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What proportion of the peasantry was well off and what poor is judged by what they bequeathed, and since the poorest had nothing to leave, they remain mute. For no other class is that famous goal of the historian, wie es wirklich war (how it really was), so elusive. For every statement on peasant life there is another that contradicts it. It has been said that “bathing was common among the lower classes … even small villages had their public bath houses,” yet the French peasant’s contemporaries incessantly complained of his filth and foul smell. While the English of the time seem to agree that the French peasant was worse off than their own and frequently comment on his meatless diet, he is elsewhere recorded as regularly eating pork and fowl roasted on a spit. He also had access to eggs, salt fish, cheese, lard, peas, beans, shallots, onions, garlic, and some leaf vegetables grown in his kitchen garden, fruits cooked in juice or dried for winter, rye bread, honey, and beer or cider.

The middle group would own a bed for the whole family, a trestle table with benches, a chest, cupboard, wardrobe, iron and tin cooking pots, clay bowls and jugs, homemade baskets, wooden buckets and washtubs, in addition to farming tools. They lived in one-story, wood-framed houses with thatched roof and plaster walls made of various mixtures of clay, straw, and pebbles. Most such houses had Dutch doors to let light and air in and smoke out, some had tiny windows, the best had walled chimneys. Life expectancy was short owing to overwork, overexposure, and the afflictions of dysentery, tuberculosis, pneumonia, asthma, tooth decay, and the terrible rash called St. Anthony’s Fire, which by constriction of the blood vessels (not then understood) could consume a limb as by “some hidden fire” and sever it from the body. In modern times the disease has been identified in some cases as erysipelas and in others as ergot poisoning caused by a fungus on rye flour kept too long over the winter.

The affluent few might own sixty to eighty acres, plow-horses and rope harness, sheep, pigs, cattle, stores of wool, hides, and hemp, and of wheat, oats, and corn, a boat and net for fishing in the river, a vineyard, a woodpile, and vessels of copper, glass, and silver. Their homes contained, in the case of one comfortable peasant of Normandy, two featherbeds, one wooden bed, three tables, four skillets, two pots and other cooking utensils, eight sheets, two tablecloths, one towel or napkin, a lantern, two vats for trampling grapes, two barrels and two casks, a cart, a plow, two harrows, two hoes, two scythes, one spade, one sickle, three horse collars, and a pack saddle. Rich peasants are recorded who employed a dozen field hands and gave their daughters dowries of 50 gold florins plus a fur-trimmed mantle and fur bedcover.

Truer to the mass is the peasant who cries, in the French tale Merlin Merlot, “Alas, what will become of me who never has a single day’s rest? I do not think I shall ever know repose or ease.… Hard is the hour when the villein is born. When he is born, suffering is born with him.” His children go hungry, holding out their hands to him for food; his wife assails him as a poor provider. “And I, unhappy one, I am like a rooster soaked in the rain, head hanging and bedraggled, or like a beaten dog.”

A deep grievance of the peasant was the contempt in which he was held by the other classes. Aside from the rare note of compassion, most tales and ballads depict him as aggressive, insolent, greedy, sullen, suspicious, tricky, unshaved, unwashed, ugly, stupid and credulous or sometimes shrewd and witty, incessantly discontented, usually cuckolded. In satiric tales it was said the villein’s soul would find no place in Paradise or anywhere else because the demons refused to carry it owing to the foul smell. In the chansons de geste he is scorned as inept in combat and poorly armed, mocked for his manners, his morals, even his misery. The name Jacques or Jacques Bonhomme to designate a peasant was used by nobles as a term of derision