by Alan Ereira
DAYS OF SURVIVAL
In the eleventh century peasant farmers lived pretty close to subsistence level. The year’s work began in October, ploughing and harrowing what had been the fallow field with wheat and rye. The aim was to have done this by All Saints’ Day, 1 November. A reasonably substantial peasant farmer with 30 acres scattered over three village fields would have ten acres in his fallow field. An acre was in theory the amount of land that could be ploughed in a day – typically, four lands (strips), each of which was covered with five long furrowlengths (furlongs), turning the plough at the end of each furrow. A strip was therefore a quarter-acre.
The farmer would need to prepare these in five weeks, covering 84 miles with the plough and the same again with the harrow. And with one day a week given over to God, and up to three days to the lord of the manor, he had 15 days to do it in. This sounds fine, except that in practice it was not uncommon to cover only half an acre in a day (problems with the plough, problems with the animals drawing it, soil that was sodden with rain or ground that was frozen too hard to be worked).
At Candelmas, 2 February, ploughing would resume. This time, last year’s rye-and-wheat field would be ploughed for oats, barley, peas and beans, and the third field ploughed for fallow. The work was supposed to be finished by Easter – ideally by 25 March, but it could go on until the end of April. A long, hard frost could be a serious problem.
In the eleventh century it is likely that the best yield to be hoped for, on good land, was eight bushels of corn per acre. The net harvest, after losses during harvesting and to animals, and after the farmer had handed over his tithe to the Church and produce to his lord, was half that or less – and two bushels would have to be kept back as seed corn. Overall, the farmer would have enough to feed a family of five and there would be a small surplus, but only so long as nothing went wrong with the ploughing, ripening and harvesting of the crops. And so long as no marauding armies came along.
But things did go horribly wrong at times, and there were marauding armies. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the end of the eleventh century is a list of things going awry:
AD 1077
This year was the dry summer; and wildfire came upon many shires, and burned many towns; and also many cities were ruined thereby.
AD 1082
. . . and this year also was a great famine.
AD 1086
And the same year there was a very heavy season, and a swinkful and sorrowful year in England, in murrain of cattle, and corn and fruits were at a stand, and so much untowardness in the weather, as a man may not easily think; so tremendous was the thunder and lightning, that it killed many men; and it continually grew worse and worse with men.
AD 1087
In the one and twentieth year after William began to govern and direct England, as God granted him, was a very heavy and pestilent season in this land. Such a sickness came on men, that full nigh every other man was in the worst disorder, that is, in the diarrhoea; and that so dreadfully, that many men died in the disorder. Afterwards came, through the badness of the weather as before mentioned, so great a famine over all England, that many hundreds of men died a miserable death through hunger. Alas! how wretched and how rueful a time was there! When the poor wretches lay full nigh driven to death prematurely, and afterwards came sharp hunger, and dispatched them withal! Who will not be penetrated with grief at such a season? or who is so hardhearted as not to weep at such misfortune? Yet such things happen for folk’s sins, that they will not love God and righteousness.
AD 1098
Before Michaelmas the heaven was of such an hue, as if it were burning, nearly all the night. This was a very troublesome year through manifold impositions; and from the abundant rains, that ceased not all the year, nearly all the tilth in the marshlands perished.
Things would have been even worse without the strip system, which at least meant that a peasant’s lands were scattered and he did not have to put all his eggs in one basket. There was also a system of food-sharing in bad times. This was one beneficial result of tithes – the great tithe-barns of the Church could become charity food stores in times of need. It looks as though there was virtually no chance of starvation for a peasant farming more than 20 acres.*2 Unless, of course, there was widespread famine.
At the start of a famine people would eat bad bread, often made with rye that had developed a fungus (ergot) that produced a burning sensation in the body and LSD-type hallucinations. Then came starvation.
Starvation kills a healthy human in six to ten weeks. To begin with, a person can lose up to 10 per cent of their body weight without losing much strength or energy. At this stage they can still work and do other normal activities. Then they begin to weaken. When they have lost 15 to 20 per cent of their normal body weight they become depressed and apathetic, and can no longer participate in day-to-day life. As a person continues to lose weight the stomach accumulates abnormal amounts of watery fluids, and balloons outwards. Flesh wastes from the face and the eyes also appear to balloon outwards. The flesh increasingly sags away from the bones and permanent dark splotches from glandular disturbances may appear all over the body. Racked by the pain caused by these changes, a starving person becomes more susceptible to diarrhoea, cholera and dysentery.
The victim can see and feel their body withering away, and becomes obsessed with food. Indifference and apathy replace compassion for their starving neighbours, friends and family. Mothers have been known to snatch food from the hands of their children. Cannibalism is not uncommon. Eventually, when a person has lost about 40 per cent of their body mass, death is inevitable.*3
THINGS GET BETTER
The manorial system developed during a period when England was getting warmer and wetter. This meant many years of good harvests (which we can see today in the evidence of tree rings) interrupted by rain-driven famines, with all the horrors described above. This is the framework within which the medieval peasant saw his life, and the prospects of an afterlife.
But famine became rarer, and the economics of farming improved steadily in the centuries after the Conquest. In the thirteenth century the rise in temperature was reversed, and the tempests of the previous 200 years declined. Vineyards, an important part of the English economy for two centuries, disappeared completely by 1300 and the growing season shortened, but winters became milder and summers drier. From 1220 to 1315 there was no famine in England. This coincided with improvements in agricultural technology (primarily faster ploughing as horse teams replaced oxen in favourable areas) and the growth of markets and towns. The result was a golden age for the peasant, and a spectacular rise in the population, from 2.5 million to approaching 6 million by 1315. Wasteland was taken into cultivation, marginal land was converted into manorial farms and the standard of living rose.
There was also a significant broadening of people’s outlooks. Villein tenancies were inherited by the eldest son so younger brothers had to find livings elsewhere, which meant a considerable movement of people. The inevitable result was that a large number of peasant families had relatives in newly growing towns and so were probably quite well informed about politics and trade. They were also likely to have relatives in other parts of the country, as the pressure to bring more land under the plough meant people were moving to new manors in areas that had never been farmed before. Although peasants did not exactly go visiting much, they made pilgrimages to famous shrines and travelled to markets, and may not have had much reason to see themselves as country bumpkins.
In fact, at this time the lot of a peasant farmer was in some ways comparable with that of a modern worker. Sundays, saint’s days and Church holidays like Easter and Christmas meant he had at least as much free time as a modern employee, and the amount of work required to pay rent and taxes was probably pretty similar to that needed now. Of course, provision for old age was a bit of a problem (as it is now for many people), but peasants didn’t often live so long. The truly poor probably made up about a third of the po
pulation, as they do today (in fact, one of the oddities of English society is that it has always had roughly the same percentage of the population living on the breadline).
By 1315 the countryside was full, busy and making money. Farming was becoming more sophisticated and trade-orientated; well-managed hay meadows produced a good flow of cash, and eight to ten million sheep supplied wool for the export trade alone. There were also more horses than ever before, both for riding and for draught. In the most advanced regions – eastern Norfolk (the most crowded county in England) and eastern Kent – the old system of common fields was already on its way out because it was inefficient. These areas would be particularly prominent in the ‘Peasants’ Revolt’.
People were not starving. In fact, their diet was pretty healthy. Today, we are urged to stop eating fast foods with all the nutrition of cardboard and to eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. This is actually a return to the peasant diet – a diet that was despised by the nobility. They regarded fruit and veg as poor man’s food, believing that greens weren’t good for you and that fruit gave you dysentery – the bloody flux.
Peasant bread was much healthier than our white, steam-baked, sliced bread: it was brown, like a good wholemeal loaf. Peas and beans were sometimes added, which made it even more nutritious. In the fields people ate a kind of medieval pot noodle, a paste of dried vegetables, beans and bread to which they added ale to turn it into an instant meal. Eel pasties were another favourite, and preserved foods such as bacon, cheese and sausages were special treats.
Even for the poorest, the countryside was a larder teeming with wild life. Rivers were full of fish – there were even plenty of salmon in the Thames – and peasants had elaborate nets and traps to catch songbirds, eels and rabbits.
The countryside was healthier than the towns. When the graveyard at Wharram Percy was excavated archaeologists found 687 peasant skeletons, enough for them to draw some firm conclusions about health and ageing. It is clear that these country dwellers had suffered fewer illnesses than their urban relatives. A lower rate of infection showed in their bones, and fewer cases of anaemia suggested fewer parasites.
It is also clear, surprisingly, that they ate a reasonable amount of seafood. This is further evidence that trade networks penetrated deep into the countryside. And there was very little tooth decay – none in any of the children’s skeletons. In fact the medieval diet, with lots of coarse grains and grit in the bread, was much better for human teeth than our own. It meant they were worn down to a flat plane leaving no crevices for food to fester. But fossilized plaque in some skeletons’ teeth does suggest that many of the people at Wharram Percy had suffered from chronic bad breath. This was a bit of an issue in medieval times; in Wales a peasant woman could divorce her husband on the grounds of his halitosis.
In both countryside and towns, babies were breastfed until they were 18 months old, which protected both the child (helping its immune system and keeping its diet free of germs) and the mother (it was believed that breastfeeding can act as a natural contraceptive).
One further surprise at Wharram Percy was a skull with a big hole in it, the result of an injury caused by some kind of blunt instrument. This had clearly been operated on: the skin had been folded back, the wound was cleaned up and then the skin was stitched back again. The person had recovered from the injury. Even the inhabitants of a small village could hope for skilled and effective surgical help.
Of course, the picture was not entirely rosy. Animals were small (smaller than they had been in Roman times) and grains were tall, low-yielding varieties. Pastures were overused and easily degraded. Village life may have been healthier than life in a town, but nevertheless infant mortality was high, childbirth was dangerous, agricultural labourers were old at 40.
But the kind of peasant Froissart described – the servile villein obliged to work his lord’s land – was a diminishing class by the start of the fourteenth century. Most of the land newly taken into cultivation was farmed by freemen who paid rent for it, and they seem to have had larger families than serfs. There were now more of them than there were villeins. Villein duties had anyway often been replaced by money rents, so lords of the manor received nearly 90 per cent of their income in cash. The power of customary laws meant that a villein holding 15 to 30 acres for a fixed rent was often comparatively well off, especially as land was scarce, open-market rents were high, prices were rising and wages were low.
VILLAGE AND CHURCH
Village life was centred not just on work and home, but also on the church. Churches had been few and far between in Anglo-Saxon times, but the Church was an important element in Norman domination, and a village without a church became almost inconceivable.
The building was the physical property of the manor, and the lord appointed the priest (who would be a commoner, but not a serf). The core of any church is the chancel with the altar, and this belonged to the lord. The nave and the tower belonged to the people of the parish, who stood in the nave to hear services. Each person was expected to give one-tenth of their earnings to support the Church. This tithe was evenly divided between the parish priest, the church maintenance fund, the poor and the local bishop.
Manor courts were often held in the nave, but the church and churchyard were also places for parties, plays, pageants and games such as football and tile- or stone-throwing. Many parish priests brewed their own ale and drinking was a big part of any festival.
The church was also the centre of education. By the mid-twelfth century literacy was a real, and not impossibly distant, ambition for large numbers of people in the countryside. This is shown by the fact that one in ten boys in peasant families advanced to at least the lowest levels of the clergy, which required the ability to read Latin. There were, inevitably, traditionalists who complained that the Church had become a meritocracy, employing ministers ‘raised from the dust’. It was, in fact, a sign that the age of the Conquest was over, and that the Church was no longer an implement of Norman power.
A common illusion about the medieval period is that society consisted of rigid feudal orders, and that if you were born a serf you would die a serf. This is not quite true. For ambitious women there was always the possibility of making a good marriage or becoming a rich man’s mistress, and there were many ways for men to change their status – living in a town as a guild member for a year and a day, joining the army or Church, or, of course, entering a life of crime. But it was also possible for a poor boy to rise in a secular profession.
The most astonishing example of this is the career of William of Wykeham, the child of a peasant family who took his name from the village where he was born in 1324. He was educated at the local cathedral school at the expense of the lord of the manor (a not uncommon arrangement), who then took him on as his own secretary. The lord, Uvedale, was governor of Winchester Castle and passed the young man on to the bishop of Winchester.
In the small world of English government William was noticed by Edward III, and when he was in his early twenties the king took him into service. He was obviously clever and careful, had an interest in and talent for construction and design, and could be trusted as a manager. In his early thirties he was clerk of the king’s works in two manors, and was made surveyor of Windsor Castle. It seems to have been his idea that Edward should express his Arthurian fantasies by rebuilding the castle, and from then on his rise was irresistible.
By 1364 William had been made keeper of the privy seal and was so powerful that, according to Froissart, he ‘reigned in England, and without him they did nothing’. He was the ultimate self-made man, and fully understood the significance of education. He founded a free school, to offer 70 boys from poorer, rural backgrounds – peasants – a proper education, and also a university college to which they could go when they were ready. Both have survived to this day: Winchester College and New College, Oxford. William’s own motto, ‘manners mayketh man’, became the motto of both institutions; ‘manners’ means not sim
ply politeness, but being a capable and reliable member of society. This was a peasant attitude rather than an aristocratic one.
William of Wykeham would have been unique in any age. However, by the mid-fourteenth century most peasants knew their ABC, could sound out, and therefore recognize, their names and were familiar with the English equivalents of perhaps 10 or 20 Latin words. This allowed them to locate and recognize references to their land in court rolls, and to be aware of and talk about the contents of charters.
THE FOURTEENTH-CENTURY CATASTROPHE
The busy, prosperous and successful rural society of the start of the fourteenth century did not last. Within 15 years nature had dealt it a crushing blow:
In the year of our Lord 1315, apart from the other hardships with which England was afflicted, hunger grew in the land . . . Meat and eggs began to run out, capons and fowl could hardly be found, animals died of pest, swine could not be fed because of the excessive price of fodder. A quarter of wheat or beans or peas sold for twenty shillings [in 1313 a quarter of wheat sold for five shillings], barley for a mark, oats for ten shillings. A quarter of salt was commonly sold for thirty-five shillings, which informer times was quite unheard of. The land was so oppressed with want that when the king came to St. Albans on the feast of St. Laurence [10 August] it was hardly possible to find bread on sale to supply his immediate household . . .
JOHANNES DE TROKELOWE, Annales
This dearth had begun in May. Then came heavy summer rains and the corn did not ripen – the start of a series of agricultural disasters. Villages built on dried-out marshlands sank back into the mud and there was not enough food for the greatly swollen populace. The annals are full of misery. Then, when the famines had run their course, the Black Death came.
Having spread across Europe from the east, it arrived at Weymouth in June 1348. In less than a year the whole country was stricken. No-one could have understood what was happening. Once a person was infected large, foul-smelling swellings developed in their groin, neck and armpits. Death followed within two or three days. The disease killed more than a third of the people and by 1350 the population of England was half what it had been in 1315. Villages shrank in size or were simply abandoned. The land was covered in images of death. Church walls were painted with depictions of the ‘Three Living and the Three Dead’ and scenes of the ‘Dance of Death’.
