How did English medieval peasants see themselves?

were medieval peasants slaves and was medieval serfdom effectively the same as slavery [Music] the population of medieval england is actually quite hard to estimate the doomsday book that fantastic document written by our norman conquerors duke william of normandy in 1086 catalogued a huge amount of the country in a vast amount of detail but it actually only mentions about 283 000 people and it misses out some very big categories women children the clergy it doesn't talk about london in particular and it misses out some parts of england as well because it wasn't fully completed so of that 283 000 men that are mentioned in the doomsday book we projected up to be something of the order of two million two and a half million people living in england in the medieval time in the 11th century most of the population lived in villages in rural communities and by most of the population i mean estimates vary between 90 to 95 of the population leaving five percent of the population to live in the growing towns and cities london was quite big but by comparison to today absolutely minuscule what that means then is that the vast majority of the medieval population were peasants typically peasants were divided into two broad categories they were serfs or servile or they were free men or free well what's the difference between a surf and a slave well actually quite a lot a surf could be bought and sold but as part of a piece of land so the lord of the manor could buy and sell a parcel of land that would have you attached to it but you had certain rights to that land to farm and live there and those couldn't be removed by the lord of the manor which is a kind of form of buying and selling tenancies landlords today will buy a tenement building with a lot of people that have rights that are living in it and they get the rent same thing really so arguably nothing much has changed there slaves on the other hand could be bought and sold as individual human beings for money with no reference to a piece of land nothing at all now interestingly in the norman period slavery seems to have been massively in decline in fact various bishops preached against it and bishop anselm said in particular it should be wrong to sell a man like a brute beast so it appears that the normans made significant efforts to actually destroy the trade in slavery that happened in the earlier medieval period there was a slave trade between bristol and dublin dublin was actually set up by the vikings specifically as a slave trading port and bristol which became famous for the slave trade later on in history was also partly responsible for dispatching slaves to various parts of the world back then in the medieval period the worst slaves mentioned in the doomsday book these are englishmen whose social status is slave but they're few and far between the vast majority of farm workers are peasants and they have rights so it appears that the whole concept of slavery was dispatched and got rid of by the normans admittedly it was commuted to bonded servitude if you like basically it was norman policy to free slaves turn them into bondage servants people who actually had to work the land for themselves but give them rights it's really fascinating to think that the norman conquest brought with it one of the first emancipations of slaves in the western world a lord was not allowed to kill or maim his serf he'll get into trouble for that but he was allowed to tax him in lots of different ways so for example when a serf died the lord got to choose his best animal as a death duty we still have death duties today in much of the western world he could tax him if he wanted to get married and perhaps partly control who he married and where he was going to live afterwards and one of the ways that was particularly contentious was he could force him to use the lord's mill to mill his grain now it's perfectly possible if you're a peasant to milgrain at home but the lord could force you to mill the grain at his miller's mill and the miller would often be a bit corrupt would charge you 10 and it would also charge you much more money than it would have cost you to do it yourself so milling grain at the lord's mill was a source of revenue for the lord but it was also a source of severe discontent amongst the peasantry we do have a record of a lord being fined for thrashing we don't know what thrashing means but he was fined for thrashing his surf he's fined 40 shillings which is actually quite a large sum of money now money money's value is actually quite hard to determine by today's standards but people were paid a penny or so for a day's work so therefore shilling is many many days work it's probably the equivalent to tens of thousands of pounds or dollars in today's currencies magna carta the great charter specifically says that a lord is not allowed to bring a villain to ruin so he is specifically not allowed to confiscate his land or the tools of his trade which is interesting because that's very similar to modern day western bankruptcy laws you can take a lot of goods you can't take usually the tools of somebody's trade the typical medieval peasant lived as part of a manor and that manner would compose of two or three villagers they'd live there with their family on their effectively their small holding and they'd report to one lord so one lord would have two or three villages to his name that would obviously change some had fewer some had many many more and if you were servile you had to work two or three days a week for the lord of the manor on boon work if you were free you usually have to pay rent in terms of money but sometimes you could do physical work for the lord of course not everybody lived in the menorial system there are big religious communities and those are worked by people called lay brothers who are not specifically clergy but they were the ones doing all the physical labor in the religious institution there's a theoretical diagonal line that runs very roughly from northwest to south east that divides england the upper right bit was the danelaw and was settled by waves of immigrant from northern europe who were then called danes who were likely various different people they had their own laws and customs just to confuse things in the area known as danelore there are actually relatively few serfs recorded in the doomsday book which is interesting and mostly free men they mostly pay rent and in some areas particularly in northumberland for example in the very north of england there was a curious thing about feigns and dreams and they they actually paid tax based on the number of horned beasts they kept which is a complete hangover from the very earliest days of the medieval period in the far south in kent edward longshanks edward the first mallius scottorum the hammer of the scots specifically declared all kentishmen be free so there's a totally different organization in the south of england and in the north of england just to confuse things we do have records of some of the highly detailed jobs that the medieval peasant was expected to do the black book of peterborough which was made between 11 25 and 11 28 specifies each man must plow four acres for the spring sowing must work three days in each week and must supply 60 hens and 640 eggs a year very specific the knights templar yes real knights templars did exist and they ran religious institutions in in medieval england i'm not sure whether they were hiding the holy grail or having all these sort of legendary adventures that later stories were to embellish but they genuinely did exist and they genuinely wrote down rules for what people had to do on their land and when there are specific phrases like must mow four days a week until the meadows are cleared and the hay is carried in it was also specified that they would have to carry loads to gloucester which was 20 miles away from the religious establishment or wherever the master wills it and they also needed to move the sheepfold twice a year so the rules were written down in very very specific detail and won't be tied anybody that didn't actually follow them now of particular interest i think is that as the medieval period goes on a lot of the religious orders started to change the willingness to accept cash and i think this is really because money is a bit more reusable than four days a week mowing and so and so the actual cash could then be transported and moved abroad or moved to different parts of the world where it was specifically needed whereas having a bunch of blokes who have to specifically mow this specific field at this time of year is not as flexible as give me the money and i can do what i like with it so as the medieval period goes on we see a lot of transition from boone work having to do certain things at certain times of the year to paying money instead even if you're servile here's another interesting little nugget in the records we see some families that start out as free become servile so it's possible to go the other way and some people who started out servile become free and it does appear that certain land came with civility so it was possible in some cases to get more and better land if you were servile and sort of go down the social ladder if you like but have more land and better land and give up your freedom and vice versa so the situation as always is actually quite a lot more complex we know that some people went to court to prove that they were servile or free and often they were talking about whether their father was servile or free or not and in some cases the whole situation is muddied because free men married servile women and serval men married three women and the courts had to determine what happened to that union to that family group were they now servile or were they now free as you can imagine with human beings the situation is quite complicated but just like today status matters for some people but not everybody from the 10th century to the 12th century the courts seem very keen to determine who is a serf or is servile and who's actually free so how do you prove that you're free or how does your lord of the manor prove that you're servile well one of the definitions is terror ad fercom et flagellum which is latin for do you hold by fork and flail which we think and we're not sure we think this means do you hold the land because of tasks you have to do for the lord of the manor or do you actually pay him rent because the idea is if you broadly have to do work for the lord of the manor you are servile and if you pay money rent then you're free but of course in life it is never that simple because most of the records indicate that people had a bit of both they paid some money and they did some tasks so the courts had to work out how servile or how free you might or might not be then of course as now going to court was expensive so it must have been a really important thing for people to have decided for them or they must have wanted to prove that they were free as opposed to servile we don't quite know why maybe it was a social thing maybe it was just a personal i am free and i want to prove it and have the courts prove it maybe lords of the manor didn't want too many free people on there on their land and maybe because you had a broadly less literate society people didn't have the paperwork to prove what their status was so forks and flails are important deciders as far as the court is concerned if you are a villain a serf you are servile how do you win your freedom well there are several ways that can happen actually the first one and you might have guessed you pay money to your lord in what's called quit rent you pay him money and he declares you free now technically all the money you owed had to be paid by a third person because as a if you didn't actually own any of your own money technically although it's a bit more complex than that basically you had to get a third person to pay the money to your lord but the lord is probably quite happy to receive the money declared you free sometimes there'd be a big ceremony associated with it and we have records of the mayor of the town celebrating your freedom so it was a big social event in some cases and who knows why people wanted to become free maybe it was just social status maybe it saved them taxes we don't really know but that's the main way people became free there's another one if you didn't have any money you could run away yes you could actually run away to the town there's an expression in medieval england which is town air sets men free and that's exactly what you had to do you had to run away and live in the town undetected for a year and a day now lords of the manor were often not very keen for this to happen so they would send people in to capture you but the towns were actually expanding rapidly at this time in history they were quite keen to make sure you became free because then you become a townsmen and you would add to their power so the towns usually turn to either a blind eye to you being a runaway surf or slightly helped you kind of gave you nudges in the right direction or certainly wouldn't have turned you in because it's to their advantage if you become free thirdly you take holy orders because if you are a member of the clergy you are exempt from ordinary rules you have to follow church rules and you would be tried in church courts for example and often the churches didn't have the death penalty they sent you to some far away monastery to deliver the rest of your life if you're particularly bad but basically the clergy were outside the surf free kind of spectrum if you like so you can become a man of the cloth follow god and become free that way and lastly it is possible but it's not really recorded very much in medieval manuscripts but it is possible that good military service might have enabled you to win your freedom if you like and some of the evidence we have from that is william shakespeare post-medieval but quite close to the medieval period in henry v he says he who sheds his blood with me shall be my brother be he now so vile i he's a villain he's servile today shall gentle his condition today he shall become free so in that statement henry v is specifically saying to the villains or the servile people in his army that if you fight for me you shed your blood and we win i will give you your freedom you'll become a free man whether that happened in history or not we don't actually know but i think it's quite likely so if you fought for your country and did so well there's a fair chance if you did it well enough you might become free but it is an interesting representation of what shakespeare who was closer to the medieval period thought might be the case he could be making it up but i think it's quite likely that if you gave good military service and you were a villain why wouldn't your lords and masters make you free 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Channel: Modern History TV

Views: 492,585

Keywords: documentary, history, history documentary, kingsley, jason kingsley, medieval, middle ages, knight, mediaeval, peasant, slave, viking, witcher, fantasy, RPG

Id: iTm_zb9k2us

Length: 17min 56sec (1076 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 16 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Vocalic985]

Slaves with extra steps is more like it.