What Was Life Really Like For A Medieval Peasant?

foreign [Music] looked like lots of different things to lots of different people your place in society could dictate everything from what food you ate where you could go how educated you were and even how long you were likely to live for across this series we'll discover what life was like for those that worked those that earned those that learned and those that played in medieval England foreign [Music] which is a really exciting place to think about the various strands of medieval Society in the fields around the Abbey you would have peasants working peasants make up about 80 percent of the European population in the medieval period and they are out in the fields growing the crops necessary for everybody to survive and for Grand places like Denny Abbey to keep going so if we're going to talk about peasants what is a peasant it doesn't just mean a poor person or someone who's lowly which is kind of the way that we use it now a peasant very specifically means a farmer it's somebody who is tied to the land and they're out there farming and it's the great majority of people in medieval Europe 80 of the European medieval population as a whole are peasants underneath that 70 of the European population are serfs which means that they are peasants who are unfree or tied to the land they live and work on strips of land that they rent from someone a landlord and they can't just decide that they want to move they are seen as almost property in parcel with the land so say a great Lord or something inherits a manner it's also assumed that they inherit the people that live on the manor as well that sounds pretty bad and to be honest it is pretty bad being unfree isn't anybody's first choice however there are some rights that kind of go along with that as well so you can't move down the road but also your landlord can't kick you off your land you are paying rent but it is considered to be something that's in your family and generations of serfs will pass the same land down through their family so if surfs are tied to the land and they're paying rent to landlords what is a landlord the hit is kind of in the name the Lord is the pejorative here um so a lot of people who are landlords come from the nobility and Noble houses we'll talk more about those later as well but to be a landlord doesn't necessarily mean that one is a lord oftentimes a landlord could be another peasant who is free and very well to do or quite often the church [Music] on the one hand medieval peasants in the countryside are all good Christians so they're going to be happy that there are people in The Abbey praying for their souls on the other hand they're the ones that pay for all of this The Abbey is also not doing their own farming if you're spending all day long praying or you're a retired monk like the Knights Templar you're not going to be the one out in the fields plowing it's the peasants who do the actual work that sustains The Abbey it's also interesting because since the Abbey is enclosed this is as close as any average medieval peasant would actually get to The Abbey itself you see this Grand edifice that you're paying for and you know that people are praying in it but it's never something that you're going to be able to see from the inside as we'll see tensions like this eventually reach a boiling point peasants get really tired with their specific lot in life and the idea that they should simply be paying for everything around them with their own sweat [Laughter] farming in the medieval period is very interesting I promise uh is this is because there are a lot of really big innovations that happen in the medieval period in terms of Technology here is a really cool bit of medieval Innovation it's a Causeway what it is is a raised bit of road that allows peasants to move their goods back and forth across the Farmland here as you can tell from all of the water behind me here in the fence it used to mostly be a bunch of marshes a really neat medieval Innovation is the draining of those marshes and turning them into arable lands it wasn't until the high medieval period that people actually knew how to do this so previous to this the entire fenland was really mostly unusable when we talk about peasants and farming and we're on historical Farmland like this it's really easy to forget that this isn't actually how things always looked for medieval Farmers what we see here is an example of what we call enclosed farming when we see things like hedgerows and fences that indicates that it's owned by one farmer who owns that land that's not how farming works in the medieval period the way that landlords kind of divvy out land for the various surfs and that they oversee is generally through what we call the open field system they've got two or three large fields and then they might also have a common grazing ground for stuff like animals and livestock they might also if they're particularly well to do have a couple of Mill ponds so they can grind their own wheat into flour and they might also have some fishing rights on those ponds as well the way that land is then divided up further is through renting out the various strips of the fields into what are called celions so each family will have a certain number of celions that they are responsible for tilling over time and these will be passed down through generations in the same family although they do pay rent to the landlord overall in order to farm them Beyond draining finlands and turning it into arable land there's also a really cool medieval farming invention called the three field system the three field system is when you alternate various strips of land and cultivate different things on it so one year you might grow a crop that particularly strips a lot of nitrogen out of the soil the next year you would then allow that same strip of land to go fallow and just take a bit of a break then the year after that you would plant a crop something like Alfalfa that puts a lot of nitrogen back into the soil then you can rotate in your crop that is going to pull a lot of nitrogen out again this allows you to constantly be using land and constantly farming something without exhausting anything completely this is important when you have really highly cultivated areas of land and a lot of people attempting to live off exactly the same parcels so what are people farming it really depends on the region that you're in we know that they are farming wheat barley oats Rye peas and what are called veggies veggies are kind of pea adjacent crop that you kind of feed to horses and cattle and stuff like that they're very important because they are one of those nitrogen-rich crops which is going to like enhance your soil after you've leached it out with a bunch of wheat they're also raising livestock so they are raising cattle they're raising horses they're raising pigs all types of poultry and excitingly I promise sheep luckily for medieval people one of the best things that you can do with lab that's been recently reclaimed is run sheep through it sheep are particularly important because they are covered in the miracle fiber that stays warm even when it's wet wool and wool is one of the most important and widely traded Commodities in the medieval world there are all sorts of trade routes which spring up specifically just to trade wool back and forth what does this mean for peasants well you can actually become pretty rich trading wool this is especially true in England in the 14th century when England well London more specifically joins What's called the hanseatically the Hanseatic League are a number of northern European towns kind of along the North Sea and in the Baltic Sea that trade wool and cloth back and forth these are long International roots and it's a good way to make very good money if you're a peasant we do know that there are rich peasants so they are not only getting by but they're doing pretty well for themselves and this might be through trading the actual vegetables it might be through trading wool or it might be engaging in other industries that are considered Cottage like Brewing or weaving and in fact that's where we get the term cottage industry it's something that someone might be doing in their Cottage unsurprisingly so if you're growing a bunch of sheep maybe you're also carting that wool and you're weaving it into cloth interestingly both brewing and weaving are specific feminine Industries you know they were out there helping to till the land certainly but they might also be doing a second shift on top of that making things like cloth and beer that can also be sold in Market foreign this absolutely gorgeous medieval Barn is a wonderful reminder of how important farm animals are in the medieval period because let's remember this is owned by The Abbey so even monks and nuns are keeping their own cows their own sheep their own horses and that's the sort of thing they could even do themselves they don't necessarily need peasants to do it if you want milk and butter that isn't something you can get from the store in the medieval period you've got to get it from a cow it reminds us that all communities probably have their own farm animals in the countryside so you have a really great and impressive Barn like this to keep your animals inside and to also keep crops like hay for the winter farm animals aren't just important because of the products that they can give you farm animals in their own right are a type of Machinery in the medieval period and they also change over time in terms of what the most popular animal to use for what is in the earlier medieval period we start to see the heavy plow come into use it's a great new technology that allows you to slice through the heavier more clay-based soils that we have in northern Europe the heavy plow as the name indicates is kind of heavy so in order to pull one you're going to use teams of oxen the auxin will have what we call an ox collar over their neck this allows them to pull the plow along with the human behind it guiding it through the fields later in the medieval period however we come up with the horse collar a horse collar means that you can use horses to plow instead of oxen previous to the invention of the horse collar we weren't exactly sure how to have a horse pull a plow without suffocating them horses although they are not as strong as oxen are much faster so they can pull a plow faster through a field and it actually speeds the work up horses are also really useful in their own right you can use them for transportation you can use oxen to pull carts but because they Tire more easily it's better to use horses so if you have a horse collar instead of an ox collar it means that you can reduce the amount of livestock that you have for plowing and the livestock that you have is a little more useful peasantry generally also has one hitch in that is definitively tied to Nature you can't make wheat sprout in January so you're always going to have to be doing things at a specific time of year that benefit that it doesn't matter how hard you try it's not going to be time to slaughter a pig in the middle of July it just doesn't work that way another huge advantage that people in the medieval period have at least in the high and late medieval period is something that we call the medieval warm period this bounds from about the year 900 to about the year 1300 where Europe experiences a particularly warm and stable climate so suddenly Winters are a little bit shorter summers are a little bit longer and you have a larger growing period for things we see this reflected in stuff like what is called the labors of the year it's a typical medieval art Trope and if you see pictures of December for example you'll see peasants engaging in their normal December activities which are slaughtering pigs and baking bread there's no snow on the the ground in conjunction with the great medieval developments of the new tech this means more food for more people and more happy peasants these new technologies are very Advanced and it's the most advanced that Europe had ever been up to this point Romans for as much as they did do that is very interesting couldn't come up with this they did not have heavy plows they did not have horse collars and they did not have the three field system suddenly places like Germany or England can sustain much larger populations because they have peasants who are able to feed people using inventions like the horse collar like the three field system and like the heavy plow this is a real Tech and it's a real advancement for society as a whole we have one very interesting family the Collins is who are a great example of how peasants can really rise in the world we first meet them through the means of Thomas Collins the head of the family he's a very welts dupe peasant when we first meet him in the 1270s we see that he owns half a vergate of land which means about 15 Acres or so that's a lot of land he also raises livestock like cattle and sheep and some geese which are very nice little cash crop at Christmas or Mickle miss everybody likes to eat a goose so he's doing extremely well and we know also that his wife is brewing beer so we know that there's a lot of money coming in for him and he's definitely someone that you and I would class as well to do if not simply middle class all of this eventually changes though when we next catch up with him there's a gap in the records from about 1282 to 1292 and when we see Thomas again his fortunes have come down slightly this was a man who was super well connected in his community he was serving as a pledge a pledge would mean that if someone else says oh I owe some money Thomas would say he's good for it and I will put my own land up Thomas can't be a pledge anymore why he's in debt and he's in pretty serious debt he comes to our attention through the court records because there's someone called Walter from oldbury who sues Thomas because he owes him five Shillings sounds probably like not much money but for Thomas at the time this is a real problem because he can't pay five Shillings back he's mortgaged all of his crops to someone else to pay off other debts mortgaging your crops is pretty much exactly what it sounds like it's like mortgaging your house now you'll say okay well I've got my barley crop coming in in the Autumn and so after I take that to Market you will get the proceeds from that Barley if you give me money now Walter is demanding his five Shillings Thomas can't pay it back and Thomas is in a real dilemma here it means that he has to sell one of the only things he possibly can his land but of course Thomas doesn't own his land he is a serf technically the Abbey owns his land so the only person he can sell his land to is the Abbey this is a really difficult circumstance to be in because obviously you can't demand you know the best price possible it's just whatever the app it will give you for the land that Thomas holds the Abbey gives him two pounds now that definitely covers his debt to Walter it covers his other debts but it also means that the family are in real trouble now there's nine mouths to feed and they're suddenly happened to do so based only on Thomas's wife's land that she brought into the marriage through her Dowry this is interesting because it does show us that peasant women even do have some power and some control over their circumstances land that comes into a marriage is still their land and Thomas life can't be forced to sell it if she needs to they still need to make some money somehow and the only real way to do that is if they can farm and take part in the generalized agricultural community that they live in unfortunately it seems like that is not enough to ever get Thomas back to the same standing in the community that he enjoyed he dies in the year 1312 and when he does he's massively in debt again his lands do pass to his wife and daughters only two of whom have been married off so you still got six women who need to be supported somehow if we look ready for any records of them by the year 1319 all of the Collins sisters are gone we're not exactly sure what happened it could be that all the Collins sisters simply moved away that would be possible for them because they are women they might be tied to the land but the Abbey is going to be less interested in forcing them to stay in place because they'll be seen as less productive peasants if they need help tilling their crops for example why not just get some men in there to do it for them people who don't have to ask for help so it might be that they decide to try their luck somewhere else and simply moved away very unfortunately also it's equally as possible that they simply all died from the years 1317 to 1319 there is a constant wide disaster called the Great Famine as the name indicates there simply wasn't enough food to go around the Great Famine is a very serious event it really does hurt the majority of the population in Europe and we do see a huge drop in population at the time the Collins sisters that very well may have fallen victim to this in the 1300s we exit the medieval warm period the temperature begins to drop and Europe begins sliding into what we call the little Ice Age we can see again in medieval paintings like the labors of the Year suddenly we have December scenes of peasant slaughtering pigs in the snow instead of in the mud so it means that we do know that the winters are colder and longer but also there's been two years of extensively heavy rains and flooding the crops simply can't grow so there's a large mortality across the continent because there just isn't enough food to go around this impacts peasants more than it impacts other layers of society say you're the local happy their risk is sort of spread out over all of the peasants that they oversee those peasants still have to pay them their rent they still have to pay them their crops so they're getting fewer crops in but it's still some of everybody's crops instead of being completely dependent on one specific patch of land so when we think about peasants we think of them as largely a great Aryan and in the countryside for a good reason you sort of have to do your farming in the countryside however that doesn't mean that they don't have any links to London itself just behind me the cloth Fair Street opens up onto the Smithfield in the medieval period this might actually have been referred to as the smooth field and it's where peasants would bring their cattle sheep pigs in order to be slaughtered and sold at Market from The Peasants perspective Smithfield is also an extraordinarily important place because it's the scene of one of the most important parts of the peasants Rebellion The Peasants rebellion in England is part of a series of peasants rebellions that we see in the 14th century across the continent here in England it's led by a man named watt Tyler while Tyler is of peasant himself but he's someone who thinks that he sees a world where peasants can take greater control he's one of the first people that really starts arguing that there are generalized rights of men as a whole and that peasants are more than just a sort of implement till your land they're people who deserve the same rights as we do also attached to what Tyler's Rebellion is a man called John Ball he's a popular preacher there's a very famous quote often attributed to John Ball that we think might be spurious which is when Adam delved and Eve span who was then a gentleman this idea is that Adam and Eve were not Noble everyone has the same rights in God's eyes so why is it that peasants have such a much more difficult Shake in society The Peasants get together and they have an actual military Rebellion they famously come to London and besiege it and they do really well surprisingly they take over London they burned down the Savoy Palace which is in the place of the Savoy here instead of looting all the goods from the Savoy Palace though they burn them all they're not here to steal they want to start a new Society where everyone is on equal footing they then come and meet up with Lord mayor of London on the Smith Field led by their leader watt Tyler here it's unclear exactly what happens but some kind of scuffle breaks out and what Tyler is stabbed he ends up dying this is a huge Blow To The Peasants Rebellion because without a leader they become much more fractious there's no one really driving them forward with a real Vision at this point in time eventually The Peasants are completely broken King Richard II gives a very famous speech where he tells the peasants that they are rustics and rustics they will remain he wants to make a point that peasants simply cannot see themselves as on equal footing with Nobles or indeed himself the king they exist in order to give the nobility goods and they have to know their place as rusticated here on the side of Smithfield Market we finally have a memorial to The Peasants Rebellion I say now because it wasn't until 2015 that we had anything at all memorializing the peasants Revolt this is despite the fact that the peasants rebellion was something that affected the largest number of people in the 14th century at the time I know I keep saying this but it's 80 of the European population that are peasants so the peasants Rebellion is one of the most important things in the lives of average people in England in the 14th century despite this we still don't tend to treat peasants as though they are worthy of remembrance or important enough for it all of this is particularly interesting because one of the things that we see after the years of famine after the years of Black Death is that within Society peasants live in a much more marginal position in the medieval period and this is how medieval Society likes it Nobles simply don't want to give up their very privileged position in society nor does the church the church can't have hundreds of monks copying away in scriptoria if they can't be fed Nobles can spend all of their day learning how to sword fight if they have to be tilling Fields they depend on a certain class of person not having any choice in the matter one of the frustrating things when we're trying to uncover the history of peasants in the medieval period is it so difficult to find it if they're 80 of the population why is it that I have to come to a nunnery in order to find a barn their lands change hands all the time and in fact a lot of the time their lands aren't their lands so if you build a building it's not necessarily going to be handed down through generations to come in your family it might get taken over by someone like an Abbey here at Abby's we can uncover what it might be like for peasants more directly because they are held in the hands of the incredibly Rich interestingly here at Denny Abbey one of the reasons why we have this great Old Barn is because after the dissolution of the monasteries this is actually headed back over to Farmers buildings like this are huge Monumental and really important so you wouldn't tear something like this down especially not if you're an industrious farmer trying to make their way in the world you take a huge Barn like this if it's handed to you it can be frustrating for us as historians or people who want to know more about medieval lives that we don't get to hear directly from peasants that they are kind of considered not important enough to conserve their history so it's our job to uncover the evidence of their Tech their lives and their buildings where we can find it that's why it's important to come to places like Denny Abbey to remember the people whose stories we don't hear from join me in the next chapter as we visit the Grocers company Hall and discover what life was like for those in the guilds foreign YouTube channel hope you enjoyed that video and if you'd like to see more videos where we attempt to try and bring history to life please don't forget to subscribe and hit that notification Bell cheers guys see you soon [Music]

Channel: History Hit

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Keywords: history hit, history hit youtube, middle ages, medieval history, medieval peasants, the middle ages, medieval life, medieval peasant, medieval europe, medieval times, middle ages history, middle ages documentary, peasant, what does peasant mean, what does serf mean, eleanor janega going medieval, eleanor janega history hit, eleanor janega the middle ages, peasants revolt, worst jobs in history, worst jobs in history middle ages, medieval farming, history hit medieval

Id: XwbQNyYgZIU

Length: 24min 30sec (1470 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 06 2022