How to Survive in Medieval England

Toni Mount

• Editorial: Pen and Sword History
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526754424
• Categoría: Storia
• Categoría: Storia dell'Europa medievale

Imagine you were transported back in time to Medieval England and had to start a new life there. Without mobile phones, ipads, internet and social media networks, when transport means walking or, if you’re fortunate, horse-back, how will you know where you are or what to do? Where will you live? What is there to eat? What shall you wear? How can you communicate when nobody speaks as you do and what about money? Who can you go to if you fall ill or are mugged in the street? However can you fit into and thrive in this strange environment full of odd people who seem so different from you? All these questions and many more are answered in this new guide book for time-travellers: How to Survive in Medieval England. A handy self-help guide with tips and suggestions to make your visit to the Middle Ages much more fun, this lively and engaging book will help the reader deal with the new experiences they may encounter and the problems that might occur. Know the laws so you don’t get into trouble or show your ignorance in an embarrassing faux pas. Enjoy interviews with the celebrities of the day, from a business woman and a condemned felon, to a royal cook and King Richard III himself. Have a go at preparing medieval dishes and learn some new words to set the mood for your time-travelling adventure. Have an exciting visit but be sure to keep this book to hand.

Chapter 1

Introduction

It may happen in my grandchildren’s lifetimes, or those of their grandchildren, that mankind will learn the secrets of time-travel and Doctor Who’s TARDIS becomes a reality. I have no idea what twenty-second century technology will be like. Perhaps books such as this won’t exist and ‘readers’ will simply choose a title, connect to it in some way, through the ether, and the entire text will be implanted into their minds for future reference. Personally, I prefer turning pages.

However mysterious our future may be, at least we know something about our past. This book is intended as a handy guide to the dos and don’ts for visitors to Medieval England: do be polite, don’t drink the water, do wear rabbit fur, don’t expect to eat with a fork, etc. How do you find your way around without GPS, Sat Nav or even signposts? Where can you get a decent meal; what will be served and how will it taste? What should you do if you meet royalty? If you’re not well, who should you see about it? Where can you stay? What should you wear for a night on the town? How do you contact a friend or relative1 without social media or skype and no wi-fi to look up information? (For looking stuff up, I’m afraid this book is all that will be available.) And most importantly, how do you get money to spend when there are no credit/ debit cards or cash points, or even banks?

You won’t have any relatives: they haven’t been born yet, but you will definitely have living ancestors, if you can identify them.1

You’ll find the answers to these questions and many more here, produced in a user-friendly format you can take with you on your travels back to the Middle Ages (unless you downloaded it on Kindle, in which case, it’s only of use for as long as the battery remains charged).

Setting the Scene

Labourers working in fields.

Medieval England is an agricultural land. Depending upon the date of your visit, the scenery may be rather different. Back in 1066, when William the Conqueror defeated the last Anglo-Saxon king, Harold II, at the battle of Hastings, he found England a prosperous country – the main reason he was so keen to become its king – dotted with few towns but many villages and hamlets, each with its own three-field system, growing crops in rotation. This means the arable land is divided into three fields: one growing wheat, barley, oats or rye, depending on the soil type and local climate; one sown with peas and beans, which restore nutrients to the soil; and the third left fallow, to be grazed by livestock to add their manure to the earth. Each year the use of the field rotates, keeping them all fertile, and they are divided into strips, owned by each villager in such a way that everyone has a share of the best land and the poorest. Most houses come with a garden plot, where the household grows onions, cabbages, leeks and herbs. Every village has its common land, where the locals graze their animals, and often an orchard with apple, pear, plum and cherry trees. Here the beehives, or skeps, are kept, to ensure the bees pollinate the blossom to give a good harvest of fruit and to produce honey; the poor man’s only sweetener. The village probably has areas of woodland as well, which supply timber for building, kindling for the fire, free nuts and berries in the autumn and ‘pannage’ for pigs.

DID YOU KNOW?

The ‘right of pannage’ gives legal permission to locals to let their pigs roam the woods, feasting on acorns and beechnuts (mast), to fatten the animals for the November slaughter.

When he wasn’t fighting, William the Conqueror liked to relax by hunting wild boar, deer and wolves. So he could enjoy this recreation to the full, he ‘invented’ the forest. Don’t confuse forest with woodland. A forest is an area – often vast – designated as a royal hunting ground and comprising heathland, woodland, thickets and open glades, all kinds of habitat required by the creatures to be hunted. The landscape is maintained to give plenty of opportunity for the huntsmen to track and chase down their chosen prey without hindrance. In some cases William ordered villages in the forest to be cleared away and stringent ‘Forest Law’ applies to everyone still living in the area. This law code is hated by the common folk as it bars their access to free firewood and forbids them from taking deer, hares, wild birds and newly-introduced rabbits as free food for the pot. Penalties for simply carrying a bow and arrows into the forest include blinding, having a hand chopped off or your ears sliced.

When Magna Carta (the Great Charter) was drawn up in 1215, in an effort to curb King John’s flouting of England’s laws and general bullying tactics, a second, smaller charter dealt specifically with forest law. This allowed the barons a degree of access to some of the royal hunting grounds, but did little to improve matters for the common folk. They could still be maimed for netting a wood pigeon for Sunday dinner.

By the year 1300 England’s population is at its highest for medieval times. The need to feed so many mouths means that in some villages the three-field system is reduced to two because every acre of land has to produce food, and so none is left fallow. But this is a short-term solution as the soil, never manured or given time to recover, becomes increasingly less fertile and productive.

DID YOU KNOW?

In 1086 England’s population was c.1.5 million. By 1300 it had grown to c.5.5 million, while agricultural production was decreasing.

Woodlands are chopped down to give more land over to crop growing, and heath and moorland is ploughed up, as happened in areas of Dartmoor at this time. But these lands have not been cultivated before for good reason: their thin soils are unsuitable for farming. So much effort burns off so many calories but produces very little in the way of extra nourishment. England’s woodlands are greatly reduced in area, some disappearing completely, changing the landscape and making building material and fuel for the fire difficult to come by.

Then, in the early decades of the fourteenth century, the weather takes a turn for the worse. Hard winters are followed by wet, chilly summers. Crops either fail to grow or rot away in the fields before harvest, and malnutrition, even starvation, becomes a nightmare possibility in successive years of famine. What little grain is produced is eaten by hungry folk, leaving hardly any in the way of seed to plant next spring. It’s a vicious circle.

The turning point comes in 1348 with the advent of what seemed to be, at the time, England’s greatest ever catastrophe: plague. The malnourished poor are the most likely to succumb. In the previous century and a half, towns have been developing, often founded on centres of trade at the coast or crossing points of rivers, or even sites of earlier markets. Towns are crowded, insanitary places, prime breeding grounds for disease where the plague – or the Great Pestilence, as they call it – can take hold and spread like wildfire. Within two years the population of England has been reduced by as much as half, and since the disease is never entirely absent and epidemics recur, the numbers don’t fully recover until long after the medieval period. By the 1440s, a century after the first onslaught of the plague, the population is still not much more than two million.

By 1485, when the last Plantagenet monarch, Richard III, is slain at the battle of Bosworth, England’s landscape has regained much of its woodland and agriculture can once more produce sufficient food for the smaller population, though strip farming is dying out. Larger fields are now enclosed by hedges, separating crops from pastureland. Extensive pastures are needed to feed the ever-increasing flocks of sheep. Wool is not only England’s primary and most lucrative export, its production requires far fewer labourers. Surprisingly, the plague is the main cause of these changes.

After the first, devastating plague epidemic in 1348-49, the poor discovered they were a valuable resource in short supply to their lords and masters. They began to demand higher wages for their labour. Only the more fertile land need be worked to produce enough food for fewer people. With so many deaths, vacant strips in the fields could be taken over by the survivors and melded into larger plots that were quicker to plough, sow, weed and harvest. Houses left empty when the occupants died could be pillaged to improve those still inhabited, and the poorer hovels of the remaining villagers could now be exchanged for more affluent dwellings, with the result that landlords were eager for the receipt of higher rents for better accommodation.

The lords’ incomes had reduced greatly with the loss of rents from so many empty tenancies and yet the labourers were demanding better pay. The aristocracy brought in new laws in an attempt to prevent the lower classes from rising above their God-ordained humble status, but in the long run the common folk had generally improved their lot by the early fifteenth-century.

The lords found a way of making good their lost revenues by enclosing fields that had once grown crops as pasture for thousands of sheep. Labour costs were reduced to the wages of a few shepherds with extra hands at shearing time, and the profits from wool exports more than made up for the loss of rental income. All was well until the population began to increase again in the sixteenth century and greedy lords gave over too much land to sheep farming and not enough to food production. Unemployment and hunger among the lower classes resulted, but we need not worry about that since our time parameters are 1154-1485: the era of the Plantagenet kings of England.

Apart from the changes in landscape, as travellers you need to consider the means of getting around. Roads are a bit of a problem throughout the period. The best and most direct routes between larger towns and cities are often the ruinous remains of the Roman roads, laid down a millennium before. For much of the route taken by Geoffrey Chaucer’s pilgrims from London to Canterbury, they were following the old Roman Watling Street. If you journey from London to York via Lincoln, on the Great North Road, you will in fact be using much the same route as the Roman legions who marched along Ermine Street. These roads may be pot-holed and subsiding in places, or worn away to muddy tracks, but they will be busy with foot traffic, laden carts and horses, so you shouldn’t get lost. However, there are no signposts or proper maps, so if your journey takes you to some lesser-known village you will need a guide or be prepared to ask directions. Be aware, however: the locals are likely to be suspicious of strangers and may not give you a truthful answer.

Wherever you travel, it’s best to go with company – as Chaucer’s pilgrims did – because there is always the danger of attack by bandits, robbers and ne’er-do-wells. The law states that trees and bushes should be kept cut back for a hundred yards on either side of the road, so such malefactors can’t hide in ambush for unwary travellers. But that requires a great deal of time and work and is rarely done. You may want to arm yourself with a stout stave; this will not only aid your walking, but in an emergency can help you pole-vault over puddles, test the depth of water as you cross streams or serve as a weapon, if you are unfortunate enough to be accosted by robbers.

Top Tip

Always keep your purse hidden out of sight under your clothes. Medieval thieves are known as ‘cut-purses’ for a reason. But at least there are no pickpockets as pockets haven’t been invented yet.

At the end of the day, you’ll want somewhere to sleep and get a meal. If you find an abbey or a smaller priory, the monks or nuns are obliged to give you bed and board for one night. (Board refers to the trestle boards used as tables, so it means that you get food.) In theory their hospitality is free, but, in fact, they will expect you to make a donation or small gift to the religious house. It is wise to do so, especially if you intend to stay there again on your return journey, because monks and nuns have long memories for such things. If you can’t afford to pay, you could be expected to do a day’s labour instead: mucking out the cowshed, reaping in the hay meadow or helping with the laundry. Only those going about God’s own business, such as priests, friars, visiting monks or lay people on pilgrimage, truly get their hospitality free.

Be warned: in the guesthouse you may have to share a bed with a complete stranger or two, along with fleas, bed bugs, lice, etc. Also, the food may not be to your taste. These things apply, even if you stay in a proper roadside inn. It may be a wise precaution to carry a bottle of lavender water to use as an insect repellent. Since we know – as folk at the time didn’t – that plague is transmitted by fleas, I think this is essential and could be a life-saver.

Your fellow travellers may not worry about verminous insects but they are concerned about the food they’ll be served. It is, therefore, expected that you will carry a small flask or bottle of what might be termed ‘vinaigrette’, a mixture of your favourite seasonings such as vinegar, mustard seed, salt, a few herbs, garlic and perhaps pepper and olive oil, if you can afford such luxuries.

The idea is that you use this mixture to improve – or disguise – the flavour of the food you are served. Since vinegar, garlic and herbs, such as sage, have antiseptic and antibiotic properties, your vinaigrette can also fight the bacteria present in poorly prepared food. Though nobody knows about bacteria, they are wise enough to realise some ingredients have real medicinal properties.

A vinaigrette bottle for your personal seasoning.

Top Tip

Ask for the ‘bill’ when you arrive. This is the ‘bill of fayre’ or menu, though there’s probably not much choice. When you want the bill or check, ask for the ‘reckoning’.

Preparation for your journey

I would advise, before you set out on your time-travelling adventure that you have a full medical and dental check-up and have your tetanus jab, your MMR jab and a few others, and take your anti-malaria pills, as if you were going to a third world destination. Medieval England is a third world country. Medical practice is more like witch-doctoring, sepsis is a daily risk and as for dental surgery, believe me; you want to avoid that at all costs.

You’ll need to be fit. Just surviving the daily grind is hard enough, whether you’re a lord or a labourer. And forget that diet you were thinking of going on. In a draughty stone castle in January, or a thatched hovel in March, you’ll be burning 4,000-5,000 calories a day just working and keeping warm. So could you plan your journey for the summer months? The weather will be warmer, but there will be no air-conditioning, sun-protection factor 30 or drinks from the fridge, and fleas, bed bugs, lice and ticks will be around in their greatest numbers, as will the malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

You had better get used to the dirt. The concept of ‘hygiene’ means nothing: life is unsanitary; toilet facilities are minimal, communal and very smelly. The people aren’t too fragrant either, though they do their best – as we shall see – but soon after your arrival you’ll probably start to pong like everyone else and won’t notice the stench so much. Sunday church services will probably be ...

Índice

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Social Structure and Housing
• Chapter 3: Beliefs and Religious Ideas
• Chapter 4: Clothing and Appearance
• Chapter 5: Food and Shopping
• Chapter 6: Health and Medicine
• Chapter 7: Work and Leisure
• Chapter 8: Family Matters
• Chapter 9: Warfare
• Chapter 10: Law and Order
• Conclusion
• Notes
• List of Illustrations
• Suggested Further Reading