by Ian Mortimer
Small towns are not just muddy carbuncles on the medieval landscape. Each preserves at least part of its original open market square, and in summer, when the stalls are all set up, and the shops are open, with the sunlight shining onto the wooden worktops, there is a totally different feel to them. The size of the crowd that gathers on market days will surprise you: several hundred people come in from farms and manors in the surrounding parishes. In addition there are the travelers and the long-distance merchants who journey from market to market selling their wares. Colors abound, music is to be heard in the streets. The alehouses and inns are full to overflowing; there is laughter, shouting, and banter, and much parading of strutting horses. Most of all there is a sense of excitement that leaves you in no doubt that this small community of a hundred houses is not merely a provincial outpost of the trading world but an integral part of it. The holding of a market has transformed this part of the landscape into a hubbub of commerce, discussion, gossip, and news, if only for one day each week.
The Countryside
In summer the roads are dusty. Carts and packhorses trundle along, overtaken by groups of pedestrians and the occasional galloping messenger. If you escape your fellow travelers, the road is quiet. There is suddenly nothing to hear except the birdsong, the rumble and creak of cartwheels, and perhaps the rushing water of a stream or a river. The quiet distance of the hills and fields becomes the focus of your attention.
In the modern world, an English field is a small square patch of ground between two and ten acres. You are used to seeing them all spread out across the hills like a patchwork quilt. They are very different in the fourteenth century. Throughout most of the country—in fact in all areas apart from Devon and Cornwall, parts of Kent and Essex, and the northwest—you will encounter massive, irregularly shaped fields of between seven hundred and twelve hundred acres, with no hedges, fences, or walls. Within each huge field there are individual strips of land, each one of about an acre, marked out and maintained separately by tenants, so that they resemble an enormous set of allotments. These strips are all grouped in “furlongs”—not to be confused with the unit of distance used in more recent times—and the furlongs are surrounded by “baulks,” or paths. School history lessons will probably have led you to believe that one in every two or three fields is left fallow every second or third year, but, as you can see for yourself, it is not the huge fields that are left fallow but the individual furlongs within them. Two out of every three furlongs are planted with grain of some sort—mostly wheat, oats, and barley—but every third one is left fallow, grazed in the meantime by cattle, sheep, goats, or pigs.
Around these huge areas of land, bounded by ditches and earth walls, are commons of grassland for sheep, or woodlands to provide firewood and building materials, or wide low-lying meadows in which to grow hay. Commons and meadows are to be found in all areas of England, many thousands of upland acres being given over to grazing sheep. Here and there you will see small fields or enclosures, surrounded either by stone walls or a ditch, bank, and hedge, where the animals are kept when brought in for winter. But such walls and raised hedges are few in number. You could saunter straight off the highway onto the grass verge and into the fields. Many grazing animals do exactly that and trample all over the harvest crops, much to the annoyance of the villagers and the embarrassment of the hayward whose duty it is to protect the crops.
Contrary to what you might expect, the woodland area is not very much greater than in the modern world—that is to say about 7 percent of the land. However, almost every inch of the medieval woodland is managed carefully. Some areas are cornered off and coppiced and then surrounded by high earth banks with hedges on top to stop the deer and other animals from eating the new shoots. The coppiced trees provide poles for charcoal burning, for fences and staves, or just for firewood. Other areas of the woodland are managed for timber, with spaces being cleared to encourage the trees to grow tall and straight. Great oaks are prized commodities, allowing wide structural spans to be crossed with a single beam. There is relatively little fallen wood lying on the ground, especially in those woods near villages. The right to gather sticks and fallen timber is one which the manorial lord often grants to his tenants, and they take advantage of every last twig of it. In many areas it is their sole means of keeping warm through the long winter months. Where there is more fallen wood than the local tenants can use, the rights to gather it are sold. When the forest of Leicester is impassable, the lord sets a price of Id for six cartloads of dead wood. That sees the forest floor quickly cleared.8
You might notice something else as you wander through the wood. Where are the conifers? In medieval England there are just three coniferous species—Scotch pine, yew, and juniper—and juniper is more of a bush than a tree. There are very few evergreens at all—holly is the only common one—so the winter skyline is particularly bleak. Every other pine, spruce, larch, cedar, cypress, and fir you can think of is absent. In case you see pine or fir boards used in a lord’s castle and wonder where the trees are, the answer is that they are in Scandinavia: the timber is imported.9 Nor will you find holm oaks, red oaks, redwoods, Turkey oaks, or horse chestnuts. The trees that cover England are largely those introduced during the Bronze Age and Roman periods mingled with the species which repopulated the British Isles after the last Ice Age: rowan, ash, alder, field maple, hazel, sweet chestnut, whitebeam, aspen, some poplars, silver birch, beech, lime, walnut, willow, elm, and hornbeam. And of course the good old oak. Both forms of oak are common: the small sessile variety that thrives in hilly areas, and the far more valuable pedunculate sort used for building houses and ships.10
Now you are looking more closely at the landscape, you might notice some more subtle differences. That squirrel in the trees above you is a red one—the grey variety has yet to reach Britain. In the fields the cattle are smaller than their modern counterparts: much smaller. So too are the sheep. The breeding programs to produce large farm animals will not take place for several centuries. The lichens hanging from the boughs above the path through the wood are probably unfamiliar, as many more varieties survive in the unpolluted air. With darkness closing in over the trees, and a long way yet to the next town, you might wonder whether there are still wolves in medieval England . . . Rest assured that there are not. Well, probably not. The modern tradition states that the last English wolf was killed in North Lancashire in the fourteenth century but you are very unlikely to meet it. Ralph Higden, writing at Chester in 1340, comments that there are now “few wolves” left in England.11 The last set of instructions to trap and kill wolves is issued in 1289, so if you want to see an indigenous wild wolf, you will have to go to the Highlands of Scotland. There are still some wild boar in the aristocratic hunting parks or chases but they too have been brought almost to the point of extinction, so the chances of your being gored by one are remote. The only really dangerous beast to be encountered in the woods and forests of fourteenth-century England is—as you have probably guessed—man. Groups of armed men, like the Folville and Coterel gangs, do roam the forest roads looking for stragglers to rob. But that is a business to consider in the chapter on law and order, not here.
The Changing Landscape
There is a common misconception that the English countryside is unchanging.“As old as the hills” is a phrase one often hears. However, those hills are slowly being developed. Some are being cleared of undergrowth and coming under the plow for the first time. Some are being enclosed within field boundaries, for the more efficient management of large flocks of sheep. The gentle slopes where oats once grew are now increasingly manured carefully so that they can yield wheat. The flat ground is also changing. The Lincolnshire Fens, Somerset Levels, and Romney Marsh are all much smaller than they used to be; many square miles of marshland have been reclaimed through the construction of long drainage ditches. Wheat, oats, and barley grow where once eels were farmed.
There are many factors affecting change in the medieval landscape, a
nd not all of them are of human origin. For example, the silting up of rivers can hugely affect the patterns of economic development and trade in a region. A prosperous port can very quickly become a ghost town, with a ripple effect on the roads and hinterland. Coastal erosion has similar consequences. At the beginning of the century the East Anglian town of Dunwich is one of the most important ports in England. It has a Benedictine priory, two friaries, six parish churches, two chapels of ease, and a church belonging to the Knights Templar. But if you go there in January 1328, be warned: a terrific storm on the night of the fourteenth will destroy part of the town and shift enough gravel and pebbles to block the harbor entirely. Dunwich’s importance to shipping is extinguished. If you stay around the area for the next twenty years you will see the rest of the town suffer, economically decaying after the loss of its harbor. In 1347 another almighty storm sweeps away four hundred houses and two parish churches. Go there and you will hear the crashing of buildings as they collapse into the sea and the screams of terrified people trapped by fallen timbers in the darkness, struggling to escape the sea spray and gale.
Climate change is another factor affecting the landscape. At the beginning of the century it is not unusual to buy English wine. Many noble and royal houses have extensive vineyards. Not so a hundred years later. By 1400 the vineyards of England have all gone. The mean temperature for the year has dropped by about one degree centigrade. 12 This does not sound like a very great difference but it represents a severe setback for some communities. The weather is that little bit colder in every circumstance, including when there are rain clouds nearby. The greater rainfall leads to flooded roads and ruined crops. In 1315–17, during the terrible years of the Great Famine (a consequence of prolonged heavy rainfall), animals may be seen drowned in their flooded pastures. Flooding also leads to greater numbers of parasites and a prevalence of crop diseases. If you tour any part of England during the Great Famine you will see the peasants digging and repairing ditches in the hope of saving their crops. Many fail and whole families die as a consequence, killed by the diseases connected with malnutrition. With fewer people left to tend the land, more acres are abandoned and return to waste ground. In this way even a slight variation in temperature can wreak profound changes upon the countryside.
The factor which affects the landscape more than any other is disease. From 1348, waves of plague depopulate rural manors to such an extent that the entire way of managing the land changes. It is not just the people killed by the disease itself who matter. If a manor suddenly has a third of its workforce wiped out, then a third of the lord’s rents go unpaid. The lord might demand that the surviving tenants work twice as hard. However, if he is not paying them and the lord of the next manor who is in need of workers is offering to pay them good money for helping with his harvest, they are likely to forget their bonds of service to their original lord and move, taking their families with them, even though it is against the law. In this way the lord of a manor might lose not just a third or a half of his manorial tenants but all of them. Then, faced with the prospect of a useless piece of land, he will wonder how he can make money out of it. One solution is to forget about arable farming altogether and let the manor revert to grazing land where a large flock of sheep can be kept. Thus you may see several thousand acres of well-tended grain around a village turn into a grassy down in just a few years, the ruined church tower left as the sole reminder that here was once a community.
Villages
In total more than a thousand villages have been deserted and are in ruins by the end of the century.13 Thus a visit to England in 1300 is a very different experience from a visit in 1400. Even those communities that continue to thrive are affected by the Great Plague of 1348–49 (“the Black Death,” as we refer to it). In the 1350s and 1360s most villages have abandoned houses on the outskirts. Robbed of their valuable timbers, their roofless cob walls are sadly collapsing into the mud and untended grass and weeds. In some places the repairs to a once-prosperous parish church are beyond the means of the parishioners. Rather than replace the roof of one aisle or one chapel, they will pull down the walls and fill in the arches, shrinking the church to suit both their budget and their requirements.
A fourteenth-century village is far from picturesque. Forget postcard images of flowers in pots at the doors of quaint thatched cottages. It is a visual mess in both layout and presentation. The first house you might see has low walls of limewashed cob and narrow windows with external shutters. A broad thatched roof rises from about chest height to twenty-five feet or more, with smoke coming from one of the crude triangular openings—makeshift louvers—built into either end of the ridge. The thatch itself, which probably is laden with moss and lichen, extends out over the walls by a good eighteen inches, giving the whole building the aspect of a frown. The cobbles of the toft (the area on which the house is built) are uneven and have partially sunk into the mud. A small fence runs around the whole house and garden. Adjacent to the house are water butts and piles of firewood. Nearby are a hut containing the privy, a working cart, the remains of a broken cart, a haywain, a thatched stable, a goose house, a henhouse, a barn, and perhaps a small brew house and bake house.
After a few minutes of staring at this conglomeration, you might start to realize how the whole toft, together with its garden, has been arranged. The firewood is located within easy reach of the house. Likewise the privy—a smelly earth closet—is close (but not too close) to the door. The reason the thatch extends so far out over the walls is to protect them from the rain and snow, for they are composed of cob or clay, straw, and animal dung. The henhouse and goose house are positioned where they are in order to keep them safe from foxes and other predators at night. The broken cart is there so it can be repaired or reused for something else: a principle of recycling which applies to almost everything in medieval England. The garden at the rear is where the householder grows vegetables and herbs. The barrels are deliberately placed to collect rainwater—the cleanest water available—as it runs off the roof. Gradually you realize that there is a wholly different aesthetic at work here. Of course there is no need for flowers in a pot to beautify a medieval house. To the medieval yeoman’s eye, the beauty lies in having the necessities of life close at hand. To the family which lives here, beauty lies in the smoke issuing from the roof openings and the knowledge that there is plenty more firewood just outside the door.
Once you understand the aesthetic difference between the modern concept of a comfortable home and the practicalities of living in the fourteenth century, you will begin to understand why the village looks as it does. Practicalities take precedence over beauty and thus become ideals, or things of beauty, in themselves. Yes, the houses appear to have been scattered all over the place, as if each toft were a giant playing card from a pack that the Devil once tossed over his shoulder in a fit of pique. Nevertheless there is a reason why each one is where it is. Many stand alongside the lanes which lead to their allotted acres in the open fields, permitting easy access for the carts and oxen. The mill stands where it does because the river runs that way. Other houses are situated where they are because of their wells, or because there is a frost pocket that chills a certain area of land in winter, or because a certain area is liable to flood. The village develops in line with the contours of necessity. Now you can see why medieval parishioners have no compunction about simply lopping off one aisle of the church when the population of the village shrinks. The harmonious symmetry of the church is destroyed, as they realize; but the resultant smaller building is better suited for the reduced population, and there is a different sort of harmony in that.
Your first impression on reaching the heart of any one English village will be that all the houses look much the same. Whether they are built individually or in groups, they are almost all single storey and no more than sixteen feet from front to back—all medieval houses are just one room in depth. Village houses also tend to have the same style of construction and roofing as one
another. However, across the wider landscape, this appearance of similarity is misleading. There are differences of size, purpose, and construction methods. And, of course, there are substantial regional variations. In some parts of the country stone is more easily available than oak. On Dartmoor, where large beams cannot easily be transported but stone is plentiful, people live in granite houses and thatch them with reed or bracken, which needs to be replaced annually. In parts of Cornwall houses are built of slate blocks and roofed with slate slabs. In Kent, elm is used in the frames of a substantial minority of houses.14 In most regions, stone buildings are a status symbol. The majority of rural workers live in timber-framed houses thatched with straw.
Most village houses measure between twenty-five and forty feet in length, but some are square one-roomed cottages and others sixty-foot-long yeomen’s houses. The latter are handsome two-bay halls, with a two-storey wing at each end and many outbuildings. At the other extreme, a widow’s cottage may be just a single-storey, one-room dwelling of about thirteen feet square, with a porch and a henhouse by the back door. In some regions, especially in the West Country, you will still find longhouses; these can be anything up to ninety feet long, with one end accommodating cattle and the other the farmer’s family. Bear in mind that in these remote regions, a village will not necessarily be a series of grouped houses but may well consist of a number of scattered farmsteads, with only a handful of them being in sight of the parish church.
