A Day with a Medieval Peasant Family in England, 1280
Time Surfing: Graphic History
Time Surfing: Experience History.
Historical Backdrop
In 1280 England is ruled by Edward I, and the country is fuller of people than it has ever been. Land is scarce, holdings are small, and most villagers are villeins — unfree tenants who hold a few strips of land from a lord in exchange for rent, fees, and hard labor.
Our subject is Walter Attewell, thirty-four, a half-virgater at Cuxham, a tiny village of about a dozen tenant households in the Chiltern foothills of Oxfordshire. Since 1268 the manor has belonged to the scholars of Merton College in Oxford, who send a clerk each year to audit the reeve’s accounts. Walter holds roughly twelve acres scattered in strips, plus a cottage, a toft, a cow, a pig, and some hens. He owes the lord rent in pennies, a hen at Christmas and labor — including harvest “bedrip” boon-days, when every able body in the village must cut the lord’s wheat first, before their own. Late August is the hinge of the year. Get the wheat in dry and the family eats bread until spring. Lose it to rain and they eat pottage, then debt, then nothing. Today is a Friday: a fast day, no flesh meat, and the fourth boon-day of the harvest. Walter’s family are his wife Alice, thirty-one; his son Adam, twelve; his daughter Cecily, nine; a toddler, Hawise; and his widowed mother, old Matilda, fifty-six and half-blind.
Date/time and location: Friday, 22 August 1280, about 3:55 a.m. — Walter Attewell’s cottage, Cuxham, Oxfordshire
You wake in the dark because the cow shifts her weight and the wattle partition creaks. The smell hits you first: dung, sour milk, woodsmoke soaked into the thatch, five bodies and their sweat. You are lying on a straw sack on a low board bed with your wife and the baby. Your shin itches. You scratch and feel the welt of a flea bite, then another. The fire is a red eye in the hearth stones in the middle of the floor. Smoke drifts flat under the roof and out through the gable. Your back aches from yesterday. Your right palm is a single hard blister. Somewhere over the ridge a dog barks. You lie still for ten more breaths, because it is the last rest you will get, and then you sit up and put your feet on the beaten earth floor.
Date/time and location: Friday, 22 August 1280, about 4:25 a.m. — inside the cottage
Alice is already up and kneeling over the handmill, turning the top stone with a peg, grinding rye and wheat together. The noise is a low grating that you feel in your teeth. That mill is against the lord’s rules — every grain in Cuxham should go to his watermill on the brook and pay its share to the miller — so the quern lives under a sack behind the cow. Two men in this village have been fined for the same thing. You say nothing. You eat: a hunk of dark maslin loaf, dense and gritty from the millstones, and a wedge of hard ewe’s-milk cheese, and a wooden cup of thin brown ale that Alice brewed Tuesday. It is already going sour. Adam wolfs his bread and coughs on the crust. Cecily gets less. The baby gets a crust dipped in ale. You wipe your knife on your tunic and slide it back in the sheath.
Date/time and location: Friday, 22 August 1280, about 4:50 a.m. — the doorway and toft of Walter’s cottage
Outside, the sky over the eastern hedge is the color of watered milk. Cool air. Dew heavy enough to soak your shoes through in ten steps. You sit on the threshold stone with your sickle across your knee and work the curved blade with a whetstone, long strokes, spitting on the stone. The rasp carries. Down the row of cottages you hear the same sound from three other doorways. You check the edge with your thumb, then the toothed section near the heel. In the toft your beans are yellowing on their poles and the leeks need water. The pig is off in the lord’s wood eating acorns, and you owe pennies for the privilege. Alice ties the baby’s swaddling band, gives your mother the milking pail, and pushes bread and cheese and a stoppered leather flask into a coarse sack. Adam comes out with his own small sickle. Cecily brings the rake.
Date/time and location: Friday, 22 August 1280, about 5:20 a.m. — the headland of the lord’s wheat field, west of the village
Sunrise comes over the shoulder of the hill and turns the field the color of a new penny. Twenty acres of standing wheat, hip-high, heads bent, and every stalk of it the lord’s. Simon the hayward stands on the headland with a peeled hazel wand in his fist and a bundle of notched tally sticks at his belt. He calls the households one by one and looks each of you in the face. You answer for your holding. This is a bedrip — a boon-day — so you cut the lord’s grain for nothing but your dinner and his ale, and your own strips wait another day. Robert the reeve sits on a rough pony behind him and says little. Old men have brought grandsons. Widows have come. Somebody’s dog runs the stubble. The hayward marks off the first land, points, and says begin.
Date/time and location: Friday, 22 August 1280, about 6:00 a.m. — the lord’s wheat, first land
