12/13/2023 0 Comments Medieval english village![]() ![]() It was a hungry world, made hungrier by intermittent crop failures. Besides the shortage of protein, medieval diets were often lacking in lipids, calcium, and vitamins A, C, and D. If possible, every meal including breakfast was washed down with weak ale, home-brewed or purchased from a neighbor, but water often had to serve. Stronger or weaker, more flavorful or blander, the pottage kettle supplied many village families with their chief sustenance. Except for poisonous or very bitter plants, “anything that grew went into the pot, even primrose and strawberry leaves.” The pinch came in the winter and early spring, when the grain supply ran low and wild supplements were not available. ![]() Nuts, berries, and roots were gathered in the woods. In spring and summer a variety of vegetables was available: cabbage, lettuce, leeks, spinach, and parsley. These were bread, pottage or porridge, and ale. The thirteenth-century villager’s aim was not exactly self-sufficiency, but self-supply of the main necessities of life. Husband and wife shared a bed, sometimes with the baby, who alternatively might sleep in a cradle by the fire. To lighten the task of carrying and heating water, a family probably bathed serially in the same water.Īt night, the family slept on straw pallets, either on the floor of the hall or in a loft at one end, gained by a ladder. When they bathed, which was not often, medieval villagers used a barrel with the top removed. A well-to-do peasant might own silver spoons, brass pots, and pewter dishes. Clothing, bedding, towels, and table linen were stored in chests. Hams, bags, and baskets hung from the rafters, away from rats and mice. A cupboard or hutch held wooden and earthenware bowls, jugs, and wooden spoons. The family ate seated on benches or stools at a trestle table, disassembled at night. ![]() The dog, driven out of the kitchen with a basinful of hot water, fights over a bone, lies stretched in the sun with flies settling on him, or eagerly watches people eating until they throw him a morsel, “whereupon he turns his back.” But what then? Come the capons and the hens and scrape it around and make it as ill as it was before.” We see the woman doing laundry, soaking the clothes in lye (homemade with ashes and water), beating and scrubbing them, and hanging them up to dry. she casts it with great violence out of the door.” But the work is never done: “For, on Saturday afternoon, the servants shall sweep the house and cast all the dung and the filth behind the door in a heap. They picture the housewife at her cleaning: “She takes a broom and drives all the dirt of the house together and, lest the dust rise. Medieval sermons, too, yield a glimpse of peasant interiors: the hall “black with smoke,” the cat sitting by the fire and often singeing her fur, the floor strewn with green rushes and sweet flowers at Easter, or straw in winter. The pot is boiling over into the fire, and the churl her husband is scolding. Her cake is burning on the stone, and her calf is licking up the milk. At night a fire-cover, a large round ceramic lid with holes, could be put over the blaze.Ī thirteenth-century writer, contrasting the joys of a nun’s life with the trials of marriage, pictured the domestic crisis of a wife who hears her child scream and hastens into the house to find “the cat at the bacon and the dog at the hide. The atmosphere of the house was perpetually smoky from the fire burning all day as water, milk, or porridge simmered in pots on a trivet or in footed brass or iron kettles. Some hearths were crowned by hoods or funnels to channel the smoke to the makeshift chimney, which might be capped by a barrel with its ends knocked out. burned on a raised stone hearth, vented through a hole in the roof. In the center, a fire of wood or of peat. Floors were of beaten earth covered with straw or rushes. Interiors were lighted by a few windows, shuttered but unglazed, and by doors, often open during the daytime, through which children and animals wandered freely. Dwellings commonly still lodged animals as well as human beings, but the was more often partitioned off and sometimes positioned at right angles to the living quarters. A MIDDLE-LEVEL PEASANT probably lived in a three-bay house, the commonest type. ![]()
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