Life in a Medieval Village - Frances Gies [0]
Frances and Joseph Gies
To Dorothy, Nathan, and Rosie
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
PROLOGUE: ELTON
1 THE VILLAGE EMERGES
2 THE ENGLISH VILLAGE: ELTON
3 THE LORD
4 THE VILLAGERS: WHO THEY WERE
5 THE VILLAGERS: HOW THEY LIVED
6 MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY
7 THE VILLAGE AT WORK
8 THE PARISH
9 VILLAGE JUSTICE
10 THE PASSING OF THE MEDIEVAL VILLAGE
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
GLOSSARY
INDEX
COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Acknowledgments
Other Books By
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE: ELTON
IN THE DISTRICT OF HUNTINGDON THERE IS A CERtain village to which far-distant antiquity gave the name of Aethelintone,” wrote the twelfth-century monk who chronicled the history of Ramsey Abbey, “on a most beautiful site, provided with a course of waters, in a pleasant plain of meadows with abundant grazing for cattle, and rich in fertile fields.”1
The village that the Anglo-Saxons called Aethelintone (or Aethelington, or Adelintune), known in the thirteenth century, with further spelling variations, as Aylington, and today as Elton, was one of the thousands of peasant communities scattered over the face of Europe and the British Isles in the high Middle Ages, sheltering more than 90 percent of the total population, the ancestors of most Europeans and North Americans alive today.
Many of these peasant settlements were mere hamlets or scattered homesteads, but in certain large areas of England and Continental Europe people lived in true villages, where they practiced a distinctive system of agriculture. Because England has preserved the earliest and most complete documentation of the medieval village, in the form of surveys, accounts, and the
The River Nene at Elton.*
rolls of manorial courts, this book will focus on an English village.
Medieval villages varied in population, area, configuration, and social and economic details. But Elton, a dependency of wealthy Ramsey Abbey, located in the East Midlands, in the region of England where villages abounded and the “open field” agriculture associated with them flourished, illustrates many of the characteristics common to villages at the high point of their development.
Elton stands today, a village of about six hundred people, in northwest Cambridgeshire.† seventy miles north of London, where it has stood for more than a thousand years. Its presentday gray stone houses cluster along two axes: one the main road from Peterborough to the old market town of Oundle; the other, at right angles to it, a street that ends in a triangular village green, beyond which stands an eighteenth-century mill on the banks of the River Nene. Smaller streets and lanes intersect these two thoroughfares. The two sections have long been known as Overend and Nether End. Nether End contains the green, with a Methodist chapel adjoining. Near the river here the construction of a floodbank in 1977 uncovered the foundations of the medieval manor house. Overend centers around the church, with its school and rectory nearby. At the southern limit of Overend stands the village’s tourist attraction, Elton Hall, a stately home whose gatehouse and chapel alone date as far back as the fifteenth century, the rest from much later.
Two pubs, a post office/general store, and a garage comprise Elton’s business center. Buses and cars speed along the Peterborough-Oundle road. Some of the cottages, nestling in their neat gardens, are picturesquely thatched. Off beyond the streets, sheep graze in the meadows. Yet Elton, like many other English villages, is no longer a farming community. Most of its inhabitants work in nearby Peterborough, or commute to London. The family that owns Elton Hall operates an agricultural enterprise, and one independent farmer lives in the village; two have farms outside, in the parish. A few descendants of farm laborers live in subsidized housing on a Council estate.
Except perhaps for the sheep, almost nothing medieval survives in twentieth-century Elton. In the northwest corner of the churchyard, inconspicuous in the