Did medieval PEASANTS TRAVEL?

many people think that medieval peasants lived worked and died in exactly the same place well that's not actually true they travel the surprisingly large amount and for all sorts of different reasons let me explain foreign of course most Ordinary People did spend the majority of their lives in the same Village after 95 of the population were farmers looked after their own land if they were villains they worked the land for the Lord if they were free they worked their own land now technically if you weren't free you needed permission from The Lord of The Manor to travel but it seems like that was probably sought and given quite easily it wasn't really that formally done you could travel especially to the local market and sometimes quite a lot further afield now if you were poor didn't have a horse didn't have a beast of burden there's a fair chance that your travel was going to be on foot and some people traveled from England all the way to the Holy Land mostly on foot a journey that would have taken months if not years of course roads in the medieval period were a very variable quality as you might guess there were Roman roads the Romans quite a few hundred years ago had built about 2 000 miles of of Highway incredibly high quality Highway across England and some of Britain as well and a lot of those were still in use some of those were looked after and maintained some of them were in really bad condition and others are completely abandoned because nobody used them anymore because they're not going anywhere that anybody wanted to go so it's quite variable most medieval roads though were more like footpaths or Bridal ways or what we call easements today you you had the right to travel along that road that route rather than it having a surface like we would imagine a pavement might be so the surface itself was probably going to be well it was going to reflect the weather that you were traveling in so if it was really rainy it was going to be very muddy and there are medieval rules that you were allowed to go off the main path if it was impossible if there's an obstacle if there was a vast Lake of mud and you couldn't actually get through it you were actually allowed to go all the way around on somebody else's land including actually damaging their crops by way of circumventing the obstacle and that was permitted by law it's probably frowned upon by the farmer but it was actually permitted by law so travel was quite important an enabling travel was very important for the medieval period now how did you actually find your way because there weren't GPS systems like there are today and today let's face it lots of people type in their destination and they just follow the GPS the GPS tells them where to go even when they're walking but certainly when they're in the car how do you get from Village to Canterbury let's say well there are things called itineraries which are basically lists of places you need to go in order so what you would do is go for your village to the local town you would know that route you'd get to the town and then you'd say we choose the road to the next place I need to get to and you take that road and then you get to that place and you'd ask the locals which is the road to uh place on your itinerary and you'd follow that road so you sort of leapfrogging from location to location possibly not even having an idea of the physical layout that we would from sort of satellite photos or modern Maps but it was actually a very efficient way of traveling because you use local knowledge to find out where you were getting to and eventually you would take the Canterbury Road to get to Canterbury or as they used to say all roads finally lead to Rome so you go along these highways and you'd eventually get to Rome if you wanted to and then be on even today some of the roads are labeled with the destination they're going to so for example in Oxford there is a road called London Road which goes to London um and that same road becomes Oxford Street when you get to London so if you get to London you want to go to Oxford you take exactly the same road but from the perspective of London so an awful lot of Roads in England are still named after the destination so makes it quite straightforward now how did you know you were on the right Road well sometimes there were Road markers there were crosses there are markers on the ground telling you a certain distance to a certain place few and far between but they were there especially on the major roads and there were places that it was expected you would stop so medieval people unlike fantasy adventurers typically didn't really go and camp in the woods on their Journeys they typically went from A to B stayed in a Tavern or an in a in a kind of way station and so places that you went to were organized around travel it was expected that you would stop in this place and there were different values you could have a very Posh room if you wanted to with clean sheets or you could be sleeping basically in The Tap Room in the tavern or in the stables in fact or even in somebody's Barn it was expected that these sort of places were allowable for you to sleep in of course when you travel in the medieval period you're going to be meeting a whole cast of different fellow Travelers obviously pilgrims people going to Market you've got mercenaries you've got Messengers you've got people traveling for pleasure yeah just exploring you'd have monks you'd have people traveling on the business of religious houses you'd meet soldiers as well all sorts you probably wouldn't actually be that vulnerable to being attacked though because the roads in many of England were it appears surprisingly safe though obviously were criminals abroad but not as many as you might think from television and uh and Hollywood movies that were actually relatively safe I couldn't find many records of ordinary Travelers being that worried about being attacked although people did tend to travel in groups so maybe they weren't as safe as we might think possibly carrying knives and decent sticks meant that you were a bit more safe than might be today of course people travel long distances on foot today there are still pilgrimages done Santiago de Compostela is still done by a lot of people and there are Pilgrim routes all the way along there but you probably are not going to walk more than 15 miles a day so going to Constantinople or Beyond to Jerusalem 20 miles a day 10 miles a day that was a lot of days walking but it appears it was done often at least once in a lifetime in the medieval peasantry it was on a peasants bucket list if you like it was something they had to do and if chaucers tails are anything to go by they weren't as devout as some people might have thought you kind of were supposed to be being religious but it was the journey that mattered you were going to be surrounded by the company of other Travelers possibly people you'd met before possibly complete strangers who became friends you'll be traveling a long way in a big group of people and you would get to know them you would be drinking with them you would be having fun with them you'd be getting cross and angry with them as well and the Canterbury Tales are all about the different characters that went on pilgrimages I think there's a fair chance that most of them weren't that Pious they were going on pilgrimage more as a holiday thing they were probably Pious when they got there and turning up to a medieval Cathedral when you'd only lived in the local Village and the biggest house was the lord of the manners modest manor house if you went to see a medieval Cathedral it would have been spectacular it would have taken your breath away they still take your breath away today even when we have high-rise buildings in a taller there's something Majestic about the medieval Cathedral and so even the ones that weren't Pious I think probably had a bit of a rush of religious fervor and of course there were souvenirs as well so you got to that Cathedral you wanted to prove that you'd be on pilgrimage so like today you bought those souvenirs tin Badges and all sorts of things like that possibly even relics because you could buy cheap relics you could buy a piece of cloth that had been looked on by some Saint probably wasn't it's probably fake but you know um it gave you us Keepsake to take back with you and show to all the all the friends in the village that you'd been there I love that idea that the journey was the main thing yes you were going to a destination but you were you were also having the experience of travel and remember if you're traveling on foot you're going very slowly so you would see the world revealed to you you would you you would almost smell the changes you would you would see the landscape change from one place to the other and certainly if you were going on a major Journey you would actually see the plant life change the language people spoke could change as well um and eventually you would get to a totally different climate you might have gone from um English slightly rainy Green Fields all the way through Spain or all the way through Italy eventually to the Holy Land and the deserts there and the the very much hotter Landscapes so I think medieval Journeys would have been as much about personal Discovery as they were about getting somewhere as quickly as possible [Music]

Channel: Modern History TV

Views: 490,592

Keywords: documentary, history, history documentary, kingsley, jason kingsley, medieval, middle ages, knight, travel, peasant, adventurer, walking, pilgrimage, religion, cathedral, medieval times

Id: qvbm84iN7qk

Length: 10min 19sec (619 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 25 2022