The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only)

by Christopher Hibbert

  Lesser guests were placed at a separate table in the chamber. The yeomen ushers sat with the ‘ladies’ gentlewomen’ at a board laid outside the chamber door; while those guests considered unworthy of dining upstairs at all were found places at the steward’s table in the hall.

  After grace had been said by the almoner or the clerk of the closet, eating could at last begin. The gentleman cupbearer attended only to the earl, holding the cup for him on bended knee and carrying in his other hand a second cup into which he caught any drops that might fall from his master’s lips. The sewer and carver, helped by gentlemen waiters, looked after the earl and his guests above the salt, while another sewer, without a napkin and assisted by yeomen, waited upon those at the less favoured end of the board.

  The second course was welcomed into the chamber with even more elaborate ceremony than the first, being met at the door by two yeomen ushers carrying their rods of office and escorted to the board by the sewer who made three obeisances on the way before kneeling down to take the prescribed ‘sayes’ from dishes held up to him by kneeling gentlemen.

  When the meal had been finished, the tables cleared and the guests’ hands washed, all stood up to bow or curtsey to the earl and then retired to the end of the chamber where they stood in rows in order of seniority. The earl himself now stood up; his hands were also washed; grace was said; the gentlemen attendants and yeomen servants who had served the meal left the room, their places being taken by other gentlemen and servants who had dined in the hall. Musicians were called in and dancing began.20

  The most popular form of dancing was the carole in which the ladies and gentlemen held each other by alternate hands and moved round in a circle, singing to the tune. There was often, as in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ‘much noise and merriment’ and ‘all the mannerly mirth that men tell of’, although dances were usually then less energetic than the lively, almost acrobatic skips and jumps later to be enjoyed at the court of Queen Elizabeth I.

  As well as dancing there were often entertainments by tumblers, buffoons, jugglers, knife-dancers and acrobats, story-tellers, minstrels and musicians. The musicians played a variety of instruments, viols and timbrels, tabors and citoles, citherns, bagpipes and drums, representations of which are to be seen, carved as label-stops, on the blind arcading in the north aisle of the nave in Beverley Minster.

  Harps were a source of particular pleasure; and in several richer families a harpist, as well as a wayte to pipe the watch, was a permanent member of the household. In the later Middle Ages the instruments became both more refined and more numerous; and a cultivated man able to afford them might have virginals, clavichords and portable organs as well as flutes, gitterns (early guitars) and shawms (types of oboe).

  While listening to the music, women might take up their embroidery if the light was strong enough, or fondle a pet, a cat, a monkey or a lap dog whose feeding at table books of etiquette still regularly condemned. And after the music they might play games, on summer evenings in the garden, bowls perhaps, or handball, or whip and top, or a sort of nine-pins known as kayles after the French quilles in which the players threw balls or, more commonly, sticks at rows of pins or pegs, endeavouring to knock them all down at once.

  On winter evenings guests would play games indoors, games of chance or games of skill like chess. Tables, a kind of backgammon, was popular; so was an early form of noughts and crosses; so were all the many different ways of playing with dice, the names of ten of which were listed by John of Salisbury in the twelfth century; and so was the game of draughts or checkers which was played on boards resembling our own but usually with square instead of round pieces.

  Chess, which seems not to have been so common in England as it was on the Continent until Queen Elizabeth I encouraged the game, was played with pieces similar to those in use today. As it was introduced into Europe in the tenth century from the Muslim world, the original pieces had to be modified. The Arabs admitted no females on to their boards, so there were no queens, these European pieces replacing the eastern vizier. Also there were, of course, no bishops which were represented on the Saracenic board by an elephant. The European sets were, however, often as elaborately carved, in wood, ivory and semi-precious stone, as their Middle Eastern and Asian counterparts; and the boards upon which the pieces were moved were, as frequently, valuable slabs of precious metals or crystal. The pieces were of large dimensions, a king of the twelfth century, belonging to one of several sets found off the coast of Scotland in 1831, being no less than seven inches in circumference and over four inches high. And, since the game, like so many others, was generally played for money and quarrels often arose, the pieces made handy and, on occasions, dangerous missiles. Bauduin, the illegitimate son of Ogier, is said to have received such a violent blow with a rook from the young Prince Charles that both his eyes flew out of his head. And there is a similar story of King John as a boy losing his temper when playing, and battering his opponent over the head with a heavy board.

  The rules for playing chess were less complicated then than now, although there were numerous variations of the game, among them ‘The Damsel’s Game’, ‘The Chase of the Knight’ and ‘The Battle of the Rooks’. The rules were available in Latin verse from the twelfth century; and by the sixteenth there were instructions in English on how to ‘Learn the Game Easily and Play it Well’.21

  Playing cards were also introduced into England from the East by way of France or Spain; though these were not known until the fourteenth century, the date 1379 being ascribed by an Italian writer to their first arrival in Viterbo ‘from the country of the Saracens’. But Chaucer and his contemporaries never refer to them; and it was not until after his death that card games began to rival tables as a popular medieval pastime. By 1463 they had become so popular and so many packs were being brought in from the Continent, particularly from Germany, France and the Netherlands, that Parliament forbade their importation at the request of the English manufacturers; and by 1497 apprentices were spending so much time playing cards, and presumably quarrelling over the money won and lost, that a statute was passed forbidding them to play except in their masters’ houses at Christmas. A few years later, when Margery Paston wrote to one Lady Morley asking what kinds of game were considered suitable for a house in mourning over the Christmas holidays, she received the reply that in the Morley family ‘there were none disguisings, nor harpings, nor luting, nor none loud disports, but playing at the tables, and the chess, and cards’. An inquiry addressed to Lady Stapleton elicited a similar response.22

  For those too high-spirited to settle down to play cards, there were numerous more lively and frolicsome games, some of them of unknown antiquity. Among the most popular, particularly with ladies, or so it seems from contemporary illuminations, was blindman’s buff, then known as hoodman blind, and hot-cockles in which one of the party knelt down blindfolded with her face on the knee of another while the rest of the players sat round her in a circle. One of these would hit her on the hand or on the back; and from the strength of the blow or otherwise she had to guess who the striker was. If she guessed aright, the striker took her place; if not, she had to submit to further punishment. An even livelier and potentially painful game was frog-in-the-middle in which the frog was required to sit on the ground while the other players surrounded and buffeted him, or more usually her, until one of them was caught and held so firmly that escape was impossible. These games were particularly rowdy at Christmas when they came under the control of a lord of misrule who, arrayed in the most elaborate costume and carrying a wand of office, was allowed to make up new rules during his term of office.

  There were also less energetic games, among them roy-qui-ne-ment (the king who does not lie) in which one of the party asked another questions, often extremely indelicate questions, designed to provoke laughter by their phrasing and the answers they were expected to elicit; and ragman in which the participants drew at random strings attached to rolls of verses – often again ve
ry coarse verses – describing the supposedly good or evil character of the person who selected them.

  When it was time to go to bed, the guests dispersed to their lodgings where beds would have been prepared for them.

  In the bedchamber let a curtain go round the walls decently, or a scenic canopy, for the avoiding of flies and spiders [one early medieval book advised]. A tapestry should hang appropriately. Near the bed let there be placed a chair to which a stool may be added, and a bench nearby the bed. On the bed itself should be placed a feather mattress to which a bolster is attached. A quilted pad of striped cloth should cover this on which a cushion for the head can be placed. Then sheets of muslin, ordinary cotton, or at least pure linen, should be laid. Next a coverlet of green cloth or of coarse wool, of which the fur lining is badger, cat, beaver, or sable, should be put over all … A perch should be nearby on which can rest a hawk … From another pole let there hang clothing … and let there be also a chambermaid whose face may charm and render tranquil the chamber, who, when she finds time to do so may knit or unknit silk thread, or make knots of orphryes [gold lace], or may sew linen garments and woollen clothes, or may mend.23

  In most great houses these might be either a single room or, in the case of the most distinguished guests, a set of rooms to which he and his personal servants only had access. The sets of rooms might contain a principal chamber for the guest’s own use, two other chambers, sometimes known as pallet chambers, for his servants, a closet in which he could be on his own to pray or read, a wardrobe and a privy. If he were accompanied by his wife, she might have her own chamber, with another chamber for her gentlewomen leading out of it. The wardrobe was a room in which the servants could sit by a fire and perhaps mend clothes; the privy, which often led off it and was sometimes consequently known by the Norman-French word garderobe, was a small apartment – also called the withdraught, jakes, latrine, or gong-in which the seat was positioned over a shaft leading to a pit or drain or was suspended over the moat. In royal houses the privy was in the care of a groom of the stool or stole, a servant whose title was later to be borne by one of the most senior officers of the royal household. As well as privies, chamber pots were available in all large households; and, for those who wanted to have a bath, big tubs were available, and in these the guest sat while servants poured warm water over him.

  While important guests were conducted to the lodgings assigned to them, others, less favoured, had to make do with a shared room or even with a shared bed; while many of the lord’s servants had no beds at all. The steward and one or two senior officials might have rooms of their own; and other gentlemen servants would sleep in what was called the knights’ chamber. But the less favoured were required to sleep on pallets, or to share a pallet, outside their master’s door. And for many the best places they could find would be on the straw by the hall fire or by the still warm ovens of the high-ceilinged kitchen.24

  2 Cottagers and Peasants

  Dwarfed by the church, the castle and the manorial hall, the cottages of the villagers were squat and dark. They had no chimneys, the smoke from the fire being allowed to escape as best it could through the partially open door or the small window apertures which were closed in cold weather with wooden shutters or pieces of cloth. The interiors were commonly divided into two main rooms, one for sleeping, the other for eating, animals frequently grunting or clucking in both, or rustling about in the straw on the floor of trodden earth. Light when required for some essential task was provided by flickering rush-lights that momentarily dispelled the gloom. Furniture was rarely to be seen, other than a few stools, a trestle table, a bench, a chest for the clothes reserved for Sundays, and frames for the bags of straw on which the occupants slept. In a corner might be glimpsed some cooking pots and dishes, a tub for washing and a home-made broom. Outside in the open, or in a shed, there might be a farm implement or two; and men fortunate enough to possess these were constantly called upon to lend or hire them, and frequently seem to have had difficulty in getting them back.1

  Very few of the cottages were of stone, even in those areas where good stone was readily found. Most were built on wooden frames, the walls being made of rows of sticks between which long twigs were intertwined, creating a lattice-work; and on these frames, layers of mud, or mud mixed with straw, were plastered and left to dry. In the simplest, triangular structures the side wall timbers were planted in the earth at an angle and fixed overhead to a ridge pole; in others the wall timbers, or crucks, were curved so that it was easier to stand up inside. In those more elaborate still, the side timbers stood straight up from the earth, their tops being fixed to rafters, and the rafters in turn to the ridge pole. The roofs were usually thatched with straw, or with reeds or sedge where these grew nearby, or occasionally covered with wooden shingles.

  Between each cottage and the village lane grew a few onions or cabbages, peas or beans, leeks or garlic; and, beside the path, there were perhaps a few rows of parsley and other herbs. Behind, in a small enclosed plot, grew more vegetables, a fruit tree or two, cherries, apples and pears. Some cottages had a pig snuffling about beside a mud-splashed sty and fed on nothing but waste; several had hens, capable of providing, so Walter of Henley said in the middle of the thirteenth century, as many as 180 eggs a year each; several, also, had geese – in some villages there were enough of these to warrant the employment of a gooseherd – and a few, very few, had a cow.2 By the later Middle Ages, however, a man with a holding of more than eight or ten acres would probably have a cow, as well as other animals. In 1414, so Professor Hilton has recorded, the possessions of a tenant from the Worcestershire village of Ombersley were confiscated while he was apparently on the run as a horse thief. He held nineteen and a half acres, mostly wheat, but also rye, oats, and vetch for his animals’ forage. It was valued by his neighbours at 50s for which price one of them bought it. The man also owned, in addition to a wagon, a winnowing fan, a riddle, a plough, three cartloads of firewood, three vats of malt, and a bacon, four hogs, twenty geese, a cock with four hens, and two oxen as well as his cow.3

  In most cottages, though, a bowl of milk was not as often seen on the peasant’s table as an earthenware jug of ale; nor was a piece of beef as frequently to be found in the metal pot that hung over his fire as a mess of vegetables and oatmeal pottage which, with a hunk of dark-coloured bread, had generally to serve for his evening meal. Sometimes there would be cheese and curds or on special occasions a chicken or a rabbit snared on a poaching expedition. Yet, while peasants – not commonly known by that name in England – rarely went hungry, except in winters of exceptional hardship, when, in William Langland’s words, they ‘suffered much hunger and woe’, they seem not to have enjoyed as a general rule even the modest fare of the widow of Chaucer’s ‘Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ who ‘had a yard that was enclosed about by a stockade and a dry ditch without’:

  Sooty her hall, her kitchen melancholy,

  And there she ate full many a slender meal;

  There was no sauce piquante to spice her veal,

  No dainty morsel ever passed her throat,

  According to her cloth she cut her coat.

  Repletion never left her in disquiet

  And all her physic was a temperate diet,

  Hard work for exercise and heart’s content.

  And rich man’s gout did nothing to prevent

  Her dancing, apoplexy struck her not;

  She drank no wine, nor white, nor red had got.

  Her board was mostly served with white and black,

  Milk and brown bread, in which she found no lack;

  Broiled bacon or an egg or two were common,

  She was in fact a sort of dairy-woman.4

  Work in the village began as soon as it was light. The peasants trudged out to work, their shirts tucked into the waistbands of their breeches; those with coats wore them to the knee; many of them were bare-legged. They made their way either to the parallel strips into which their land was divided or, if
their services were required that day, to the fields of the lord of the manor. Their strips, about half an acre or an acre in extent, were divided from each other by rows of stones or ridges of unploughed land; and one man’s holding would consist of several strips, usually scattered about the village rather than in a single block. So it was in each man’s interest to work in cooperation with his neighbour, as they had to do when yoking their animals together to plough the lord’s demesne. A selfish and difficult man, however, might prefer to work independently and this would give him an opportunity to cheat his neighbour, as the dishonest peasant does in Piers Plowman by allowing his plough to gnaw into land which is not his, and, when reaping, to swing his sickle over his own boundary and cut corn he had not sowed.

  When the ground was ready for sowing, the peasants carried sacks of seeds on to their strips and either filled a basket or box, which was slung around their neck or tied round their waist, or they poured a quantity of seed into an apron which they held up for the purpose with one hand. They then scattered the seed as their wives kept away the ‘crowes, doves and other byrdes’ with stones cast from slings or arrows shot from bows. Afterwards the ground was harrowed, usually by means of a rough wooden implement drawn across the ground at the tail of some animal, a horse or an ox, a beast which Walter of Henley believed to be the more useful, since, ‘when the horse is old and worn out, then there is nothing but the skin; but when the ox is old, with ten pennyworth of grass, he shall be fit for the larder’. Peas and beans were dropped into holes made in the ground with pointed sticks.5

  The peasant’s constant concern was to procure enough manure, for the lord usually maintained that all dung found on his demesne and in the village streets was his; and the peasant was consequently driven to sweeping up the straw of the previous year’s harvest, which had been used in cowsheds during the winter, mixing this with earth, and throwing it on to the streets before ploughing it back into the fields. When his crop had grown, he mowed it with a scythe, an implement much like those still occasionally to be seen, managing to cut about an acre a day. He then thrashed his corn with flails made of two pieces of some wood such as blackthorn tied together by strips of leather, then either winnowed it with a fan or cast it into the air by the open door of a barn where the wind would carry off the chaff and allow the separated grain to fall to the ground.