The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century (2 page)

Having emphasized that the focus of this book is fourteenth-century England, a few caveats must be added. It is not possible to recover every detail of the period on the basis of fourteenth-century English evidence alone; sometimes the contemporary record is frus-tratingly incomplete. Also we cannot always be sure that the manner of doing something in 1320 necessarily held true in 1390. In some cases we can be sure that things changed dramatically: the entire nature of English warfare altered over this period, and so did the landscape of disease, with the catastrophic advent of the plague in 1348. Thus, where necessary, details from the fifteenth century have been used to inform descriptions of the later part of the fourteenth century, and the thirteenth century has been used to inform judgments about the early part. This blurring of time boundaries is only necessary where very difficult questions are raised. For example, we have relatively few sources underpinning our understanding of courtesy and manners in the fourteenth century whereas we have several excellent sources for the early fifteenth. Since it is unlikely that good manners developed overnight, the later evidence has been used as the fullest and most accurate available.

Many types of source material have been used in writing this book. Needless to say, contemporary primary sources are of vital importance. These include unpublished and published chronicles, letters, household accounts, poems, and advisory texts. Illuminated manuscripts show daily life in ways which the texts do not always describe: for example, whether women rode sidesaddle. A wealth of architectural evidence is available in the extant buildings of fourteenth-century England—the houses as well as the castles, churches, and monasteries—and the ever-expanding literature about them provides even more information. In some cases we have documents which complement the architectural record: building accounts and surveys, for example. We have an increasing array of archaeological finds, from excavated tools, shoes, and clothes to the pips of berries found in medieval latrines, and fish bones on the waterlogged sites of ancient ponds. We have a plethora of more usual archaeological artifacts too, such as coins, ceramics, and ironware. The extent to which a good museum can give you an insight into how life was lived in the Middle Ages is restricted only by your own curiosity and imagination.

But most of all, it needs to be said that the very best evidence for
what it was like to be alive in the fourteenth century is an awareness of what it is like to be alive in any age, and that includes today. Our sole context for understanding all the historical data we might ever gather is our own life experience. We might eat differently, be taller, and live longer, and we might look at jousting as being unspeakably dangerous and not at all a sport, but we know what grief is and what love, fear, pain, ambition, enmity and hunger are. We should always remember that what we have in common with the past is just as important, real, and as essential to our lives as those things which make us different. Consider a group of historians in seven hundred years’ time trying to explain to their contemporaries what it was like to live in the early twenty-first century. Maybe they will have some books to rely on, some photographs, perhaps some digitized film, the remains of our houses, and the odd council rubbish pit but overall they will concentrate on what it is to be human. W H. Auden once suggested that to understand your own country you need to have lived in at least two others. One can say something similar for periods of time: to understand your own century you need to have come to terms with at least two others. The key to learning something about the past might be a ruin or an archive but the means whereby we may understand it is—and always will be—ourselves.

It is the cathedral that you will see first. As you journey along the road you come to a break in the trees and there it is, massive and magnificent, cresting the hilltop in the morning sun. Despite the wooden scaffolding at its west end, the long eighty-foot-high pointed lead roof and the flying buttresses and colossal towers is simply the wonder of the region. It is hundreds of times bigger than every other building around it and dwarfs the stone walls surrounding the city. The hundreds of houses appear tiny, all at chaotic angles, and of different shades and hues, as if they were so many stones at the bottom of a stream flowing around the great boulder of the cathedral. The thirty churches—though their low stumpy towers stand out from the mass of roofs—seem humble by comparison.

When you draw closer to the city walls you will see the great gatehouse. Two round towers, each more than fifty feet high, stand either side of a pointed arch, newly built, with a painted statue of the king in a niche above the grand entrance. It leaves you in no doubt about the civic pride of the city, nor its authority. Beyond these gates you are subject to the mayor’s jurisdiction. Here reside the king’s officers, in the castle on the northeastern perimeter. Here is a place of rule and order. The high circling walls, the statue of the king, the great round towers, and—above it all—the immense cathedral collectively impress you with their sheer strength.

And then you notice the smell. Four hundred yards from the city gate, the muddy road you are following crosses a brook. As you look along the banks you see piles of refuse, broken crockery, animal bones, entrails, human feces, and rotting meat strewn in and around the bushes. In some places the muddy banks slide into thick quagmires where townsmen have hauled out their refuse and pitched it into the
stream. In others, rich green grasses, reeds, and undergrowth spring from the highly fertilized earth. As you watch, two seminaked men lift another barrel of excrement from the back of a cart and empty it into the water. A small brown pig roots around in the garbage. It is not called Shitbrook for nothing.

You have come face-to-face with the contrasts of a medieval city. It is so proud, so grand, and in places so beautiful and yet it displays all the disgusting features of a bloated glutton. The city as a body is a caricature of the human body: smelly, dirty, commanding, rich, and indulgent. As you hurry across the wooden bridge over Shitbrook and hasten towards the gates, the contrasts become even more vivid. A group of boys with dirty faces and tousled hair run towards you and crowd around, shouting, ‘Sir, do you want a room? A bed for the night? Where are you from?’ struggling between them to take the reins of your horse and maybe pretending that they know your brother or are from the same region as you. Their clothes are filthy, and their feet even filthier, bound into leather shoes which have suffered the stones and mud of the streets for more years than their owners. Welcome to a place of pride, wealth, authority, crime, justice, high art, stench, and beggary.

The city described above is Exeter, in the southwest of England, but it could almost be any of the seventeen cathedral cities. You could say the same for many of the large towns too, except for the fact that their churches are not cathedrals. Arriving in every one of these places involves an assault on all the senses. Your eyes will open wide at the great churches, and you will be dazzled by the wealth and the stained glass they contain. Your nostrils will be invaded by the stench from the sewage-polluted watercourses and town ditches. After the natural quiet of the country road, the birdsong, and the wind in the trees, your hearing must attune to the calls of travelers and town criers, the shouts of laborers and the ringing of church bells. In any town on a market day, or during a fair, you will find yourself being jostled by the crowds who come in from the country for the occasion, and who live it up rowdily in the taverns. To visit an English town in the late fourteenth century is a bewildering and extreme sensory experience.

A major town is an intimidating place. Already you will have seen the desiccated remains of thieves left hanging on gallows at windswept crossroads. At the principal gates of a regional capital you will
find the heads and limbs of traitors on display. When you enter the city of York (the largest city in the north) you will see the blackened heads of criminals stuck on poles above the city gates, their eyes plucked out by birds. Legs and arms hang by ropes, each the relic of a treasonable plot, now riddled with maggots or covered with flies. These remains remind you of the power of the king, a greater and more ominous shadow behind the immediate authority of the mayor and aldermen, local lords, sheriffs, and judicial courts.

This, you could say, is the landscape of medieval England: a place of fear and decay. But the moment you walk under the shadow of a city gatehouse, you realize it is much more than that. In Exeter, for example, as soon as you enter the great gate of the city, you face the wide and handsome prospect of South Street. Some of the finest houses and inns are here, the gable ends of their steeply angled roofs neatly meeting the street. On your right is the church of Holy Trinity, a cult of special devotion in the late fourteenth century. Farther down you have the handsome town house of an abbot. On your left is a row of merchants’ houses, some with their shops open, with silks and other expensive fabrics on show inside the covered shop fronts. For a moment you might notice the uneven surface of the road, which is dust, or mud after it has rained. But then you will be distracted by the amount of activity around you. Ponies and packhorses are ambling through the town, towards the marketplace, laden with grain and guided by peasants from the local farms. Priests pass by, robed in their habits, with crucifixes and rosaries hanging from their girdles. Perhaps a black-robed Dominican friar is preaching to the people at the top of the street, watched by a small circle of admirers. Workers are driving their sheep and cattle into market or steering carts laden with eggs, milk, and cheeses towards the line of shops known as Milk Street.

The city is so
alive,
so full of busy people, that within a short while you have forgotten about the decapitated traitors. And Shitbrook’s stench is no longer in the air; now there is a remarkable absence of animal dung in the streets. All is revealed in South Street when you see a servant shoveling up horse dung from the area in front of his master’s house. As you walk towards the center of the city, you will encounter more traders’ shops tightly packed together in small street-front premises—sometimes tiny rooms of less than forty square feet—but all with their distinctive projecting signs to tell the illiterate their trade. Some
are paintings depicting the items on sale, such as a painted knife indicating the shop of a cutler. Others are three-dimensional objects: a bushel on a pole, showing that freshly brewed ale is available, or a bandaged arm, marking a surgeon’s premises. At the top of Smithen Street, which leads down to the river, you can hear the clang of blacksmiths hammering away at their forges and shouting in guttural voices at their apprentices to fetch water or bring coal. Others in the same street are setting up stalls, hanging out ironwares such as scissors, rushlight holders, and knives to attract the attention of those coming in from the surrounding countryside. A little farther on you come to Butchers Row, or the Shambles, where the counters of the shops are laden with meat lying exposed in the sun, with joints and carcasses hanging from hooks in the shade of the shop behind. Listen to the
thunk
as the cleaver comes down and strikes the chopping board, and watch as the leather-aproned butcher lifts the red meat onto the scales, balancing it carefully with metal weights until he is satisfied that he, at least, is getting a good deal.

It is here, among the city’s shops, that your preconceptions of medieval England will begin to fall apart. Walk into the center of any large town or city and you will be struck by the extraordinary range of costumes, from russet-clad peasants to richly dressed merchants and esquires and their wives, and maybe even a knight or nobleman. Their traveling cloaks might hide the colorful hues of their clothes in grey winter but, in this sunlight, the rich reds, bright yellows, and deep blues are shown off, trimmed with furs according to social rank. Similarly the languages and accents you hear in a city give a cosmopolitan air to the place. Foreign merchants are regularly to be found in the greater towns and cities, but even in the smaller ones you will hear both French and English spoken in the street, and occasionally Latin and Cornish. Over the hubbub of the morning’s business you will hear the town crier, calling from the crossroads at the center of the town, or laughter as friends share a joke. Over it all the practiced cries of the street vendors ring out as they walk around with trays of food, calling out “Hot peascods” or “Rushes fair and green,” “Hot sheep’s feet” or “Ribs of beef and many a pie.”
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Given the noise and the textures of the place, you may be surprised to learn how few people actually live in the greater towns and cities of England. In 1377 the walls of Exeter encircle six or seven hundred houses where about twenty-six hundred citizens live. But that makes it
the twenty-fourth largest community in the whole kingdom. Only the very largest—London, with more than forty thousand inhabitants—can properly be called a great city when compared to the largest Continental cities of Bruges, Ghent, Paris, Venice, Florence, and Rome, all of which have in excess of fifty thousand. However, do not be misled into thinking that towns like Exeter are small, quiet places. The inns add considerably to the total, albeit on a continually shifting basis. Travelers of all sorts—clergymen, merchants, messengers, king’s officers, judges, clerks, master masons, carpenters, painters, pilgrims, itinerant preachers, and musicians—are to be found every day in a town. In addition you will come across crowds of local people coming in from the countryside to buy goods and services or to bring their produce to the retailers. When you think of the sheer variety of wares and services which the city provides, from metalwork to leatherwork, from the sheriff’s courts and scriveners’ offices to apothecaries’ and spicemongers’ shops, it soon becomes clear how the daytime population of a city can be two or even three times as great as the number of people living within the walls. And on a special occasion—during a fair, for example—it can be many times greater.