The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century (6 page)

A fourteenth-century village is far from picturesque. Forget postcard images of flowers in pots at the doors of quaint thatched cottages. It is a visual mess in both layout and presentation. The first
house you might see has low walls of limewashed cob and narrow windows with external shutters. A broad thatched roof rises from about chest height to twenty-five feet or more, with smoke coming from one of the crude triangular openings—makeshift louvers—built into either end of the ridge. The thatch itself, which probably is laden with moss and lichen, extends out over the walls by a good eighteen inches, giving the whole building the aspect of a frown. The cobbles of the toft (the area on which the house is built) are uneven and have partially sunk into the mud. A small fence runs around the whole house and garden. Adjacent to the house are water butts and piles of firewood. Nearby are a hut containing the privy, a working cart, the remains of a broken cart, a haywain, a thatched stable, a goose house, a henhouse, a barn, and perhaps a small brew house and bake house.

After a few minutes of staring at this conglomeration, you might start to realize how the whole toft, together with its garden, has been arranged. The firewood is located within easy reach of the house. Likewise the privy—a smelly earth closet—is close (but not too close) to the door. The reason the thatch extends so far out over the walls is to protect them from the rain and snow, for they are composed of cob or clay, straw, and animal dung. The henhouse and goose house are positioned where they are in order to keep them safe from foxes and other predators at night. The broken cart is there so it can be repaired or reused for something else: a principle of recycling which applies to almost everything in medieval England. The garden at the rear is where the householder grows vegetables and herbs. The barrels are deliberately placed to collect rainwater—the cleanest water available—as it runs off the roof. Gradually you realize that there is a wholly different aesthetic at work here. Of course there is no need for flowers in a pot to beautify a medieval house. To the medieval yeoman’s eye, the beauty lies in having the necessities of life close at hand. To the family which lives here, beauty lies in the smoke issuing from the roof openings and the knowledge that there is plenty more firewood just outside the door.

Once you understand the aesthetic difference between the modern concept of a comfortable home and the practicalities of living in the fourteenth century, you will begin to understand why the village looks as it does. Practicalities take precedence over beauty and thus become ideals, or things of beauty, in themselves. Yes, the houses appear to
have been scattered all over the place, as if each toft were a giant playing card from a pack that the Devil once tossed over his shoulder in a fit of pique. Nevertheless there is a reason why each one is where it is. Many stand alongside the lanes which lead to their allotted acres in the open fields, permitting easy access for the carts and oxen. The mill stands where it does because the river runs that way. Other houses are situated where they are because of their wells, or because there is a frost pocket that chills a certain area of land in winter, or because a certain area is liable to flood. The village develops in line with the contours of necessity. Now you can see why medieval parishioners have no compunction about simply lopping off one aisle of the church when the population of the village shrinks. The harmonious symmetry of the church is destroyed, as they realize; but the resultant smaller building is better suited for the reduced population, and there is a different sort of harmony in that.

Your first impression on reaching the heart of any one English village will be that all the houses look much the same. Whether they are built individually or in groups, they are almost all single storey and no more than sixteen feet from front to back—all medieval houses are just one room in depth. Village houses also tend to have the same style of construction and roofing as one another. However, across the wider landscape, this appearance of similarity is misleading. There are differences of size, purpose, and construction methods. And, of course, there are substantial regional variations. In some parts of the country stone is more easily available than oak. On Dartmoor, where large beams cannot easily be transported but stone is plentiful, people live in granite houses and thatch them with reed or bracken, which needs to be replaced annually. In parts of Cornwall houses are built of slate blocks and roofed with slate slabs. In Kent, elm is used in the frames of a substantial minority of houses.
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In most regions, stone buildings are a status symbol. The majority of rural workers live in timber-framed houses thatched with straw.

Most village houses measure between twenty-five and forty feet in length, but some are square one-roomed cottages and others sixty-foot-long yeomen’s houses. The latter are handsome two-bay halls, with a two-storey wing at each end and many outbuildings. At the other extreme, a widow’s cottage may be just a single-storey, one-room dwelling of about thirteen feet square, with a porch and a
henhouse by the back door. In some regions, especially in the West Country, you will still find longhouses; these can be anything up to ninety feet long, with one end accommodating cattle and the other the farmer’s family. Bear in mind that in these remote regions, a village will not necessarily be a series of grouped houses but may well consist of a number of scattered farmsteads, with only a handful of them being in sight of the parish church.

At the start of the fourteenth century there is a great deal of shoddy building. Many rural workers’ houses are built cheaply, without proper foundations but with their beams placed straight into the ground. Of course, without a foundation plinth the timbers rot, so houses of this type need replacing every thirty or forty years. Early in the century, however, things start to change. More houses begin to be built with stone foundations, or footings, for timber and cob walls or rebuilt entirely with walls of stone. The roofs are also improved. A technique is developed in some parts of the country whereby the top level of thatch is replaced regularly while the base level is kept in place. Some of this fourteenth-century base thatch lasts so well it may be found in the roofs of houses in modern times, after more than six hundred years—complete with the dried bodies of medieval grasshoppers and ladybirds which happened to be crawling across it when it was cut.

Apart from the church, the highest-quality buildings in any village are those constructed by the lord of the manor. Some of these are stone residences for the lord and his family. But even if the lord does not reside there himself, there will be a manor house or barton set at the heart of his principal farm or demesne (land that he does not rent out but keeps for his own use). Here all the tenants of the manor come to pay their rents, fines, and other dues to the bailiff and to join in the communal meals held at Christmas and on other special occasions, such as harvesttime. The gamut of farm buildings clustered around a manor house may make it appear more like a hamlet—with its huge threshing barns and haylofts, ox houses and brew houses, stables, slaughterhouse, granary, goose house, henhouse, shearing shed, bailiff’s house, and workers’ cottages.

Of course there are many other individual buildings which make up the rural landscape. In the past, Cistercian monks were keen to build their monasteries in remote places, and although the great age of monastery building has long since gone, their huge and strikingly

elegant churches still dominate their valley settings. Likewise, although most castles in England are situated within or adjacent to towns, a few do stand in rural areas, guarding roads and harbors. Sir Edward Dallyngrigge’s new fortress at Bodiam in Sussex is a good example; so are the Pomeroy family’s castle at Berry in Devon and the Talbot family’s seat at Goodrich in Herefordshire. You may also notice the open tin mining in the southwest, where deep scars in the hillsides attest to the quarrying and washing of mineral ore, or the vast fishponds situated on the estates of the great monasteries.

For the sake of advising the would-be visitor, perhaps there is just one other essential thing to say. Not all of rural England is the same. In some of the hilly regions it is not possible to use wheeled transport. This means that the character of the landscape is altogether different from lowland England. Building materials are gathered from the immediate vicinity. Being prone to heavy rainfall, and poor for arable farming, the manors have far lower populations. Many abandoned settlements are to be found in these regions after the Great Plague. Also, being poorer and relatively isolated, these manors are normally ignored by their lords. So they do not attract the best master masons to rebuild the churches or manorial buildings, and the structures that are erected are often provincial in character and amateurish in execution. At the other extreme, areas of East Anglia are very flat and fertile, and thus rich. They are also relatively safe, unlike rural areas bordering on Scotland and Wales.

The largest areas of abandoned landscape are to be found in the far north, in parts of Cumberland and Northumberland. Here there
are
parishes and manors, in theory, but for much of the fourteenth century there are few or no people. This is for three reasons: climate change, plague, and the frequent incursions of the Scots. The ruined houses and chapels are left open to the elements. A huge parish like Bewcastle in Cumberland, consisting of more than forty thousand acres, is almost uninhabited. A similar situation prevails in Northumberland. The land is border land, guarded by the valiant Percy family, lords of Alnwick, but for the most part it is empty. Areas like Redesdale, which were once well populated, have been largely abandoned. The massive parish of Simonburn, measuring thirty-three miles by fourteen and covering more than 150,000 acres, is so sparsely populated that its tithes are insufficient to maintain a single priest. No royal
tax collectors go there. No one goes there. Battles take place from time to time, and you will find the odd obstinate crofter eking out a living from a smallholding hidden in a valley, but sometimes you can ride for a whole day in this region and see no one. It is simply not worth building a home in a land where there is a strong likelihood that your crops with be burnt, your animals stolen, and you and your family assaulted and killed by the invading Scots. It is certainly a far cry from the villages and small towns in the Midlands and the south, where young children can be found playing in the dust of the street.

No one can tell you exactly how many people there are in fourteenth-century England. Estimates tend to be around 5 million in 1300 (give or take half a million) and around 2.5 million in 1400 (give or take a quarter of a million)
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. The one thing that everyone agrees on is that there are far fewer people at the end of the century than at the start: about half as many. The total population shrinks by 9 to 10 percent between 1315 and 1325, by 30 to 40 percent in the Great Plague of 1348–49, and by a further 15 to 25 percent over the rest of the century. Large numbers of children cannot quickly reverse these losses. As you will have seen from the effects on the landscape, it is a traumatic experience for the whole of society. Not until the 1630s will the population get back to 5 million again, and not until the 1740s will it reach 5.5 million.

How long do these people live? It depends on where you are and what sort of wealth you enjoy. Yeomen in Worcestershire in the first half of the fourteenth century can, at the age of twenty, look forward to an average of twenty-eight years more life; and their successors in the second half can expect another thirty-two years.
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This does not sound too bad: a lifespan of fifty years, more or less. However, this bald figure means that half of all adults die before they reach fifty. And these are the
prosperous
members of Worcestershire society. Poor peasants in the same area can expect to live for five or six years less. And all these figures are for those who have already reached the age of twenty: half the population will die before this age. Life expectancy at birth can be as low as eighteen, as at the Yorkshire village of Wharram Percy.