Life in a Medieval Village (15 page)

A fourteenth-century sermon pictures a mother and her child: “In winter, when the child’s hands are cold, the mother takes him a straw or a rush and bids him warm it, not for love of the straw, to warm it, but to warm the child’s hands [by pressing them together].” When the child falls ill, “the mother for her sick child takes a candle, and makes a vow in prayers.”
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The coroners’ rolls yield rare glimpses of children at work and play: the baby in the cradle by the fire; little girls following their mothers around, helping stir the pot, draw water, gather fruit; little boys following their fathers to the fields, to the mill, or fishing, or playing with bows and arrows. A sermon pictures a child using his imagination, playing “with flowers…with sticks, and with small bits of wood, to build a chamber, buttery, and hall, to make a white horse of a wand, a sailing ship of broken bread, a burly spear from a ragwort stalk, and of a sedge a sword of war, a comely lady of a cloth, and be right busy to deck it elegantly with flowers.”
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A child, said one preacher, did not bear malice, “nor rancor nor wrath toward those that beat him ever so sorely, as it happened for a child to have due chastising. But after thou hast beaten him, show him a fair flower or else a fair red apple; then hath he forgotten all that was done to him before, and then he will come to thee, running, with his embracing arms, to please thee and to kiss thee.”
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Small children played; older ones did chores. In their teens, both boys and girls moved into the adult work world, the girls in and around the house, the boys in the fields. Contrary to what was formerly believed, in this period village children were not ordinarily sent away to become servants in other people’s households or to be apprenticed at a craft. Most remained at home.
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The Middle Ages produced the world’s first hospitals and medical schools, but these important advances hardly affected life in
the village. Doctors practiced in city and in court. Villagers were left to their own medical devices. Even the barbers who combined shaving with bloodletting (a principal form of therapy) and tooth-pulling (the sole form of dentistry) were rarely seen in villages. Most manorial custumals provided for a period of sick leave, commonly up to a year and a day. “If [the villein] is ill, so that he cannot leave his house,” states a Holywell custumal, “he is quit of all work and heusire before the autumn, except plowing [which presumably he would have to pay someone else to do]. In the autumn he is quit of half his work if he is ill, and he will have relaxation for the whole time he is ill, up to a year and a day. And if his illness lasts more than a year and a day, or if he falls ill again, from that time he will do all works which pertain to his land.”
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Life was short. Even if a peasant survived infancy and childhood to reach the age of twenty, he could not expect to live much beyond forty-five, when old age
(senectus)
began.
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The manorial records make no mention of diseases, though to the well-known afflictions of tuberculosis, pneumonia, typhoid, violence, and accident may probably be added circulatory disorders: stroke and heart attack. The coroners’ rolls list several cases of fatal accidents from “falling sickness”—epilepsy. Invalids flocked on pilgrimage to Canterbury and other shrines: spastics, cripples, paralytics, the mentally ill, and the scrofulous (skin disease was especially prevalent in a not very well washed society).

The most pathetic of the medieval sick, however, were excluded from the benefits of the shrine. Leprosy, mysteriously widespread, inspired a vague terror that outlasted the Middle Ages. Its victims were isolated, either singly or in colonies, and were permitted to emerge in public only when clothed in a shroud and clacking a pair of castanets in warning. The isolation of lepers represented a remarkable advance in medical theory, the recognition of contagion, but at the same time a sad irony, since leprosy (Hansen’s disease) is only slightly contagious. The Elton court rolls record a single possible mention of the disease in the fine in 1342 of “Hugh le Lepere” for carrying away the lord’s stubble.
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As in all societies, the old and infirm depended on the younger generation for help when they were no longer able to work their land. The commonest form such help took in the thirteenth century was an arrangement between tenant and heir, in essence an exchange of the older person’s land for the younger person’s work. The holding was transferred to the heir, who promised in return to maintain the parents, widowed father or mother, or other aged relative, either in a separate dwelling or as free boarders. Typically the son accepted the holding’s obligations of work service, rent, and fees, and pledged himself to support his parent or parents, stipulating that he would provide them with a separate house or “a room at the end of the house” that had been theirs, food, fuel, clothing, and again and again “a place by the fire.” Most such arrangements must have been informal, leaving no trace in the records, but they were also spelled out in written contracts, entered in the manorial court rolls.
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Both sermons and moral treatises warned parents against handing over their land to their sons without such safeguards. Men gave their children land, said Robert Manning, to provide sustenance in their old age; better for them to keep it “than beg

it at another’s hand.” In illustration he told a version of the already old story of the “Divided Horsecloth”: a man gave his son “all his land and house and all his cattle in village and field, so that he should keep him well in his old age.” The young man married and at first bade his wife “to serve his father well at his will.” But soon he had a change of heart, and began to be “tenderer of his wife and child than of his father,” and it seemed to him that his father had lived too long. As time passed, the son served him worse and worse, and the father began to rue the day he “gave so much to his son.” One day the old man was so cold that he begged his son to give him a blanket. The son called his little boy and told him to take a sack and fold it double and put it over his grandfather. The child took the sack and tore it in two. “Why have you torn the sack?” asked the father. The child replied:

This deed have I done for thee.
Good example givest thou me
How I shall serve thee in thine age.
…This half sack shall lie above thy father,
And keep the other part to thy behalf.
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Most peasants were more careful. In Upwood in 1311 Nicholas son of Adam turned over his virgate to his son John, stipulating that he should have “a reasonable maintenance in that land until the end of his life,” and that John should give him “every year for the rest of his life” specified amounts of grain.
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At Cranfield in 1294, Elias de Bretendon made a more complicated agreement with his son John; John was to take over his house, yard, and half virgate for the services and money rent owed the lord. “And…the above John will provide suitable food and drink for Elias and his wife Christine while they are alive, and they will have residence with John [in his house].” The contract left nothing to chance:

And if it should happen, though may it not, that trouble and discord should in the future arise between the parties so that they are unable to live together, the above John
will provide for Elias and Christine, or whichever of them should outlive the other, a house and curtilage [yard] where they can decently reside. And he will give each year to the same Elias and Christine or whichever of them is alive, six quarters of hard grain at Michaelmas, namely three quarters of wheat, one and one-half quarters of barley, one and one-half quarters of peas and beans, and one quarter of oats. [The addition evidently gave trouble, since the total is not six but seven quarters.]
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If the retiring tenant was childless, the pension was contracted for outside the family, an arrangement that became frequent after the Black Death. In 1332 John in the Hale of Barnet, Hertfordshire, agreed with another peasant, John atte Barre, to turn over his house and land in return for a yearly contribution of “one new garment with a hood, worth 3 shillings 4 pence, two pairs of linen sheets, three pairs of new shoes, one pair of new hose, worth 12 pence, and victuals in food and drink decently as is proper.” An unusual feature of the contract was that the retiring tenant agreed to work for his replacement “to the best of his ability,” and that the new tenant not only paid an entry fee, as was customary, but “satisfied the lord for the heriot of the said John in the Hale by [the payment of] one mare,” although the retiree was not yet dead.
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Pension contracts were enforceable in the manor court, a sign of one of their most striking aspects: the community’s interest in enforcement. “Dereliction of duty to the old [was] a matter of public concern,” observes Elaine Clark.
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A son undertaking to support his aged parents commonly requested the manorial court to witness his oath, or enlisted as guarantors pledges whose names he reported to the steward. For the court’s participation the pensioners paid a fee.
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In Ellington in 1278, William Koc acknowledged that he was in arrears for the contributions he owed his father, in wheat, barley, beans, and peas, and promised to make amends.
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The jurors in Warboys in 1334 reported: “And since Stephen the
Smith did not keep his mother according to their agreement he is [fined] sixpence. And afterwards the above jurors ordered that the said land be given back to his mother and that she should hold it for the rest of her life. And the above Stephen may not have anything of that land while his mother is alive.”
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Pensions were sometimes negotiated between the parties, sometimes mandated as deathbed settlements—mainly by husbands in favor of their widows—and sometimes ordered by the manorial court. When a tenant’s disability rendered him unfit to discharge the obligations of his holding, it was in the interest of the lord to make a change, but the change served the interest of the elderly tenant as well.
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A pension contract that dated back to the early Middle Ages was originally developed in the monasteries to provide for the retirement of monks. The corrody consisted of a daily ration of bread and ale, usually two loaves and two gallons, plus one or two “cooked dishes” from the monastic kitchen. In the later Middle Ages, corrodies became available to lay pensioners, who purchased them like life insurance annuities. The purchaser might stipulate for a certain amount of firewood every year, a room in the monastery, sometimes with a servant, clothing, candles, and fodder for horses. A wealthy peasant might buy a corrody that even included a house and garden, pasture, and cash; a poor one might buy only a ration of dark bread, ale, and pottage.
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Still other arrangements might be made. A widow and her young son leased their holding at Stoke Pryor to a fellow villager for twelve years in return for an annual supply of mixed grain; presumably in twelve years the son would be old enough to take over the holding.
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The pension agreement implied bargaining power on the part of the aging tenant, nearly always meaning landholding. In its absence, an old man or woman might end like those whose deaths are recorded in the coroners’ rolls: Sabinia, who in January of 1267 went into Colmworth, Bedfordshire, to beg bread and “fell into a stream and drowned,”
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or Arnulf Argent of
Ravensden, “poor, weak, and infirm,” who was going “from door to door to seek bread,” when he fell down in a field and “died of weakness.”
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When death was imminent, the priest was sent for, and arrived wearing surplice and stole, carrying the blessed sacrament, preceded by a server carrying a lantern and ringing a hand bell. If the case was urgent and no server could be found, the priest might hang the lamp and bell on his arm, or around the neck of his horse. According to Robert Manning, sick men were often reluctant to accept the sacrament because of a belief that if they recovered they must abstain from sex:

Many a one thus hopes and says,
“Anoint them not save they should die,
For if he turns again to life
He should lie no more by his wife.”

Manning counseled against the superstition and recommended more trust in God:

In every sickness ask for [the sacrament] always;
God almighty is right courteous.
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John Myrc advised that if death was imminent, the priest should not make the sick man confess all his sins, but only counsel him to ask God’s mercy with a humble heart. If the dying man could not speak but indicated by signs that he wished the sacraments, the priest should administer them. If, however, the dying man was able to speak, Myrc advised that he should be asked “the seven interrogations”: if he believed in the articles of the faith and the Holy Scriptures; if he recognized that he had offended God; if he was sorry for his sins; if he wished to amend and would do so if God gave him more time; if he forgave his enemies; if he would atone for his sins if he lived; and finally, “Do you believe fully that Christ died for you and that you may never be saved but by the merit of Christ’s passion, and do you think of God with your heart as much as you may?” The sick
man should answer yes and be instructed to say, “with a good steadfast mind, if he can…‘Into thy hands I commend my soul.’” If he could not, the priest should say it for him, anoint him, and administer Communion.
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