The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century (5 page)

The streets are muddy, rutted, and uneven, the center of each one being a drain carrying whatever detritus has been discarded by townsmen and market visitors. As for the marketplace itself, it has probably been partially filled with ramshackle wooden houses. Over the years, lines of market stalls have become rows of two- and three-storey houses in which traders live above their shops. They have little or no outside space. Hence they add to the density of even the smallest
town, making the once-spacious marketplace into a series of narrow alleys. The strict orders stopping unsavory trades being carried on in the main streets do not apply in a small town. There is every likelihood that as you glance into the workshops you will see piles of animal entrails being slopped into a bucket. Similarly there are normally no rules preventing roofs from being thatched (unlike in a city or large town). Hence these rows of cheap houses in marketplaces present a huge fire risk, being built of wood and cob (a mixture of clay, straw, dung, and animal hair) with roofs of thatch. When one catches alight, the whole line tends to go up in flames. Unsurprisingly such a conflagration only encourages the lord to build a replacement row on similarly shaky principles. Within a few months, the streets are foul with debris again and the alleys partially blocked by empty barrels and broken crates, the conflagration all but forgotten.

Small towns are not just muddy carbuncles on the medieval landscape. Each preserves at least part of its original open market square, and in summer, when the stalls are all set up, and the shops are open, with the sunlight shining onto the wooden worktops, there is a totally different feel to them. The size of the crowd that gathers on market days will surprise you: several hundred people come in from farms and manors in the surrounding parishes. In addition there are the travelers and the long-distance merchants who journey from market to market selling their wares. Colors abound, music is to be heard in the streets. The alehouses and inns are full to overflowing; there is laughter, shouting, and banter, and much parading of strutting horses. Most of all there is a sense of excitement that leaves you in no doubt that this small community of a hundred houses is not merely a provincial outpost of the trading world but an integral part of it. The holding of a market has transformed this part of the landscape into a hubbub of commerce, discussion, gossip, and news, if only for one day each week.

In summer the roads are dusty. Carts and packhorses trundle along, overtaken by groups of pedestrians and the occasional galloping messenger. If you escape your fellow travelers, the road is quiet. There is suddenly nothing to hear except the birdsong, the rumble and creak of
cartwheels, and perhaps the rushing water of a stream or a river. The quiet distance of the hills and fields becomes the focus of your attention.

In the modern world, an English field is a small square patch of ground between two and ten acres. You are used to seeing them all spread out across the hills like a patchwork quilt. They are very different in the fourteenth century. Throughout most of the country—in fact in all areas apart from Devon and Cornwall, parts of Kent and Essex, and the northwest—you will encounter massive, irregularly shaped fields of between seven hundred and twelve hundred acres, with no hedges, fences, or walls. Within each huge field there are individual strips of land, each one of about an acre, marked out and maintained separately by tenants, so that they resemble an enormous set of allotments. These strips are all grouped in “furlongs”—not to be confused with the unit of distance used in more recent times—and the furlongs are surrounded by “baulks,” or paths. School history lessons will probably have led you to believe that one in every two or three fields is left fallow every second or third year, but, as you can see for yourself, it is not the huge fields that are left fallow but the individual furlongs within them. Two out of every three furlongs are planted with grain of some sort—mostly wheat, oats, and barley—but every third one is left fallow, grazed in the meantime by cattle, sheep, goats, or pigs.

Around these huge areas of land, bounded by ditches and earth walls, are commons of grassland for sheep, or woodlands to provide firewood and building materials, or wide low-lying meadows in which to grow hay. Commons and meadows are to be found in all areas of England, many thousands of upland acres being given over to grazing sheep. Here and there you will see small fields or enclosures, surrounded either by stone walls or a ditch, bank, and hedge, where the animals are kept when brought in for winter. But such walls and raised hedges are few in number. You could saunter straight off the highway onto the grass verge and into the fields. Many grazing animals do exactly that and trample all over the harvest crops, much to the annoyance of the villagers and the embarrassment of the hayward whose duty it is to protect the crops.

Contrary to what you might expect, the woodland area is not very much greater than in the modern world—that is to say about
7 percent of the land. However, almost every inch of the medieval woodland is managed carefully. Some areas are cornered off and coppiced and then surrounded by high earth banks with hedges on top to stop the deer and other animals from eating the new shoots. The coppiced trees provide poles for charcoal burning, for fences and staves, or just for firewood. Other areas of the woodland are managed for timber, with spaces being cleared to encourage the trees to grow tall and straight. Great oaks are prized commodities, allowing wide structural spans to be crossed with a single beam. There is relatively little fallen wood lying on the ground, especially in those woods near villages. The right to gather sticks and fallen timber is one which the manorial lord often grants to his tenants, and they take advantage of every last twig of it. In many areas it is their sole means of keeping warm through the long winter months. Where there is more fallen wood than the local tenants can use, the rights to gather it are sold. When the forest of Leicester is impassable, the lord sets a price of Id for six cartloads of dead wood. That sees the forest floor quickly cleared.
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You might notice something else as you wander through the wood. Where are the conifers? In medieval England there are just three coniferous species—Scotch pine, yew, and juniper—and juniper is more of a bush than a tree. There are very few evergreens at all—holly is the only common one—so the winter skyline is particularly bleak. Every other pine, spruce, larch, cedar, cypress, and fir you can think of is absent. In case you see pine or fir boards used in a lord’s castle and wonder where the trees are, the answer is that they are in Scandinavia: the timber is imported.
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Nor will you find holm oaks, red oaks, redwoods, Turkey oaks, or horse chestnuts. The trees that cover England are largely those introduced during the Bronze Age and Roman periods mingled with the species which repopulated the British Isles after the last Ice Age: rowan, ash, alder, field maple, hazel, sweet chestnut, whitebeam, aspen, some poplars, silver birch, beech, lime, walnut, willow, elm, and hornbeam. And of course the good old oak. Both forms of oak are common: the small sessile variety that thrives in hilly areas, and the far more valuable pedunculate sort used for building houses and ships.
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Now you are looking more closely at the landscape, you might notice some more subtle differences. That squirrel in the trees above you is a red one—the grey variety has yet to reach Britain. In the fields
the cattle are smaller than their modern counterparts:
much
smaller. So too are the sheep. The breeding programs to produce large farm animals will not take place for several centuries. The lichens hanging from the boughs above the path through the wood are probably unfamiliar, as many more varieties survive in the unpolluted air. With darkness closing in over the trees, and a long way yet to the next town, you might wonder whether there are still wolves in medieval England . . . Rest assured that there are not. Well, probably not. The modern tradition states that the last English wolf was killed in North Lancashire in the fourteenth century but you are very unlikely to meet it. Ralph Higden, writing at Chester in 1340, comments that there are now “few wolves” left in England.
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The last set of instructions to trap and kill wolves is issued in 1289, so if you want to see an indigenous wild wolf, you will have to go to the Highlands of Scotland. There are still some wild boar in the aristocratic hunting parks or chases but they too have been brought almost to the point of extinction, so the chances of your being gored by one are remote. The only really dangerous beast to be encountered in the woods and forests of fourteenth-century England is—as you have probably guessed—man. Groups of armed men, like the Folville and Coterel gangs, do roam the forest roads looking for stragglers to rob. But that is a business to consider in the chapter on law and order, not here.

There is a common misconception that the English countryside is unchanging.“As old as the hills” is a phrase one often hears. However, those hills are slowly being developed. Some are being cleared of undergrowth and coming under the plow for the first time. Some are being enclosed within field boundaries, for the more efficient management of large flocks of sheep. The gentle slopes where oats once grew are now increasingly manured carefully so that they can yield wheat. The flat ground is also changing. The Lincolnshire Fens, Somerset Levels, and Romney Marsh are all much smaller than they used to be; many square miles of marshland have been reclaimed through the construction of long drainage ditches. Wheat, oats, and barley grow where once eels were farmed.

There are many factors affecting change in the medieval landscape, and not all of them are of human origin. For example, the silting up of rivers can hugely affect the patterns of economic development and trade in a region. A prosperous port can very quickly become a ghost town, with a ripple effect on the roads and hinterland. Coastal erosion has similar consequences. At the beginning of the century the East Anglian town of Dunwich is one of the most important ports in England. It has a Benedictine priory, two friaries, six parish churches, two chapels of ease, and a church belonging to the Knights Templar. But if you go there in January 1328, be warned: a terrific storm on the night of the fourteenth will destroy part of the town and shift enough gravel and pebbles to block the harbor entirely. Dunwich’s importance to shipping is extinguished. If you stay around the area for the next twenty years you will see the rest of the town suffer, economically decaying after the loss of its harbor. In 1347 another almighty storm sweeps away four hundred houses and two parish churches. Go there and you will hear the crashing of buildings as they collapse into the sea and the screams of terrified people trapped by fallen timbers in the darkness, struggling to escape the sea spray and gale.

Climate change is another factor affecting the landscape. At the beginning of the century it is not unusual to buy English wine. Many noble and royal houses have extensive vineyards. Not so a hundred years later. By 1400 the vineyards of England have all gone. The mean temperature for the year has dropped by about one degree centigrade.
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This does not sound like a very great difference but it represents a severe setback for some communities. The weather is that little bit colder in every circumstance, including when there are rain clouds nearby. The greater rainfall leads to flooded roads and ruined crops. In 1315–17, during the terrible years of the Great Famine (a consequence of prolonged heavy rainfall), animals may be seen drowned in their flooded pastures. Flooding also leads to greater numbers of parasites and a prevalence of crop diseases. If you tour any part of England during the Great Famine you will see the peasants digging and repairing ditches in the hope of saving their crops. Many fail and whole families die as a consequence, killed by the diseases connected with malnutrition. With fewer people left to tend the land, more acres are abandoned and return to waste ground. In this way even a slight variation in temperature can wreak profound changes upon the countryside.

The factor which affects the landscape more than any other is disease. From 1348, waves of plague depopulate rural manors to such an extent that the entire way of managing the land changes. It is not just the people killed by the disease itself who matter. If a manor suddenly has a third of its workforce wiped out, then a third of the lord’s rents go unpaid. The lord might demand that the surviving tenants work twice as hard. However, if he is not paying them and the lord of the next manor who is in need of workers is offering to pay them good money for helping with
his
harvest, they are likely to forget their bonds of service to their original lord and move, taking their families with them, even though it is against the law. In this way the lord of a manor might lose not just a third or a half of his manorial tenants but all of them. Then, faced with the prospect of a useless piece of land, he will wonder how he can make money out of it. One solution is to forget about arable farming altogether and let the manor revert to grazing land where a large flock of sheep can be kept. Thus you may see several thousand acres of well-tended grain around a village turn into a grassy down in just a few years, the ruined church tower left as the sole reminder that here was once a community.

In total more than a thousand villages have been deserted and are in ruins by the end of the century.
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Thus a visit to England in 1300 is a very different experience from a visit in 1400. Even those communities that continue to thrive are affected by the Great Plague of 1348–49 (“the Black Death,” as we refer to it). In the 1350s and 1360s most villages have abandoned houses on the outskirts. Robbed of their valuable timbers, their roofless cob walls are sadly collapsing into the mud and untended grass and weeds. In some places the repairs to a once-prosperous parish church are beyond the means of the parishioners. Rather than replace the roof of one aisle or one chapel, they will pull down the walls and fill in the arches, shrinking the church to suit both their budget and their requirements.