In addition to the hearth, some of the houses showed signs of fire pits for baking and ovens against the side of the wall. Internal ovens were not common in England, although they have been routinely found in central Europe.36
Partitions divided rooms within houses. Unless an oven was built against the partition, it was probably made of wattle and daub or a thin wall of stone, although an eary-fourteenth-century Wakefield case speaks of the theft of a partition of boards from an empty house.37 These partitions were unstable even compared to outside walls and sometimes came tumbling down on the occupants. On Christmas Day 1362 a twomonth-old baby was sleeping in bed with its mother when the house partition fell and killed him.38
People moved in and out of houses freely; in fact, the close was as much a part of the family living quarters as the house was. By the late fourteenth century the close was often cobbled and thus a more agreeable place to work. Rather than the oven being in the house, it was often located outside in the courtyard. Brewing might also be done outside, where there was more room to maneuver the large vats. At some manor houses ovens were very large. For instance, a twelve-year-old swineherd got so cold at his task in December that he went to the manor bakery, where he stirred up a fire in the oven, put on some more charcoal and crawled inside to get warm.39 The result, sadly, was roast swineherd.
The close might also contain a well or a pit to collect runoff water. There were, of course, pubic wells, and 2 percent of all recorded accidents happened in them. But many closes had private wells, as both archaeological and record evidence indicate. Three percent of all accidents occurred in the family's well, while 1 percent occurred in a neighbor's well. People without wells probably used a neighbor's well as frequently as they went to the village well, which might have been a longer walk. Wells were treacherous, for often they were simply pits in the ground without a superstructure over them. It was easy for a child to fall in and easy also for the weight of a filled pitcher or bucket to pull in an adult, since the ground around the well would be muddy and slippery. The wells were deep and narrow, making them difficult to get out of; they were deep enough that repairs were done by someone lowering a ladder into the well.40
Pits, or open cisterns, were also a common feature of closes. Like wells they served as a source of water for cooking and drinking; but they were also used for bathing, washing clothes, and watering animals. Pits, like wells, could be quite deep; one at Barton Blount was described as nine feet deep.41
Latrines and rubbish pits have been neglected in archaeological sites because of the emphasis on houses rather than on the whole close. Castles, manor houses, and ecclesiastical establishments left good evidence of elaborate garderobe facilities, and record sources confirm these. But of the many pits and ditches that one could fall into, latrines are seldom mentioned. In one case, a man employed by the prior of Spalding was working in the priory's latrine when he was overcome by fumes. In another case, a man fell into a latrine at Grimsby that was called Budyk. It was described as a public latrine when a three-year-old boy fell into it.42 In two excavated sites the latrines in peasant closes have been only about three feet square and two feet deep, so that falling into one would be disagreeable but difficult for an adult to drown in. One of these had two postholes, indicating that a bench had been placed over it at one time.43
In general, the excavated toft sites have been remarkably clean, and archaeological evidence does not indicate what was done with rubbish. The houses were swept out, probably into the immediate area, but there is very little broken pottery on the sites nor is it obvious that it was spread over the fields. Not even the old quarries at Wharram Percy appear to have been used for rubbish.44 Complaints in manorial courts about dung heaps obstructing village streets suggest that each house had one by its door.45 Coroners' inquests provide further corroboration. One case mentions a dunghill in the street outside a residence, and several cases involved people carting dung into fields.46 One -brutal homicide also featured a dung heap. A husband and his children murdered their stepmother, cut her up, and buried her in a dung heap outside their door.47
Clustered around the courtyard were barns, byres, and other outbuildings. The byres in long-houses are recognizable by built-in mangers, doorways that were large enough to accommodate cows and oxen, and the wear on the floor from manure removal and the tread of animals. But byres might be used for other purposes as well, such as dairying, brewing, storing grain, or perhaps even some other cottage industry such as cloth making. In parts of England where long-houses were not typical, barns were constructed in a similar fashion to the houses. Set at a right angle to the house, the combination formed part of a courtyard for keeping in animals. The other sides were built up with clay walls as at Glotho. Crew yards or cattle yards such as this were large enough to keep fourteen adult cows or twelve draft oxen. The surfaces have been scoured away by animals' hooves.48
In the coroners' inquests 1.5 percent (45 cases) of the accidental deaths occurred in barns. To the extent that accidental deaths can indicate the prevalance of various structures, Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire, and Cambridgeshire appeared to have a higher frequency of barns (2 per cent of all accidents in those counties), whilst Wiltshire had the fewest (.003 percent). Barns may indicate a greater prevalance of animal husbandry, but cannot be taken as conclusive evidence.
The close might also include a separate, smaller residence, such as a dower cottage, for a retired peasant and his wife or a rental unit. In 1374 a man and his wife were staying in a cottage in the close of their landlord when it caught fire because they had not properly covered the hearth.49
Other features that could be found on closes were pigsties, dovecotes, cowsheds, stables, drying ovens, kilns, and haystacks. Stables mentioned in the coroners' rolls appear to belong only to manorial establishments or to very successful peasants.50 Dovecotes may also have been more common on larger holdings.5' Most bylaws required that pigs be confined to sties or sheds at night.52 Drying ovens or kilns have been found throughout the highland zone in the southwest, where it was difficult to dry crops naturally. In addition to corn, they also dried beans, flax, malt, and hay.53 Haystacks were for feeding animals, but stacks of straw served a variety of purposes. Straw from oats made fairly good fodder, but on the whole animals could not digest straw. Instead, it was used for thatching, floor covering, bedding for humans and animals, and starting fires. Isabella, wife of John, the son of Margery of Bodekesham, went early in the morning to her straw stack to get straw to start a fire. She put a ladder against the stack but fell from the ladder.54
Some of the tofts contained more specialized buildings and other signs of supplemental economic activites, such as a smithy and a sawyer's pit.55 In one coroner's inquest a potter's kiln had been built close to his house and caused it to burn down when it got too hot.56
The croft, or garden area, was so intimately related to the toft in the claylands of the Midlands and East Anglia that no clear division was made between them, other than perhaps a drainage ditch. In the north, as at Wharram Percy, sizable ditches or walls separated crofts from tofts and prevented animals from straying into the living area.57
Archaeological evidence suggests that the major earthworks surrounding crofts and tofts appeared first in the fourteenth century. The ditches were predominant in the clayland areas, where it is possible that they became necessary for drainage as the weather turned wetter.58 In coroners' inquests ditches were more prominent in Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire, but since they figure in 7 percent (175 cases) of the accidental deaths in all counties, they must have been a common feature. While ditches may have been created chiefly for drainage, they served a variety of functions, aside from indirectly reducing population. Women washed cloth and clothes in ditches; children played in them, chasing ducks that fed there; both men and women bathed in them; farm animals watered there; the herbs on their banks were gathered for salads and seasonings; and they were an additional source of water. The ditches kept animals from st
raying out of the close, but planks were put across them so that the inhabitants were not isolated on quasi-islands. In Lincolnshire, as we noted, boys dispensed with planks and bridges and pole-vaulted across ditches and streams.59
In addition to the garden, the croft often had pear, apple, and cherry trees to supplement the family diet. The croft might also have a pit or pond on it for a water supply, a pig wallow, or keeping geese.
The toft and croft were areas for both activity and repose. During the day doors were opened and children and animals wandered in and out freely. While the baby of the family slept in its cradle by the open hearth, chickens, pigs, and the family cat rooted in the straw around the cradle. We know about this peaceful scene in detail, for the inquests often recount it when a chicken dropped a burning straw or ember into the cradle or pigs came in and mauled the baby. Toddlers sat by the hearth, keeping warm and investigating the contents of pots on the trivets. The young children also followed their parents as they did chores around the courtyard or in the croft. They set off on their own errands as well, chasing ducks and picking flowers. Older children were sent to collect the fruit from the croft or to herd geese and ducks at the ponds. The adults had a variety of activities that centered in the close: mending farm equipment and fishing nets or pursuing a craft. In August tall wagonloads of grain would be brought in from the fields in sheaves to be winnowed and a straw stack erected. In June the haystack would be made with grass from the meadow. The plough oxen or horses were kept in the byre or barn, and the wagon, plough, and other implements were stored there. For the housewife the house and close were places for washing clothes, churning, peeling vegetables, baking and brewing, and cooking the family supper. In good weather the trestle table was set out for family meals.60
We have a description of a family supper. William Foleweye and his wife, Albreda, were sitting at supper. Their infant son, John, was sitting on Albreda's lap. When Albreda got up to serve her husband a second helping of food and drink, the baby slipped off her lap into a pan of hot milk on the hearth. The record implies that Albreda was drunk.61
Was the peasant's home his castle or at least his private bastion and retreat? The phrase "A man's home is his castle" goes back at least to the sixteenth century, but we know that a villein's house was not safe from a lord, who could tear it down at will. And we also know that the homes were not substantial enough to withstand strong armed burglars. Beyond these powerful social predators, however, the houses did provide medieval peasant families with more privacy than early modern historians have assumed.62 A three-room house with outshoots provided considerable privacy, and many so-called late developments, such as staggered entrances, can be found in thirteenth-century peasant houses.63 The major change that took place in housing in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was not an increase in privacy, but rather that more substantial houses replaced badly built, short-lived ones.
The concern for privacy of housing was almost an obsession among the peasantry. Articles of frankpledge made gossiping and spying on neighbors a finable offense and a matter for the tithingmen to correct. They took their charge seriously, as is indicated by the fining of a woman who had hidden under a wall and listened to her neighbor's secrets.64
Human intrusions on domestic peace were not the only ones with which peasants coped. One villein complained that he could not sleep and could not have peace in his home because of noisy crows in some fine old trees by his house. The lord gave him permission to remove the trees.65 There was also the problem of the ubiquitous rodents. Other than keeping a cat, little could be done to keep mice and rats away from granary and house. There was an incantation against them, but its effectiveness is unproven:
One of the few extant English poems about peasant life is "The Man in the Moon" of the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century. In three vignettes the poet describes the peasant in winter; wearing torn and inadequate clothing, carrying a bundle on a forked stick, he will freeze to death. Next he is shown working very slowly, moved neither by exertion of labor nor by what he sees. And, finally, he is collecting wood illegally and the hedgekeeper catches and fines him. The peasant hopes to get his pledge back, "but the man in the moon does not hear."' In contrast to these pictures of misery in the material environment is Chaucer's Reeve, the wealthy peasant who grew rich as a manorial official. To indicate his wealth and status, Chaucer situates him in a treeshaded house and tells us that he has become so wealthy through his shrewd bargains that he lent money to the lord for whom he worked.2 These contemporary literary pictures of peasants are not contradictory, for both the very poor and the wealthy were present in all peasant communities and the contrast was starkly observable. These inequalities among villagers, which appear in the Domesday Book, became increasingly pronounced by the end of the fifteenth century. Thus we cannot make a generalized statement about the living standards for all peasants, just as we cannot for landholding or for house size.
A number of sources indicate the contents of peasant households. Perhaps the best place to begin is with the principalia, the household items and field equipment that the lord lent villeins when they took over a tenement. We know about these goods because they were listed in the court rolls when a villein died or fled the estate, often absconding with them. The lists are rudimentary but resemble the list a landlord would give for a furnished apartment today with the expectation that the items would be returned when the tenant vacated the apartment. A cottager, such as Agnes atte Mulle, received in 1391 a gallon brass pot, a brass pan worth 6d., two chests without locks but with tops, one chest without a bottom or a top, and one trestle table with feet. Another cottager, Thomas atte Frythe, received somewhat more goods, including a brass pot and a brass pan, a mashing vat, a barrel for ale and a barrel for verjuice, a broadcloth, a chair, a spinning wheel, a chest, a brendart (cooking implement), a shovel, an ax, a harrow, and a carder and comb for flax.3
Half-virgaters and virgaters received the same basic issue of table and tablecloth, chests, pots and pans, and vats, but in addition they might receive more elaborate furniture and certainly more farm equipment. Thomas Mody, a half-virgater who died in 1363, had a stand and a cupboard to add comfort to his home along with the usual household items, and for fieldwork he had a cart horse with a saddle and collar, a plow with a coulter, share, and yoke, a hoe, a shovel, an ax, a sieve, a sack, and a flail. John atte Wall, a virgater and a wealthy man by peasant standards, had the usual table and pots and pans, but also had a towel, a silver spoon, a four-gallon and a twelve-gallon brass pot, a stool, a goblet, a blanket and two pairs of sheets, a mattress, a chest, a coffer, various serving utensils, a lamp, and a kiln or oven. For farming he had two iron-bound wagons, one for dung, a cord, a plow, a horse harrow, a dung fork, a sheaf fork, a mattox, a flail, an ax, a sieve, a sack, and a seed lip.' Neither cottagers nor virgaters were often given chairs or even stools.
The principalia, like the contents of a furnished apartment, did not represent the whole of a family's possessions. Other items appear in record sources and in archaeological evidence, particularly at house sites. Various types of pottery are the most common find on an archaeological site. Everyday pottery was coarse, unglazed ware for cooking pots, bowls, and jugs. These were very functional because they were cheap and could be put on a trivet over a low fire for heating liquids. In addition, all sites show some glazed pottery that was imported from regional potteries. Finally, digs turn up some very fine and highly glazed jugs that must have been prized items in peasant households. They could come from as much as a hundred miles away. One may assume that most of the better-quality pottery came from market towns where peasants sold their surpluses and bought a variety of ready-made goods.'
Metal objects such as locks, hinges, spurs, knives, and parts of spits, trivets, and cooking pots were also found on the archaeological sites. But perhaps the most interesting items among private possessions were querns of stone that had come from the Rhineland in Germany or from the Mediterranean. The quer
n stones could be twenty-four inches across and must have presented real problems to transport by pack animals over the bad roads leading to these isolated villages. Similarly heavy objects such as Purbeck marble and whetstones from France and Scotland also appear.' The presence of these objects for food preparation, along with imported and decorated spindle whorls, suggests that families invested rather heavily in the housewife's work and even spent some money on decorative items to make her work more enjoyable.'
Ephemeral items were not preserved and valuable ones were not idly lost in a house or village ditch. The former included baskets, wooden bowls and buckets, towels and other articles of cloth, rope, and so on. The latter included silver spoons, coins, and jewelry. Bits of jewelry and coin turn up on village sites, but these fragments indicate that peasants were very prudent about letting them out of their possession. Only recently a fourteenth-century silver-spoon was found in a thatched roof. The high price it fetched at auction attests to its rarity. For the peasantry silver spoons meant more than an indication of wealth and status; they were also a form of saving and accumulating profits. They played a role similar to that of women's gold and silver jewelry in other peasant societies: for both display and savings. Since the houses were so easy to break into, peasants kept silver spoons and other such valued items in locked chests.
We know about ephemeral and valuable possessions from court records. Valuable goods stolen from houses included mazers (drinking bowls usually made of maple), tablecloths and sheets, brass pans and pots, silver spoons, pieces of jewelry, and money. In all, 2 percent of the thefts appearing in jail delivery rolls included household goods; 5 percent, clothing; and 17 percent, valuables. Cloth, often stored in houses, accounted for 15 percent of thefts.'
The Ties That Bound Page 6