The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century (7 page)

For this reason the majority of medieval people are relatively young. Between 35 and 40 percent of those you will meet are under
fifteen. At the other end of the age spectrum, just 5 percent of fourteenth-century people are aged over sixty-five. There are many more youths and far fewer old people. The contrast is most striking when you consider the median age. If you were to line up every modern English person in age order, the man or woman in the middle would be thirty-eight. If you were to do the same in the fourteenth century, the median would be twenty-one. Half the entire population is aged twenty-one or less.
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This preponderance of young people leads to social differences in every community and field of activity. The average man or woman in the medieval street has seventeen years’ less experience to draw on in every aspect of his or her lives. He or she has many fewer elders to ask for advice. When you consider that societies with youthful populations are more violent, tend to be supportive of slavery, and see nothing wrong in holding brutal combats in which men fight to the death for the sake of entertainment, you realize that society has changed fundamentally. The Middle Ages are not comparable with ancient Rome, but the medieval understanding of a bondman’s servitude is not very far removed from slavery, and the enthusiasm for watching knights jousting is not totally dissimilar to that of Roman citizens watching gladiators draw blood. There is just one very important difference: medieval audiences know that their tournament fighters are
voluntarily
risking injury and death. They are aristocratic knights fighting for pride and glory, not slaves forced to hack each other to pieces for the amusement of the bloodthirsty masses.

How do medieval people appear? On the whole they are just slightly shorter than us. The average man is a little over 5’ 7” (171 to 172 cm) and the average woman about 5’ 2” (158 to 159 cm). Their feet are also smaller, most men having shoe sizes (English) of 4 to 6 and most women 1 to 3.
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However, you will note that the wealthy tend to be more or less the same height as you.
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The poor, on the other hand, tend to be considerably shorter: a disparity due to genetic selection as well as diet. This gives the nobleman a clear advantage when it comes to a fight. Talking of fighting, you are bound to come across men who have lost eyes, ears, or limbs in the French and Scottish wars, or in less glorious outbursts of violence. A surprisingly large number hobble about with leg or foot injuries that have never healed properly, often a result of an accident at work. In some towns one in every twenty
people is getting by with a broken or fractured limb.
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Then there are accidents of birth to consider. One bishop of Durham, Louis de Beaumont, is renowned for having two clubfeet. Most people have suffered at some time or another from a disease which has affected their youthful beauty (supposing they had some to start with).

It is generally said that medieval men are in their prime in their twenties, mature in their thirties, and growing old in their forties. This means that men have to take on responsibility at a relatively young age. In some towns citizens as young as twelve can serve on juries.
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Leaders in their twenties are trusted and considered deserving of respect. At the age of just twenty Edward III declares war on the Scots and leads an army into battle despite being outnumbered two to one. This is not some rash act; he commands the full confidence of his nobles, knights, men-at-arms, and infantry. In the modern world he would still be considered too young even to be an MP. When people declare that “children have to grow up so quickly these days,” they should pause and reflect on this fact. Medieval boys are expected to work from the age of seven and can be hanged for theft at the same age. They can marry at the age of fourteen and are liable to serve in an army from the age of fifteen. Noblemen might hold office or be given command of an army before they are twenty. At the battle of Crécy (1346) the command of the vanguard—the foremost battalion of the army—is given to Prince Edward, then just sixteen years of age. It is unthinkable that we would put a sixteen-year-old in charge of a battalion, in combat, today.

As for women, you can advance these “prime,” “mature,” and “growing old” periods of life by six or seven years. A woman is in her prime at seventeen, mature at twenty-five, and growing old by her mid-thirties. In the words of one of Chaucer’s characters, a thirty-year-old woman is just “winter forage.” Betrothals of boys and girls take place in infancy, and marriage at the age of twelve is approved of for a girl, although cohabitation usually begins at fourteen. Teenage pregnancies are positively encouraged—another significant contrast with modern England. Most girls of good birth are married by the age of sixteen and have produced five or six children by their mid-twenties, although two or three of those will have died. At that age many of them are widows as a result of the Scottish and French wars. That is, of course, presuming they survive the high risks associated with multiple childbirth.

Having said all this, a tiny number of men and women do live into their eighties. That grizzled old knight Sir Geoffrey de Geneville, the brother of the biographer of St. Louis, is still living in the Dominican Friary at Trim in 1314, at the age of eighty-eight.
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The shrewd Cornish clergyman, linguist, and translator John Trevisa, who comes into the world in about 1326, has yet to depart from it in 1412, aged eighty-six. The chronicler John Hardyng, born in 1377, writes a chronicle about the triumph of the first Lancastrian king, Henry IV, in 1399 and lives long enough to rewrite the whole story with the opposite political slant for the Yorkist king, Edward IV, in the 1460s. He is still alive in 1464 at the age of eighty-seven. Similar extremes of old age are to be found among the English bishops. The average age at election of those in office in 1300 is forty-three. They live for another twenty-one years, taking them to an average age of sixty-four. Those in office in 1400 are, on average, forty-four at the time of their election. They survive for another twenty-three years, taking them to sixty-seven. Among this group are men like Bishop Skirlaw of Durham and Bishop Burghill of Lichfield, who are still in office at the age of seventy. William of Wykeham is still bishop of Winchester at the age of eighty.

Medieval society thinks of itself like this: there are three sections of society, or “estates,” created by God—those who fight, those who pray, and those who work the land. The aristocracy are “those who fight.” They protect “those who pray” and
“those who work.” The clergy do the praying and intercede on behalf of the souls of the fighters and the workers. “Those who work” feed the aristocracy and the clergy through the payment of service, rents, and tithes. In this way each group contributes to the welfare of society as a whole.

It is a neat concept and particularly attractive to those doing the fighting and praying, who use it to justify the gross inequalities in society. But it is a concept that has been increasingly outdated since the twelfth century. Between 1333 and 1346 it is systematically shredded by the English longbowmen, who, although ranked among “those who work,” show that they are a far more potent military force than the massed charging ranks of “those who fight.” In those few years, “those who work” become “those who fight,” thereby threatening to make the old aristocracy redundant. Nevertheless, despite the inadequacy of the model, it is worth using it, if only because it shows how fourteenth-century people themselves understand their class system.

As the above diagram shows, “those who fight” includes several tiers, a pyramid of wealth and military responsibility. At the top of the pile is the king, who is the lord of all the land in the kingdom. Those royal estates which are kept in the king’s hand bring in an annual income from which the king pays for the royal household, including the various departments of government. In addition, the king can seek extra money to finance military expeditions through subsidies and other taxes, subject to the approval of Parliament.

In the second tier are the lords. There are three ranks: dukes, earls, and barons.
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The title of duke takes precedence, being invented in 1337 for Edward III’s eldest son, Edward of Woodstock, later known as the Black Prince. It is normally a royal title: three of the four dukes created before 1377 are the king’s sons. More common are those great lords in the next tier of precedence: the earls. Their number fluctuates between seven and fourteen over the century. The lowest rank of aristocracy is the baronage: the number of barons fluctuates between forty and seventy.

All these lords hold their principal estates
directly
from the king and are thus known as “tenants-in-chief.” They normally receive a personal summons to attend each parliament. They constitute the House of Lords. When it comes to fighting, they are all technically bound to serve the king with their retinues at their own expense for forty days
each year. In effect, however, those who are willing to serve the king do so for as long as they are required and are compensated for their expenditure accordingly.

Lordly status loosely correlates with income. In theory each earl should receive at least £1,000 from his estates. Most have between £700 and £3,000. The richest is Thomas of Lancaster, who has five earldoms and an income of about £11,000 in 1311. This is exceeded by only two people over the whole century. Second on the fourteenth-century “Rich List” is Queen Isabella, who allocates to herself 20,000 marks (£13,333) per year in 1327-30. First place goes to John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, whose gross income from his English and Welsh estates in 1394-95 is in the region of £12,000, in addition to a pension from Castile of about £6,600.
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Most barons have an income of between £300 and £700, but in a few exceptional cases—Lord Berkeley, for instance—a baron may receive as much as £1,300 per year.

The third tier in the feudal hierarchy is made up of lords of manors held
indirectly
from the king—that is to say, held by local lords from the tenants-in-chief. These local lords do not receive a personal summons to attend parliaments, although they may be elected to represent their country as “knights of the shire.” They are not “lords” in the sense of having a baronial title but merely lords over their manorial tenants. In theory all of them with an annual income of £40 or more—about eleven hundred men—should be dubbed knights by the king. Those who are not are called “esquires” (provided they are entitled to bear coats of arms, due to their descent from a knight; otherwise they are just “gentlemen”).

The foregoing does not account for all manorial lords. Many lordships are in the hands of clergymen or institutions, such as monasteries or university colleges. Many old manors have been divided between co-heiresses, and so a “lord of the manor” might be the holder of just a quarter of a knight’s fee, perhaps less than a thousand acres, yielding as little as £5 per year. There are about ten thousand men who fall into this category of local gentry, with incomes of £5 to £40 per year.
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To what extent they should be considered among “those who fight” is open to debate. Nevertheless, their legal status and family connections give them influence among their peers and power over their tenants and bondmen, so do not be fooled by their lack of wealth into thinking they are of little consequence.