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CHAPTER 1
The Villagers of the Middle
Ages
This book is about the villagers of medieval Europe during the 13th and 14th centuries. These were the people who lived in small rural communities and supported their families by farming the land. Since at least 90 per cent of all the people who lived in the Middle Ages were villagers, they far outnumbered all other groups in medieval society. These were the “common people” of the day.
Despite their numbers, the villagers had little direct impact on the great events of their time. During most of the Middle Ages a very few people‑kings, nobles, and clergy ‑controlled the lives of everyone else. The same few ordered the splendid cathedrals and sturdy castles to be built. They wrote the famous medieval works of theology and literature. But the great mass of villagers were humble folk living in the countryside far from the religious and political centers of their time. With no political power and little wealth, they had no voice in the vital decisions of their age.
Still, in their own way, the villagers of the Middle Ages played an important part in building their society. And they left impressive evidence of their work, if only we will train our eyes to see it. In a very real sense the whole European countryside as we see it today stands as their monument. Untold millions of them worked hard over long centuries. They gradually made the vast European forests, swamps, and wasteland into rich farms and settled villages which supported the entire medieval population. The measure of their success was the new wealth of Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries. Towns, trade, and population could never have grown to the extent that they did if farmers had not learned to raise the food necessary to feed townspeople as well as themselves.
THE GROWTH OF VILLAGE LIFE
All this work the villagers did under very hard conditions. The fall of the Roman Empire and the invasions of Germanic peoples in the 4th and 5th centuries A.D. left western Europe in shambles. Governments had collapsed. City life and trade had broken down almost completely, and poverty reigned everywhere. In many places nearly everyone moved to the countryside seeking farms to avoid starvation. It was in these difficult times that countless villagers patiently founded a new rural society.
The following pages will show how the villagers achieved their success. To do this we must draw a realistic picture of what it was like to have been a villager in the Middle Ages. This is especially important since the life of a villager differed greatly from that of most farmers today.
We will begin by describing the rural countryside of Europe as it appeared at that time. Then we will observe the people as they farmed to make a living as they relaxed in their moments of recreation, and as they worshipped. We will also discuss their relationships with the people who ruled them, the nobles and priests. Finally, we will try to see how the villagers themselves looked at their own lives, what sorts of things they valued most, and what kind of future they could look forward to as they grew from childhood to old age.
One word of explanation is in order here. Since the villagers could neither read nor write, they left no writ ten records of their own. This fact rules out any chance of our ever knowing them as individual human being. It is a staggering thought that for all the millions of villagers who lived during the Middle Ages, not one single biography survives to the present. Thus we cannot study specific people or families and learn about the drama of their lives, about their joys, sufferings, and hardships, about their successes and failures. However, we do know a good deal about the general outlines of their lives and what they had in common with one another. It is this that we will stress.
To make our study as close as possible to daily life, we will focus our attention on the people of one English Village, Cuxham in Oxfordshire in the 13th and 14th centuries. From Cuxham, a great number of records have survived. Thus we can get a detailed picture of how the local people lived. Our story will therefore often deal with villagers in later medieval England. But this does not mean that our conclusions do not apply to other European countries or earlier periods. Important differences sometimes separated English from French, German villagers, for example, but on the whole their ways of life were very much alike.
As a first step in understanding the medieval villagers (or peasants, as they are also called), we must look at the world in which they lived. The words "Middle Ages” bring to mind a time when Europe was little more than a vast expanse of wilderness, barren wasteland, desolate swamps and marshes. Forests covered great stretches of land, as they had from the earliest times. In many cases there were no roads or even paths. Dangerous-looking and forbidding, the forests dwarfed the patches of land the peasants had cleared for farming. To be sure, the forests supplied building materials, firewood, and a place for pigs to run. They also provided berries and mushrooms; game birds like the partridge, quail, and pheasant; and wild animals like rabbits and deer. Wild honey, the only available source of sweetening, was found in the forests. But the forests also teemed with dangerous animals like the bear, the wolf, and the boar. These animals could find their way through hedges to steal livestock and poultry. The forests also sheltered outlaws, who waited to rob innocent passersby. Little wonder that medieval people thought of the forests as places that were filled with magic forces and evil spirits.
In this forbidding world, people liked to live in closely-knit villages rather than on separate farms far from one another. Neighbors offered company and help with the tasks of farming. They offered, also, protection against danger. Thousands of these tiny settlements dotted the European landscape wherever there was enough good land to support a hundred or so peasants. Many villages were located by rivers or along roads. Others were set in clearings in the forests or along their edges. Many still exist today. They are often little changed by the passage of centuries save for bigger houses and other more modern facilities.
This was a thinly populated world. England has 50 million people today. It could count only one million in the 11th century and only 3.5 million in the middle of the 14th century. The modern city of London alone has five times as many inhabitants as the whole country had in the 11th century. Individual villages seldom numbered more than 100 or 200 people. Each person must have known everyone else in the settlement very well. This led to a strong sense of community among the villagers, who could count on one another for aid in times of emergency. Difficulty of movement, even between neighboring villages, only added to the isolation of people. Routes from one village to another were commonly simple dirt paths that became muddy obstacle courses in the wet seasons. Ten miles (about 16 kilometers) on horseback could be a good day's travel, and 25 miles (about 40 kilometers) or more was a long journey.
A typical rural community of that time was the English village of Cuxham some 50 miles (about 80 kilometers) west and slightly north of London. Cuxham consisted of some 25 little houses, each with its enclosed garden, spread out along the village stream (see map). The population numbered 125. Rising above the homes of the villagers was the manor house, the dwelling of the lord of Cuxham. Nearby was the village church, a large stone building with its single tower, still standing today. Along the banks of the stream were meadows from which the villagers cut hay for their animals. The current of the stream turned the wheels of the two mills on the northern and eastern edges of the community. Starting from the backs of the houses, the plowed fields stretched for a half or three-quarters of a mile in all directions. There were also pastures used by all the villagers to graze their animals. At Cuxham there was no large forest. Unusually fertile soil had for centuries tempted the villagers to clear all the available land for farming. By 1300 only a few scattered woodland areas remained within the bounds of the village.
Cuxham included all the normal features of medieval villages. It had a manor house, peasant houses, a church, and a mill. It had plowable land, pasture, meadows, woodlands, and a stream. Without all of these it would have been difficult, in those days, to keep a whole group of families alive in a single small area.
Nearly all medieval people lived their entire lives in places like Cuxham. Such villages were tiny centers of intense human activity, scattered across wide-open spaces of forest, wasteland and farmland. To us such a place may seem like a lovely rural setting away from the noise, dirt, and crowds of cities. No doubt medieval farmers treasured the beauty of the woods and lands with all their sounds and colors and wildlife. But we must not paint too rosy a picture. The farmers’ entire lives were an unending struggle to gain a meager living from the soil. No matter how hard they worked the uncertainties of the weather- drought, excessive rain, unexpected storms-often defeated their best efforts. Sometimes it reduced them even to famine. How they sought to cope with this environment, and to earn a living from the land, is the subject of our next chapter.
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