Peasants

Perhaps, in our search for the real signs of change in society after 1350 we need to look not so much to the royal family, to the aristocracy or to the politically active gentry, but to a class thus far consigned to the role of a mere chorus in history: the peasantry, who tilled the land, bore the brunt of taxation and who, throughout the fourteenth century had died from a variety of pestilences and natural or human disasters in anonymous and unquantifiable droves. Peasants in the Middle Ages have names, but rarely any more rounded identity. Peasant surnames, which develop earlier in England than elsewhere in Europe, themselves are a consequence of subservience rather than liberty, since they come to us chiefly from the rich sources recording taxation and justice imposed by kings and other lords. Collectively, peasant lives revolved around the great open fields cultivated on the edge of the village, assessed as so many plough-lands (bovates or virgates), divided into strips over which there was near permanent dispute. Some 90 per cent of peasant homicides took place in these fields or on the paths and roads that divided them, very often as a result of boundary disputes.

The peasant home, although a comparatively safe place, was very far from being a luxurious one. The old idea, favoured by historians who wished to see a dramatic and disastrous collapse in family values as a result of the rise of capitalism, was that peasants inhabited houses themselves generations old, in which large, extended families of uncles, aunts and cousins lived side by side. In reality, the house was a short-lived structure, built of wood and mud, its clay floor regularly swept and cleaned. A hole in the thatch allowed some (but one suspects never enough) of the smoke to escape. Such homes were intended to last a single generation, twenty years or so, before being razed and rebuilt.

There was a clear distinction here between peasant modes of life and the ‘big houses’ of urban merchants, the gentry or the aristocracy, often constructed of stone and intended to last. The gentry house revolved around its communal dining and its entourage of servants and dependents. Service, either to a great landowner, as a domestic retainer in a gentry house, as a retained labourer, or as the humblest of maids or menials in a yeoman farmhouse was one of the underlying pillars of English society. From at least the time of Beowulf through to the First World War, an extraordinary proportion of the population lived as servants in other people’s houses. By contrast, the peasant hut was reserved for a nuclear family, for the most part merely parents and children, living in close proximity to their livestock.

There were hazards to such an existence. Smoke and dust inflamed eyes already weakened by a diet of cereals from which vitamin A was notably lacking. The straw used for bedding and floor-covering provided an ideal breeding ground for fleas. Zoonotic diseases (those shared with or spread by animals) were unavoidable: internal parasites, ringworm, whipworm and tapeworm were transmitted from the faecal matter of domestic animals. Sheep scattered ticks. Bovine tuberculosis was acquired through the ingestion of infected meat or milk, and in its glandular form, as ‘scrofula’ or the ‘king’s evil’, was reputed to be treatable only through the touch of a king: by the reign of Edward I, as many as 1,000 sufferers, for the most part peasants, were queuing up each year at the royal court in order to be cured.

Modern health and safety officers would have been appalled by communal ovens (into which children could all too easily climb for warmth), wells and outside latrines (into which the unwary could tumble), and ponds (in which they could drown, especially at night, which was unlit save by moon and stars and, in modern terms, eerily quiet). Most collections of miracle stories of the English saints will include at least one or two instances of children who strayed too near building sites or mills. The King himself was occasionally called upon to exercise mercy by pardoning homicides accidentally committed by peasants, as for example on behalf of Katherine Passeavant, aged four, in 1249 imprisoned in the abbot of St Albans’ gaol because, opening a door, she had accidentally knocked a younger child into a cauldron of hot water from which injury the child had died. To judge from coroners’ records, nearly half of the fatal accidents that befell adult males involved carting or transport. Hernias (from heavy lifting) were common, and osteoarthritis, aggravated by cold and damp working conditions, has been diagnosed in as many as half of the skeletal remains of those involved in manual labour.

The medieval equivalent of the tractor, the ox-cart or handcart, essential to harvesting and to the gathering of timber for fuel, was a dangerous and lumbering piece of equipment from which it was easy to fall, and under which it was all too easy to be crushed. With ale brewed from malted barley drunk in preference to water, available in almost unlimited quantities to those working the lord’s land, drunkenness was frequent and affected both men and women. Even so, and by contrast with the Russian peasantry of the nineteenth century described by Maxim Gorky, violence within such communities tended to be accidental and occasional rather than deliberate and habitual.

The disciplining of wives by husbands was advocated as a necessary duty: ‘For he that fails to beat his wife, will never wear the britches the rest of his life’. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, from a class somewhere between yeomanry and gentry, married for the fifth time to a much younger husband, dared tear out a page from a book that he was reading her about the wiles and wickedness of women. The husband struck her such a blow that she was permanently deafened. She, however, responded in kind, and there can be little doubt who it was in that particular household that henceforth wore the britches. In illustrations of peasant life, most famously in the Luttrell Psalter (made c.1340 for Geoffrey Luttrell of Irnham in Lincolnshire, and intended to emphasize the exalted but benign nature of his lordship), it is more often women who are shown chastising their husbands than men who are shown beating their wives. Women undoubtedly worked as hard if not harder than men, in the home, in the fields and in such tasks as brewing or spinning which were considered specifically female occupations. The husband-beater of the Luttrell Psalter wields a large broom that is itself perhaps an ale stake, the symbol stuck from the eaves of a house to indicate beer for sale. The English ‘pub’, often regarded as a traditionally male enclave only recently invaded by women, began its existence as the village alehouse, recorded from at least the thirteenth century. Generally, as in rural Ireland, it was a peasant home rather than a purpose-built tavern or inn, run by a female ale wife and supplied with ale, often as thick and cloudy as fermented bread, that she herself had brewed.

Within this world, there was a vast distinction to be drawn between the poorest labourers, barely able to support themselves, and the richer peasants, already, before the Black Death, accustomed to those habits of thrift and hard work which ensured their status as property-owners, able to save money and to lend it to their neighbours in return for favours or profit. In the Middle Ages, we are told, work was generally inefficient, small-scale and task orientated rather than determined according to time. In reality, the modern work ethic is by no means as modern as might be supposed. The very fact that the Church found it necessary to insist that everyone cease work on the Sabbath and on a series of the greater Church festivals (about twenty days in all during the course of the liturgical year), suggests that it was necessary to compel medieval peasants not to work. Manorial by-laws suggest that there were time restrictions and curfews, by the 1450s by clock hours, imposed on labour. Our first knowledge of the existence of alehouses comes from the 1190s, precisely because certain people, above all the clergy, were prohibited from entering them. Langland’s Piers Plowman was beset by ‘wasters’ who preferred singing songs to tilling the land, but Piers, who owned his own equipment and draft animals, was himself clearly a successful and hardworking kulak. The Luttrell Psalter is as full of illustrations of peasant hard labour as it is of peasants wrestling, setting dogs on a tinker, bear-baiting, or engaged in other ‘leisure-time’ activities. Even the shepherds’ flutes shown in the Psalter have a utilitarian purpose, not just to wile away the time in Arcadian sloth, but to summon their sheepdogs to their work.

Throughout history, from the eleventh century to the fourteenth, a large proportion of the peasantry was regarded as human property: a brood of animals belonging to their manorial lord. Heriot (the obligation by a peasant, when his lord died, to hand over the peasant’s best beast as a token that all his property belonged to the lord’s successor), merchet (the obligation to pay a fine on the marriage of a daughter, in essence because such women and their progeny were now removed from the lord’s labour force), legerwite (a fine payable when such girls were deflowered, with or without marriage), boon work in cultivating the lord’s land without recompense as a natural consequence of the privilege of cultivating one’s own few strips of field: all of these marked out the peasant as unfree, unable to leave his servitude, unprotected by a large part of the law by which the freeman’s status was affirmed. The voice of the peasants themselves is first heard filtered through clerical spokesmen, through demands that the great do justice to their dependents and succour the hungry and the weak. From around 1300, a tradition of vernacular poetry emerged in which the sufferings of the poor take a particularly prominent place. This is poetry written by clergymen merely pretending to speak in the accents of the peasantry. Nonetheless, there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of the indignation that it expressed. Such protests increased beyond measure as a result of the famine and pestilence after 1315. The so-called Song of the Husbondman (and we might remember here that Clement Paston, ancestor of the Pastons of Caister, was himself by origin described as nothing more than a ‘husbondman’) laments, c.1320, a brutal existence, in which the peasant and his wife, her bleeding feet wrapped in rags, drive the plough whilst their baby lies in a basin at the end of the field and two other infants howl from cold and hunger.

Before the fourteenth century, peasants played little role in English politics, although King Henry I is said to have dreamed, as early as the 1120s, of three angry peasants threatening him with a spade, a pitchfork and a scythe. As illustrated in John of Worcester’s Chronicle, for the peasants of Henry’s dream already to be carrying either a tax demand or a parchment schedule of their grievances is a portent of many such manifestos of reform yet to come. Henry II was occasionally approached by peasants (in the sources generally referred to as ‘rustics’) offering advice or prophesying doom. On one occasion, riding with his court, he was addressed in English by such a man who warned the King to pay greater respect to the Sabbath. Rather than reply in person, the King turned to one of his knights and, in French, told him to deal with ‘that rustic’. In the 1260s, during the turmoil of baronial rebellion against Henry III, peasants had become mixed up in the violence, on occasion claiming to act in the interests of the ‘community of the realm’, a highly significant concept that sought to join King, barons and peasantry into a single, indivisible and English political cooperative, committed to the welfare of the many rather than the few. For the most part, however, when peasant violence erupted it was incoherent, sudden and directed against particular injustices or individuals.

As early as the 1220s, all but four of the peasants of the village of Sandford in Somerset had attacked their lord, Nicholas de Arundell, chasing him through the town to the church whose chaplain slammed the door in his face. The peasants then killed Nicholas, carrying his body to his house, which was set on fire in the hope that it might be supposed he had died by accident. Fifteen men and women were drawn and hung for this offence. Six others fled and were outlawed. In 1303, Archbishop Winchelsea’s local representative at the manor of Selling in Kent was set upon by villagers who

They afterwards cut off the tail, ears and lips of the horse, mutilation of a lord’s animals and in particular of his horses, one of the greatest symbols of lordly privilege, being a popular means by which the poor could vent their fury against the rich. In the same year, Henry Bobbe of Lower Caldecote in Bedfordshire, having hung a local felon, was set upon by peasants and stabbed in the chest with a fork. But these were unconcerted expressions of rage or contempt, of little political significance.

Only in the towns were there serious outbreaks of political violence: at London in the 1190s, when a movement gathered around William fitz Osbert, known as William Longbeard, claiming to represent the interests of the poor against the rich city oligarchy; again in London in the 1220s, when civil unrest had brutally to be suppressed; at Norwich and Winchester in the 1270s when Norwich Cathedral and one of the gates of Winchester were burned down in civic riots inspired by anti-monastic feeling; at Bury St Edmunds, in the 1320s, and at Canterbury in 1343, when the townspeople are said to have attacked the prior’s house, stealing forty horses and assaulting his men and servants. After the 1340s, something of this previously urban spirit of resistance leaped the city walls into the countryside. The peasant, the labourer, the skilled artisan, gradually began to impinge upon the concerns of a royal government convinced that the poor were growing rich at the expense of their social superiors and that government itself was starved of revenue through the refusal of the new-rich to pay tax.

The labour shortage and the consequent rise in wages occasioned by the Black Death led to a rise in peasant expectations and opportunities. In a society accustomed to a shortage of land, there was suddenly a glut of empty fields waiting to be cultivated by peasants with the sense and resources to take advantage of changing circumstance. Lords who attempted to enforce old burdens, to demand boon work or unpaid labour, found themselves confronted by a peasantry keen to throw off the shackles of villeinage. Attempts by government to regulate wages and prices were as ineffective in the 1370s as in the 1970s. There had been widespread withdrawal of services from the Archbishop of Canterbury’s estates in Kent within only a few years of the great pestilence of 1348. In 1377, in the immediate aftermath of the Good Parliament, a great rumour spread across forty or more manors in southern England that the King was about to declare all manors named in Domesday (‘The King’s Book’, or ‘The Book of Winchester’) immune from labour services not mentioned in ‘The Book’.