Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History by Robert Bucholz, Newton Key Read Free Book Online Page A

newspapers, no radio, no television. The monarch’s proclamations were printed, but often in the hundreds or, at most, in the several thousands, hardly enough to blanket the country’s 9,000-plus parishes. In any case, the vast majority of the rural population was illiterate. The Sunday sermon was, apart from the occasional traveler, the only source of outside news. After mass, there was likely to be a “church ale” in the church hall or village common at which villagers ate, drank, played sports like camp ball or stoolball (forerunners of football/soccer and cricket), chatted up members of the opposite sex, and shared the unofficial news purveyed in village rumor and gossip.
    Plate 1 Diagram of an English manor. The Granger Collection, New York .

    After the excitement of the day, the villagers would return to their homes. A more substantial villager, say a yeoman, would live in a stone farmhouse in the North, a wooden one in the South. But at the end of the Middle Ages most villagers lived in one- and two-room huts or shacks, made of “wattle and daub” – essentially, mud, animal manure, straw – anything that would hold together within a timber frame. 9 They had one wooden door and few windows – for windows let in the cold. These would be covered by thin horn or greased paper. If we were to enter one of these hovels, it would take our eyes some time to adjust to the darkness, first because of the lack of windows, and second because, in the center of the beaten mud floor, would be a smoking hearth. This would be the family’s main source of heat and implement for cooking. Its smoke was vented through a hole in the thatched roof. Looking about the room, there might be a few pots and pans, some tools, a candle holder with some candles, a chest, a table and a few stools, and some articles of clothing. Bags of flock or straw served as mattresses. The entire family lived in these one or two damp, drafty rooms with very little privacy from each other and, often, but a thin wall to separate them from their livestock. This would consist of perhaps a cow, certainly a sheep. The milk, cheese, wool, and, very occasionally, meat they provided would be crucial to keep the family fed and solvent, especially during bad times. Conversely, the death of the family’s animals could spell economic disaster, so it was as important to shelter them as it was to house the family itself.
    Prior to the period of time covered by this book, during the Middle Ages, these villagers would likely have been serfs, that is, unfree laborers who held land from their landlord in exchange for work on his estate. But, in an ironic twist, the Black Death which had been so destructive of human life had broken the chains of serfdom for those who had survived. That is, the dramatic fall in population which followed the epidemic had led to a labor shortage at the end of the fourteenth century. The peasants who were left alive, sensing their advantage, began to demand their freedom from serfdom and their pay in wages. So few peasants remained to do the work of the manor that, if their landlord refused to make concessions, they could always leave him for a master who would do so. At first, medieval landlords resisted. But in the end, the law of supply and demand, which few in the Middle Ages understood and no one had yet named, worked as inexorably on labor as it does on products: peasants were able to commute their serfdom into freedom, their work into wages, to be partly paid back to the landlord in rent. By 1485 most villagers were free tenant farmers; that is, they rented from a great landlord who owned the manor upon which the village was built. The villagers, unlike serfs, were able to leave this relationship if they wished. This forced landlords to try to keep their old tenants or attract new ones by increasing wages and lowering rents: since the time of the Black Death laborers’ wages had doubled from 2 pence a day to 4, while rents in some areas