Peasantry

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Peasantry

Survival . The Middle Ages (earlier known as the Dark Ages) refers in Europe to a period that started with the precarious survival of enough men and women to reproduce themselves. The feat to keep its numbers up against malnutrition, poor hygiene, parasitic infections, and disease in order to cultivate the land and support a new generation so that they could carry on the societal groups and reproduce themselves was, as late as 1000, hard for the medieval populace. The natural hostilities of climate made many a poor infant defenseless with a mortality rate of several hundred per thousand. Many adults’ lives were brought to an end in their thirties by death from war or disease. Yet, medieval Europeans were not wiped out because after 814 there was a remarkable economic growth that was to make Western Europe a rich and powerful part of the world.

Earning a Living . At first, earning a living during the Middle Ages was limited to “those who worked” and “those who fought.” The Christian Church, however, rapidly interposed its institutions within this context, making “those who prayed,” particularly in the monastic setting, a part of the medieval economy of the ninth century.

Farming . To earn their livelihood, medieval peasants simply worked from sunrise to sunset. Peasant life followed the seasons and most of the already time-honored practices of cultivating fields: preparing the land, sowing, cutting, and stocking the grain, and usually threshing and winnowing it, since they grew predominantly wheat-type grains for food. In spring the peasants raked and planted seed for grain. From summer into early fall was weeding, haying, and harvest time for fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters, on their land and the lord’s, cutting the crop with scythes and turning it with rakes. Sheep were left to graze on fallow areas. For women there was the milking of the cows and the feeding of the chickens at home. Some women made ale to quench the thirst of the field laborers. During the winter, peasants stayed indoors. They made candles, wove cloth, and did other tasks.

Technological Transformations . Two technological transformations in medieval agriculture by about 800—a new horse collar, rigid yet padded such that the animal would not strangle itself as soon as it began to pull with significant force, and the integration of the heavy plow—altered somewhat the previously habitual routines. The heavy plow added plowing to the spring tasks and led in particular to the arduous task of bringing more land under cultivation. The peasantry cut down forests and removed bushes and briars to clear vast new areas of land for farming. A slowly integrated technique of dividing all the land of a single estate into communally worked fields also had an impact on peasant livelihood. Eventually across Europe, each community of peasants worked two or three large fields in rotation. One would be planted with wheat or rye in the fall and a second left uncultivated to lie fallow; a third was sown with oats, barley, or legumes in the spring.

Husbandry . Work in the fields was fundamentally physical and hard. Some aspects of the exhausting toil of the medieval peasant were diminished by the exploitation of both water- and windpower to raise water and grind grain, as well as to drive trip-hammers and saws. By 1300, with agricultural surpluses available, a part of the peasantry specialized in sheep and pig raising. In southern France, northern Spain, and in England in the Cotswolds and East Anglia, herds ranged in size from fifty to a thousand head. In most regions an amount more than a thousand head was so large that the sheep or pig herders needed to move them from one foraging area to another, beginning in some areas the seasonal practice of transhumance.

Peasant Home . The medieval peasant lived within a cluster of small houses in a village, often with its own church, blacksmith’s shop, and mill, all of which was owned by the lord of the land. Each house was a simple single-room, single-story, high-roofed structure. At the center of the room was an open-hearth fire on the packed-earth floor; it vented through a hole in the roof. The term hut is often used to describe the peasant home, perhaps to evoke the fragility of its construction from

readily available, often highly flammable materials, including a thatched straw roof, unsupported by roof trussing until the thirteenth century. Most peasant houses had to be rebuilt by every new generation. At the back of their house many peasants had a rudely constructed shed or lean-to. Behind the house and shed was a stretch of enclosed piece of ground. This was usually broken up and planted with vegetables. Both at the immediate back and in the rough grass beyond, there would be a few fruit trees. At the bottom of the garden there might be a pigsty or pecking space for a few fowl. The fortunate peasant might have a cow tethered at the base of the garden grazing on the naturally growing grasses.

Food Consumption . Peasants ate at least two meals a day, using wooden or earthenware bowls and wooden spoons. In addition to the staples of the diet—bread, pottage, or porridge—peasant fare, which was hardly lavish, consisted of oatcakes, cheeses, and perhaps the odd chicken. The bread, a dark loaf of four or more pounds weight, was made of maslin, a coarse wheat-rye or barley-rye flour mixture. The vegetables a peasant grew would be available in a variety in spring and summer: cabbage, onions, lettuce, leeks, spinach, and parsley. There was also the seasonal fruit from his trees: apples, pears, and cherries. Peas, beans, eggs, and the occasional fish supplied the only protein. There was meat only rarely, since the livestock that was raised was most often used to pay rent and other obligations. Animals that were not needed for breeding were killed every winter, since over the winter there was little spare hay from the meadow left to feed other animals after giving the plow team of four to eight oxen its daily rations. Animals that survived the winter by remaining on the common pasture were apparently not the most appetizing. One medieval observer declared that if he had to choose between the meat and the hide, he would eat the hide.

Clothing . Their clothing, which varied little throughout the whole of the Middle Ages, unlike that of the urban dwellers, which changed with fashion, gave the peasantry a characteristic appearance. It consisted, for women, of long loose gowns of rough material, belted at the waist, with wimples to cover the head. For men, the attire was a short tunic and either short, below-the-knee stockings or long hose, which fastened to the waist belt. A hood or cloth cap covered the male head. The peasant man also would have had coarse gloves or mittens and heavy leather shoes, while his wife might well have had neither. This discrepancy in protective clothing ought not perhaps be surprising, for Peter Lombard, a twelfth-century theologian, had to remind Christians that, while God had indeed made Eve from Adam’s rib and not his head, he had also not created her from Adam’s foot, as a slave. Women of every station were obliged, once married, to look after the home, “cooking, sweeping, cleaning pans”; peasant women had, however, the additional challenge of helping their husbands look after the home,

Written Documentation . Accounts of peasants who spoke for or about themselves are virtually nonexistent. To thirteenth-century contemporaries who did write of the peasantry from a certain distance, several dispositions are echoed as if characteristic. From the description of one author, medieval peasants were frequently overwhelmed by the conditions of life: “Her cake is burning on the [hearth] stone, and her calf is licking up the milk. The pot is boiling over into the fire, and the churl her husband is scolding.” At the same time, peasants were also described as dealing with their lot in life with great equanimity: when the bread was of common grain or of beans, and their drink, of the spring, when cheese and milk were their only feast, with their garments of sober gray, “the world of such folk [was] well ordered in its estate.” Perhaps the most realistic general description stems from a clergyman who did not push beyond his scorn for the dissipations of the peasantry to analyze their difficult home life or their stamina to face it. In simply condemning their enjoyment of “idle play and japes, carolings, making of fool countenances, … [giving] gifts to jongleurs to hear idle tales, … smiting, wrestling, in other doings of strength,” he did more than he realized perhaps to evoke their need for such pleasures.