Medieval Lives, by Terry Jones (2004) BBC

Medieval Lives, Episode 1: The Peasant

History series with Monty Python star and medieval enthusiast Terry Jones. The popular image of a medieval peasant is a person dirty, diseased and downtrodden, little more than a slave. However, Terry discovers that the medieval peasant was in fact literate, emancipated, highly political, legally savvy, house-proud and healthy (albeit with terrible breath).

The lifestyle of peasants in Medieval England

The lifestyle of peasants in Medieval England was extremely hard and harsh. Many worked as farmers in fields owned by the lords and their lives were controlled by the farming year. Certain jobs had to be done at certain times of the year. Their lives were harsh but there were few rebellions due to a harsh system of law and order.



The peasants were at the bottom of the Feudal System and had to obey their local lord to whom they had sworn an oath of obedience on the Bible. Because they had sworn an oath to their lord, it was taken for granted that they had sworn a similar oath to the duke, earl or baron who owned that lord’s property.



The position of the peasant was made clear by Jean Froissart when he wrote:



It is the custom in England, as with other countries, for the nobility to have great power over the common people, who are serfs. This means that they are bound by law and custom to plough the field of their masters, harvest the corn, gather it into barns, and thresh and winnow the grain; they must also mow and carry home the hay, cut and collect wood, and perform all manner of tasks of this kind.

Written in 1395



The one thing the peasant had to do in Medieval England was to pay out money in taxes or rent. He had to pay rent for his land to his lord; he had to pay a tax to the church called a tithe. This was a tax on all of the farm produce he had produced in that year. A tithe was 10% of the value of what he had farmed. This may not seem a lot but it could make or break a peasant’s family. A peasant could pay in cash or in kind – seeds, equipment etc. Either ways, tithes were a deeply unpopular tax. The church collected so much produce from this tax, that it had to be stored in huge tithe barns. Some of these barns can still be seen today. There is a very large one in Maidstone, Kent, which now has a collection of carriages in it.



Peasants also had to work for free on church land. This was highly inconvenient as this time could have been used by the peasant to work on their own land. However, the power of the church was such that no-one dared break this rule as they had been taught from a very early age that God would see their sins and punish them.



The Domesday Book meant that the king knew how much tax you owed and you could not argue with this – hence why it brought ‘doom and gloom’ to people.



After you had paid your taxes, you could keep what was left – which would not be a great deal. If you had to give away seeds for the next growing season, this could be especially hard as you might end up with not having enough to grow let alone to feed yourself.



Peasants lived in cruck houses. These had a wooden frame onto which was plastered wattle and daub. This was a mixture of mud, straw and manure. The straw added insulation to the wall while the manure was considered good for binding the whole mixture together and giving it strength. The mixture was left to dry in the sun and formed what was a strong building material.



Cruck houses were not big but repairs were quite cheap and easy to do. The roofs were thatched. There would be little furniture within the cruck houses and straw would be used for lining the floor. The houses are likely to have been very hot in the summer and very cold in the winter. Windows were just holes in the walls as glass was very expensive. Doors might be covered with a curtain rather than having a door as good wood could be expensive. At night, any animal you owned would be brought inside for safety. There were a number of reasons for this.



First, wild animals roamed the countryside. England still had wolves and bears in the forests and these could easily have taken a pig, cow or chickens. The loss of any animal could be a disaster but the loss of valuable animals such as an ox would be a calamity.



If left outside at night they could also have been stolen or simply have wandered off. If they were inside your house, none of these would happen and they were safe. However, they must have made the house even more dirty than it usually would have been as none of these animals would have been house-trained. They would have also brought in fleas and flies etc. increasing the unhygienic nature of the house.



The houses would have had none of the things we accept as normal today – no running water, no toilets, no baths and washing basins. Soap was unheard of and as was shampoo. People would have been covered with dirt, fleas and lice. Beds were simply straw stuffed mattresses and these would have attracted lice, fleas and all types of bugs. Your toilet would have been a bucket which would have been emptied into the nearest river at the start of the day.



Water had a number of purposes for peasants – cooking, washing etc. Unfortunately, the water usually came from the same source. A local river, stream or well provided a village with water but this water source was also used as a way of getting rid of your waste at the start of the day. It was usually the job of a wife to collect water first thing in the morning. Water was collected in wooden buckets. Villages that had access to a well could simply wind up their water from the well itself.



Towns needed a larger water supply. Water could be brought into a town using a series of ditches; lead pipes could also be used. Water in a town would come out of conduit which was similar to a modern day fountain.



Bathing was a rarity even for the rich. A rich person might have a bath just several times a year but to make life easier, several people might use the water before it was got rid of!



It was said that a peasant could expect to be fully bathed just twice in their life; once, when they were born and when they had died! Face and hand washing was more common but knowledge of hygiene was non-existent. No-one knew that germs could be spread by dirty hands.



London had a number of public baths near the River Thames. These were called "stews". Several people at one time would bath in them. However, as people had to take off what clothes they wore, the stews also attracted thieves who would steal what they could when the victims were hardly in a position to run after them!



Regardless of how water was acquired, there was a very real potential that it could be contaminated as toilet waste was continuously thrown into rivers which would make its way into a water source somewhere.



Families would have cooked and slept in the same room. Children would have slept in a loft if the cruck house was big enough.



The lives of peasant children would have been very different to today. They would not have attended school for a start. Very many would have died before they were six months old as disease would have been very common. As soon as was possible, children joined their parents working on the land. They could not do any major physical work but they could clear stones off the land – which might damage farming tools – and they could be used to chase birds away during the time when seeds were sown. Peasant children could only look forward to a life of great hardship.



For all peasants, life was "nasty, brutish and short."

Source: http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/medieval_peasants.htm

Famous for lampooning the schoolboy view of the medieval world in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Terry Jones has a real passion for and detailed knowledge of the Middle Ages. In Terry Jones' Medieval Lives his mission is to rescue the Middle Ages from moth-eaten cliches and well-worn platitudes. Was medieval England full of knights on horseback rescuing fainting damsels in distress? Were the Middle Ages mired in superstition and ignorance? Why does nobody ever mention King Louis the First and Last?



Terry will start with a medieval archetype - the Knight, Peasant, Damsel and Monk, Outlaw, King, Merchant and Physician - and in the course of unravelling their role and function will meet a host of colourful real-life characters, recreating their world by visiting key locations. Terry Jones and Alan Ereira are your guides to this most misrepresented and misunderstand period pointing you to things that will surprise and provoke. Medieval Lives accompanies a major BBC television series of the same name, and presents Medieval Britain as you have never seen it before - a vibrant society teaming with individuality, intrigue and innovation.



The authors

TERRY JONES is most famous as a member of Monty Python. He has directed several feature films including Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Life of Brian, and The Meaning of Life. He is the author of several children's books and of two books on medieval England: Chaucer's Knight and the highly acclaimed Who Murdered Chaucer?



ALAN ALEIRA was co-producer on the Crusades series. He has worked as a BBC radio and television producer, specialising in history since 1962. His credits include Battle of the Somme (Japan Prize 1978) and Armada (Royal Television Society Best Documentary Series, 1988). He is the author of The People's England, Crusades (along with Terry Jones) The Invergordon Mutiny and The Heart of the World.



Terry Jones' Medieval Lives is published on 5th February 2003 (BBC Books, £18.99) and accompanies an 8 part series on BBC TWO starting late January/early February 2004.

Source: BBC

The Middle Ages of reason

The Observer, Sunday 8 February 2004 08.51 GMT

he main reason I wanted to make Medieval Lives was to get my own back on the Renaissance. It's not that the Renaissance has ever done me any harm personally, you understand. It's just that I'm sick of the way people's eyes light up when they start talking about the Renaissance. I'm sick of the way art critics tend to say: 'Aaaah! The Renaissance!' with that deeply self-satisfied air of someone who is at last getting down to the Real Thing. And I'm sick to death of that ridiculous assumption that that before the Renaissance human beings had no sense of individuality.



To mark the start of the new millennium, the New York Times ran a leader that stated: 'A thousand years ago, when the earth was reassuringly flat and the universe revolved around it, the ordinary person had no last name, let alone any claim to individualism... Then came the Renaissance explosion of scientific discovery and humanist insight and, as both cause and effect, the rise of individual self-consciousness... the beginning of our modern era.' Is that really what they believe in New York? Do they really think that having a surname gives a person more identity than a Christian name? Isn't it rather the reverse?



And do New Yorkers really, truly believe that before the wonderful Renaissance nobody had any sense of being an individual? Have they read the General Prologue to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales? Have they read any of Boccaccio or Dante? And I name these three as specifically medieval not Renaissance.



The Renaissance was a backward-looking movement that hailed the distant past - ancient Greece and ancient Rome - as the only source of enlightenment. Petrarch, a Renaissance writer, wanted to put the clock back and to return to writing in Latin. And not just the Latin that was then current. He wanted to return to classical Latin. The Latin that was then current and still being spoken in the churches and monasteries was condemned as deficient. Rather than reviving Latin, the Renaissance killed it stone dead as a spoken language.



Chaucer, Boccaccio and Dante (although writing at the same time as Petrarch) wrote in the vernacular. They also celebrated the vitality, exuberance and individuality of ordinary men and women. They were the modernists and in that way they were truly medieval. Petrarch was the backwards-looking conservative. The proud despiser of the common people. The willing servant of a tyrant such as Bernabo Visconti. Petrarch provides a prototype for the Renaissance and for much of what follows.



In order to sell their package of conservative intellectual authoritarianism, the writers of the Renaissance had to make out that the intervening centuries were a time of darkness and ignorance into which they would now shine the light of ancient knowledge. The distortions, obfuscations and downright lies which they and admirers of the Renaissance ever since have fastened onto the Middle Ages still infect our historical vision. The very fact that we call that period (whatever it is) 'the Middle Ages' is but one example. The idea that it is a limbo between the bright lights of the classical World and the even brighter lights of the Renaissance is enshrined there in the very title.



But the medieval world wasn't a time of stagnation or ignorance. A lot of what we assume to be medieval ignorance is, in fact, our own ignorance about the medieval world. Take for example the idea that the people of the Middle Ages thought the earth was flat. It simply isn't true. And yet the New York Times takes it as gospel and, indeed, some get quite cross when you try to tell them that people in the Middle Ages were quite aware that the world was round.



The idea that they thought it was flat was invented by an American journalist by the name of Washington Irving. In 1828, he wrote a biography of Columbus in which he described the great man confronting the Church leaders who accused him of heresy for claiming the earth was round when the Church taught that it was flat. The meeting never happened and the Church never taught that the earth was flat. Irving simply made it all up. And yet it's stuck. It's just one of the many, many misconceptions about the medieval world that we don't seem able to shake off. Medieval Lives has been my chance to put a little bit of the record straight, as far as I can.



Why do I feel so exercised about what we think of the people of the Middle Ages? Why should I care about any injustice done to them? I guess it's because so many of their voices are ringing vibrantly in my ears - Chaucer's, Boccaccio's, Henry Knighton's, Thomas Walsingham's. Froissart's, Jean Creton's... writers and contemporary historians of the period who seem to me just as individual, just as alive as we are today.



We need to get to know these folk better in order to know who we are ourselves.



· An eight-part series, Medieval Lives, written and presented by Terry Jones begins tomorrow on BBC2 with a look at 'The Peasant'. A book accompanying the series is published by BBC Books at £18.99