Life in a Medieval Village

by Frances Gies

  This deed have I done for thee.

  Good example givest thou me

  How I shall serve thee in thine age.

  …This half sack shall lie above thy father,

  And keep the other part to thy behalf.68

  Most peasants were more careful. In Upwood in 1311 Nicholas son of Adam turned over his virgate to his son John, stipulating that he should have “a reasonable maintenance in that land until the end of his life,” and that John should give him “every year for the rest of his life” specified amounts of grain.69 At Cranfield in 1294, Elias de Bretendon made a more complicated agreement with his son John; John was to take over his house, yard, and half virgate for the services and money rent owed the lord. “And…the above John will provide suitable food and drink for Elias and his wife Christine while they are alive, and they will have residence with John [in his house].” The contract left nothing to chance:

  And if it should happen, though may it not, that trouble and discord should in the future arise between the parties so that they are unable to live together, the above John will provide for Elias and Christine, or whichever of them should outlive the other, a house and curtilage [yard] where they can decently reside. And he will give each year to the same Elias and Christine or whichever of them is alive, six quarters of hard grain at Michaelmas, namely three quarters of wheat, one and one-half quarters of barley, one and one-half quarters of peas and beans, and one quarter of oats. [The addition evidently gave trouble, since the total is not six but seven quarters.]70

  If the retiring tenant was childless, the pension was contracted for outside the family, an arrangement that became frequent after the Black Death. In 1332 John in the Hale of Barnet, Hertfordshire, agreed with another peasant, John atte Barre, to turn over his house and land in return for a yearly contribution of “one new garment with a hood, worth 3 shillings 4 pence, two pairs of linen sheets, three pairs of new shoes, one pair of new hose, worth 12 pence, and victuals in food and drink decently as is proper.” An unusual feature of the contract was that the retiring tenant agreed to work for his replacement “to the best of his ability,” and that the new tenant not only paid an entry fee, as was customary, but “satisfied the lord for the heriot of the said John in the Hale by [the payment of] one mare,” although the retiree was not yet dead.71

  Pension contracts were enforceable in the manor court, a sign of one of their most striking aspects: the community’s interest in enforcement. “Dereliction of duty to the old [was] a matter of public concern,” observes Elaine Clark.72 A son undertaking to support his aged parents commonly requested the manorial court to witness his oath, or enlisted as guarantors pledges whose names he reported to the steward. For the court’s participation the pensioners paid a fee.73

  In Ellington in 1278, William Koc acknowledged that he was in arrears for the contributions he owed his father, in wheat, barley, beans, and peas, and promised to make amends.74 The jurors in Warboys in 1334 reported: “And since Stephen the Smith did not keep his mother according to their agreement he is [fined] sixpence. And afterwards the above jurors ordered that the said land be given back to his mother and that she should hold it for the rest of her life. And the above Stephen may not have anything of that land while his mother is alive.”75

  Pensions were sometimes negotiated between the parties, sometimes mandated as deathbed settlements—mainly by husbands in favor of their widows—and sometimes ordered by the manorial court. When a tenant’s disability rendered him unfit to discharge the obligations of his holding, it was in the interest of the lord to make a change, but the change served the interest of the elderly tenant as well.76

  A pension contract that dated back to the early Middle Ages was originally developed in the monasteries to provide for the retirement of monks. The corrody consisted of a daily ration of bread and ale, usually two loaves and two gallons, plus one or two “cooked dishes” from the monastic kitchen. In the later Middle Ages, corrodies became available to lay pensioners, who purchased them like life insurance annuities. The purchaser might stipulate for a certain amount of firewood every year, a room in the monastery, sometimes with a servant, clothing, candles, and fodder for horses. A wealthy peasant might buy a corrody that even included a house and garden, pasture, and cash; a poor one might buy only a ration of dark bread, ale, and pottage.77

  Still other arrangements might be made. A widow and her young son leased their holding at Stoke Pryor to a fellow villager for twelve years in return for an annual supply of mixed grain; presumably in twelve years the son would be old enough to take over the holding.78

  The pension agreement implied bargaining power on the part of the aging tenant, nearly always meaning landholding. In its absence, an old man or woman might end like those whose deaths are recorded in the coroners’ rolls: Sabinia, who in January of 1267 went into Colmworth, Bedfordshire, to beg bread and “fell into a stream and drowned,”79 or Arnulf Argent of Ravensden, “poor, weak, and infirm,” who was going “from door to door to seek bread,” when he fell down in a field and “died of weakness.”80

  When death was imminent, the priest was sent for, and arrived wearing surplice and stole, carrying the blessed sacrament, preceded by a server carrying a lantern and ringing a hand bell. If the case was urgent and no server could be found, the priest might hang the lamp and bell on his arm, or around the neck of his horse. According to Robert Manning, sick men were often reluctant to accept the sacrament because of a belief that if they recovered they must abstain from sex:

  Many a one thus hopes and says,

  “Anoint them not save they should die,

  For if he turns again to life

  He should lie no more by his wife.”

  Manning counseled against the superstition and recommended more trust in God:

  In every sickness ask for [the sacrament] always;

  God almighty is right courteous.81

  John Myrc advised that if death was imminent, the priest should not make the sick man confess all his sins, but only counsel him to ask God’s mercy with a humble heart. If the dying man could not speak but indicated by signs that he wished the sacraments, the priest should administer them. If, however, the dying man was able to speak, Myrc advised that he should be asked “the seven interrogations”: if he believed in the articles of the faith and the Holy Scriptures; if he recognized that he had offended God; if he was sorry for his sins; if he wished to amend and would do so if God gave him more time; if he forgave his enemies; if he would atone for his sins if he lived; and finally, “Do you believe fully that Christ died for you and that you may never be saved but by the merit of Christ’s passion, and do you think of God with your heart as much as you may?” The sick man should answer yes and be instructed to say, “with a good steadfast mind, if he can…‘Into thy hands I commend my soul.’” If he could not, the priest should say it for him, anoint him, and administer Communion.82

  Wakes commonly turned into occasions of drinking and merriment, condemned by the Church. Robert Grosseteste warned that a dead man’s house should be one of “sorrow and remembrance,” and should not be made a house of “laughter and play,” and a fourteenth-century preacher complained that people “finally like madmen make…merry at our death, and take our burying for a bride ale.”83 In the Ramsey Abbey village of Great Raveley in 1301, ten Wistow men were fined after coming “to watch the body of Simon of Sutbyr through the night,” because returning home they “threw stones at the neighbors’ doors and behaved themselves badly.”84

  Village funerals were usually starkly simple. The body, sewed in a shroud, was carried into the church on a bier, draped with a black pall. Mass was said, and occasionally a funeral sermon was delivered. One in John Myrc’s collection, Festiall, ends: “Good men, as ye all see, here is a mirror to us all: a corpse brought to the church. God have mercy on him, and bring him

  Fanciful funeral: animals carrying a bier draped with a pall. Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, Psalter and Book of Hours, M
s. 102, f. 76v-77.

  into his bliss that shall last for ever…Wherefore each man and woman that is wise, make him ready thereto; for we all shall die, and we know not how soon.”85

  A villager was buried in a plain wooden casket or none at all, in the churchyard, called the “cemetery,” from coemeterium (dormitory), the sleeping place of the Christian dead. Here men and women could slumber peacefully, their toil finished, until the day of resurrection.

  7

  THE VILLAGE AT WORK

  FOR THE MEDIEVAL VILLAGER, WORK WAS THE ruling fact of life. By sunup animals were harnessed and plows hitched, forming a cavalcade that to the modern eye would appear to be leaving the village to work outside it. Medieval people felt otherwise. They were as much in their village tramping the furrowed strips as they were on the dusty streets and sunken lanes of the village center. If anything, the land which literally provided their daily bread was more truly the village. The geography was a sort of reverse analogue of the modern city with its downtown office towers where people work and its suburban bedroom communities where they eat and sleep.

  Whether Elton had two or three fields in the late thirteenth century is unknown. Whatever the number, they were twice subdivided, first into furlongs (more or less rectangular plots “a furrow long”), then into selions, or strips, long and narrow sets of furrows. Depending on the terrain, a village’s strips might be several hundred yards long; the fewer turns with a large plow team the better. The strip as a unit of cultivation went far back, probably antedating the open field system itself. Representing the amount of land that could conveniently be plowed in a

  Aerial view of the deserted village of Newbold Grounds (Northamptonshire), showing house plots, sunken paths and roads, and the ridge-and-furrow of the surrounding fields. British Crown Copyright/RAF Photograph.

  day—roughly half a modern acre—it probably originated in the parcellation of land forced by a growing population. By the late thirteenth century the distribution of a village’s strips was haphazard, some villagers holding many, some few, and all scattered and intermingled. The one certainty was that everyone who held land held strips in both or all three fields, in order to guarantee a crop every year regardless of which field lay fallow.

  The furlong, or bundle of strips, was the sowing unit, all the strips in a given furlong being planted to the same crop. Many furlongs appear by name in the Elton court records: “Henry in the Lane [is fined] for bad plowing in Hollewell furlong, sixpence,” indicating, incidentally, that the lord’s demesne land was scattered, like the peasants’.1 Within each furlong the strips ran parallel, but the furlongs themselves, plotted to follow the ambient pattern of drainage, lay at odd angles to each other, with patches of rough scattered throughout. A double furrow or a balk of unplowed turf might separate strips, while between some furlongs headlands were left for turning the plow. Wedges of land (gores) created by the asymmetry of the furlongs and the character of the terrain were sometimes cultivated by hoe.2 The total appearance of an open field village, visible in aerial photographs of many surviving sites, is a striking combination of the geometric and the anarchic.

  Beyond the crazy-quilt pattern of arable land stretched meadow, waste, and woodland, hundreds of acres that were also part of the village and were exploited for the villagers’ two fundamental purposes: to support themselves and to supply their lord. But the most significant component of the open field village was always its two or three great fields of cultivated land. The difference between a two- and a three-field system was slighter than might appear at first glance. Where three fields were used, one lay fallow all year, a second was planted in the fall to winter wheat or other grain, the third was planted in the spring to barley, oats, peas, beans, and other spring crops. The next year the plantings were rotated.

  In the two-field system one field was left fallow and the other divided in two, one half devoted to autumn and the other to spring crops. In effect, the two-field system was a three-field system with more fallow, and offered no apparent disadvantage as long as enough total arable was available. If, however, a growing village population pressed on the food supply, or if market demand created an opportunity hard to resist, a two-field system could be converted to three-field. Many two-field systems were so converted in the twelfth and especially the thirteenth century, with a gain of one-third in arable.3

  Multifield systems, which could accommodate crop rotation, were also common, especially in the north of England. In some places, the ancient infield-outfield system survived, the small infield being worked steadily with the aid of fertilizer, and the large outfield treated as a land reserve, part of which could be cultivated for several successive years (making plowing easier) and then left fallow for several.4

  But in the English Midlands, and much of northwest Europe, the classic two- or three-field system of open field husbandry prevailed. It involved three essentials: unfenced arable divided into furlongs and strips; concerted agreement about crops and cultivation; and common use of meadow, fallow, waste, and stubble.

  Implied was a fourth essential: a set of rules governing details, and a means of enforcing them. Such rules were developed independently in thousands of villages in Britain and on the Continent, at first orally, but by the late thirteenth century in written form as village bylaws. The means of enforcement was provided by the manorial court. Surviving court records include many bylaw enactments and show the existence of many more by citation. For stewards, bailiffs, reeves, free tenants, and villeins, they spelled out a set of restrictions and constraints on plowing, planting, harvesting, gleaning, and carrying. They gave emphatic attention to theft and chicanery, from stealing a neighbor’s grain to “stealing his furrow” by edging one’s plow into his strip, “a major sin in rural society”5 (Maurice Beresford). “Reginald Benyt appropriated to himself three furrows under Westereston to his one rod from all the strips abutting upon that rod and elsewhere at Arnewassebroc three furrows to his one headland from all the strips abutting upon that headland,” for which Reginald was fined 12 pence by the Elton manorial court of 1279.6

  Bylaws stipulated the time the harvested crop could be taken from the fields (in daylight hours only), who was allowed to carry it (strangers not welcome), and who was allowed to glean. All able-bodied adults were conscripted for reaping. “And [the jurors] say that Parnel was a gleaner in the autumn contrary to the statutes. Therefore she is in mercy [fined] sixpence.”7 “The wife of Peter Wrau gleaned…contrary to the prohibition of autumn.”8 Bylaws ruled the period when the harvest stubble should be opened to grazing, and for which kind of animals, when sheep were barred from the meadows, and when tenants must repair ditches and erect, remove, and mend fences. (Only the lord’s land could be permanently fenced, and only if it lay in a compact plot.) Repeatedly, through the year, the village animals were herded into or driven off the open fields as crop, stubble, and fallow succeeded each other.

  The regulation of grazing rights was fundamental to the operation of open field farming. The lord’s land was especially inviolate to beastly trespass: “Robert atte Cross for his draft-beasts doing damage in the lord’s furlong sown with barley, [fined] sixpence.”9 On some manors grazing rights were related to the size of the holding. A Glastonbury survey of 1243 found the holder of a virgate endowed with pasture enough for four oxen, two cows, one horse, three pigs, and twelve sheep, calculated as the amount of stock required to keep a virgate of land fertile.10

  The open field system was thus not one of free enterprise. Its practitioners were strictly governed in their actions and made to conform to a rigid pattern agreed on by the community, acting collectively.

  Neither was it socialism. The strips of plowed land were held individually, and unequally. A few villagers held many strips, most held a few, some held none. Animals, tools, and other movable property were likewise divided unequally. The poor cotters eked out a living by working for the lord and for their better-off neighbors who held more land than their families could
cultivate, whereas these latter, by marketing their surplus produce, were able to turn a profit and perhaps use it to buy more land.

  How much of his time a villager could devote to cultivating his own tenement depended partly on his status as free or unfree, partly on the size of his holding (the larger the villein holding, the larger the obligation), and partly on his geographical location. In England “the area of heavy villein labor dues—say two or more days each week—was relatively small,” consisting mostly of several counties and parts of counties in the east.11 In the rest of the country, though rules varied from manor to manor, the level of villein obligations tended to be lower. In several counties in the north and northwest they were very light or nonexistent.

  Huntingdonshire, containing Ramsey Abbey and Elton, was in the very heart of the heavy-labor region, where the obligation was basically two days’ work a week. In Elton, the dozen free tenants owed very modest, virtually token service. The cotters owed little service because they held little or no land. Only the two score villein virgaters owed heavy week-work, amounting to 117 days a year (the nine half-virgaters owed fifty-eight and a half days).12 In addition, the Elton virgater owed a special service, the cultivation of half an acre of demesne land summer and winter, including sowing it with his own wheat seed, reaping, binding, and carrying to the lord’s barn.13