by Robert Lacey
Master What do you say, ploughman? How do you carry out your work?
“Ploughman” Oh, I work very hard, dear lord. I go out at daybreak driving the oxen to the field, and yoke them to the plough; for fear of my lord, there is no winter so severe that I dare hide at home; but the oxen having been yoked and the share and coulter fastened to the plough, I must plough a full acre or more every day.
Master Have you any companion?
“Ploughman” I have a lad driving the oxen with a goad, who is now also hoarse because of the cold and shouting.
Master What else do you do in the day?
“Ploughman” I do more than that, certainly. I have to fill the oxen’s bins with hay, and water them, and carry their muck outside.
Master Oh, oh! It’s hard work.
“Ploughman” It’s hard work, sir, because I am not free.
The ploughman’s colloquy draws attention to the basic and unromantic reality of English life in the year 1000 - the reliance on slave labour. In 1066 the Normans were to bring to England their military-based arrangement of landholding known to generations of school children as the feudal system, with the hierarchy of serfs, villeins, and lords whose niceties are much argued over by historians. But prior to 1066, virtually all the documentary sources - wills, land deeds, and the literature of the day - clearly show that the basic underpinning of the rural economy in several parts of England was a class of workers who can only be described as slaves.
It is a commonplace that slavery made up the basis of life in the classical world, but it is sometimes assumed that slavery came to an end with the fall of Rome. In fact, the Germanic tribes who conquered Rome captured, kept, and traded in slaves as energetically as the Romans did - as indeed did the Arab conquerors of the Mediterranean. The purpose of war from the fifth to the tenth centuries was as much to capture bodies as it was to capture land, and the tribes of central Germany enjoyed particular success raiding their Slavic neighbours. If you purchased a bondservant in Europe in the centuries leading up to the year 1000, the chances were that he or she was a “Slav” - hence the word “slave.”
In England, the Anglo-Saxons proved to be slavers on a par with their Germanic cousins. Weallas, or Welshman, was one of the Old English words for slave - which showed where the Anglo-Saxons got their slaves. When, in 1086 a.d., the Normans commissioned their Domesday survey of the land they had conquered, it showed that there were significantly more slaves in the west of England than in the east, reflecting the closeness of Wales, and also the fact that Bristol was a slave port, trading with the Viking merchants based in Ireland. According to contemporary chronicles, eleventh-century Dublin operated the largest slave market in western Europe.
But war was not the only source of slaves. Anglo-Saxon law codes cited “slavery” as the penalty for offences ranging from certain types of theft to incest. In this latter case, the male involved became a slave of the king, while the woman was consigned to the service of the local bishop.(30) Execution was evidently considered too severe a penalty for such an offence, while long-term imprisonment was not a practical possibility. Prisons did not develop until stone buildings and iron bars made them feasible, and since impoverished offenders had no money to pay fines, the only thing they could forfeit was their labour.
People also surrendered themselves into bondage at times of famine or distress, when they simply could not provide for their families any more. In later centuries there was the poorhouse or the bankruptcy law to help cope with such tragedies, but in the year 1000 the starving man had no other resort but to kneel before his lord or lady and place his head in their hands. No legal document was involved, and the new bondsman would be handed a bill-hook or ox-goad in token of his fresh start in servitude. It was a basic transaction - heads for food. The original old English meaning of lord was “loaf-giver,” and Geatfleda, a lady of Northumbrian made the transaction explicit in the will she drew up in the 990s: “for the love of God and for the need of her soul, [Geatfleda] has given freedom to Ecceard, the blacksmith, and Aelfstan and his wife and all their offspring, born and unborn, and Arcil and Cole and Ecgferth [and] Ealdhun’s daughter, and all those people whose heads she took for their food in the evil days.”(31)
Slavery still exists today in a few corners of the world, and from the security of our own freedom, we find the concept degrading and inhuman. But in the year 1000 very few people were free in the sense that we understand the word today. Almost everyone was beholden to someone more powerful than themselves, and the men and women who had surrendered themselves into bondage lived in conditions that were little different to those of any other member of the labouring classes. “Slave” is the only way to describe their servitude, but we should not envisage them manacled like a galley slave in ancient times, or living in segregated barracks like eighteenth-century slaves on the cotton plantations - or, indeed, like the workers in South African mines in our own times. Most bondsmen lived in what we would now describe as “tied” accommodation in a village with their families, and probably reared their own livestock as well. They were the men with the spades.
In the year 1000 people could not imagine themselves without a protector. You had a lord in heaven and you needed a lord on earth. The ploughman in Aelfric’s Colloquy talked resentfully about his fear of his lord, and the fact that he worked so hard because his master required it. But other medieval documents proposed faithful service to a good master as a considerable - even a life-fulfilling - source of satisfaction, as it was for many servants right into our own times. It is a late twentieth-century innovation to scorn the concept of “service.” In the year 1000 every English village had its local lord who provided an umbrella of protection for his neighbourhood, and that relationship involved a significant element of mutual respect. Anglo-Saxon lords never exercised, or attempted to claim, the notorious droit de seigneur whereby manorial law in some parts of Europe gave the local lord the right to bed the young brides of the village on their wedding night, and there were significant limits on their powers.
The great English churchman of the time was Wulfstan of York, the Billy Graham of the year 1000, whose fire-and-brimstone sermons had folk trembling. As chief executive of two major dioceses - Wulfstan was bishop of Worcester as well as archbishop of York - the great orator had to administer one of the largest sets of landholdings in England, and according to one theory he was the author of the Rectitudines Singularum Personarum,(32) a tract which tried to set down the rights and obligations that regulated lordship and servitude. In a connected document on the duties of the estate manager, or reeve,(33) the archbishop examined the mechanics of how a successful farm business worked, listing all the spades, shovels, rakes, hoes, ox-goads, buckets, barrels, flails, sieves, and other tools that were needed, right down to the last mousetrap.
Wulfstan described the various types of worker one might find living in the average Anglo-Saxon village, and his account makes it clear that the ploughman and his assistant with the ox-goad were almost certainly bondsmen, looking after the team of oxen belonging to the local lord, who might be a bishop, the head of a monastery, or a nobleman. The ox-team’s primary task was to plough the lord’s land, but it also ploughed the strips of the village’s other inhabitants, who paid for this service with various sorts of rent in kind.
Wulfstan listed the dues and the perks of a centralised and authoritarian system which allowed space for free enterprise: if the ox-herd had his own cow, he could pasture it with his lord’s oxen; it was the shepherd’s perk to retain the use of twelve nights’ dung at Christmas and also to keep the milk of his flock for the first seven days after the equinox; the cottager was someone who farmed at least five acres of land and who paid for this by working for his lord every Monday in the year, as well as for three days a week in August as the harvest approached. Nor was just turning up for a day good enough. The cottager would be expected to reap a whole acre of oats in the course of one August day, or half an acre of wheat - though he was all
owed to go home with a sheaf for himself as a bonus.
Wulfstan sketched out the intricacies of give and take on any estate, emphasising how regulations should be flexible and responsive to varying local conditions. “One must learn the laws in a district lovingly,” he wrote, “if one does not wish to lose good opinion on the estate,” and he concluded his survey with a catalogue of the mechanics of celebration which brought everyone together at the key stages of the farming year - a harvest feast after reaping, a drinking feast for ploughing, a reward for successful mowing, a meal at the haystack, a log from the wagon at wood carrying, a rick-cup at corn carrying, “and many things which I cannot recount.”(34)
Unrelenting though they were, the labours of the month involved moments of great fun and celebration in the year 1000, and as March drew to an end, the village looked forward to one of the greatest festivals of all - Easter.
April: Feasting
Eostre was the goddess of dawn for the tribes of Scandinavia. Her name came from “east,” the direction from which the sun arrived every morning, and her special festival was the spring equinox - the dawn of the sun’s reign in the northern year. Pagan tradition told of the “Year King,” the human victim who was chosen and sacrificed as winter turned into spring. Buried in the fields, his body would come magically to life again with the rising grain, and everyone could share in the miracle of his rebirth by eating the bread that was made from that grain.
The Christian festival of Easter embraced these pre-Christian traditions. Following Bede’s calculations, the English Catholic church celebrated Easter on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox, and worshippers were encouraged to experience Christ’s Passion almost personally. There was a tradition that people should refrain from using nails or iron tools on Good Friday in remembrance of the iron that pierced Christ’s hands on Calvary, and next day worshippers went to church for a sombre Saturday ritual of vigil that followed Christ into the tomb, with five grains of incense being put into a candle to signify the Saviour’s five wounds.
In the celebrations of Easter Sunday, the Eucharist took on special significance, since Easter was one of the rare feast days - the others were Christmas and Whitsun - when the ordinary members of the congregation were allowed to consume the bread and wine themselves. This was not a matter of doctrine but of availability. There simply was not that much wine and bread to go round on a weekly basis, and Aelfric took advantage of the specialness of the occasion to explain the significance of the sacrament in a homily that was composed for parish priests to read out in their local churches:
Dearly beloved, you have frequently been told about our Saviour’s resurrection, how on this present day He rose up in strength from death after his Passion. Now, by the grace of God, we will explain to you about the Holy Eucharist to which you must now go ... lest any doubt concerning the living food might harm you.
... Now certain men have often questioned, and still frequently question, how the bread which is prepared from grain and baked by the heat of the fire can be changed into Christ’s body; or the wine, which is pressed out from many grapes, becomes changed, by any blessing, into the Lord’s blood?
Now we say to such men that some things are said about Christ figuratively.... He is called “bread” and “lamb” and “lion” and so forth figuratively. He is called “bread” because he is our life, and the life of the angels; he is called “lamb” on account of his innocence; a “lion” on account of the strength with which he overcomes the powerful Devil. But nevertheless according to true nature, Christ is neither bread, nor lamb, nor lion....
If we consider the Holy Eucharist in a bodily sense, then we see that... it is corruptible bread and corruptible wine, and by the power of the divine word it is truly Christ’s body and his blood; not, however, bodily, but spiritually.(35)
Aelfric’s teaching on the Eucharist differed significantly from the later doctrine of transubstantiation as fixed by the Catholic Church. In stressing the symbolism of the bread and wine, the monk was almost Protestant in his teaching, and the treatise on which he based his homily was later condemned and ordered to be destroyed by the Roman church. But what strikes the modern reader is less the theology than the clarity and power of the monk’s exposition of a complicated subject, composed and conveyed (in Englisc) without condescension or oversimplification.
The Easter feast was appreciated the more by people who had encountered the reality of famine. Today we watch famine on television, but it is scarcely a source of personal anxiety to those of us who live in the developed West. It is another of the crucial distinctions between us and the year 1000, where the possibility of famine was ever-present and haunted the imagination.
“I shall provide . . . the necessities for life,” promised Piers Plowman in the late medieval fable - with one proviso: “unless the land fails.”(36) Natural disaster and the hardship that it caused were constant spectres. People dated their lives by the years when the land and weather failed, and the pages of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle listed the milestones of misery:
975 Came a very great famine....
976 Here in this year was the great famine in the English race. . ..
986 Here the great pestilence among cattle first came to England....
1005 Here in this year there was the great famine throughout the English race, such that no one ever remembered one so grim before. . .
1014 In this year on St. Michael’s Eve [September 28] that great sea-flood came widely throughout this country, and ran further inland than it ever did before, and drowned many settlements and a countless number of human beings....
1041 All that year was a very heavy time in many and various ways: both in bad weather and crops of the earth; and during this year more cattle died than anyone remembered before, both through various diseases and through bad weather.(37)
These were the evil years when men were compelled to kneel and place their heads in the hands of their lord. In time of famine, according to one Anglo-Saxon law code, “a father may sell his son aged under seven as a slave if necessity forces him to do so,”(38) and even infanticide was not accounted a crime.(39) Bede tells an affecting story of suicide pacts among the seventh-century victims of famine in Sussex: “Frequently forty or fifty emaciated and starving people would go to a cliff, or to the edge of the sea, where they would join hands and leap over, to die by the fall or by drowning.”(40) It is not surprising that another chronicle of these years records that “men ate each other.”(41)
Cannibalism was only a ghastly folk memory for people living in the year 1000, but everyone knew the reality of scavenging the woods for beechnuts and for the other marginal foodstuffs which, in better times, were left for pigs. Charred acorns have been found in the excavations of Anglo-Saxon settlements, and it is known that acorns, beans, peas, and even bark were ground down to supplement flour when grain stocks grew low. In times of scarcity, people were not ashamed to scour the hedgerows for herbs, roots, nettles, wild grasses - anything to allay the pangs of starvation.
“What makes bitter things sweet?” asked Alcuin, the Yorkshire schoolmaster who went to reform Frankish education for the emperor Charlemagne in the eighth century. “Hunger.”
Fasting was the church’s way of harnessing hunger to spiritual purposes, and Easter came at the end of the forty-day fast of Lent. Occurring when it did, in the final months of winter when the barns and granaries were getting bare, there was a sense in which Lent made a virtue of necessity. But fasting was a process which elevated material concerns to a higher plain - a means of personal purification and the way to get God on your side. Perhaps choosing a lack would induce God to give plenty. The rhythm of fasting and feasting was another medieval experience which is foreign to most Westerners today, and it brought a special intensity to the joy with which Easter was celebrated, both in church and at the table after the triumphant Easter morning service.
Meat was the principal ingredient of an Anglo-Saxon feast
- large spit-roast joints of beef being considered the best treat. Mutton was not a particular delicacy. Wulfstan’s memorandum of estate management described mutton as a food for slaves, and pork seems also to have been considered routine.
The relatively small amounts of fat on all these meats would be viewed by modern nutritionists with quite a kindly eye. Saturated fat, the source of cholesterol with its related contemporary health problems, is a problem of the intensively reared factory-farmed animals of recent years, with their overabundant “scientific” diets and their lack of exercise. All Anglo-Saxon animals were free range, and the Anglo-Saxons would have been shocked at the idea of ploughing land to produce animal feed. Ploughland was for feeding humans. So farm animals were lean and rangey, their meat containing three times as much protein as fat. With modern, intensively reared animals that ratio is often reversed.(42)
Poultry was considered a luxury food, and it was also recognised as a therapeutic diet for invalids, particularly in broth form. Old English recipe and remedy books show that in the year 1000 chicken soup was already renowned for its soothing and restorative powers. As well as chickens, an Anglo-Saxon feast might feature ducks, geese, pigeons, and various forms of game birds - with venison the most highly prized game of all.
Aelfric’s schoolroom colloquy is eloquent on the subject of fish, which his “Fisherman” describes himself catching by net, bait, hook, and basket. We are familiar today with lobster and crab baskets, but fishermen in the year 1000 made much use of the brushwood fishing weirs one can still see in the estuary of the river Severn - wide, fixed funnel-shaped networks of basketwork set out like so many pigeonholes into which fish are swept, then left marooned. Archbishop Wulfstan described the construction of fish weirs as one of the tasks for the summer on the well-run estate, and there were evidently so many of the contraptions in eleventh-century England that they came to hinder river navigation. An enactment in the reign of King Edward the Confessor in the 1060s ordered the destruction of the ”fisheries” that hindered the flow of the rivers Thames, Trent, Severn, and Yorkshire Ouse.(43)
