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Source B – Two pictures from the 14th Century showing life on a Medieval farm.
Source C – A description of Medieval life from a school history website.
The land that was owned by the lord was called the manor. A manor consisted of
a village with land around it. The villeins lived in the village which was surrounded
by three large fields. Each field was divided into long strips. A villein would farm
strips in each of the fields. This made sure that everyone had a share of the
good land and the bad land. The strips were divided by mounds of earth or by
rocks.
Strip farming meant that villeins had to work together. A whole field would be
sown and harvested and each villein worked closely with his neighbour to get his
work done. The other land around the village was also important. Villeins collected
wood from the woodland, their animals grazed on the common land and fish could
be collected from the river which was also used for washing and cooking. The land
around the village supplied the villeins with nuts, berries and mushrooms.
Villeins lived on the manor in cruck-houses. Their house would have a small
garden where vegetables like carrots and cabbages could be grown. The villeins
usually built their own house and had very few possessions. They would have some
animals like pigs, sheep, cows and chickens but other than their day-to-day tools
and equipment they owned very little.
www.schoolhistory.co.uk, 2003
The lives of peasant children would have been very different to today. They
would not have attended school for a start. Very many would have died before
they were six months old as disease would have been very common. As soon
as was possible, children joined their parents working on the land. They could
not do any major physical work but they could clear stones off the land –
which might damage farming tools – and they could be used to chase birds
away during the time when seeds were sown. Peasant children could only
look forward to a life of great hardship.
While noblemen and their ladies flounce around in sumptuous clothes and are
entertained at court and tournament, an army of unlucky souls toils away in some
spectacularly hideous employment. In this time of thanes and barons, the lowly
peasant is in for a rough time. The worst jobs in the Middle Ages are pretty grim.
"Being a peasant after the Norman Conquest would have been a pretty rough time, but by
the 14th century, peasants would probably have been having a pretty good time," he says.
"They had a lot more free time - 80 Holy Days a year, compared with nine now. I don’t
think people realise how awful the Industrial Revolution has been in reducing the quality
of life for people."
Most peasants, he says, were required to work just 60 days per year, as their "feudal
burden" to their landowner. In return, the lord would provide two banquets every year.
The rest of the time, they lived off their own pickings, working the ten or 20 acres given
them.
Source I: Interview with Terry Jones, author of ‘Terry Jones’s Medieval Lives’, a
book and BBC television series.