Life in a Medieval Village

by Frances Gies

  Some question exists about the length of the work day required of tenants. A Ramsey custumal for the manor of Abbot’s Ripton stipulates “the whole day” in summer “from Hokeday until after harvest,” and “the whole day in winter,” but during Lent only “until after none (mid-afternoon).”14 In some places a work day lasted until none if no food was supplied, and if the lord wanted a longer day, he was obliged to provide dinner. Another determinant of the length of the working day may have been the endurance of the ox (less than that of the horse).15

  The annual schedule of week-work at Elton divided the year into three parts:

  From September 29 (Michaelmas) of one year to August 1 (Gules of August) of the following year, two days’ work per week (for a virgater).

  From August 1 to September 8 (the Nativity of the Blessed Mary), three days’ work per week, with a day and a half of work for the odd three days. This stretch of increased labor on the demesne was the “autumn works.”

  From September 8 to September 29, five days’ work a week, known as the “after autumn works.”16

  Thus the autumn and post-autumn works for the Elton virgater totaled thirty-one and a half days, half of the two critical months of August and September, when he had to harvest, thresh, and winnow his own crop.

  The principal form of week-work was plowing. Despite employment of eight full-time plowmen and drivers on the Elton demesne, the customary tenants, with their own plows and animals, were needed to complete the fall and spring plowing and the summer fallowing to keep the weeds down. Default of the plowing obligation brought punishment in the manor court: “Geoffrey of Brington withheld from the lord the plow work of half an acre of land. [Fined] sixpence.”17 “John Page withholds a plowing work of the lord between Easter and Whitsuntide for seven days, to wit each Friday half an acre. Mercy [fine] pardoned because afterwards he paid the plowing work.”18

  By the same token, the main kind of work the villein did on his own land was plowing. Stage by stage through the agricultural year he worked alternately for the lord and for himself.

  His plow (not every villein owned one) was iron-shared, equipped with coulter and mouldboard, and probably wheeled, an improvement that allowed the plowman to control the depth of furrow by adjusting the wheels, saving much labor. He might own an all-wooden harrow, made by himself from unfinished tree branches, or possibly a better one fashioned by the carpenter. Only the demesne was likely to own a harrow with iron teeth, jointly fabricated by the smith and the carpenter. The villein’s collection of tools might include a spade, a hoe, a fork, a sickle, a scythe, a flail, a knife, and a whetstone. Most virgaters probably owned a few other implements, drawn from a secondary array scattered through the village’s toolsheds: mallets, weeding hooks, sieves, querns, mortars and pestles, billhooks, buckets, augers, saws, hammers, chisels, ladders, and wheelbarrows. A number of villagers had two-wheeled carts. Those who owned sheep had broad, flat shears, which were also used for cutting cloth.19

  Heavy plow, with coulter and mouldboard, drawn by four oxen. British Library, Luttrell Psalter, Ms. Add. 42130, f. 170.

  Plows and plow animals were shared to make up plow teams. Agreements for such joint plowing appear in court records. At one time scholars debated the discrepancy between Domesday Book’s repeated references to the eight-ox plow team and iconographic evidence insistently showing smaller teams, but a modern consensus agrees that teams varied in size, up to eight animals and occasionally more. The largest teams were required to break new ground, the next largest for first plowing after Michaelmas or in spring. Medieval cattle were smaller than their modern descendants and by the time of spring plowing were probably weakened by poor winter diet.20 Domesday Book refers to smaller teams in non-demesne plowing: “three freemen” plowing with two oxen; freemen plowing with three oxen; “two freewomen” plowing with two oxen. “The Domesday plow team…was quite certainly not always an eight-ox team on the villein lands,” says R. Trow-Smith; neither was the post-Domesday team.21

  Horses and oxen were often harnessed together for village as for demesne plowing, not because Walter of Henley recommended it but because availability dictated. Cows were even pressed into service, though modern experiments indicate a lack of enthusiasm on the part of the cows. Cows were kept mainly to breed oxen. An ox took two years to train to the plow, and averaged only four years in service. Thus a four-ox team required complete replacement every four years without allowing for sickness or accident.22 When horses and oxen were harnessed jointly, it was done in pairs, the horses together, the oxen together, to accommodate the two quite different styles of harness, horse collar and ox yoke. Such teaming, common in England up to modern times, in itself implies large teams.

  The first plowing in spring, to turn under the residue of crop and the weeds and grasses, was done early enough to allow time for decomposition of the organic material.23 A second, shallower plowing aerated the soil, preparing it for seeding. The plowman began just to one side of the center line of the strip to be plowed, effected the laborious turn at the end, and returned on the other side of the center.24 Peas and beans were planted in the furrow, grain on the ridge. Spring, or Lenten, sowing was done as soon as the soil was warm and frost no longer a danger.25 Patterns of ridge-and-furrow from the Middle Ages are still visible in aerial photographs, sometimes with the boundaries between neighboring selions indicated by balks or rows of stones.

  Demesne plowing might cease at none or at vespers, but a man working his own land might keep his hand to the plow longer, under pressure of time or weather. The first winter wheat plowing, in April after the spring crops were sown in other fields, was shallow. A second, in June, went deeper, as did a third in midsummer. The field was then harrowed and the last clods crumbled with a mattock or long-handled clodding beetle.26 Grain seed was sown from a straw basket, two bushels (or more) to the acre.27 Seed was not sown casually. In 1320 four Elton villagers were fined threepence apiece for carelessness in planting, in one case on the part of a servant who allowed “four or five beans” to fall into a single hole “to the damage of the lord.”28 Besides scarce manure, the peasant cultivator might supply equally scarce marl, a clay containing carbonate of lime.29

  Walter of Henley warned that spring plowing done too deep too early might make fields muddy at sowing time.30 Spring crops—barley, oats, peas, beans, vetch—were usually planted

  Man and woman breaking up clods, following the plow. British Library, Luttrell Psalter, Ms. Add. 42130, f. 171v.

  Man sowing grain, using a seed basket, while one crow raids seed bag and dog drives away another. British Library, Luttrell Psalter, Ms. Add. 42130, f. 170v.

  more thickly than winter, about four bushels to the acre.31 For autumn sowing, Walter recommended small furrows with narrow ridges, and planting early enough to allow the seed to take root before the frost.32 Heavy rain within a week after sowing, followed by a sharp frost, could destroy a winter wheat crop.

  It is probable that Elton villagers had their own meadowland. If so, it was doubtless allocated, in accordance with an ancient tradition, by a lottery among all the holders of arable, both free and unfree.33 Hay was always in short supply because of the lack of artificial meadow, for want of suitable irrigation, and was precious because it was by far the best winter feed available.

  Mowing required care and skill. The grass had to be thoroughly dried (tedded) for storage, and if rained on had to be retedded.34 Demesne mowing at Elton was assigned entirely to the villeins, among whom it was not notably popular; many fines are recorded for failing to do the job properly. They may well have resented being kept from their own mowing. Some lords sweetened the mowing chore with a bonus in the form of a sheep for the mowers to roast, or as on some Ramsey manors, by the game of “sporting chance.” At the end of the haymaking, each man was permitted to carry off as large a bundle of hay as he could lift and keep on his scythe; if the scythe broke or touched the ground, he lost his hay and had to buy an obol’s worth of ale for his
comrades. In Elton, at least by 1311, mowers were being paid a cash bonus.35

  After haying, the meadow had to be left alone for three or four weeks to allow the grass to grow; consequently another communal agreement was needed about reopening the meadow for grazing. A good hay crop could take the animals through the winter; a good grain crop could do the same for the human beings. The tension of June, relieved by the drudgery of weeding in July, was redoubled in August and September as the fields reached maturity. First in order of priority came the lord’s harvest boon. Not only villeins ad opus but free tenants, censuarii, cotters, and craftsmen, women and children as well as men, turned out—all save those “so old or so weak [that they] could not work”—reaping, gathering, binding, stacking, carrying, and gleaning.36 Even a villein rich enough to employ labor was not exempt, though he was usually not asked to wield the scythe himself, only to “hold the rod over his workers,” as the custumals phrased it.37

  The word “boon” or “bene” in “harvest boon” or “boon works” literally meant gift, something freely bestowed, but the usage savored of irony, as the court records indicate: “Geoffrey Gamel…made default at the boon works of the autumn. Sixpence.”38 “Richard in Angulo, late in his carrying boon works. Sixpence.”39 On the other hand, a dinner of rare abundance was served in the field to the harvest army. For the 329

  Women reaping while man binds. British Library, Luttrell Psalter, Ms. Add. 42130, f. 172v.

  persons who turned out for the Elton harvest boon of 1298, the reeve, Alexander atte Cross, listed the victuals consumed: eight rings (thirty-two bushels) of wheat, an almost equal quantity of other grains, a bull, a cow, a calf, eighteen doves, and seven cheeses. The second day’s work required only 250 hands, who however ate bread made from eleven rings, along with eight hundred herrings, seven pence worth of salt cod, and five cheeses. A partial third day’s boon was exacted from sixty villeins, who were fed on three cheeses and “the residue from the expenses of the [manor] house.”40 Of nineteen recorded harvest boons at Elton, this was the only one to last three days. Seven others lasted two days, eleven only one.

  The food supplied at boon-works was an important article of the ancient compact between lord and tenants. Size and composition of the loaves of bread made from the grain were commonly stipulated in writing. At Holywell boons, two men were to share three loaves “such that the quantity of one loaf would suffice for a meal for two men,” and the bread was to be of wheat and rye, but mainly wheat.41’ At the Ramsey manor of Broughton in 1291 the tenants actually struck over what they deemed an insufficient quantity of bread supplied them, and only returned to work when appeal to the abbey cartulary proved them mistaken. Reapers liked to wash down their wheat bread with plenty of ale, typically a gallon a day per man, according to one calculation, and “some harvesters consumed twice as much.”42

  Wheat was cut with a sickle, halfway or more up the stalk, and laid on the ground. Binders followed to tie the spears in sheaves and set them in shocks to dry. In demesne harvesting, one binder followed every four reapers, advancing in echelon at a rate of two acres a day.43 That similar teamwork was applied in village harvesting is a reasonable supposition. Oats and barley were mown with scythes, close to the ground.44 Harvesting of all three crops left much residue, making gleaning an important function. It was too important, according to Warren Ault, to support a famous assertion by Blackstone in the eighteenth century that “by the common law and custom of England the poor are allowed to enter and glean upon another’s ground after

  Stacking the sheaves. British Library, Luttrell Psalter, Ms. Add. 42130, f. 173.

  the harvest without being guilty of trespass.”45 In the medieval village, gleaning was strictly limited to the old, the infirm, and the very young, less out of charity than to conserve labor, all able-bodied adults of both sexes being needed for the heavier harvest work. Bylaws generally forbade gleaning by anyone offered a fair wage for harvesting, usually meaning “a penny a day and food” or twopence without food (Walter of Henley recommended paying twopence for a man, one penny for a woman).46 Bylaws welcomed strangers to the village as harvesters while barring them as gleaners.

  After cutting, gathering, binding, and stacking their sheaves, the villagers carted them to their barns and sheds to be threshed with the ancient jointed flail and winnowed by tossing in the air from the winnowing cloth or basket, and if necessary supplying breeze with the winnowing fan.

  Besides the grain crops, harvest included “pulling the peas,” the vegetable crops that matured in late September and whose harvest also required careful policing against theft.

  Yields for the villagers could scarcely have exceeded those of the demesne, which enjoyed so many advantages. Three and a half to one was generally a very acceptable figure for wheat, with barley a bit higher and oats lower, and bad crops always threatening. R. H. Hilton has calculated that an average peasant on a manor of the bishop of Worcester might feed a family of three, pay a tithe to the church, and have enough grain left to sell for twelve or thirteen shillings, out of which his rent and other cash

  Carting. British Library, Luttrell Psalter, Ms. Add. 42130, f. 173v.

  obligations would have to come.47 If he was required to pay cash in place of his labor obligation, he would need to make up the difference by sale of poultry or wool, or through earnings of wife or sons. As Fernand Braudel observes, “The peasants were slaves to the crops as much as to the nobility.”48

  Harvest time was subject to more bylaws than all the rest of the year together. “The rolls of the manor courts are peppered with fines levied for sheaf stealing in the field, and a close watch had to be kept in the barn as well,” says Ault.49 The small size of the medieval sheaf, twenty to a bushel, contributed to temptation, Seneschaucie mentioning as familiar places of secreting stolen grain “bosom, tunic, or boots, or pockets or sacklets hidden near the grange.”50

  Another communal agreement was needed for post-harvest grazing of the stubble. Sometimes a common date was set, such as Michaelmas, for having everybody’s harvest in. Bylaws might specify that a man could pasture his animals on his own land as soon as his neighbors’ lands were harvested to the depth of an acre. This was easy to do with cows, which could be restrained within a limited space. Sheep and hogs, on the other hand, had to wait until the end of autumn.51

  The lord’s threshing and winnowing were followed by the villagers’, with whole families again joining in. Winter was the slack season, at least in a relative sense. Animals still had to be looked after, and harness, plows, and tools mended. Fences, hurdles, hedges, and ditches, both the lord’s and those of the villagers, had to be repaired to provide barriers wherever arable land abutted on a road or animal droveway. Houses, byres, pens, and sheds needed maintenance. So did equipment: “The good husbandman made some at least of his own tools and implements.”52

  The true odd-job men of the village were the cotters. They rarely took part in plowing, having neither plows nor plow beasts, but turned to “hand-work” with spade or fork, sheep-shearing, wattle-weaving, bean-planting, ditch-digging, thatching, brewing, even guarding prisoners held for trial. They were commonly hired by wealthier villagers at harvest time, getting paid with an

  Threshing, using jointed flail. British Library, Luttrell Psalter, Ms. Add. 42130, f. 74v.

  eleventh, a fifteenth, or a twentieth sheaf. Cotters’ wives and daughters were in demand for weeding and other chores.53

  Yet though they occupied the lowest rung on the village ladder, even cotters were capable of asserting their rights, as a remarkable entry in the Elton court rolls of 1300 testifies. Among the few service obligations of the Elton cotters was that of assisting in the demesne haymaking. A score of cotters, including three women, were prosecuted

  because they did not come to load the carts of the lord with hay to be carried from the meadow into the manor as formerly they were wont to do in past times, as is testified by Hugh the claviger. They come and allege that they ought not to
perform such a custom save only out of love (amor), at the request of the serjeant or reeve. And they pray that this be inquired into by the free tenants and others. And the inquest [a special panel of the court] comes and says that the abovesaid cotters ought to make the lord’s hay into cocks in the meadows and similarly in the courtyard of the lord abbot, but they are not bound to load the carts in the meadows unless it be out of special love at the request of the lord.

  That left the lord’s hay sitting in haycocks in his meadow and the cotters in the manor courtyard waiting for it to be brought to them. The steward confessed himself unable to resolve the dispute without reference to the rule and precedent given in the register at Ramsey, and so ordered “that the said cotters should have parley and treaty with the lord abbot upon the said demand.” The ultimate issue is not recorded.54

  The pathetic picture in Piers Plowman of the peasant husband and wife plowing together, his hand guiding the plow, hers goading the team, their baby and small children nearby, illustrates the fact that the wife of a poor peasant had to turn her hand to every kind of labor in sight.55 For most of the time, however, in most peasant households, the tasks of men and women were differentiated along the traditional lines of “outside” and “inside” work. The woman’s “inside” jobs were by no means always performed indoors. Besides spinning, weaving, sewing, cheese-making, cooking, and cleaning, women did foraging, gardening, weeding, haymaking, carrying, and animal-tending. They joined in the lord’s harvest boon unless excused, and helped bring in the family’s own harvest. Often women served as paid labor, receiving at least some of the time wages equal to men’s.56 R. H. Hilton believes that peasant women in general enjoyed more freedom and “a better situation in their own class than was enjoyed by women of the aristocracy, or the bourgeoisie, a better situation perhaps than that of the women of early modern capitalist England.”57 The statement does not mean that peasant women were better off than wealthier women, only that they were less constricted within the confines of their class. “The most important general feature of their existence to bear in mind,” Hilton adds, “[is] that they belonged to a working class and participated in manual agricultural labor.”58