Life in a Medieval Village - Frances Gies [60]
The pathetic picture in Piers Plowman of the peasant husband and wife plowing together, his hand guiding the plow, hers goading the team, their baby and small children nearby, illustrates the fact that the wife of a poor peasant had to turn her hand to every kind of labor in sight.55 For most of the time, however, in most peasant households, the tasks of men and women were differentiated along the traditional lines of “outside” and “inside” work. The woman’s “inside” jobs were by no means always performed indoors. Besides spinning, weaving, sewing, cheese-making, cooking, and cleaning, women did foraging, gardening, weeding, haymaking, carrying, and animal-tending. They joined in the lord’s harvest boon unless excused, and helped bring in the family’s own harvest. Often women served as paid labor, receiving at least some of the time wages equal to men’s.56 R. H. Hilton believes that peasant women in general enjoyed more freedom and “a better situation in their own class than was enjoyed by women of the aristocracy, or the bourgeoisie, a better situation perhaps than that of the women of early modern capitalist England.”57 The statement does not mean that peasant women were better off than wealthier women, only that they were less constricted within the confines of their class. “The most important general feature of their existence to bear in mind,” Hilton adds, “[is] that they belonged to a working class and participated in manual agricultural labor.”58
For many village women one of the most important parts of the daily labor was the care of livestock. Poultry was virtually the
Woman milking cow. Bodleian Library, Ms. Bodl. 764, f. 41v.
Woman feeding chickens, holding a distaff under her arm. British Library, Luttrell Psalter, Ms. Add. 42130, f. 166v.
Woman on the left is spinning, using the thirteenth-century invention, the spinning wheel. Woman on the right is carding (combing) wool. British Library, Luttrell Psalter, Us. Add. 42130, f. 103.
woman’s domain, but feeding, milking, washing, and shearing the larger livestock often fell to her also.
The biggest problem with livestock was winter feed, the shortage of which was once thought to have provoked an annual “Michaelmas slaughter.” Given the high rate of loss to natural causes, an annual slaughter would have threatened the survival of a small flock or herd.59 The feed shortage certainly played a role in keeping numbers of animals down, but some successful peasants just as certainly overcame the problem. At Bowerchalk in Wiltshire, twenty-three tenants are known to have owned 885 sheep, or 41 per owner; at Merton, eighty-five tenants owned 2,563 sheep, and one is known to have owned 158.60 Individual ownership within a combined flock was kept straight by branding or by marking with reddle (red ochre), many purchases of which are recorded.61
Among peasants as among lords, sheep were esteemed as the “cash crop” animals. Though worth at best only one or two shillings, compared with two and a half shillings for a pig, they had unique fivefold value: fleece, meat, milk, manure, and skin (whose special character made it a writing material of incomparable durability). Lambing time was in early spring, between winter and spring sowing, so that the lambs, weaned at twelve weeks, could accompany their mothers to graze the harvest stubble of last year’s wheatfield.62 The sheep were sheared in mid-June and the fleeces carted to market, probably, in the case of Elton, to Peterborough, about eight miles away. Medieval fleeces weighed from a pound to two and a half pounds, much below the modern average of four and a half pounds.63
Pigs were the best candidates for a Michaelmas slaughter, since their principal value was as food and since their meat
Weeding, using long-handled tools. British Library, Luttrell Psalter, Ms. Add. 42130, f. 17s.