Life in a Medieval Village (17 page)

Plows and plow animals were shared to make up plow teams. Agreements for such joint plowing appear in court records. At one time scholars debated the discrepancy between Domesday Book’s repeated references to the eight-ox plow team and iconographic evidence insistently showing smaller teams, but a modern consensus agrees that teams varied in size, up to eight animals and occasionally more. The largest teams were required to break new ground, the next largest for first plowing after Michaelmas or in spring. Medieval cattle were smaller than their modern descendants and by the time of spring plowing were probably weakened by poor winter diet.
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Domesday Book refers to smaller teams in non-demesne plowing: “three freemen” plowing with two oxen; freemen plowing with three oxen; “two freewomen” plowing with two oxen. “The Domesday plow team…was quite certainly not always an eight-ox team on the villein lands,” says R. Trow-Smith; neither was the post-Domesday team.
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Horses and oxen were often harnessed together for village as for demesne plowing, not because Walter of Henley recommended it but because availability dictated. Cows were even pressed into service, though modern experiments indicate a lack of enthusiasm on the part of the cows. Cows were kept mainly to breed oxen. An ox took two years to train to the plow, and averaged only four years in service. Thus a four-ox team required complete replacement every four years without allowing for sickness or accident.
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When horses and oxen were harnessed jointly, it was done in pairs, the horses together, the oxen together, to accommodate the two quite different styles of harness, horse collar and ox yoke. Such teaming, common in England up to modern times, in itself implies large teams.

The first plowing in spring, to turn under the residue of crop and the weeds and grasses, was done early enough to allow time for decomposition of the organic material.
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A second, shallower plowing aerated the soil, preparing it for seeding. The plowman began just to one side of the center line of the strip to be plowed, effected the laborious turn at the end, and returned on the other side of the center.
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Peas and beans were
planted in the furrow, grain on the ridge. Spring, or Lenten, sowing was done as soon as the soil was warm and frost no longer a danger.
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Patterns of ridge-and-furrow from the Middle Ages are still visible in aerial photographs, sometimes with the boundaries between neighboring selions indicated by balks or rows of stones.

Demesne plowing might cease at none or at vespers, but a man working his own land might keep his hand to the plow longer, under pressure of time or weather. The first winter wheat plowing, in April after the spring crops were sown in other fields, was shallow. A second, in June, went deeper, as did a third in midsummer. The field was then harrowed and the last clods crumbled with a mattock or long-handled clodding beetle.
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Grain seed was sown from a straw basket, two bushels (or more) to the acre.
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Seed was not sown casually. In 1320 four Elton villagers were fined threepence apiece for carelessness in planting, in one case on the part of a servant who allowed “four or five beans” to fall into a single hole “to the damage of the lord.”
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Besides scarce manure, the peasant cultivator might supply equally scarce marl, a clay containing carbonate of lime.
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Walter of Henley warned that spring plowing done too deep too early might make fields muddy at sowing time.
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Spring crops—barley, oats, peas, beans, vetch—were usually planted

more thickly than winter, about four bushels to the acre.
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For autumn sowing, Walter recommended small furrows with narrow ridges, and planting early enough to allow the seed to take root before the frost.
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Heavy rain within a week after sowing, followed by a sharp frost, could destroy a winter wheat crop.

It is probable that Elton villagers had their own meadowland. If so, it was doubtless allocated, in accordance with an ancient tradition, by a lottery among all the holders of arable, both free and unfree.
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Hay was always in short supply because of the lack of artificial meadow, for want of suitable irrigation, and was precious because it was by far the best winter feed available.

Mowing required care and skill. The grass had to be thoroughly dried (tedded) for storage, and if rained on had to be retedded.
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Demesne mowing at Elton was assigned entirely to the villeins, among whom it was not notably popular; many fines are recorded for failing to do the job properly. They may well have resented being kept from their own mowing. Some lords sweetened the mowing chore with a bonus in the form of a sheep for the mowers to roast, or as on some Ramsey manors, by the game of “sporting chance.” At the end of the haymaking, each man was permitted to carry off as large a bundle of hay as he could lift and keep on his scythe; if the scythe broke or touched the ground, he lost his hay and had to buy an obol’s worth of
ale for his comrades. In Elton, at least by 1311, mowers were being paid a cash bonus.
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After haying, the meadow had to be left alone for three or four weeks to allow the grass to grow; consequently another communal agreement was needed about reopening the meadow for grazing. A good hay crop could take the animals through the winter; a good grain crop could do the same for the human beings. The tension of June, relieved by the drudgery of weeding in July, was redoubled in August and September as the fields reached maturity. First in order of priority came the lord’s harvest boon. Not only villeins
ad opus
but free tenants,
censuarii,
cotters, and craftsmen, women and children as well as men, turned out—all save those “so old or so weak [that they] could not work”—reaping, gathering, binding, stacking, carrying, and gleaning.
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Even a villein rich enough to employ labor was not exempt, though he was usually not asked to wield the scythe himself, only to “hold the rod over his workers,” as the custumals phrased it.
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The word “boon” or “bene” in “harvest boon” or “boon works” literally meant gift, something freely bestowed, but the usage savored of irony, as the court records indicate: “Geoffrey Gamel…made default at the boon works of the autumn. Sixpence.”
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“Richard in Angulo, late in his carrying boon works. Sixpence.”
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On the other hand, a dinner of rare abundance was served in the field to the harvest army. For the 329

persons who turned out for the Elton harvest boon of 1298, the reeve, Alexander atte Cross, listed the victuals consumed: eight rings (thirty-two bushels) of wheat, an almost equal quantity of other grains, a bull, a cow, a calf, eighteen doves, and seven cheeses. The second day’s work required only 250 hands, who however ate bread made from eleven rings, along with eight hundred herrings, seven pence worth of salt cod, and five cheeses. A partial third day’s boon was exacted from sixty villeins, who were fed on three cheeses and “the residue from the expenses of the [manor] house.”
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Of nineteen recorded harvest boons at Elton, this was the only one to last three days. Seven others lasted two days, eleven only one.

The food supplied at boon-works was an important article of the ancient compact between lord and tenants. Size and composition of the loaves of bread made from the grain were commonly stipulated in writing. At Holywell boons, two men were to share three loaves “such that the quantity of one loaf would suffice for a meal for two men,” and the bread was to be of wheat and rye, but mainly wheat.
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’ At the Ramsey manor of Broughton in 1291 the tenants actually struck over what they deemed an insufficient quantity of bread supplied them, and only returned to work when appeal to the abbey cartulary proved them mistaken. Reapers liked to wash down their wheat bread with plenty of ale, typically a gallon a day per man, according to one calculation, and “some harvesters consumed twice as much.”
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Wheat was cut with a sickle, halfway or more up the stalk, and laid on the ground. Binders followed to tie the spears in sheaves and set them in shocks to dry. In demesne harvesting, one binder followed every four reapers, advancing in echelon at a rate of two acres a day.
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That similar teamwork was applied in village harvesting is a reasonable supposition. Oats and barley were mown with scythes, close to the ground.
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Harvesting of all three crops left much residue, making gleaning an important function. It was too important, according to Warren Ault, to support a famous assertion by Blackstone in the eighteenth century that “by the common law and custom of England the poor are allowed to enter and glean upon another’s ground after

the harvest without being guilty of trespass.”
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In the medieval village, gleaning was strictly limited to the old, the infirm, and the very young, less out of charity than to conserve labor, all able-bodied adults of both sexes being needed for the heavier harvest work. Bylaws generally forbade gleaning by anyone offered a fair wage for harvesting, usually meaning “a penny a day and food” or twopence without food (Walter of Henley recommended paying twopence for a man, one penny for a woman).
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Bylaws welcomed strangers to the village as harvesters while barring them as gleaners.

After cutting, gathering, binding, and stacking their sheaves, the villagers carted them to their barns and sheds to be threshed with the ancient jointed flail and winnowed by tossing in the air from the winnowing cloth or basket, and if necessary supplying breeze with the winnowing fan.