by Ian Mortimer
At the start of the fourteenth century there is a great deal of shoddy building. Many rural workers’ houses are built cheaply, without proper foundations but with their beams placed straight into the ground. Of course, without a foundation plinth the timbers rot, so houses of this type need replacing every thirty or forty years. Early in the century, however, things start to change. More houses begin to be built with stone foundations, or footings, for timber and cob walls or rebuilt entirely with walls of stone. The roofs are also improved. A technique is developed in some parts of the country whereby the top level of thatch is replaced regularly while the base level is kept in place. Some of this fourteenth-century base thatch lasts so well it may be found in the roofs of houses in modern times, after more than six hundred years—complete with the dried bodies of medieval grasshoppers and ladybirds which happened to be crawling across it when it was cut.
Apart from the church, the highest-quality buildings in any village are those constructed by the lord of the manor. Some of these are stone residences for the lord and his family. But even if the lord does not reside there himself, there will be a manor house or barton set at the heart of his principal farm or demesne (land that he does not rent out but keeps for his own use). Here all the tenants of the manor come to pay their rents, fines, and other dues to the bailiff and to join in the communal meals held at Christmas and on other special occasions, such as harvesttime. The gamut of farm buildings clustered around a manor house may make it appear more like a hamlet—with its huge threshing barns and haylofts, ox houses and brew houses, stables, slaughterhouse, granary, goose house, henhouse, shearing shed, bailiff’s house, and workers’ cottages.
Of course there are many other individual buildings which make up the rural landscape. In the past, Cistercian monks were keen to build their monasteries in remote places, and although the great age of monastery building has long since gone, their huge and strikingly
Density of Rural Settlement in England in 1377
Region and County
Rural Poll Tax Payers (over 14 years)
Total Population Per Sq. Mile15
East of England
Bedfordshire
20,339
73
Norfolk
88,797
71
Suffolk
58,610
65
Huntingdonshire
14,169
64
Essex
47,962
52
East Midlands
Rutland
5,994
70
Northamptonshire
40,225
66
South Coast
Kent
56,557
61
Dorset
34,241
57
Hampshire
33,241
34
Southwest
Cornwall
34,274
43
Devon
45,635
29
West Midlands
Staffordshire
21,465
31
Shropshire
23,574
29
The North
Lancashire
23,880
22
Westmorland
7,389
16
Cumberland
11,841
13
elegant churches still dominate their valley settings. Likewise, although most castles in England are situated within or adjacent to towns, a few do stand in rural areas, guarding roads and harbors. Sir Edward Dallyngrigge’s new fortress at Bodiam in Sussex is a good example; so are the Pomeroy family’s castle at Berry in Devon and the Talbot family’s seat at Goodrich in Herefordshire. You may also notice the open tin mining in the southwest, where deep scars in the hillsides attest to the quarrying and washing of mineral ore, or the vast fishponds situated on the estates of the great monasteries.
For the sake of advising the would-be visitor, perhaps there is just one other essential thing to say. Not all of rural England is the same. In some of the hilly regions it is not possible to use wheeled transport. This means that the character of the landscape is altogether different from lowland England. Building materials are gathered from the immediate vicinity. Being prone to heavy rainfall, and poor for arable farming, the manors have far lower populations. Many abandoned settlements are to be found in these regions after the Great Plague. Also, being poorer and relatively isolated, these manors are normally ignored by their lords. So they do not attract the best master masons to rebuild the churches or manorial buildings, and the structures that are erected are often provincial in character and amateurish in execution. At the other extreme, areas of East Anglia are very flat and fertile, and thus rich. They are also relatively safe, unlike rural areas bordering on Scotland and Wales.
The largest areas of abandoned landscape are to be found in the far north, in parts of Cumberland and Northumberland. Here there are parishes and manors, in theory, but for much of the fourteenth century there are few or no people. This is for three reasons: climate change, plague, and the frequent incursions of the Scots. The ruined houses and chapels are left open to the elements. A huge parish like Bewcastle in Cumberland, consisting of more than forty thousand acres, is almost uninhabited. A similar situation prevails in Northumberland. The land is border land, guarded by the valiant Percy family, lords of Alnwick, but for the most part it is empty. Areas like Redesdale, which were once well populated, have been largely abandoned. The massive parish of Simonburn, measuring thirty-three miles by fourteen and covering more than 150,000 acres, is so sparsely populated that its tithes are insufficient to maintain a single priest. No royal tax collectors go there. No one goes there. Battles take place from time to time, and you will find the odd obstinate crofter eking out a living from a smallholding hidden in a valley, but sometimes you can ride for a whole day in this region and see no one. It is simply not worth building a home in a land where there is a strong likelihood that your crops with be burnt, your animals stolen, and you and your family assaulted and killed by the invading Scots. It is certainly a far cry from the villages and small towns in the Midlands and the south, where young children can be found playing in the dust of the street.
2
The People
No one can tell you exactly how many people there are in fourteenth-century England. Estimates tend to be around 5 million in 1300 (give or take half a million) and around 2.5 million in 1400 (give or take a quarter of a million)1. The one thing that everyone agrees on is that there are far fewer people at the end of the century than at the start: about half as many. The total population shrinks by 9 to 10 percent between 1315 and 1325, by 30 to 40 percent in the Great Plague of 1348–49, and by a further 15 to 25 percent over the rest of the century. Large numbers of children cannot quickly reverse these losses. As you will have seen from the effects on the landscape, it is a traumatic experience for the whole of society. Not until the 1630s will the population get back to 5 million again, and not until the 1740s will it reach 5.5 million.
How long do these people live? It depends on where you are and what sort of wealth you enjoy. Yeomen in Worcestershire in the first half of the fourteenth century can, at the age of twenty, look forward to an average of twenty-eight years more life; and their successors in the second half can expect another thirty-two years.2 This does not sound too bad: a lifespan of fifty years, more or less. However, this bald figure means that half of all adults die before they reach fifty. And these are the prosperous members of Worcestershire society. Poor peasants in the same area can expect to live for five or six years less. And all these figures are for those who have already reached the age of twenty: half the population will die before this age. Life expectancy at birth can be as low as eighteen, as at the Yorkshire village of Wharram Percy.
For this reason the majority of medieval people are relatively
young. Between 35 and 40 percent of those you will meet are under fifteen. At the other end of the age spectrum, just 5 percent of fourteenth-century people are aged over sixty-five. There are many more youths and far fewer old people. The contrast is most striking when you consider the median age. If you were to line up every modern English person in age order, the man or woman in the middle would be thirty-eight. If you were to do the same in the fourteenth century, the median would be twenty-one. Half the entire population is aged twenty-one or less.3
This preponderance of young people leads to social differences in every community and field of activity. The average man or woman in the medieval street has seventeen years’ less experience to draw on in every aspect of his or her lives. He or she has many fewer elders to ask for advice. When you consider that societies with youthful populations are more violent, tend to be supportive of slavery, and see nothing wrong in holding brutal combats in which men fight to the death for the sake of entertainment, you realize that society has changed fundamentally. The Middle Ages are not comparable with ancient Rome, but the medieval understanding of a bondman’s servitude is not very far removed from slavery, and the enthusiasm for watching knights jousting is not totally dissimilar to that of Roman citizens watching gladiators draw blood. There is just one very important difference: medieval audiences know that their tournament fighters are voluntarily risking injury and death. They are aristocratic knights fighting for pride and glory, not slaves forced to hack each other to pieces for the amusement of the bloodthirsty masses.
How do medieval people appear? On the whole they are just slightly shorter than us. The average man is a little over 5’ 7” (171 to 172 cm) and the average woman about 5’ 2” (158 to 159 cm). Their feet are also smaller, most men having shoe sizes (English) of 4 to 6 and most women 1 to 3.4 However, you will note that the wealthy tend to be more or less the same height as you.5 The poor, on the other hand, tend to be considerably shorter: a disparity due to genetic selection as well as diet. This gives the nobleman a clear advantage when it comes to a fight. Talking of fighting, you are bound to come across men who have lost eyes, ears, or limbs in the French and Scottish wars, or in less glorious outbursts of violence. A surprisingly large number hobble about with leg or foot injuries that have never healed properly, often a result of an accident at work. In some towns one in every twenty people is getting by with a broken or fractured limb.6 Then there are accidents of birth to consider. One bishop of Durham, Louis de Beaumont, is renowned for having two clubfeet. Most people have suffered at some time or another from a disease which has affected their youthful beauty (supposing they had some to start with).
It is generally said that medieval men are in their prime in their twenties, mature in their thirties, and growing old in their forties. This means that men have to take on responsibility at a relatively young age. In some towns citizens as young as twelve can serve on juries.7 Leaders in their twenties are trusted and considered deserving of respect. At the age of just twenty Edward III declares war on the Scots and leads an army into battle despite being outnumbered two to one. This is not some rash act; he commands the full confidence of his nobles, knights, men-at-arms, and infantry. In the modern world he would still be considered too young even to be an MP. When people declare that “children have to grow up so quickly these days,” they should pause and reflect on this fact. Medieval boys are expected to work from the age of seven and can be hanged for theft at the same age. They can marry at the age of fourteen and are liable to serve in an army from the age of fifteen. Noblemen might hold office or be given command of an army before they are twenty. At the battle of Crécy (1346) the command of the vanguard—the foremost battalion of the army—is given to Prince Edward, then just sixteen years of age. It is unthinkable that we would put a sixteen-year-old in charge of a battalion, in combat, today.
As for women, you can advance these “prime,” “mature,” and “growing old” periods of life by six or seven years. A woman is in her prime at seventeen, mature at twenty-five, and growing old by her mid-thirties. In the words of one of Chaucer’s characters, a thirty-year-old woman is just “winter forage.” Betrothals of boys and girls take place in infancy, and marriage at the age of twelve is approved of for a girl, although cohabitation usually begins at fourteen. Teenage pregnancies are positively encouraged—another significant contrast with modern England. Most girls of good birth are married by the age of sixteen and have produced five or six children by their mid-twenties, although two or three of those will have died. At that age many of them are widows as a result of the Scottish and French wars. That is, of course, presuming they survive the high risks associated with multiple childbirth.
Having said all this, a tiny number of men and women do live into their eighties. That grizzled old knight Sir Geoffrey de Geneville, the brother of the biographer of St. Louis, is still living in the Dominican Friary at Trim in 1314, at the age of eighty-eight.8 The shrewd Cornish clergyman, linguist, and translator John Trevisa, who comes into the world in about 1326, has yet to depart from it in 1412, aged eighty-six. The chronicler John Hardyng, born in 1377, writes a chronicle about the triumph of the first Lancastrian king, Henry IV, in 1399 and lives long enough to rewrite the whole story with the opposite political slant for the Yorkist king, Edward IV, in the 1460s. He is still alive in 1464 at the age of eighty-seven. Similar extremes of old age are to be found among the English bishops. The average age at election of those in office in 1300 is forty-three. They live for another twenty-one years, taking them to an average age of sixty-four. Those in office in 1400 are, on average, forty-four at the time of their election. They survive for another twenty-three years, taking them to sixty-seven. Among this group are men like Bishop Skirlaw of Durham and Bishop Burghill of Lichfield, who are still in office at the age of seventy. William of Wykeham is still bishop of Winchester at the age of eighty.
The Three Estates
Medieval society thinks of itself like this: there are three sections of society, or “estates,” created by God—those who fight, those who pray, and those who work the land. The aristocracy are “those who fight.” They protect “those who pray” and “those who work.” The clergy do the praying and intercede on behalf of the souls of the fighters and the workers. “Those who work” feed the aristocracy and the clergy through the payment of service, rents, and tithes. In this way each group contributes to the welfare of society as a whole.
It is a neat concept and particularly attractive to those doing the fighting and praying, who use it to justify the gross inequalities in society. But it is a concept that has been increasingly outdated since the twelfth century. Between 1333 and 1346 it is systematically shredded by the English longbowmen, who, although ranked among “those who work,” show that they are a far more potent military force than the massed charging ranks of “those who fight.” In those few years, “those who work” become “those who fight,” thereby threatening to make the old aristocracy redundant. Nevertheless, despite the inadequacy of the model, it is worth using it, if only because it shows how fourteenth-century people themselves understand their class system.
As the above diagram shows, “those who fight” includes several tiers, a pyramid of wealth and military responsibility. At the top of the pile is the king, who is the lord of all the land in the kingdom. Those royal estates which are kept in the king’s hand bring in an annual income from which the king pays for the royal household, including the various departments of government. In addition, the king can seek extra money to finance military expeditions through subsidies and other taxes, subject to the approval of Parliament.
In the second tier are the lords. There are three ranks: dukes, earls, and barons.9 The title of duke takes precedence, being invented in 1337 for Edward III’s eldest son, Edward of Woodstock, later known as the Black Prince. It is normally a royal title: three of the four dukes created before 1377 are the king’s sons. More common are those great lords in the next tier of precedence: the earls
. Their number fluctuates between seven and fourteen over the century. The lowest rank of aristocracy is the baronage: the number of barons fluctuates between forty and seventy.
All these lords hold their principal estates directly from the king and are thus known as “tenants-in-chief.” They normally receive a personal summons to attend each parliament. They constitute the House of Lords. When it comes to fighting, they are all technically bound to serve the king with their retinues at their own expense for forty days each year. In effect, however, those who are willing to serve the king do so for as long as they are required and are compensated for their expenditure accordingly.
Lordly status loosely correlates with income. In theory each earl should receive at least £1,000 from his estates. Most have between £700 and £3,000. The richest is Thomas of Lancaster, who has five earldoms and an income of about £11,000 in 1311. This is exceeded by only two people over the whole century. Second on the fourteenth-century “Rich List” is Queen Isabella, who allocates to herself 20,000 marks (£13,333) per year in 1327-30. First place goes to John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, whose gross income from his English and Welsh estates in 1394-95 is in the region of £12,000, in addition to a pension from Castile of about £6,600.10 Most barons have an income of between £300 and £700, but in a few exceptional cases—Lord Berkeley, for instance—a baron may receive as much as £1,300 per year.
The third tier in the feudal hierarchy is made up of lords of manors held indirectly from the king—that is to say, held by local lords from the tenants-in-chief. These local lords do not receive a personal summons to attend parliaments, although they may be elected to represent their country as “knights of the shire.” They are not “lords” in the sense of having a baronial title but merely lords over their manorial tenants. In theory all of them with an annual income of £40 or more—about eleven hundred men—should be dubbed knights by the king. Those who are not are called “esquires” (provided they are entitled to bear coats of arms, due to their descent from a knight; otherwise they are just “gentlemen”).
