Life in a Medieval Village - Frances Gies [12]
Stone construction was still rare in England, except in areas like the Cotswolds where stone was plentiful and timber scarce. Elton’s houses in the thirteenth century were in all likelihood timber-framed with walls of wattle and daub (oak, willow, or hazel wands coated with clay). Timber-framing had been improved by the importation from the Continent of “cruck” construction, a system of roof support that added space to interiors. The cruck consisted of the split half of the trunk and main
Cruck construction supporting roof of early fourteenth-century tithe barn, Bradford-on-Avon.
branch of a tree. Two or three such pairs, sprung from the ground or from a foundation, could support a ridgepole, their curvature providing enough elevation to save the need for a sunken floor and to put an end to the long, murky history of the sunken hut. Progress in carpentry permitted the framing of walls with squared uprights planted in postholes or foundation trenches, making houses more weathertight.23
Roofs were thatched, as from ancient times, with straw, broom or heather, or in marsh country reeds or rushes (as at Elton). Thatched roofs had formidable drawbacks; they rotted from alternations of wet and dry, and harbored a menagerie of mice, rats, hornets, wasps, spiders, and birds; and above all they caught fire. Yet even in London they prevailed. Simon de Montfort, rebelling against the king, is said to have meditated setting fire to the city by releasing an air force of chickens with flaming brands attached.24 Irresistibly cheap and easy to make, the thatched roof overwhelmingly predominated century after century atop the houses and cottages of medieval peasants and townsmen everywhere.25
Some village houses were fairly large, forty to fifty feet long by ten to fifteen wide, others were tiny cottages.26 All were insubstantial. “House breaking” by burglars was literal. Coroners’ records speak of intruders smashing their way through the walls of houses “with a plowshare” or “with a coulter.”27 In the Elton manorial court, a villager was accused of carrying away “the doorposts of the house” of a neighbor;28 an angry heir, still a minor, “tore up and carried away” a house on his deceased father’s property and was “commanded to restore it.”29
Most village houses had a yard and a garden: a smaller “toft” fronting on the street and occupied by the house and its outbuildings, and a larger “croft” in the rear. The toft was usually surrounded by a fence or a ditch to keep in the animals whose pens it contained, along with barns or storage sheds for grain and fodder.30 Missing was a privy. Sanitary arrangements seem to have consisted of a latrine trench or merely the tradition later recorded as retiring to “a bowshot from the house.”31
Drainage was assisted by ditches running through the yards.
Private wells existed in some villages, but a communal village well was more usual. That Elton had one is indicated by a family named “atte Well.” Livestock grazed in the tofts—a cow or an ox, pigs, and chickens. Many villagers owned sheep, but they were not kept in the toft. In summer and fall, they were driven out into the marsh to graze, and in winter they were penned in the manor fold so that the lord could profit from their valuable manure. The richer villagers had manure piles, accumulated from their other animals; two villagers were fined when their dung heaps impinged “on the common highway, to the common harm,” and another paid threepence for license to place his on the common next to his house. The croft, stretching back from the toft, was a large garden of half an acre or so, cultivated by spade—“by foot,” as the villagers termed it.32
Snow highlights house sites, crofts behind them, and surrounding fields in aerial photograph of deserted village of Wharram Percy. Upper left, modern manor house, with ruined church behind it. Cambridge University Collection of Air Photographs.