Foundation (History of England Vol 1) (33 page)

Henry resumed his reign. The great seal was returned to him, and he sat as before with his council. The imposition of order was swift enough, although in truth the country had not been much affected by the wars between its lords. Local difficulties had occurred in the immediate neighbourhood of the fighting, but the business of the realm continued as before. Henry’s son and heir, Edward, felt able to leave the country and take the part of a crusader in the Holy Land. He prepared himself to ascend the throne in the service of Christ.

The king himself was free to press ahead with the rebuilding of Westminster Abbey, where he was impatient to remove the relics of Edward the Confessor to a new shrine. The abbey itself was another example of the community of the realm. For twenty-five years 800 men had worked upon the glorious fabric with its new presbytery, new chapter house, new crossing and a slowly rising north front. It was a work for the generations. The stonemasons of Purbeck, the craftsmen of all England, the sailors and wagoners, had all played their part in this mighty enterprise. The tilemakers, the mosaicists and the workers in metal had collaborated in the
service of the king’s passion for curiously crafted things. He lavished so much money on the building that it has become a permanent memorial of his reign. He expired in the fifty-sixth year of that reign, on 16 November 1272; at the age of sixty-five, he is likely to have died simply of old age. The tomb of Henry III, with a gilt-bronze effigy of the king, is still to be seen in the abbey that he built.

18

The seasonal year

Of the ways of marking time in England, the calendar of the years of the king’s reign was the least significant; the sacred calendar and the seasonal calendar were pre-eminent. They represented the habitual and unchanging nature of the world; they expressed a deep sense of belonging to the land and to the everlasting that are the true horizons of the medieval period. Seasonal and sacred time were intermingled.

Winter, lasting from Michaelmas on 29 September to Christmas, was the season for sowing; wheat and rye were known as winter seed. Some of the cattle were removed from their summer pastures to the relative warmth of the stalls, while the rest were slaughtered; the pigs were hustled to their sties. November was known as the blood month. What was not eaten was salted. The twelve days of the Christmas celebration were the only long holiday that the farmers and labourers enjoyed; it was a time of feasts and drinking, and of the mysterious rituals of the mummers’ plays.

In spring, from Epiphany on 6 January to the Holy Week of Easter, the men set the vineyards and made the ditches; they hewed wood for fences and planted the vegetable garden. The world of work had begun again. The first Monday after Epiphany was known by the women as Distaff Monday and by the men as Plough
Monday, thus neatly describing their two occupations. One spun and the other delved.

On Plough Monday, a ‘fool plough’ or ‘white plough’ was dragged about the village by young ploughmen covered in ribbons and other gay ornaments; they asked for pennies at every door and, if refused, they ploughed the ground before the cottage. The leader of the ploughmen, or ‘plough-bullocks’, was a young man dressed up as an old woman and known as Bessy. Another participant would wear a foxskin as a hood, with the tail hanging behind his back. This ancient ceremony was still being performed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, perhaps testifying to the customary nature of English rural life. It is still practised in certain areas of eastern England, where its origins in the Danelaw are assumed to lie. The feast of Candlemas on 2 February, commemorating the Purification of the Virgin, was the time for tillage to be resumed; it was the moment for the ‘lenten seed’ of oats and barley and beans to be sown. This was also the time for the pruning of trees.

From Hocktide, the second Monday and Tuesday after Easter, to Lammas, on the first day of August, came the summer. That is why the May queen or Flora was known as the summer queen rather than the spring queen. On the day before Hockday the females of the village captured and bound as many men as they could find, and kept them until a fee or ransom had been paid. On Hockday itself the males of the village engaged in the same sport. Days of festival were always celebrated before the resumption of serious agricultural work. This was the time when the husbandman must lay down the manure, cut the wood, shear the sheep, clear the land of weeds, repair fences, rebuild the fish-weirs and the mills. The fallow fields were ploughed. Midsummer occurred on the feast of the nativity of St John the Baptist. On St John’s Eve, 23 June, as a thirteenth-century monk from Winchcombe observed, ‘the boys collect bones and certain other rubbish, and burn them, and therefrom a smoke is produced on the air. They also make brands and go about the fields with the brands. Thirdly, the wheel which they roll.’ The wheel was the wheel of fire, set aflame and sent rolling down the hills of the region. In this way the pagan rituals and the Christian calendar were united in one celebration.
On St John’s Day itself the harvest of hay was brought in. When all the hay had been stacked a sheep was let loose in the field; it became the prize of the mower who caught it. Only after St John’s Day were the thistles in the fields cut down; it was said that if they were removed earlier, they would increase threefold.

From Lammas to Michaelmas, at the end of September, came the harvest time of corn known as
autumpnus
. The name Lammas came from the Anglo-Saxon
hlaf-Mass
or loaf-Mass; in a good year it was a time of fruitfulness. When the last sheaf had been ceremonially cut, a supper known as harvest home was served. As Thomas Tusser wrote in the sixteenth century,

In their laughter and in their dancing they were keeping time with the seasons and at the same time celebrating the continuities of the earth; they were part of a universal rhythm which they experienced but did not necessarily understand.

After the harvest had been taken in, the cattle would be allowed to graze on the stubble. At the same time rye and wheat would be sown in the fallow fields after they had been ploughed and harrowed. After the sowing was over there was customarily a feast with seed cake, pasties and a dish of milk, wheat, raisins and spices known as furmenty or frumenty. Then came a time when the sheaves of the harvest were threshed, separating the ears from the straw; this was followed by the winnowing, when the grain was divided from the chaff. Also at this period the labourers were obliged to prepare the sheep-pens and the pigsties.

So the agricultural year was embedded in the ritual year. That is why, in the churches and cathedrals of England, the capitals and pillars were decorated with images of the months; the mowers are carved to celebrate the month of July, while a husbandman with sickle is the stone emblem of September. In Southwell Minster the pigs snuffle among the great stone oak leaves for the acorns of November. The natural world is familiar and immutable. The ease of summer and the woe of winter are part of the eternal order in which the humblest labourer participated; in medieval poetry, the ploughman was often considered to be holy. On sacred days
the worshippers in the parish church, and the labourers in the field, were participating in complementary rituals. On the three rogation days preceding the Ascension Day, the parishioners would walk around the boundaries and bless the fields.

Murrain, the infectious disease that blighted sheep and cattle, was considered to be susceptible to prayer. A Mass in celebration of the Holy Spirit was sung, each parishioner offering up a penny. The sheep were then gathered in the field, and passages from the gospels were read out to them; then they were sprinkled with holy water while a hymn was chanted. This was followed by the recital of the
Pater Noster
and
Ave Maria
. Nevertheless animal mortality remained very high.

The nature of agriculture, month by month, hardly changed over the centuries. Open-field systems were common in the midlands, where large and unfenced fields were divided into strips which were owned by individual families; small enclosed fields were ubiquitous in Kent and in Essex; in the north and west rectangular fields were aligned one with another. From the thirteenth century there emerged the device of enclosure, whereby individual farmers exchanged their strips of land with one another; they could then create a larger portion that could be enclosed by hedges or fences.

Hamlets and small fields were typical of the north of England, while villages and large fields spread across the midlands. Considerable variety, however, existed within the counties. East Somerset was the home of open fields, while the west of that county was enclosed. East Suffolk was enclosed, and West Suffolk was open. The standard tenement of land was known in the south as yard-land, and in the north as oxgang, and its location is ascertained in documents by the position of the sun. The south and the east were considered to be the brighter part of the earth. The lie of the land, the nature of the soil, the patterns of the climate, all played their part in shaping the farming system of each small territory. Parts of Wiltshire were clay land and other parts were chalk; the soil of Hampshire was basin gravel.

An infinite variety of agricultural practice existed in every part of the country, enforced or determined by custom and tradition. The families of each village or hamlet could have been tending the same parcel of land for many centuries, living in intimate
relationship with it. They were part of the soil. In an early book of law we find that a hamlet is defined as possessing ‘nine buildings, and one plough, and one kiln, and one churn, and one cat, and one cock, and one bull, and one herdsman’. The different kinds of field and pasture may also reflect the persistent influence of tribal customs that cannot be assigned a definite date. The communal history that allowed the partition into small fields or strips is also now irrecoverable; it is merely present as far back as we can look. Every portion of land had over the centuries acquired its own character of uses, rights and duties; it was a living thing, created out of custom and habit.

It was through land that a man gained honour and prestige as well as wealth; the extent of his lands measured the size of his military obligations. It was a commonplace that if you did not own a parcel of land you could not marry or raise a family. The landless man in the countryside was a nonentity. The law was essentially the will of the majority of those who owned land. Social life was dominated by the sale or purchase of land, in which 90 per cent of the population were involved one way or another. Castles were at the centre of military campaigns, from the eleventh century onwards, precisely because they dominated the surrounding land. The most severe form of punishment was the ravaging of the land. The pattern of landholding, rather than any administrative division, determined the nature and policy of each district and each shire.

Land was in fact the single most important cause of violence and social dissension. When one knight named only as Edward refused to do services to the prior of St Frideswide in exchange for a hide of land at Headington, the matter was resolved by judicial combat. ‘After many blows between the champions, and although the champion of Edward had been blinded in the fight, they both sat down and as neither dared attack the other, peace was established as follows . . .’ Less forceful means of justice could be tried. A farmer from Evesham claimed land from the abbey there; he took the precaution of filling his shoes with earth from his own estate so that he could swear in front of the monks that he was standing upon his own land.

Ploughing time, and the season for mowing, were earlier in some parts of the country than in others. Yet the rewards of labour
were the same. The scythe and the sickle, the flail and the winnowing fan and the plough, were part of the common inheritance. A medieval folk song celebrated the appearance of ‘oats, peas, beans and barley’ that in
The Tempest
became ‘wheat, rye, barley, fetches, oats and peas’. In the great fields we would see fifty or sixty men working on the land, scattered over the strips, bent over with toil. Many illustrations of them can be found in calendars and books of hours, dressed in tight breeches with a smock or blouse made of cloth and tied at the waist by a belt; in cold weather they wore a hooded mantle of wool that covered the upper part of the body. Sometimes they wore woollen caps.

‘First thing in the morning,’ the peasant recites in a tenth-century treatise, ‘I drive my sheep to pasture and stand over them in heat and cold with dogs lest wolves should devour them, and I lead them back to their sheds and milk them twice a day and move their folds besides, and I make cheese and butter . . .’ On the common land of the village, the cattle would be watched by a boy.