The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century (9 page)

Villeins may escape from their servitude in one of two ways. One is to be made free by the lord. The other is to run away. If a man runs away to a town, and lives there for a year and a day, he is legally free. Of course he will forgo all his possessions in his original manor, and his nearest male relative will be fined.
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If he is married then his wife and children will be turned out of the house and the family possessions confiscated—so married men do not often escape. If they try, their wives are likely to follow them and drag them home again. Also, it is worth remembering that a free man is not necessarily better off than his unfree cousins. Even if he has a craft or skill, he will not have the tools or money to start up in a trade. Most escapees have nothing to sell but their labor, and that is very cheap. In this way a town is regularly kept populated, mainly by younger sons seeking their fortune. As the poor men in the slums die off from malnutrition, injury, and disease, there is a regular stream of incoming young men ready to take their place, living in the cheap subdivided tenements while eking out a living by laboring in dangerous and unsavory occupations.

Just as there is a great difference between the villeins on the manor—between those who have more than thirty acres and those who have just one or two—there is a considerable range of wealth and status among the franklins and yeomen (freemen). At the high end are those who have acquired enough freehold land to sustain their families comfortably and to employ others to help them farm their acres. They also have several servants. But even within this group there is a degree of variation. At the very top there are some who have undertaken to rent the entire manor from the lord, farming the whole estate, court and all, as if they themselves were the lords. This is not that uncommon after the Great Plague, when lords are increasingly eager to offload the financial risk of managing their estates by renting them out lock, stock, and barrel for fixed rents.
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The franklins who take on such an estate further blur the distinction between the gentry and the peasantry by marrying the daughters of esquires. A man who appoints his own bailiff, is attended by servants, has cousins among the gentry, and lords it over his fellow villagers in the manorial court hardly fits the usual image of a peasant.

The majority of freemen are not as well off as farmers of manors. Like villeins, most of them have less than a yardland in the common fields. Obviously they cannot farm all thirty acres at once—a third or so must be left fallow—so they have to earn a living from their remaining fifteen or twenty acres. In a good year this will leave them with a cash surplus; in a bad year they will struggle to get by. They may have other rights, such as the right to graze their livestock on the lord’s common or to gather firewood in the wood, but the freeholder has a hard time of it when sequential harvests are bad. Those freeholders who have less than eight acres—about half of all free peasants—have the hardest time of all. In terrible years (like the Great Famine of 1315-17) they can see that the villeins are economically better off than they are. In such circumstances there is little to do but sell up to a wealthier, more secure franklin and start laboring.

For all these reasons, when you trot into a village on your palfrey, and see one villager’s wife leaning over a wall talking to another, and think to yourself how harmonious everything seems to be, just reflect that there are many inequalities, tensions, and fears which you cannot see. The three or four families from which the local officers are most often drawn (the reeve, jurors, chief tithing-men, ale-tasters, constable, and hayward) may well be resented by those who have suffered most from their accusations in the manorial court. Some families consider other families beneath them on account of their villein status or because one of them is a servant. In most places the manorial lord will be held in a special position of esteem or hatred. The general philosophy—especially in the early part of the century—is that the harsher a lord is towards his tenants, the more he will be feared and respected, be he an abbot or a knight. And on the whole peasants
do
respect their lords. This is not surprising when you reflect that villeins in particular are dependent on their lords for their lands and their livelihoods, as well as customary feasts at harvesttime and Christmas. It is relatively rare for tenants to ransack and loot their lord’s houses and granges. The idea expressed during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381—that all peasants should be freed from their manorial bonds—is a reflection of the changing circumstances after the Great Plague and not of a long tradition of widespread interclass bitterness.

You will already have realized many of the shortcomings of the “three estates” model. Bishops may take up arms and fight, and are manorial lords just like earls and barons. In some cases a rich peasant may be indistinguishable from a poor gentleman. But a bigger failing with the model lies in the fact that many people fall outside it altogether. For example, where are the merchants? As shown in
chapter 1
, about an eighth of the population lives in a town; so where do these people appear in the scheme of “the three estates”? They hardly count among “those who work,” as their income does not support a lord. And what about everyone else? Where are the jugglers, the acrobats, and the jesters? What about the mariners, servants, and the emerging professions such as physicians and lawyers? Where do they fit into the three estates?

The people who fall outside the three estates are among the most interesting you will meet. Consider the servants. You might assume that a servant is the lowest ranking person of all, beneath even those who work. But as any servant will tell you, service has its reward, and the level of that reward depends on whom you serve and in what capacity. A royal sergeant-at-arms is a servant but, as a man-at-arms authorized to act as a king’s enforcer, he commands a great deal of authority—more than the rich merchants whose merchandise he may be sent to impound. Similarly the man who acts as a lord’s steward may be a manorial lord in his own right. A bailiff overseeing the running of a manor is similarly a lord’s servant, but he has more authority than probably everyone else resident on the manor. A lord’s son is often sent to learn how to behave by being placed in the service of another lord: he too is a servant, but not lowly in status, even though he receives no income. At the bottom end of the scale, a ten-year-old boy serving in the house of a hardworking villein or poor franklin has a very low status, lower than the other peasants. He might grow up to be a peasant farmer in his own right, but in the meantime he is the lowest of the low. His wages reflect this; boys and girls often receive nothing at all for their labor but board and lodging.

You can say similar things about merchants. At the top end of society there are some very wealthy merchants. Almost all the really rich ones—international traders with goods and property worth £1,000
or more—live in London. Their incomes, which roughly equate to a tenth of their wealth, put them on a par with wealthy knights. Approximately 14 percent of all London merchants fall into this category
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Many more have less than £50 worth of goods, and commensurately lower incomes. A significant number of them mix their trading of goods with renting-out of town houses in order to make a living. Lower down the economic ladder you have the various traders who can hardly be called merchants at all, on account of their relatively low incomes and the limited and specific nature of their work. Few of them earn as much as £5 per year. Those tailors, bakers, apothecaries, cordwainers, and butchers making £4 annually are doing well—much better than the average water carrier or laborer. At the bottom of the hierarchy are those who are not even freemen of the city and who have no right to carry on a trade within the walls. In the first half of the century carters are lucky if they make £2 10s annually, and laborers if they make £2 (see
chapter 4
). And there are many people worse off than these men, who are at least employed.

The inequalities of wealth in a town, coupled with the domination of the manorial lords in the country, might make you yearn to escape the whole medieval hierarchy. If you do, you will not be alone. There are quite a few travelers on the road. There are the beggars who roam around the country, stopping in each place for a while, until they are moved on. Such men—and almost all of them are men—often have routes incorporating the houses of friendly hosts, with whom they will stay for a week or two each year. Lepers of course are forced into such a life, but, once their symptoms begin to show, they are made to feel so unwelcome that they tend to confine themselves to leper hospitals near towns. Much more readily received are the traveling performers: the tumblers and jugglers. Although most professional musicians are attached to great men’s households and religious houses, you do come across wandering minstrels. It is not a bad life in the summer months: traveling around, playing a merry jig on a pipe or a rebec. You may decide to help with the harvest in the daytime, before keeping your fellow workers dancing in the evening. It certainly beats being one of the mass of men peddling some sort of service. Who would be a pardoner, selling documents purporting to guarantee the purchaser freedom from sins? Or a soothsayer, predicting doom? Or a hermit, living on the proceeds of alms given by passersby?

Unlike men, women are not usually described by what they do but by their marital condition. Thus the medieval mind tends to categorize women as follows: maidens, wives, nuns, and widows. The status of a maiden or wife depends on that of the man who supports her. When she is a girl, this is her father or stepfather. On marrying, it is her husband. Once she has married, she becomes subject to his authority. She is unable to resist him sexually, to borrow money without his consent, or to dispose of any property—even to the point of being unable to make a will. Nuns depend on their nunnery in much the same way, being considered the brides of Christ. Only widows and aged spinsters can achieve a measure of independence, and even widows are often categorized according to the status of their last husband. This is the most fundamental aspect of women’s lives. From birth until widowhood they are living under the control—nominally, at least—of someone else, in most cases a man.

From this it is only a small step to realize that women are constantly the victims of sexual prejudice. It is not that they are second-class citizens—class has got little to do with it; high-status females are just as highly respected as high-status males—it is that women are blamed for all the physical, intellectual, and moral weaknesses of society. It was a woman who first persuaded a man to take a bite from the forbidden fruit, with the result that all humanity was cast out of Paradise, and that is a difficult thing to live down. The fact that the Bible is “a text wherein we find that woman was the ruin of Mankind” (as Chaucer puts it) presents a fundamental platform upon which all manner of prejudices are founded (although Chaucer himself is remarkably free from these). According to a thirteenth-century work translated into English in the fourteenth century, women are smaller, meeker, more demure, more gentle, more supple, and more delicate, but they are also “more envious and more laughing and loving, and the malice of the soul is more in a woman than in a man.” The author goes on to add that a woman “is of a feeble nature, tells more lies . . . and is slower in working and in moving than a man.”
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Clearly this author is not wholly unappreciative of female qualities, but his report of women is not exactly a glowing one.

Although you may find these sexual prejudices disturbing, it is difficult to see how things could easily change. This is not just because of the misogyny of society; it is also a matter of trust in the law and social norms. Men might act in the name of the law but that does not qualify them to change it, especially as it has been built up slowly, over many generations. Nor does the law help them understand the problem of legal prejudices against women. It is debatable as to how many people think there
is
a problem. Many women consider that this male-dominated society is simply the way things are, and the way that God intended the world to be, as a punishment on women. For if anyone looks anywhere for guidance in such matters, they look in the Bible, and Genesis is not the only book with a sexist slant. In addition, the intellectual developments of the thirteenth century—which increasingly form the basis of educated opinion in the fourteenth—have spread the Aristotelian dictum that women are basically “deformed men.” A few educated women rail against this sexism but there is not much they can do about it except write witty antisexist polemics, to be shared with their friends and acquaintances.

The paralyzing factor in male–female relations at all levels of society is the inability to understand and control sexual desire. Medical knowledge, which is heavily based on the teachings of the third-century writer Galen, holds that women’s wombs are “cold” and need constant warming by “hot” male sperm. In addition, if women do not regularly copulate, their “seed” (as Galen calls it) might coagulate and suffocate their wombs, thereby damaging their health. Therefore it is widely understood that women have a physical need to have sex regularly. Marriage is seen as an essential means of satiating both female and male lust through making each partner “indebted” to the other. By this reckoning, neither partner may deny the other repayment of the marital “debt.” You therefore have a society in which men are led to believe that their wives are constantly aching to have sex as often as they can. At the same time the women are led to believe that they are the physical manifestations of lust and that their wombs will suffocate with excess seed unless they have sex regularly. For unmarried women this presents something of a problem. John Gaddesden—one of the leading medical lights at Oxford in the early part of the century—recommends women suffering from a superfluity of lust should find a man and marry him quickly. If this is not possible, they should travel,
exercise frequently, and take medicines. If this regimen does not work, and the lust brings on a fainting fit, a woman should find a midwife who should lubricate her fingers with oil, insert then into her vagina, and “move them vigorously about.”
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