The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century

by Ian Mortimer

  ’Sire, ye be welcome.’

  ’Yea, lady or damoiselle, ye be welcome.’

  ’ Sire, God give you good day.’

  ‘Dame, good day give you our Lord.’

  ’Fellow or friend, ye be welcome.‘

  ‘What do ye? How is it with you? Where have ye been so long?‘

  ‘I have been long out of the country.’

  ‘In what country?’

  sire, that should be overmuch for to tell; but if you please, anything that I may do, command it me as to him that gladly shall I do it.’

  ’Sire, gramercy of your courteous words and of your good will;

  God reward you!’11

  shopping

  When the town bell rings prime, the shops start to open. If it is a market day, then the traders in the market too can start doing business.

  Where you shop will, of course, depend on what it is you hope to buy. There is no point going to a market for armor or jewelry; you will need to find specialist shops in a city. Large cities and some towns have more than one market. A city market can become so crowded that several smaller, specialist marketplaces are necessary. In Stratford upon Avon, for example, there are separate markets every Thursday for corn, hay, livestock, poultry, and dairy products. London has a whole range of markets, from the daily poultry market at Leadenhall to the Friday horse market at Smithfield.

  A town market is held primarily for the purpose of supplying goods to those who live in the town and its surrounding parishes. However, most markets also have a wholesale function, providing livestock for butchers, for example. In a coastal town, the daily catch of fish is sold in the fish market. Some of the catch is bought and consumed locally but most is transported inland to other towns by fish merchants for sale in those markets. There it is sold direct to the customer; there is no point in a fishmonger buying it to sell over the course of a whole week, it will not keep. Other sorts of market goods include items that are not required on a day-to-day basis. Furs of hares, rabbits, kids, foxes, cats, and squirrels (used as trimmings on the clothes of the well-to-do) are available in the market, but there is insufficient demand in most small towns for many shops to be dedicated to such commodities on a daily basis. Hence there are itinerant furriers, traveling between towns, arriving on their respective market days. The market also serves as a hardware shop. If you want a full picture of what is available, stand on the roadside and check what items are in the carts and wagons approaching the town. At Newark in 1328, for example, you will see the following being taken to market: grain (mainly wheat, barley, oats, and rye), salted meat and bacon, fresh meat, salmon, mackerel, lampreys, saltwater fish, stockfish, herrings, Aberdeen fish (cured salmon and herring), sheep, goats, pigs, fleeces, tanned hides, leather, furs, cloth of many descriptions, iron, steel, tin, woad, wine, sacks of wool, apples, pears, nuts, linen, canvas, timber, new carts, horses, mares, laths, wooden planks, hay, rushes (for hall floors), coverlets (for beds), glass, garlic, salt, faggots, coal, brushwood, nails, and horseshoes.12

  This list of what you normally can buy in a market gives you a good idea of the things which you cannot. Hawkers might be selling pies as you walk around between the market stalls, but otherwise you will have to go to a cookshop to buy one. You might buy cloth in a market but you will need to go to a shop to have your clothes tailored. A cobbler will buy his leather in the market, and so it is to his shop you will go to buy shoes, not the market itself. Such shops are arranged in the vicinity of the marketplace, often fronting onto it. In Norwich the market is so busy that certain traders operate not in the marketplace itself but in the streets and alleys around it. The range of services available on a daily basis—including days when the market is not in operation—can be judged from the range of merchants resident in a town. In Colchester in 1301 you will find ten smiths, eight weavers, eight butchers, seven bakers, five carpenters, and thirteen mercers. The mercers all vie for the same trade—they all sell leatherware, such as gloves, belts, purses, and needle cases—but a few specialize in rarer commodities. One is also a cloth merchant, another sells verdigris and mercury for cosmetics and ointments.13

  Towns which have weekly markets normally have an annual fair as well, usually held on a feast day between July and September (and always between May and November). Fairs are the great gatherings of medieval England. They usually last for three days, being held on the day before a specific saint’s day, on the feast day itself, and on the following day. When a fair is in progress thousands of people flock to the town. Whereas markets present country people with a weekly chance to buy goods and commodities, fairs present them with a once-in-the-year opportunity to buy more exotic items. A fair is an opportunity for many townsmen to buy items in bulk from wholesalers; these will be stored in their warehouses for use in subsequent months. Dyers, for example, have difficulty obtaining some of the rarer colors; the hundred miles or so that these need to be transported from the nearest port prohibits their being taken to every market, but suppliers of dyestuffs turn up at fairs. Merchants importing exotic spices and rare fruit—such as oranges, lemons, figs, dates, and pomegranates—also attend fairs, especially those in or near a city.

  Trade is regulated everywhere. Most major towns and cities normally have a “guild merchant” (sometimes spelled “gild merchant”): a trading organization which controls who can and who cannot trade freely in the market.14 Such a body sets the duties payable by nonresidents selling goods in the market and charges a wide variety of fees, such as pontage (for maintenance of a bridge), stallage (the right to have a stall in a marketplace), and pavage (for maintenance of the road). In some cases they may ban the sale of certain goods by nonresidents altogether. The Leicester guild merchant has some strong rules forbidding anyone who is not a freeman of the town from selling cloth, wax, fish, or meat. The guild merchant may also impose restrictions on who can buy goods on nonmarket days, prohibiting all but their own freemen from buying wool, for example, or prohibiting butchers’ wives from buying meat to sell again on the same day.15

  There are reasons to be grateful for the supervision of trade. Caveat emptor (buyer beware) should be engraved in big letters over the entrance to every marketplace. You simply would not believe how many different tricks and deceptions are practiced on the unwary customer. Ask any clerk in the London Guildhall; he will tell you of cooking pots being made out of soft cheap metal and coated with brass and of loaves of bread baked with stones or pieces of iron inserted in them, to make them up to the legally required weight. If you visit the city you may well find out for yourself what tricks are employed. Items are arranged on stalls so as to conceal their defects. Wool is stretched before it is woven, to make it go farther (but then it shrinks terribly). Cloth is sometimes mixed with human hair. Shoes are made of substandard leather. Meat is sold even though it is putrid, wine even though it has turned sour, and bread when it has gone green and is considered to be in danger of killing the purchaser. Pepper is sold damp, making it swell, weigh more, and rot sooner. Short measures are a notorious problem, and from 1310 turners have to swear to make wooden measures of the appropriate size. Even oats can be falsely sold by a regrator. How come, you ask? Surely oats are oats? Not when a sack of rotten oats is sold with a few handfuls of good, fresh oats placed carefully in the top of the sack.16

  Do not feel you have to accept being ripped off. Wherever you are shopping, you will find opportunities to have your grievances addressed. Guild merchants are acutely aware that their position is open to challenge from other markets and are thus keen to protect the good name of their own market and freemen. Lords of seigneurial boroughs are likewise very keen to make sure that nothing damages their income from tolls in their markets. Similarly the right to hold a fair conveys the right—and responsibility—to hold a court to try fraudulent traders. These are called “piepowder courts.”

  If you are the victim of malpractice, go straight to the authorities. At a fair, the perpetrator will be fined. In a town he will be pill
oried, literally. The pillory is the wooden board which clasps the guilty man’s head and hands and prevents him avoiding either his shame or the insults of the crowd—and anything else they might care to throw at him. A butcher selling bad meat can expect to be dragged through the streets of the town on a hurdle and then placed in the pillory with the rotten meat being burnt under him. Likewise a baker selling bad bread. A vintner caught selling foul wine is dragged to the pillory on a hurdle, forced to drink a draught of the offending liquor, and then set in the pillory, where the remainder of the liquid is poured over his head. The sweetness of the revenge makes up for the sourness of the wine.

  Money

  As you will have noticed, the currency is not a decimal system (one made up of multiples of ten). The basic unit is the pound (£1), which should be the equivalent of a pound in weight of silver. But there is no actual £1 coin. Nor are there any £1 notes. Instead there are small silver coins, of which the penny (Id) is by far the most common. Twelve pennies make a shilling (1s) and twenty shillings make £1.

  Until 1344, the only coins in a merchant’s purse are silver ones. A few big silver groats (4d) from the reign of Edward I are still in circulation, but otherwise you will only come across pennies, halfpennies and farthings (¼d). In 1344 Edward III mints a superb florin or double leopard (worth 6s) as well as a half florin or leopard (3s) and a quarter florin or helm (1s 6d). The purpose is to publicize his nation in the same way that the Florentine “florin”—used right across Europe—publicizes the international importance of the Italian city-state of Florence.17 Sadly, you are extremely unlikely to see any of these coins: the gold in them is worth more than the face value of the coin and so they are almost all melted down immediately. But after several more attempts, Edward gets the size of coin right in the noble of 1351 (worth 6s 8d). This remains the pattern for the rest of the century. Henceforth he mints nobles, half nobles, and quarter nobles in gold. Groats, pennies, halfpennies, and farthings are minted in silver.

  The value of a noble—6s 8d—at first seems an odd one. However, it is a particularly useful amount. There are two normal units of account in England. In addition to the pound there is the mark (13s 4d). One noble is exactly a third of £1 and half of a mark. Having one coin which equates to a substantial fraction of both units of account is a considerable advance on weighing out 160 or 240 little silver pennies for every mark or £1 of account.

  If you take the purse hanging from the belt of any moderately wealthy townsman and inspect the coins you find inside, you will see how much variety there is in the design and size of medieval coinage. Coins last a long time. Even when their designs are worn and barely recognizable, the size of silver pennies means that they remain perfectly acceptable. Hence in the reign of Edward II the coinage predominantly consists of coins minted in the very long reigns of his father, Edward I, and grandfather Henry III. Slowly these become less numerous and Edward III’s image takes over. By 1400, a handful of silver at random will mostly show the tumbling locks of Edward III in his heyday.

  The range and variety of coin designs will amaze you. Between Edward I’s great recoinage of 1279 and the deposition of Richard II (1399) there are about 160 varying sorts of penny struck—more than one per year. This is partly because, unlike in the modern world, there are several mints in operation at once. There are at least three royal mints, at Canterbury, Berwick-on-Tweed, and the Tower of London. There are also private mints, operated by the abbot of Bury St. Edmunds, the bishop of Durham, and the archbishop of York. Edward III opens an additional mint at Calais in 1351, and the abbot of Reading starts another mint on the king’s behalf in the 1330s. Each of these mints has several moneyers who all mark their coins, and the mints at York and Durham change their marks when a new archbishop or bishop is elected. So, when a new king ascends the throne, or when a title (such as “king of France”) is adopted or dropped by Edward III, a new batch of coins appears.

  Prices

  You will be pleased to know that prices are relatively static by comparison with modern inflationary standards. This is helped by longstanding legal provisions controlling the price of bread, wine, and ale. Expect to spend 3d on a gallon of average wine in 1305, and Id on a gallon of second-best ale. The same prices apply a century later. In times of crisis, however, prices can go in all directions at once. Grain prices increase massively after successive harvest failures, while the cost of luxury items plummets. Conversely, in the year of the Great Plague (1348–49), there is so much food and livestock available that the economy enters a deflationary cycle. As the Leicester chronicler Henry Knighton points out, in 1349 you can buy a horse which was previously worth £2 for just half a mark (6s 8d)—a sixth of its original value. He also mentions that a cow is worth just 12d, whereas before the plague it was worth eight times as much.

  In the modern world, the English are not accustomed to haggle.

  This is something you will have to get used to: it is the principal means of establishing prices. The following is a contemporary example of how you may expect the system to work:

  “Dame, what hold ye the ell of this cloth? Or what is worth the cloth whole? In short, so to speak, how much the ell?”

  ”Sire, I shall do you to reason; ye shall have it good and cheap.”

  “Yea, truly. Dame must me win. Take heed what I shall pay.”

  “Four shillings for the ell, if it please you.”

  “That were no wisdom. For so much would I have good scarlet.”

  “You are right, if ye may. But I have some which is not of the best which I would not give for seven shillings.”

  “I you believe well. But this is no such cloth, of so much money, that ye know well!”

  “Sire, what is it worth?”

  “Dame, it were worth to me well three shillings.”

  .””That is evilboden . . .”

  “But say certainly how shall I have it without thing to leave?”

  “I shall give it you at one word: ye shall pay five shillings, certainly if ye have them for so many ells, for I will abate no thing.”

  “Dame, then what shall avail long words?”18

  Although there is modest inflation in the fourteenth century, it is impossible to give modern equivalents to the prices you will be charged. Any comparison is bound to be misleading. For example, in 1339, in Exeter, one hundred nails for constructing tables for the fish market cost 3d: about the same as the carpenters’ wages for making those tables (2’d per person per day, plus ale).19 In the modern world, those nails would cost no more than £4; but nobody would give a day’s work for so little, however much ale you gave them. A carpenter’s daily wage at the time of writing is nearer £100—the wages have increased in price twenty-five times as much as the nails. Such disparities in long-term inflation are to be noted across most forms of produce and service. Henry IV has to pay 10s for a pound of saffron in 1391; today it is still picked by hand and has a retail price of £2,000 per kilogram (£909 per pound), an increase of 181,700 percent. In the same account Henry pays 5d per chicken (capon). If chickens had increased at the same rate as saffron they would cost nearly £38 each in the modern world. If they had increased as much as carpenters’ wages, they would cost £154, thirty times as much as a plucked one actually costs at the time of writing.

  The reason for stressing this point is to show that some things we take for granted are far more prized in medieval society than in the modern world. Food is far more valuable and expensive in the fourteenth century than in modern England. Labor on the other hand is relatively cheap. Land is dirt cheap (rents of 1d or 2d per acre for free tenants are common). But a chicken can cost more than a laborer’s daily wage, and a pound of sugar costs more than twice as much. There is a different scale of need and demand underpinning these prices. Moreover, the relative demand for a service or commodity varies in different parts of the country. Food is much cheaper in rural areas than in the city. A pig normally costs 3s in the city but just 2s at a country market. Oats similarl
y cost half as much in the country as they do in a city. As a consequence of food being cheaper, everything else tends to be less expensive in the country too. Candles cost 2½d per pound in the city but only 1½d per pound in the country.20 asic essentials? The laws of supply and demand operate on a far more localized pattern. Money has different values when the transportation of goods is so slow, difficult, and expensive.

  Working and Wages

  Earning an income in medieval England is not easy. Very few people start out in life as a villein and work their way up to a position of independent means. Those who make their fortunes in a trade, war, the Church, or the law tend to come from families which are at least reasonably well-off to begin with. Not even the semilegendary fourteenth-century mayor of London, Dick Whittington, can be said to have dragged himself out of the gutter. He did die an exceedingly wealthy man, it is true; but he was hardly poor at birth. His father was the Gloucestershire landowner Sir William Whittington.

  What jobs are open to you and what do they pay? As you may have gathered, to enter any sort of worthwhile employment in a town requires you to become a freeman of the town by becoming a member of its guild merchant (or, in some towns, one of its craft-specific guilds, such as the Carpenters’ Guild or the Goldsmiths’ Guild). Entry to a guild is either by inheritance or by payment of an entry fine, often £1 or £2. To become a member of a London guild (or livery company) you might need to pay as much as £3. To become an apprentice similarly requires a sum to be paid to the master. Without the freedom of a town and an apprenticeship in a trade or craft, laboring is practically your only option.