Life in a Medieval Village - Frances Gies [41]
All such thing forbidden is
While the priest standeth at Mass.*37
A preacher condemned the common people’s enjoyment of “idle plays and japes, carolings, making of fool countenances…[giving] gifts to jongleurs to hear idle tales…smiting…wrestling, in other doing deeds of strength.”38
Many of the games enjoyed by the villagers were played alike by children, adolescents, and adults, and endured into modern times: blind man’s buff, prisoner’s base, bowling. Young and old played checkers, chess, backgammon, and most popular of all, dice. Sports included football, wrestling, swimming, fishing, archery, and a form of tennis played with hand coverings instead of rackets. The Luttrell Psalter (c. 1340) portrays a number of mysterious games involving sticks and balls and apparatus of various kinds, remote ancestors of modern team sports. Bullbaiting and cockfighting were popular spectator sports.
Yet the favorite adult recreation of the villagers was undoubtedly drinking. Both men and women gathered in the “tavern,” usually meaning the house of a neighbor who had recently brewed a batch of ale, cheap at the established price of three gallons for a penny. There they passed the evening like modern villagers visiting the local pub. Accidents, quarrels, and acts of violence sometimes followed a session of drinking, in the thirteenth century as in subsequent ones. Some misadventures may be deduced from the terse manorial court records. The rolls of the royal coroners, reporting fatal accidents, spell many out in graphic detail: In 1276 in Elstow, Osbert le Wuayl, son of William Cristmasse, coming home at about midnight “drunk and disgustingly over-fed,” after an evening in Bedford, fell and struck his head fatally on a stone “breaking the whole of his head.”39 One man tumbled off his horse riding home from the tavern; another fell into a well in the marketplace and drowned; a third, relieving himself in a pond, fell in; still another, carrying a pot of ale down the village street, was bitten by a dog, tripped while picking up a stone to throw, and struck his head against a wall; a child slipped from her drunken mother’s lap into a pan of hot milk on the hearth.40
Many violent quarrels followed drinking bouts, as the Bedfordshire coroners’ rolls attest. In 1266, “about bedtime,” three men who had been drinking in a Bedford tavern fell to quarreling on the king’s highway, two attacking the third and stabbing him in the heart with a sickle.41 In 1272 in Bromham, four men who had been drinking in a tavern accosted a passerby, Ralph, son of the vicar of Bromham, and demanded to know who he was. Ralph replied defiantly, “A man, who are you?” Whereupon one of the men, Robert Barnard of Wooton, “because he was drunk,” struck Ralph over the head with an axe. Ralph’s widow testified that all four men had assaulted her husband with axes and staves, and accused the tavern keeper and his wife of having instigated the attack.42 In another case, an innocent bystander was killed. Four villagers of Wooton who had been drinking in Bedford were returning home when one of them suddenly “and with no ulterior motive” turned, drew his bow, and took aim at a man who was following them. The only woman in the party, Margery le Wyte, threw herself between the two men and received the arrow in her throat “so that she immediately died.”43
Not all village violence was drink-related. The subject of the numerous altercations recorded in the Elton court records is not usually given, but the coroners’ rolls report quarrels about debt, in one case a halfpenny one brother lent another, thefts (a bushel of flour, a basket, a hen), trespass, and once simply “an old hatred.” Occasionally the subject was a woman: two brothers in Radwell, Bedfordshire, found their sister Juliana “lying under a haystack” with a young man who “immediately arose and struck [one of the brothers] on the top of the head, to the brain, apparently with an axe, so that he immediately died.” The lovers fled.44 Domestic quarrels got out of hand, as when Robert Haring of Aston, Bedfordshire,