Life in a Medieval Village - Frances Gies [50]
The Middle Ages produced the world’s first hospitals and medical schools, but these important advances hardly affected life in the village. Doctors practiced in city and in court. Villagers were left to their own medical devices. Even the barbers who combined shaving with bloodletting (a principal form of therapy) and tooth-pulling (the sole form of dentistry) were rarely seen in villages. Most manorial custumals provided for a period of sick leave, commonly up to a year and a day. “If [the villein] is ill, so that he cannot leave his house,” states a Holywell custumal, “he is quit of all work and heusire before the autumn, except plowing [which presumably he would have to pay someone else to do]. In the autumn he is quit of half his work if he is ill, and he will have relaxation for the whole time he is ill, up to a year and a day. And if his illness lasts more than a year and a day, or if he falls ill again, from that time he will do all works which pertain to his land.”64
Life was short. Even if a peasant survived infancy and childhood to reach the age of twenty, he could not expect to live much beyond forty-five, when old age (senectus) began.65 The manorial records make no mention of diseases, though to the well-known afflictions of tuberculosis, pneumonia, typhoid, violence, and accident may probably be added circulatory disorders: stroke and heart attack. The coroners’ rolls list several cases of fatal accidents from “falling sickness”—epilepsy. Invalids flocked on pilgrimage to Canterbury and other shrines: spastics, cripples, paralytics, the mentally ill, and the scrofulous (skin disease was especially prevalent in a not very well washed society).
The most pathetic of the medieval sick, however, were excluded from the benefits of the shrine. Leprosy, mysteriously widespread, inspired a vague terror that outlasted the Middle Ages. Its victims were isolated, either singly or in colonies, and were permitted to emerge in public only when clothed in a shroud and clacking a pair of castanets in warning. The isolation of lepers represented a remarkable advance in medical theory, the recognition of contagion, but at the same time a sad irony, since leprosy (Hansen’s disease) is only slightly contagious. The Elton court rolls record a single possible mention of the disease in the fine in 1342 of “Hugh le Lepere” for carrying away the lord’s stubble.66
As in all societies, the old and infirm depended on the younger generation for help when they were no longer able to work their land. The commonest form such help took in the thirteenth century was an arrangement between tenant and heir, in essence an exchange of the older person’s land for the younger person’s work. The holding was transferred to the heir, who promised in return to maintain the parents, widowed father or mother, or other aged relative, either in a separate dwelling or as free boarders. Typically the son accepted the holding’s obligations of work service, rent, and fees, and pledged himself to support his parent or parents, stipulating that he would provide them with a separate house or “a room at the end of the house” that had been theirs, food, fuel, clothing, and again and again “a place by the fire.” Most such arrangements must have been informal, leaving no trace in the records, but they were also spelled out in written contracts, entered in the manorial court rolls.67
Both sermons and moral treatises warned parents against handing over their land to their sons without such safeguards. Men gave their children land, said Robert Manning, to provide sustenance in their old age; better for them to keep it “than beg
Man warming himself at the fire. Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Ms. 385, f. 6v.
it at another’s hand.” In illustration he told a version of the already old story of the “Divided Horsecloth”: a man gave his son “all his land and house and all his cattle in village and field, so that he should keep him well in his old age.” The young man married and at first bade his wife “to serve his father well