Life in a Medieval Village - Frances Gies [35]
Not all the troublemakers were from the elite families. One family that never appeared in the lists of officials but often in the court rolls was the Prudhommes, of whom William was one of John of Elton’s cotters and Walter a free virgater. Walter’s wife Emma and Matilda, possibly William’s wife, appear a number of times, quarreling with their neighbors, suing or being sued, or as brewers. The family produced the only murderer among the Elton villagers to be named in the court rolls (homicides were judged in royal courts): Richard Prudhomme, who in 1300 was convicted of killing Goscelyna Crane.71 The Sabbes, also, were prominent mainly for their participation in quarrels and violence, and one of their members, Emma, was fined for being a “fornicatrix” and “as it were a common woman,” a whore.72
Through the formulas and the abbreviated Latin of the court rolls, the villagers’ speech echoes only remotely. Prudence Andrew, in The Constant Star, a novel about the Peasants’ Rebellion of 1381, follows a popular tradition by recording her hero’s speech as on an intellectual level just above that of the donkey with whom he sometimes sleeps. No reliable real-life source exists for the everyday speech of the English peasantry (though Chaucer yields hints), but the Inquisition records for the village of Montaillou, in the Pyrenees, roughly contemporary with the court records of Elton, cast valuable light.73 The Montaillou peasants talk freely, even glibly, about politics, religion, and morality, philosophizing and displaying lively intelligence, imagination, humor, and wisdom. The Elton court records give us a single glimpse of peasants in an informal dialogue. The villagers were gathered in the churchyard on the Sunday before All Saints, when three people belonging to the elite families, Richer son of Goscelin and Richard Reeve and his wife, confronted Michael Reeve “with most base words in front of the whole parish.” They accused Michael of a number of corrupt practices often imputed to reeves: “that he reaped his grain in the autumn by boon-works performed by the abbot’s customary tenants, and plowed his land in Eversholmfield with the boon plows of the village; that he excused customary tenants from works and carrying services on condition that they leased their lands to him at a low price”; and finally “that he had taken bribes from the rich so that they should not be censuarii, and [instead] put the poor ad censum.”
Michael sued for libel, and the jurors pronounced him “in no article guilty,” fined Richard Reeve and Richer Goscelin two shillings and 12 pence respectively, and ordered Richard Reeve to pay Michael the substantial sum of ten shillings in damages. Michael later forgave all but two shillings of the award.74
5
THE VILLAGERS:
HOW THEY LIVED
ALL THE VILLAGERS OF ELTON, FREE, VILLEIN, AND of indeterminate status, virgaters, half-virgaters, cotters, servants, and craftsmen, lived in houses that shared the common characteristic of impermanence. Poorly built, of fragile materials, they had to be completely renewed nearly every generation. At Wharram Percy, nine successive transformations of one house can be traced over a span of little more than three centuries. The heir’s succession to a holding probably often supplied an occasion for rebuilding. For reasons not very clear, the new house was often erected adjacent to the old site, with the alignment changed and new foundations planted either in postholes or in continuous foundation trenches.1
Renewal was not always left to the tenant’s discretion. The peasant taking over a holding might be bound by a contract to build a new house, of a certain size, to be completed within a certain time span. Sometimes the lord agreed to supply timber or other assistance.2 The lord’s interest in the proper maintenance of the houses and outbuildings of his village was sustained
Fourteenth-century peasant house, St. Mary’s Grove cottage, Tilmanstone, Kent. Originally of one story,