A lively, detailed picture of village life in the Middle Ages by the authors of Life in a Medieval City and Life in a Medieval Castle . "A good general introduction to the history of this period."-- Los Angeles Times
“The nexus of a working agricultural system, the village was a place of bustle, clutter, smells, disrepair, and dust, or in much of the year mud. It was far from silent. Sermons mention many village sounds: the squeal of cartwheels, the crying of babies, the bawling of hogs being butchered, the shouts of peddler and tinker, the ringing of church bells, the hissing of geese, the thwack of the flail in threshing time. To these one might add the voices of the villagers, the rooster's crow, the dog's bark, and other animal sounds, the clop of cart horses, the ring of the smith's hammer, and the splash of the miller's great waterwheel.”
“Yet despite all his collections, enforcements, and impingements, perhaps the most arresting aspect of the lord's relations with the villagers is the extent to which he left them alone. The once popular picture of the lord as 'an omnipotent village tyrant' was, in George Homan's words, 'an unrealistic assumption.' The medieval village actually lived and worked in a state of near autonomy. The open field system exacted a concert of the community at every point of the agricultural cycle....It is now virtually certain that the village achieved this concert by itself, with little help or leadership from outside. To <the> observation that there was never any 'necessary opposition' between the lord's manor and the peasant's village, Homans added that 'the manor could be strong only where the village was strong.'”
“The thirteenth-century villager was a cultivator rather than a herdsman because his basic need was subsistence, which meant food and drink produced from grain. His aid was not exactly self-sufficiency, but self-supply of the main necessities of life. These were bread, pottage or porridge, and ale. Because his wheat went almost exclusively to the market, his food and drink crops were barley and oats.”
“Fundamental to the system of justice was the inequality between lord and villager. If the villager missed an autumn boon-work, neglected his demesne plowing, or defaulted on any of his other obligations, he was certain of being fined. The system was onerous and exploitative, yet it apparently felt less oppressive to those who lived under it than appears to modern eyes. The villager knew the rules and could rely on them. If they were not equal for everybody, they were the same for all villeins, a fact which doubtless contributed to the success with which they were applied — 'neighbors' who turned out for the harvest boon would feel little sympathy for one who did not.”
“...the open field village of the Middle Ages was a distinctive community, something new under the sun and not repeated since. Its intricate combination of social, economic, and legal arrangements, invented over a long period of time to meet a succession of pressing needs, imparted to its completed form an image, a personality, and a character. The traces of its open fields that aerial photographs reveal, with their faded parallel furrows clustered in plots oddly angled to each other, contain elements of both discipline and freedom.”
“Village life for men and women alike was busy, strenuous, unrelenting, much of it lived outdoors, with an element of danger that especially threatened children. Diet was poor, dress simple, housing primitive, sanitary arrangements derisory. Yet there were love, sex, courtship, and marriage, holidays, games and sports, and plenty of ale. Neighbors quarreled and fought, sued and countersued, suspected and slandered, but also knew each other thoroughly and depended on each other, to help with the plowing and harvesting, to act as pledges, to bear witness, to respond when danger threatened.”
era of prosperity for all, but especially for the lords, who saw their incomes, especially their cash incomes, rise rapidly.Highlighted by 4 Kindle customers
officials, in fact, constituted the lord’s material presence in the village. Three of them, the steward, the bailiff, and the reeve, were the key executives of the manorial system.Highlighted by 3 Kindle customers
“hamlets were often simply pioneering settlements established in the course of agricultural expansion,”Highlighted by 3 Kindle customers
Typically the steward of a great lay lord was a knight, that of a great ecclesiastical lord was a cleric.Highlighted by 3 Kindle customers
Kitchen and bakehouse were in separate buildings nearby, and a granary was built up against the hall.Highlighted by 3 Kindle customers
now virtually certain that the village achieved this concert by itself, with little help or leadership from outside.Highlighted by 3 Kindle customers
In addition to dues exacted from his tenants on a variety of occasions—death, inheritance, marriage—the lord enjoyed the “ban,” a monopoly on certain activities, most notoriously on grinding everybody’s grain and baking everybody’s bread.Highlighted by 3 Kindle customers
Roofs were thatched, as from ancient times, with straw, broom or heather, or in marsh country reeds or rushes (as at Elton).Highlighted by 3 Kindle customers
Elton in the late thirteenth century was a large village, capable of summoning 327 residents to a harvest in 1287.Highlighted by 3 Kindle customers
Where the demesne was small, most of the tenants were likely to be free, or if unfree, paying a money rent rather than rendering work services.Highlighted by 3 Kindle customers
Acknowledgments
Prologue: Elton
1. The Village Emerges
2. The English Village: Elton
3. The Lord
4. The Villagers: Who They Were
5. The Villagers: How They Lived
6. Marriage and the Family
7. The Village at Work
8. The Parish
9. Village Justice
10. The Passing of the Medieval Village
Notes
Bibliography
Glossary
Index
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