Life in a Medieval Village - Frances Gies [53]
Village funerals were usually starkly simple. The body, sewed in a shroud, was carried into the church on a bier, draped with a black pall. Mass was said, and occasionally a funeral sermon was delivered. One in John Myrc’s collection, Festiall, ends: “Good men, as ye all see, here is a mirror to us all: a corpse brought to the church. God have mercy on him, and bring him
Fanciful funeral: animals carrying a bier draped with a pall. Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, Psalter and Book of Hours, Ms. 102, f. 76v-77.
into his bliss that shall last for ever…Wherefore each man and woman that is wise, make him ready thereto; for we all shall die, and we know not how soon.”85
A villager was buried in a plain wooden casket or none at all, in the churchyard, called the “cemetery,” from coemeterium (dormitory), the sleeping place of the Christian dead. Here men and women could slumber peacefully, their toil finished, until the day of resurrection.
7
THE VILLAGE AT WORK
FOR THE MEDIEVAL VILLAGER, WORK WAS THE ruling fact of life. By sunup animals were harnessed and plows hitched, forming a cavalcade that to the modern eye would appear to be leaving the village to work outside it. Medieval people felt otherwise. They were as much in their village tramping the furrowed strips as they were on the dusty streets and sunken lanes of the village center. If anything, the land which literally provided their daily bread was more truly the village. The geography was a sort of reverse analogue of the modern city with its downtown office towers where people work and its suburban bedroom communities where they eat and sleep.
Whether Elton had two or three fields in the late thirteenth century is unknown. Whatever the number, they were twice subdivided, first into furlongs (more or less rectangular plots “a furrow long”), then into selions, or strips, long and narrow sets of furrows. Depending on the terrain, a village’s strips might be several hundred yards long; the fewer turns with a large plow team the better. The strip as a unit of cultivation went far back, probably antedating the open field system itself. Representing the amount of land that could conveniently be plowed in a
Aerial view of the deserted village of Newbold Grounds (Northamptonshire), showing house plots, sunken paths and roads, and the ridge-and-furrow of the surrounding fields. British Crown Copyright/RAF Photograph.
day—roughly half a modern acre—it probably originated in the parcellation of land forced by a growing population. By the late thirteenth century the distribution of a village’s strips was haphazard, some villagers holding many, some few, and all scattered and intermingled. The one certainty was that everyone who held land held strips in both or all three fields, in order to guarantee a crop every year regardless of which field lay fallow.
The furlong, or bundle of strips, was the sowing unit, all the strips in a given furlong being planted to the same crop. Many furlongs appear by name in the Elton court records: “Henry in the Lane [is fined] for bad plowing in Hollewell furlong, sixpence,” indicating, incidentally, that the lord’s demesne land was scattered, like the peasants’.1 Within each furlong the strips ran parallel, but the furlongs themselves, plotted to follow the ambient pattern of drainage, lay at odd angles to each other, with patches of rough scattered throughout. A double furrow or a balk of unplowed turf might separate strips, while between some furlongs headlands were left for turning the plow. Wedges of land (gores) created by the asymmetry of the furlongs and the character of the terrain were sometimes cultivated by hoe.2 The total appearance of an open field village, visible in aerial photographs of many surviving sites,