Life in a Medieval Village - Frances Gies [62]
The bakers’ monopoly was also guarded by the court. Three villagers were fined in 1300 for “withdrawing themselves from the lord’s common oven,” and in 1306 eight, one of whom was excused “because she is poor.”79 Later three villagers were fined for going into the baking business: Walter Abbot, Robert son of the chaplain, and Athelina of Nassington were found to be “common bakers” and had to pay twelve pence apiece.80
The smith and the carpenter turn up in the Elton accounts
Mill with eel trap in the stream. British Library, Luttrell Psalter, Ms. Add. 42130, f. 181.
in connection with repairs to the mills as well as work on the demesne plows and carts. The smith made horseshoes either from “the lord’s iron” or from “his own iron,” and also ox shoes, since oxen were often shod (but neither horses nor oxen necessarily on all four feet). The smith fabricated blades, tanged or socketed, to be fitted with wooden knife handles; and also cauldrons, kettles, cups, sickles, billhooks, saws, and fasteners.81’ His shop in the middle of the village was equipped with tools that dated from prehistory: anvil, hammer, and the tongs with which he endlessly returned the workpiece to the fire. He probably also had the more recently invented bellows. Recorded payments to him from the manor ran from a few pence for shoeing horses of the abbot to four shillings sixpence for repairing the demesne plows.82 Often he collaborated on a job with the carpenter, fashioning a wood-and-iron plow or harrow, wheelbarrow, fork, or spade. The carpenter also appears in the manorial accounts, building a dovecote for the manor house, and repairing the manor’s chapel and granary, the porch of the barn, the mill machinery, and the abbey’s boats used to transport produce on the Nene.83
A product of collaboration of carpenter and smith, the wheelbarrow, here used to transport a crippled beggar. British Library, Luttrell Psalter, Ms. Add. 42130, f. 186v.
Other craftsmen probably served the village on a part-time basis. The cotters, jacks-of-all-trades, doubtless developed specializations. The important trade of tanning was apparently not practiced in Elton, at least not on a full-time basis, but an Elton man, son of Richard Dunning, is known to have gone to Hayham to become John Tanner, “a man of means [who] has many goods.”84 Elton villagers probably did some of their own tanning and harnessmaking at home, along with other craft functions. Among the stream of itinerant tradespeople who passed through the village were slaters, tilers, and thatchers, a tinker (“a man to repair brass jars and brass pans”), carters (“two men with dung carts at mowing time” and “two carters carrying stone”), men to “brand animals” and to “geld suckling pigs,” “a woman milking sheep,” “three grooms driving animals into the marsh,” “a girl drying malt,” “a certain excommunicated clerk helping the swineherd in the wood,” and “divers other workmen.”85 Plying trades in the abbey village of Ramsey and in Peterborough, Stamford, and other nearby towns were shoemakers, saddlers, chandlers, coopers, glaziers, tanners, tailors, and other merchant craftsmen.
The countryside profited in quality of life from the growth of city crafts. As Henri Pirenne observed, the old manorial workshops, with their serf labor, turned out tools and textiles “not half as well as they were now made by the artisan of the neighboring town.”86 At the same time, the flight of craftsmen tended to restrict the village to the uninspiring toil of plow and sickle. To the variety of life of the town was added the lure