Life in a Medieval Village - Frances Gies [39]
Laborers of olden times were not wont to eat wheaten bread; their bread was of common grain or of beans, and their drink was of the spring. Then cheese and milk were a feast to them; rarely had they any other feast than this. Their garment was of sober gray; then was the world of such folk well ordered in its estate.24
The peasant’s “garment” has often been pictured in the illuminations of manuscripts, but only occasionally in “sober gray”; the colors shown are more often bright blues, reds, and greens. Whether Gower’s memory was accurate is uncertain. Peasants did have access to dyestuffs, and Elton had a dyer.
Over the period of the high Middle Ages, styles of clothing of nobles and townspeople changed from long, loose garments for both men and women to short, tight, full-skirted jackets and close-fitting hose for men and trailing gowns with voluminous sleeves, elaborate headdresses, and pointed shoes for women. Peasant dress, however, progressed little. For the men, it consisted of a short tunic, belted at the waist, and either short stockings that ended just below the knee or long hose fastened at the waist to a cloth belt. A hood or cloth cap, thick gloves or mittens, and leather shoes with heavy wooden soles completed the costume. The women wore long loose gowns belted at the waist, sometimes sleeveless tunics with a sleeved undergarment, their heads and necks covered by wimples. Underclothing, when it was worn, was usually of linen, outer garments were woolen.
The tunic of a prosperous peasant might be trimmed with fur, like the green one edged with squirrel found by three Elton boys in 1279 and turned over to the reeve.25 A poor peasant’s garb, on the other hand, might resemble that of the poor man in Langland’s fourteenth-century allegory, Piers Plowman, whose “coat was of a [coarse] cloth called cary,” whose hair stuck through the holes in his hood and whose toes stuck through those in his heavy shoes, whose hose hung loose, whose rough mittens had worn-out fingers covered with mud, and who was himself “all smeared with mud as he followed the plow,” while beside him walked his wife carrying the goad, in a tunic tucked up to her knees, wrapped in a winnowing sheet to keep out the cold, her bare feet bleeding from the icy furrows.26
The village world was a world of work, but villagers nevertheless found time for play. Every season was brightened by holiday intervals that punctuated the Christian calendar. Many of these were ancient pagan celebrations, appropriated by the Church, often with little alteration of their character. Each of the seasons of the long working year, from harvest to harvest, offered at least one holiday when work was suspended, games were played, and meat, cakes, and ale were served.
On November 1, bonfires marked All Hallows, an old pagan rite at which the spirits of the dead were propitiated, now renamed All Saints. Martinmas (St. Martin’s Day, November 11) was the feast of the plowman, in some places celebrated with seed cake, pasties, and a frumenty of boiled wheat grains with milk, currants, raisins, and spices.
The fortnight from Christmas Eve to Twelfth Day (Epiphany, January 6) was the longest holiday of the year, when, as in a description of twelfth-century London, “every man’s house, as also their parish churches, was decked with holly, ivy, bay, and whatsoever the season of the year afforded to be green.”27 Villagers owed extra rents, in the form of bread, eggs, and hens for the lord’s table, but were excused from work obligations for the fortnight and on some manors were treated to a Christmas dinner in the hall.
This Christmas bonus often reflected status. A manor of Wells Cathedral had the tradition of extending invitations to two peasants, one a large landholder, the other a small one. The first was