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

by Ian Mortimer

  As a result of these problems, our Dominican friend tells us, some people actually climb onto the edge of the ship—what you would call the gunwales—and, as the ship plunges along in the darkness, they feel their way to the prow and the seats of mercy. Such desperation! But when a storm strikes, there is very little you can do. You will either have to squat down in a quiet corner below deck—where everyone is crammed together, on account of the bad weather—or risk being swept away by a wave. Now you can begin to understand why it smells so bad below deck. Every storm has seen men and women emptying their stomachs, souls, and bowels down here in darkness and in fear.

  7

  Where to Stay

  If you travel long distances you will need to find accommodation. It normally follows that how you spend the night depends on where you find yourself at dusk. This is not necessarily something within your control. If the heavens open and the road turns into a quagmire, you may find that you are forced to seek shelter in the nearest cottage. Similarly, if you learn from fellow travelers that the road ahead is beset with thieves, you may choose to wait at an inn until people have gathered in sufficient numbers for you all to brave the highway together. Even if you do reach your intended town or village before nightfall, you may arrive too late to find yourself a bed, especially if it is market day or there is a fair in the vicinity. If the king’s court or a nobleman’s retinue is about to arrive at the same town, you will have even greater problems finding accommodation.

  Nevertheless, people in medieval England do understand the difficulties faced by travelers, and you will find many prepared to share their lodgings and victuals with you. Even the mean miller in Chaucer’s “Reeve’s Tale” is prepared to offer two disreputable students a bed for the night. Hospitality is considered a work of charity, and listening to a stranger’s news over a mug of ale and a plate of bread and cheese is one of the most pleasant and rewarding forms of charity there is. However, you do need to remember that not all people are equal; social rank plays an important role. If you are a lord, you will be entertained almost wherever you go (barring only the houses and castles of your political enemies). If you are a peasant, and if you knock on the door of a bishop’s palace, the chances are that you will be shooed away. At best you will be told to come back in the morning when the leftovers from the bishop’s kitchens are handed out to the poor.

  The warm welcome generally extended to travelers comes with some unwritten rules. Firstly, you must respect the property of your host. Secondly, your host is legally responsible for you during your stay. Therefore at a monastery, manor house, or inn you will be expected to surrender your sword and any other weapons you are carrying. When staying at a private home, it is simply courteous to offer your sword to the master of the house. Thirdly, if you die in someone else’s house, the goods with you automatically become his property. The last rule is to avoid outstaying your welcome. As the old saying goes, after three days, two things begin to smell: fish and uninvited guests.

  Inns

  Inns are perhaps the most obvious places to seek accommodation, but that does not mean they are all welcoming, homely establishments. They are businesses built on necessity—the very opposite of luxury hotels. The number of visitors to a town is never dependent on the number of inns; rather the opposite is true. If you have an offer of a bed in a private house, you would be well advised to take it.

  The harsh practicalities of running an inn are reflected in the personages and figures of those who choose to make their living in the trade. Innkeepers are often stout, no-nonsense men, built like bears and familiar with the tricks of thieves, peddlers, beggars, and ruffians. If a traveler loses all his money in a game of dice, his pleas of poverty will fall on deaf ears when the time comes for him to pay his bill. The landlord will turn him out without his possessions, his horse, and even without his clothes if there is no other way of making good the loss. Likewise, if a traveler causes trouble at an inn, he is thrown out onto the dark streets, to be found either by a cutpurse, cutthroat, or the town watch. And, as if a rowdy clientele is not enough, an innkeeper also has to deal with the local authorities who regulate the trade. They expect him to comply with the fair prices set for food and to take responsibility for his inebriated and sometimes violent guests. It is not an easy way of making a living.

  Finding a bed at an inn is not always straightforward. It is up to you to convince an innkeeper that it is worth his while accommodating you. In some towns, the bylaws require innkeepers to offer every visitor a bed, whether they arrive on foot or on horseback. The very need for such bylaws is a reminder that landlords often refuse people accommodation. If you arrive on horseback, especially if you have sent a servant on ahead to make inquiries on your behalf, you will have no difficulty obtaining a place to stay, if there is space. If you arrive on foot, a landlord can get around the bylaw by claiming that you are a vagrant. If you look as if you are poor, and might not be able to pay your bill, the chances are that you will not be offered a bed. As many landlords are fond of pointing out, inns do not exist for the sake of charity. If you want charity, go to a monastery.

  Let us say you are riding into town on a late summer’s evening, weary after spending eight hours in the saddle. Your servant has arranged for you to stay at an inn called the Angel. You see the handsome stone structure from some distance, with a wide street frontage and an arch in the middle of the building. The image of an angel is painted on a board which hangs above. As you ride beneath the arch, note the heavy wooden door which separates the inn from the street. Such security is necessary if the innkeeper wishes to continue to attract the wealthiest clientele.

  Now you find yourself in a courtyard, which is not paved or cobbled but simply flattened earth—you come across mud in even the best establishments. On either side of you are wings of accommodation, two-storey timber-framed buildings with steep shingle-covered roofs. These have doorways on the upper floor, reached by external staircases and galleries, as well as on the ground floor. In the courtyard you dismount; one of the stable boys will take charge of your horses, leading them to the stable yard at the rear, where they will be fed and watered. Alternatively, if there is no boy present, tether your horses at the post in the courtyard before making your way through to the hall to find the landlord or his wife. “Dame, God be here!” you might say, entering the hall and seeing the innkeeper’s wife, wearing a leather apron and serving some guests at the long trestle table.

  “Fellow, ye be welcome.”

  “May I have a bed here within? May I here be lodged?”

  “Yea, well and cleanly, all, were ye twelve, all on horseback.”

  “Nay, but we two. Is there to eat here within?”

  “Yea, enough, God be thanked!”

  “Bring it to us. Give hay to the horses, and straw them well; see they be watered. Dame what owe we? We shall reckon tomorrow and shall pay also that ye shall be pleased. Now, bring us to sleep; we be merry.”

  “Jeanette! Light the candle and lead them there above in the solar, and bear them hot water to wash their feet, and cover them with cushions, and see the table be well set.”1

  The hall where you find yourself having this conversation is very high, open to the roof beams, with a hearth set on flagstones in the center. The trestle table where the other guests are eating runs down one side. Smoke rises and exits through a louver in the roof. Here of an evening you and your servant can sit with other travelers while ale, pottage, bread, and cheese are served. In most towns, innkeepers are prevented from serving food and drink to anyone other than a guest, so the hall tends to be a gathering place for people on the move. Here traveling plans and partnerships are formed and thirsts assuaged late into the night.

  If this picture of gathering around a fire in a hall with a crowd of fellow travelers exchanging tales and drinking ale seems like a pleasant way to pass the evening, be warned: there are more than a few less-romantic aspects to staying at an inn. The hall itself is often characteristically aromat
ic on account of the amount of moldy food, stale drink, mud, horse dung (trodden in from the street), and the urine of talbots (guard dogs) mixed in the rushes which cover the hall floor. While the best inns will see such noisome rushes quickly removed and replaced with fresh ones, intermingled with lavender, rose petals, and herbs, the worst will replace them infrequently, without the petals or herbs. In the evenings the only light apart from the fire comes from candles made of tallow (animal fat) or rushlights (rushes dipped in fat and supported on metal stands). As methods of lighting, these are poor. They also reek. If the toilet facilities are close at hand, that will not help the smell. The usual toilet is a barrel and seat, emptied every morning by some poor servant who has to carry it to the town’s equivalent of Shitbrook. If there is a cesspit situated not far from the hall, it is inevitable that smells will waft up from time to time.

  If the smell and poor lighting in the hall come under the heading unsanitary, the sleeping facilities are likely to be labeled unsavory. If you are lucky you will be lodged in a chamber adjacent to the hall.

  If not, you will have to go outside and climb the wooden staircase to your bedchamber. There you will find several beds, sometimes a dozen or more. Each bed may accommodate two, three, or even more men. Women will be expected to share the same quarters, although females hardly ever stay at an inn by themselves. Married couples have the advantage that they pay double for a bed, so if you are with your spouse you can expect the landlord to ask a single man to vacate a bed to make room for the two of you.

  The beds themselves are made of wooden frames strung with rope. A straw mattress, encased in a hemp or canvas cover, is placed on top of this. In a good inn, you will probably have a second mattress on top of this first one. In the best establishments, with just one or two beds per chamber, you may also find a chest for personal possessions and a pitcher of water and a brass basin for washing hands, faces, and feet. Should you or your companion in the bed feel the urge to get up in the night, you will need to make a short walk in the darkness. Hence the sound of travelers stumbling along the gallery or down the stairs is not uncommon. Down below, the talbots are easily disturbed. It is not unusual to wake up in the middle of the night to the barking of dogs, the snoring of travelers in your chamber, and the unmistakable sounds of someone urinating or drunkenly vomiting from the stairs or gallery down into the yard.

  Another unsavory fact about staying at an inn is the cost. A bed for the night will set you back about ½d to 1d, plus 1½d to 2½d for a meal (more if with meat and more again if with wine). In addition, it is most important to have your horse fed and looked after; you can expect to spend between 1½d (in summer) and 3½d (in winter) on stabling and fodder per animal. Of course you will also have to pay for a bed (¼d) and board (1d) for your servant too. At a fine, stone-built city inn with a good reputation, the bill will be higher. In some cases you may have to pay a total bill of 1s 6d for a single night’s accommodation for yourself, a servant, and three horses. And do not forget that, if you have been well served, your landlord will expect a tip as you leave. This applies to everywhere you spend the night—including the houses of wealthy and private citizens. As Chaucer puts it in “The Sea Captain’s Tale,” the welcome guest will “not forget to tip the meanest page in the whole house” and give to “his host and all the servants in the place some gift that is appropriate to their standing.”2

  Town houses

  The poorest town dwellers are not people with whom you are likely to stay. As you have already seen (in chapter 1), their lowly single-storey dwellings are smoky, filthy, crowded, and damp. A wealthy merchant’s house, on the other hand, has all the spaciousness of an inn with many more comforts besides.

  The layouts of merchants’ houses vary hugely. But take the substantial house built by the tallow-chandler Richard Willysdon in Thames Street, London, in 1384. Looking at the front you see a line of shops, which Willysdon lets out to traders. These form the ground floor of a three-storey timber-framed structure leaning out over the street. The ground floor is twelve feet high, the first floor ten feet, and the second seven feet. In the center of the building is an entrance arch with a gate, leading from Thames Street into the courtyard. If you go through this you will find yourself in a large entrance court, with storage buildings on your left and a high, long hall on your right. A short flight of stone steps leads up to this hall. Directly ahead of you are several timber-framed buildings where you will find the parlor, the chapel, and bedchambers.

  Turn to your right and enter the hall. This is a room designed to impress you and every other visitor whom Willysdon receives. Its size and height will strike you—forty feet long by twenty-four feet wide, and between thirty feet and forty feet high. Its architectural wooden roof adds grace to the spacious and airy interior. The painted wall hangings and the colorful cushions on the benches along the walls add vibrancy. The stone floor gives the hall a sense of solidity; beneath it there is a vaulted undercroft where goods are stored. The shutters are open, and through them you can see that the windows are glazed with thick greenish glass, which is opaque but allows light in and keeps the cold out. There is a fire on the central hearth, smoke from which is rising in the sunlight towards the roof.

  Turn around and explore this house further. You entered by means of a “screens passage”—a covered passageway enclosed behind a screen, which prevents the hall door opening directly to the cold. If you go back into this passage and go through the door directly opposite, you will find yourself in the buttery, where ale, wine, and all other “wet” things are kept. The next door off the passage leads to the pantry, where bread and all “dry” things are kept (including spices, tablecloths, and other linen). At the end of the passage, beyond these rooms and tucked in behind the tenanted shops, is the kitchen: a large square room open to the roof beams, with wide fireplaces.

  Walk back into the hall and go to the far end. Here you will see the merchant’s table. On one side is his aumbry, where he displays his finest pewter and silverware: silver spoons, flagons, mazers (silver-bound drinking vessels), and hanaps (two-handled drinking cups). In the end wall these is a door leading through to the south-facing parlor or solar, where Willysdon and his family spend much of their day. Upstairs from this are the main bedchambers for the family and guests, with views across the garden and down to the river. Willysdon even has his own private wharf. The rent he pays for this valuable piece of land is £12 per annum.3

  The sort of items you will find in merchants’ houses are as varied as the houses themselves. If you stroll through the private quarters of Willysdon’s house and those of his neighbors you will see feather beds in the bedchambers, painted wooden altarpieces in the chapels, gilt-silver crucifixes, seals, Bibles, and even the odd vellum-bound book of romance or history. You will find the swords and breastplates which good citizens are expected to carry, chests of clothes, and utensils for washing your hands (such as basins and ewers). You will see large quantities of linen for the bedchambers and many varieties of tableware, from pewter plates to bronze flagons and enameled gilt-silver covered goblets. Furniture is relatively scarce, but in the parlors you will see benches, chests, candlesticks, and painted wallhangings; and in the bedchambers you will find a surprisingly varied range of beds—from large, comfortable feather beds to low, narrow truckle beds for children and servants. The personalities of these men and women are to be noted in the objects which hint at their creativity: an astrolabe for measuring the stars, for instance, or a musical instrument such as a harp, tambourine, or flute. Most interesting of all are the prized, luxurious possessions. In 1383 in the house of William Harecourt, a trader of Boston, you will find a gentleman’s falcon and a couple of other hawks. In 1337 in the house of Hugh le Bever, a taverner of London, you will see a rare cup made out of a coconut.4

  Two Merchants’ Household Inventories

  Household Goods of Hugh le Bever of London, 13375

  Item

  Value

  One mattress
/>
  4s

  Six blankets and one serge

  13s 6d

  One green tapet [carpet bedcover]

  2s

  One torn coverlet with shields of sendal [a fine silk]

  4s

  Seven linen sheets

  5s

  One tablecloth

  2s

  Three tablecloths

  18d

  Three feather beds

  8s

  Five cushions

  6d

  Three brass pots

  2s

  One brass pot

  6s

  Two pairs of brass pots

  2s 6d

  One broken brass pot

  2s 6d

  One latten candlestick, a plate, and a small brass plate

  2s

  One grate

  3d

  Two andirons

  18d

  Two basins with one washing vessel

  5s

  One iron herce [a frame supporting candles]

  12d