"The poorest folk are our neighbors, if we look about us—the prisoners in dungeons and the poor in their hovels, overburdened with children, and rack-rented by landlords." The English poet William Langland, writing toward the end of the fourteenth century, was reminding his audience of how the world stood, and he was not sparing in his details. "For whatever they save by spinning they spend on rent, or on milk and oatmeal to make gruel and fill the bellies of their children who clamor for food. And they themselves are often famished with hunger, and wretched with the miseries of winter—cold, sleepless nights, when they get up to rock the cradle cramped in a corner, and rise before dawn to card and comb the wool, to wash and scrub and mend, and wind yarn and peel rushes for their rush lights. The miseries of these women who dwell in hovels are too pitiful to read, or describe in verse."
The dungeons that Langland had in mind were those of great feudal landlords, against whose arbitrary justice the poor had little recourse. And the hovels he described scarcely differed from those that had sheltered the majority of the population of Europe a thousand years before, during the period when the Roman Empire began to disintegrate and the inhabitants of its former provinces were left without the security and comforts of the material civilization they had come to know. As Roman towns and cities shrank and decayed, as trade diminished and paved roads disappeared beneath shrubs and weeds, the peasantry—who constituted around 85 percent of the population—were left with only the natural resources of their local environment from which to make a living. From dawn to dusk they worked in the fields, many of them with wooden implements that were too weak for anything but the lightest and least fertile soil, and by night they sheltered in villages that were seldom more than clusters of shabby huts.
A sixteenth-century German stained-glass window depicts Tobias and Sarah—protagonists of the Book of Tobit, included in the Old Testament Apocrypha— slumbering peacefully with their dog on a well-appointed bed. By the end of the Middle Ages such beds, covered with thick draperies and often overhung by canopies, had become hallmarks of the privacy and comfort enjoyed by well-to-do married couples. During the preceding centuries, beds had been no more than functional platforms for sleeping: Whole families often shared a single straw mattress supported by cords stretched across a wooden frame up to nine feet wide, while their servants slept on the floor nearby.
Around the beginning of the second millennium, those who had survived successive waves of invasion by the Vikings of Scandinavia and other marauders still lived precariously in isolated rural settlements. Across the center of the continent, where villages and fields were interspersed with forests, most men built wooden frames for their homes; the roofs were covered with thick thatch that sloped almost to the ground, and in the walls below, the gaps between the timbers were filled with wattle and daub, made by interlacing twigs and branches and plastering them with a mixture of mud and straw. Most houses contained only one room, and the walls on either side were so low that it was seldom possible to stand upright anywhere other than in the middle. If there was a window, it was only a hole in the wall. The entrance was more often closed with a curtain made out of leather or linen than with a wooden door. The floor was simply the bare earth strewn with rushes, and the hearth was a circle of stones in the center, with a small opening in the roof above it to let out the smoke.
The only pieces of furniture were a few stools and a board laid across two trestles
Or tree trunks, which served as a table. At night the entire family slept together, fully clothed, on thin mattresses filled with straw or heather, and they shared their dismal shelter with their hens and pigs. In winter, if they were rich enough to own cows or sheep, they brought these in as well. In cold weather, despite the hole in the roof, the room filled up with smoke from the damp log fire in the hearth. When it rained, the rushes—which were seldom changed—rotted on the muddy floor, and throughout the year they were almost always thick with the stinking excrement of animals.
In the rest of Europe the houses and the conditions were similar. In the warm climate around the Mediterranean there w'as no need to bring in livestock during the winter, and the rush-strewn floors were a little less unsanitary. But the only major difference was in the building materials. In rocky country, stones were used to build sturdier walls. In the coldest parts of the north, houses were insulated by piling dirt and turf against the sides and roof. And in the south many houses were made out of brick and tiles, some of which came from the nearby ruins of Roman towns and villas.
In such primitive and unsanitary conditions, death, while not exactly a member of the family, was a constant visitor. Cold weather, an inadequate and poorly balanced diet, and the rats, lice, and fleas that bred in the woodwork and unwashed clothing all took their toll. The true cause of infection was unknown (and would remain so until the nineteenth century); preventive medicine even in the late Middle Ages was limited to quarantine, and although a host of herbal and plant infusions were taken to alleviate sickness, most were at best neutral in their effect.
Those most at risk were infants. Women often gave birth on soiled bedclothes—to protect the good ones from damage—and were commonly expected to return to their household or field duties within hours. Those who did without the aid of a midwife were often the lucky ones: Midwives might wash their hands before a delivery but had no idea of the need for sterilization, and their folk remedies could do as much harm as good. Throughout the medieval period and in many areas up until the advent of improved medicine in the nineteenth century, between a quarter and a third of all children died within a year of birth. Many more died before they reached their tenth year. From every Kvo live births a single healthy adult might result.
William Langland was himself no stranger to poverty and death. He lived in a simple cottage with his wife and daughter, "dressed like a beggar," and made a meager living by reciting the Office of the Dead for wealthy patrons. But for Langland as for many others, the more meager and demeaning the physical conditions of his daily life, the more mysterious and challenging was the relationship between his existence on earth and what he considered to be his ultimate destiny. Langland was a minor cleric and was probably educated in a monastery, one of the chief institutions through which the Christian church in Europe had kept alive a tradition of learning and a hope of spiritual salvation through the centuries of privation that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire. And during his own lifetime, material changes were occurring in parts of Europe and in certain strata of society that would eventually improve the lot of most of the population.
Between the eleventh and the early fourteenth century, favorable climatic conditions permitted the expansion of agriculture and the growth of Europe's population. And as trade grew and new urban communities began to flourish, the wealth they accrued allowed increasing numbers to better their conditions—to build warmer and more comfortable houses, to enjoy a more varied and plentiful diet, to provide a secure inheritance for their children. By the sixteenth century, the success of manv
People's lives was measured not just by their ability to provide for their family's survival, but by their provison of luxuries far in excess of basic needs. A new elite had filled the vacuum left by the vanished patricians of Rome, and while the course of public affairs was still stained by violence and bloodshed, in the courts and mansions of the rich, conduct was marked by growing civility and decorum. Most members of this elite were no less devout than their ancestors and accepted the hardships of life on earth as preparation for a glorious afterlife. But they held a far more optimistic view than their forebears of the capacity of humans to better their worldly existence. The life of meni and women was no longer as cheap as that of beasts. "O highest and marvelous felicity of man," apostrophized the Italian count Pico della Mirandola, "to him it is granted to have whatever he chooses, to be whatever he wills."
At the beginning of the eleventh century, the edge of the familiar world for the peasant inhabitants of Europe's scattered villages was defined by two boundaries: that of the manor and that of the parish. The two sometimes overlapped, but by no means always. At the hub of the manor was the manor house, occupied by the local lord; this was the center of secular authority for the surrounding villagers. The church, at the center of the parish, was the focus of spiritual authority—although because the concerns of parish and manor overlapped and intertwined, many villagers probably made no absolute distinction between the two.
The manor was the local manifestation of the social system of dependence and obligation known as feudalism, which had spread through western Europe during the two previous centuries and which was steadily moving into eastern Europe also. The system was based on ownership of land and the need to defend it. The most powerful feudal landlords—the kings and their barons—granted estates to individual knights or landholders, in return for which each knight swore allegiance to his lord and undertook certain solemn duties, the most important usually being the obligation to serve as a member of his lord's military entourage for up to forty days each year. At the lowest level this feudal contract was echoed in the relationship between the local lords and the peasants on their estates. In return for the lord's nominal protection and the right to be heard in his manorial court, the peasants paid him a substantial share of their harvest and their profits, or else worked for him on his land.
Only a few of the peasants were freemen, and these were usually tenant farmers or essential craftsmen such as blacksmiths or millers. The majority—the ones who provided the bulk of the labor force—were serfs, owning almost nothing and entirely dependent on the lord of the manor. He allowed them to graze their livestock on some of his pastures and allotted them strips of arable land on which to grow the crops that fed their families, but in return he required them to work his own fields for up to three days every week. Serfs were effectively the chattels of the manorial lord: They could not move away from the estate or even marry without their master's permission, and it was often they who bore the brunt of any conflict between their overlords. Early in the twelfth century, for example, when a renegade French baron raided some of his king's domains, the king retaliated by invading the baron's estates, burning all his crops, and slaughtering his animals and serfs. So widespread was the indifference to the suffering of serfs that even the abbot of the great monastery of Saint Denis near Paris described the loss of their lives as no more than just and salutary retribution. "It was," he wrote, "an excellent deed."
To the serfs, the manor was their entire existence. They knew nothing of the world
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World History
