The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century (23 page)

A voyage across the Channel should take no more than a few hours—certainly less than a day—but there are instances of it taking three, four, or even more days. On one occasion King John of France spends eleven days at sea trying to cross the Channel, and the even more unfortunate Sir Hervé de Léon spends fifteen days sailing between Southampton and Harfleur.
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Most travelers make an offering of 4d at a favorite saint’s shrine before sailing.

Let us suppose you are back in Boston again, planning to sail to Poland. Such a journey will take about three weeks. A small cog is therefore not going to be suitable; you want a larger ship, probably a twin-masted hulk, in excess of one hundred feet long, to take you and your servants. As you cross the quay you will see the barrels, crates, and cages waiting to be loaded onto the vessel by crane. Cross the gangplank and step aboard: this large ship has a specially built deck. It has wooden animal cages where chickens are kept alive for the journey and stones where the cook maintains his fires. Above you is the rigging, the shrouds, the stays, and the sails. Lashed on deck you might find the spare timbers carried to effect repairs at sea. Going down the stairs you will see the piles of spare rope and canvas. Canvas stretches beyond repair after a while, or rots and tears. New ropes are regularly needed for mooring, and the rigging is replaced twice yearly. Down here, too, are the berths for the passengers. It is dark. A small
candle is all you have to see by as you suddenly shift from bright sunlight and the calls of gulls to the stinking darkness below deck.

Of course it does make a difference how wealthy you are. If you are a duke’s son, setting out on a voyage such as this, then you have your own paneled cabin, newly constructed for you, with a hanging bed, portable altar, perch for your favorite falcon, and hooks for hanging lamps.
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The hulk in which you sail may even have a stable below deck for your horses. Your cooks will have the use of tiled hearths and clay ovens while on board. Your sacks of almonds—which will be crushed to make milk for cooking on the journey—can be stacked in the hold, along with all the herbs and spices you may wish to take with you. Barrels of live lobsters, eels, and crabs stand on deck, along with casks of ale and wine, cages for your laying hens, and even a cow for fresh milk, and, in due course, a feast. Salted fish and sacks of fruit will be loaded on board. You can spend your days looking out to sea, hunting for sea birds with your falcon, or playing dice with your companions, or practicing swordsmanship. Or drinking large amounts of wine and listening to your minstrels play. Once a week you will put in to land for fresh water. In such a fashion it is possible to travel by sea to somewhere very distant in relative comfort.

Even the most magnificent lord has to face the fact that living in such close proximity to so many people hampers one’s lifestyle. A Dominican friar who once traveled to Jerusalem explains it thus.
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When you go to bed, you will have beside you a small urinal. This is made of terra-cotta, not glass (which is liable to break). As most people want to sleep below deck—especially in bad weather—it tends to be very crowded. It is also very dark, so the chances are that the urinal into which you are expected to urinate and vomit will be overturned by dawn. This is a good reason to sleep in a hammock.

In the morning, when you get up, and your bowels begin to move, you will join the queues at the bow head, where there are two seats, one projecting out on each side of the prow. Delaying too long on the precarious seat over the water is a bad idea, as the queue behind may be quite long and you are in one of the most vulnerable positions it is possible to be. On a galley in the Mediterranean, where most people sleep on deck, you have to climb over all the people to reach the seats at the prow during the night. If there is no moonlight, you will be in almost total darkness. The chances of actually making your way back
to your berth are small. If you fall overboard while using one of these facilities, it will be the last mistake you ever make. You will have been, literally, “dying for the toilet.”

As a result of these problems, our Dominican friend tells us, some people actually climb onto the edge of the ship—what you would call the gunwales—and, as the ship plunges along in the darkness, they feel their way to the prow and the seats of mercy. Such desperation! But when a storm strikes, there is very little you can do. You will either have to squat down in a quiet corner below deck—where everyone is crammed together, on account of the bad weather—or risk being swept away by a wave. Now you can begin to understand why it smells so bad below deck. Every storm has seen men and women emptying their stomachs, souls, and bowels down here in darkness and in fear.

If you travel long distances you will need to find accommodation. It normally follows that how you spend the night depends on where you find yourself at dusk. This is not necessarily something within your control. If the heavens open and the road turns into a quagmire, you may find that you are forced to seek shelter in the nearest cottage. Similarly, if you learn from fellow travelers that the road ahead is beset with thieves, you may choose to wait at an inn until people have gathered in sufficient numbers for you all to brave the highway together. Even if you do reach your intended town or village before nightfall, you may arrive too late to find yourself a bed, especially if it is market day or there is a fair in the vicinity. If the king’s court or a nobleman’s retinue is about to arrive at the same town, you will have even greater problems finding accommodation.

Nevertheless, people in medieval England do understand the difficulties faced by travelers, and you will find many prepared to share their lodgings and victuals with you. Even the mean miller in Chaucer’s “Reeve’s Tale” is prepared to offer two disreputable students a bed for the night. Hospitality is considered a work of charity, and listening to a stranger’s news over a mug of ale and a plate of bread and cheese is one of the most pleasant and rewarding forms of charity there is. However, you do need to remember that not all people are equal; social rank plays an important role. If you are a lord, you will be entertained almost wherever you go (barring only the houses and castles of your political enemies). If you are a peasant, and if you knock on the door of a bishop’s palace, the chances are that you will be shooed away. At best you will be told to come back in the morning when the leftovers from the bishop’s kitchens are handed out to the poor.

The warm welcome generally extended to travelers comes with some unwritten rules. Firstly, you must respect the property of your host. Secondly, your host is legally responsible for you during your stay. Therefore at a monastery, manor house, or inn you will be expected to surrender your sword and any other weapons you are carrying. When staying at a private home, it is simply courteous to offer your sword to the master of the house. Thirdly, if you die in someone else’s house, the goods with you automatically become his property. The last rule is to avoid outstaying your welcome. As the old saying goes, after three days, two things begin to smell: fish and uninvited guests.

Inns are perhaps the most obvious places to seek accommodation, but that does not mean they are all welcoming, homely establishments. They are businesses built on necessity—the very opposite of luxury hotels. The number of visitors to a town is never dependent on the number of inns; rather the opposite is true. If you have an offer of a bed in a private house, you would be well advised to take it.

The harsh practicalities of running an inn are reflected in the personages and figures of those who choose to make their living in the trade. Innkeepers are often stout, no-nonsense men, built like bears and familiar with the tricks of thieves, peddlers, beggars, and ruffians. If a traveler loses all his money in a game of dice, his pleas of poverty will fall on deaf ears when the time comes for him to pay his bill. The landlord will turn him out without his possessions, his horse, and even without his clothes if there is no other way of making good the loss. Likewise, if a traveler causes trouble at an inn, he is thrown out onto the dark streets, to be found either by a cutpurse, cutthroat, or the town watch. And, as if a rowdy clientele is not enough, an innkeeper also has to deal with the local authorities who regulate the trade. They expect him to comply with the fair prices set for food and to take responsibility for his inebriated and sometimes violent guests. It is not an easy way of making a living.

Finding a bed at an inn is not always straightforward. It is up to you to convince an innkeeper that it is worth his while accommodating you. In some towns, the bylaws require innkeepers to offer every
visitor a bed, whether they arrive on foot or on horseback. The very need for such bylaws is a reminder that landlords often refuse people accommodation. If you arrive on horseback, especially if you have sent a servant on ahead to make inquiries on your behalf, you will have no difficulty obtaining a place to stay, if there is space. If you arrive on foot, a landlord can get around the bylaw by claiming that you are a vagrant. If you look as if you are poor, and might not be able to pay your bill, the chances are that you will not be offered a bed. As many landlords are fond of pointing out, inns do not exist for the sake of charity. If you want charity, go to a monastery.

Let us say you are riding into town on a late summer’s evening, weary after spending eight hours in the saddle. Your servant has arranged for you to stay at an inn called the Angel. You see the handsome stone structure from some distance, with a wide street frontage and an arch in the middle of the building. The image of an angel is painted on a board which hangs above. As you ride beneath the arch, note the heavy wooden door which separates the inn from the street. Such security is necessary if the innkeeper wishes to continue to attract the wealthiest clientele.

Now you find yourself in a courtyard, which is not paved or cobbled but simply flattened earth—you come across mud in even the best establishments. On either side of you are wings of accommodation, two-storey timber-framed buildings with steep shingle-covered roofs. These have doorways on the upper floor, reached by external staircases and galleries, as well as on the ground floor. In the courtyard you dismount; one of the stable boys will take charge of your horses, leading them to the stable yard at the rear, where they will be fed and watered. Alternatively, if there is no boy present, tether your horses at the post in the courtyard before making your way through to the hall to find the landlord or his wife. “Dame, God be here!” you might say, entering the hall and seeing the innkeeper’s wife, wearing a leather apron and serving some guests at the long trestle table.

“Fellow, ye be welcome.”

“May I have a bed here within? May I here be lodged?”

“Yea, well and cleanly, all, were ye twelve, all on horseback.”

“Nay, but we two. Is there to eat here within?”

“Yea, enough, God be thanked!”

“Bring it to us. Give hay to the horses, and straw them well; see they be watered. Dame what owe we? We shall reckon tomorrow and shall pay also that ye shall be pleased. Now, bring us to sleep; we be merry.”

“Jeanette! Light the candle and lead them there above in the solar, and bear them hot water to wash their feet, and cover them with cushions, and see the table be well set.”
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The hall where you find yourself having this conversation is very high, open to the roof beams, with a hearth set on flagstones in the center. The trestle table where the other guests are eating runs down one side. Smoke rises and exits through a louver in the roof. Here of an evening you and your servant can sit with other travelers while ale, pottage, bread, and cheese are served. In most towns, innkeepers are prevented from serving food and drink to anyone other than a guest, so the hall tends to be a gathering place for people on the move. Here traveling plans and partnerships are formed and thirsts assuaged late into the night.

If this picture of gathering around a fire in a hall with a crowd of fellow travelers exchanging tales and drinking ale seems like a pleasant way to pass the evening, be warned: there are more than a few less-romantic aspects to staying at an inn. The hall itself is often characteristically aromatic on account of the amount of moldy food, stale drink, mud, horse dung (trodden in from the street), and the urine of talbots (guard dogs) mixed in the rushes which cover the hall floor. While the best inns will see such noisome rushes quickly removed and replaced with fresh ones, intermingled with lavender, rose petals, and herbs, the worst will replace them infrequently, without the petals or herbs. In the evenings the only light apart from the fire comes from candles made of tallow (animal fat) or rushlights (rushes dipped in fat and supported on metal stands). As methods of lighting, these are poor. They also reek. If the toilet facilities are close at hand, that will not help the smell. The usual toilet is a barrel and seat, emptied every morning by some poor servant who has to carry it to the town’s equivalent of Shitbrook. If there is a cesspit situated not far from the hall, it is inevitable that smells will waft up from time to time.

If the smell and poor lighting in the hall come under the heading unsanitary, the sleeping facilities are likely to be labeled unsavory. If you are lucky you will be lodged in a chamber adjacent to the hall.

If not, you will have to go outside and climb the wooden staircase to your bedchamber. There you will find several beds, sometimes a dozen or more. Each bed may accommodate two, three, or even more men. Women will be expected to share the same quarters, although females hardly ever stay at an inn by themselves. Married couples have the advantage that they pay double for a bed, so if you are with your spouse you can expect the landlord to ask a single man to vacate a bed to make room for the two of you.

The beds themselves are made of wooden frames strung with rope. A straw mattress, encased in a hemp or canvas cover, is placed on top of this. In a good inn, you will probably have a second mattress on top of this first one. In the best establishments, with just one or two beds per chamber, you may also find a chest for personal possessions and a pitcher of water and a brass basin for washing hands, faces, and feet. Should you or your companion in the bed feel the urge to get up in the night, you will need to make a short walk in the darkness. Hence the sound of travelers stumbling along the gallery or down the stairs is not uncommon. Down below, the talbots are easily disturbed. It is not unusual to wake up in the middle of the night to the barking of dogs, the snoring of travelers in your chamber, and the unmistakable sounds of someone urinating or drunkenly vomiting from the stairs or gallery down into the yard.