his sheepfold at twilight and did not return. His son found him slain the next day.42 Burglars also worked under cover of darkness, breaking into houses and killing the inhabitants. Villagers resented those who stole at night more than those who carried off goods by daylight, and although there was not an aggravated punishment for night crime, the jurors always mentioned the fact in their reports to the sheriff. It is no wonder that Thomas, son of John Rayward of Crippelowe, was suspicious when he heard a long, low whistle shortly before midnight on the Saturday before the feast of St. Gregory in 1337. He was just across from the door of Eleanor, daughter of William, and saw a certain man whom he suspected of having evil intentions. He stopped him to interrogate him, but the man would not answer and fled. Because Thomas wished to keep the king's peace, he explained, he pursued him and hit him with a staff. It was so dark that he did not recognize his neighbor, Robert Lorkyn, until he knocked him to the ground.43 But if the outside was dark and dangerous during the night, there might be some cheer and coziness in the village houses. We must therefore move from the fields and streets into the houses themselves.
The family's life centered on the croft and toft, or homestead, in both champion and woodland areas. On this small property families kept their worldly goods, cared for their animals, raised their children, and entertained their friends. They called their living structure by a variety of names. House was the old Teutonic word for the dwelling place, and home evolved from the Old English and early Middle English term which included the whole village with its cluster of cottages. The initial meaning of the word home underscored the importance of the community as well as the family in people's lives. By the fourteenth century home came to have the meaning that it does today: a family residence. Contemporary records used a variety of terms: domus was the most common, but domus capitalis (dwelling house), aula, (hall), mansum, and the English word insetenhous all appeared.
Such terms indicated the physical structure, but symbolic identification with a house was equally strong. In English we preserve this sense in that the word house means both a structure and the people living in it, the "household." In medieval England the husbond was the bondsman who held the house, and the word husbandry also derived from this root.' The house (not simply the physical structure) had similar emotional ties as haus in Germany and ostel in southern France.2 It was the center of the family's economic and dwelling unit.
The physical appearance of peasant houses emerges from a combination of archaeological evidence from the more than a score of excavated houses and from the detailed descriptions in record sources. Surviving vernacular houses are as misleading as surviving villages, because most of them date from the great rebuilding of the sixteenth century. Excavations indicate a few basic house types. At the lower end of the social scale was the hut of the cottar, the cottage. These were either one-room houses of about sixteen by twelve feet or
possibly larger two-room houses of thirty-three by thirteen feet. The typical halfvirgater or virgater had a long-house. At one end was a byre that was usually separated from the living part by a cross-passage. The byre housed farm animals or other agricultural goods such as grain or farming, brewing, or dairying equipment. An internal passageway between the two parts of a long-house permitted access to either side, so that it had the appearance from the outside of being a long, low, continuous structure. Long-houses varied in size from buildings little larger than cottages to the more normal forty-nine feet in length; some were as long as eighty-two to ninety-eight feet. In addition to the basic structure, both cottages and long-houses could have outshoots that increased the floor space and functions.3
The one-bay house (A) with the hearth marked with an H was the simplest of peasant houses. The walls were of wattle and daub and the roof thatched. The two-bay house (B) was more common. The space might be shared on one end with animals. By the late Middle Ages some of the more prosperous peasants were showing a preference for the type of housing that separated the family dwelling from the animals (C). A separate barn is at right angle to the house. [Reprinted from J. G. Hurst, "The Changing Medieval Villages in England," in Pathways to Medieval Peasants, ed. J. A. Raftis, Papers in Medieval Studies, 2 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1981), p. 42, by permission of the publishers. Q 1981 by Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto.]
Long-houses have been found in excavations and in manorial records all over England, thus making them the typical peasant housing. The exceptions are in the central Midlands, East Anglia, and Kent. Their absence from these regions, at least in the thirteenth century may have resulted from a different solution to sheltering animals. These areas produced grain and so had enough straw for bedding down animals in crew yards rather than keeping them in byres attached to houses.4
The Ties That Bound Page 4