Built of poor-quality materials scavenged from the immediate locality ‘fallen timber, mud, and furze’ with animals and humans living in the same structure, they would have needed frequent replacement, and would have turned to dark earth within a few years of abandonment. Once it was believed that Medieval peasant houses were so miserable and insubstantial that no housing from this stratum of society could possibly have survived the 500 years or so that separate us from the Middle Ages. In the same way, peasant housing underwent gradual improvement. The centre bay is an open hall, with service bay to the left and a two-storeyed chamber bay to the right. A typical Midlands cruck house, showing pairs of cruck blades rising from the sill beam at ground level to the apex of the roof in one sweep. Initially weak and vulnerable, surviving on a subsistence diet of very basic foods, peasants were increasingly able to afford better clothing, tools, utensils, and foodstuffs after the difficult decades of the mid-14th century. Many peasants were also able to supplement their income from pursuing such occupations as mining or fishing, or working as artisans or traders. Peasant landholdings doubled in size in the period 1380 to 1540, enabling peasants to produce a surplus for sale in local markets. One of the economic impacts of the Black Death and climate deterioration from the 1340s was to make more land available population decline meant that those who survived were in demand as agricultural labourers, able to sell their services for hard cash, rather than land or kind. Typically this is based on agricultural production on a piece of land held by customary tenure (common land) or copyhold tenure (in return for which the tenant had to render certain services to the lord of the manor).įifteen acres of arable land and pasture is just about enough to keep a family fed, and few peasant smallholdings exceeded 30 acres in extent up to the mid-14th century. Professor Dyer thinks that ‘peasant’ is a very useful word, and that nobody has yet devised an adequate substitute to denote people in the lower ranks of society, living in the countryside and gaining their main living from the resources available to them as a result of their own labours. For peasant, read ‘largely self-sufficient’.Ĭhris Dyer, author of Making a Living in the Middle Ages, points out that some historians are reluctant to use the term because they think it too imprecise (yet they happily use equally broad terms such as ‘merchant’ and ‘artisan’). Many a modern allotment-holder leads a semi-peasant lifestyle, and there are plenty of contemporary peasants all over southern and eastern Europe – not to mention those living in hippy communes in west Wales. In fact, all that ‘peasant’ really means is that you live mainly off the produce of your own labour. The term ‘peasant’ suggests poverty, ignorance, missing teeth, and poor personal hygiene: Baldrick stuff, all threadbare rags, hunched shoulders, and a life shared with pigs in a squalid hovel barely adequate to keep out the bitter winter wind. Ceilings, upper storeys, and a chimney were added in the 17th century. Phoenix Cottage in Warwickshire, is a well-preserved cruck house of 1480-1482. Chris Catling reports on how some peasants lived very well in the Middle Ages. Radiocarbon and tree-ring dating has now revealed that thousands of ordinary Medieval homes are still standing in the English Midlands, many incorporated into des res village houses. It used to be thought that only high-class houses had survived from the Medieval period. You get used to the rest.How the Black Death prompted a building boom She is grateful to have a roof over her head and as she puts it that “is already 90% of what you need. Also, the castle was deep in the forest, so she would encounter uninvited guests, such as various animals.īut Yulia believes that this experience prepared her for her current life and she doesn’t take simple things like running potable water, heat, and electricity for granted. Another challenging thing was showering and cleaning with cold water. It was one of the challenges living in a medieval castle, as it cannot be controlled. Yulia said that even coming from Russia, getting used to these temperatures in the living room was hard. The temperature in the castle could get as high as 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). And in the summer, the situation wasn’t a lot better. Every week, the ashes would pile up to 60 liters. The temperature in the house could go as low as 8 degrees Celsius (42 degrees Fahrenheit). The winters could get quite cold and the only source of warmth was a large furnace where Yulia and her cats would spend their time.
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