Terry Jones' Medieval Lives Read Online Free

or were in some degree of serfdom as cottagers, smallholders or villeins. It was the last group, villeins, that Froissart was describing – men who were not free to leave their land and who owed labour duties to their lords. Probably 30 per cent of men in England were villeins in 1381.
    It is often said that peasants lived in primitive one-room ‘hovels’, but in all the excavations of medieval villages there seems to be little sign of these horrible dwellings. According to the historian Christopher Dyer, ‘Most villages that have been excavated seem to consist mainly of substantial houses’. In fact, according to Dyer, ‘We should not be looking for tiny buildings, but for structures of standard size, but distinguished from the houses of the better-off by the quality and quantity of the materials used, or the standard of carpentry.’
    But even if the lowest semi-slave lived in a substantial house, presumably he and his miserable extended family were crammed in there in a half-starved, overcrowded huddle – grandparents, uncles, aunts, nieces and nephews jumbled promiscuously together?
    Well, maybe not.
    Where we do have evidence, it tends to show that peasants lived in nuclear families like our own, and that they liked their privacy. From as early as the twelfth century there were upper rooms in quite small rural buildings, and certainly this is how many people were living by the early fourteenth century. This suggests that some houses, at any rate, had private rooms and their occupants did not have to live their lives under the whole family’s gaze. The same inference – that peasants liked their privacy – can be drawn from archaeological evidence that, in the thirteenth century at least, houses were surrounded by ditches (and presumably also hedges and fences) and had locked doors, and that goods were kept in locked chests.
    What kind of peasants were these? What did they have that was worth protecting? Excavations show pewter tableware, glazed pots, dice, cards, chessmen, footballs, musical instruments and ‘ninemen’s morris’ boards in these hovels. And people seem to have eaten rather better than one might suppose. The evidence is that they didn’t simply live on bread and cheese, but ate pork, lamb and beef, fruit and vegetables, and that even in inland villages they ate fish (archaeologists have found fish bones at the deserted village of Wharram Percy in Yorkshire).
    Something seems to be not quite right about the traditional picture of peasant life.
    The excavations at Wharram Percy are full of surprises. It looks like a neat, planned village, and archaeologists expected to find traces of earlier villages going back to early Anglo-Saxon times. Those traces are missing. Even though Wharram Percy is listed in Domesday Book , the village itself seems to have come into being around the end of the twelfth century. The farmers in the area had previously lived in scattered farms and hamlets.
    It now seems as though there were very few, if any, villages in that area of England before the eleventh century. While it is impossible to show a connection between this curious fact and the Norman Conquest, it does look as though the creation of villages was linked to the manorial system. In other words – villages may have been built for the local lord’s villeins.
    THE PEASANT’S STATUS
    At the time of the Norman Conquest many in the rural population were slaves in the full meaning of the word (and the Domesday Book shows that this still applied to about 10 per cent of people in 1086). This was not a satisfactory economic arrangement for the Norman overlords whom the king had installed as landholders. These lords of the manor were military men, expected to provide military service to the king as the price for their landholdings. They wanted the English to work their land, but did not want the responsibility of feeding and caring for them – which is, of