Terry Jones' Medieval Lives Read Online Free PDF Page B

dried vegetables, beans and bread to which they added ale to turn it into an instant meal. Eel pasties were another favourite, and preserved foods such as bacon, cheese and sausages were special treats.
    Even for the poorest, the countryside was a larder teeming with wild life. Rivers were full of fish – there were even plenty of salmon in the Thames – and peasants had elaborate nets and traps to catch songbirds, eels and rabbits.
    The countryside was healthier than the towns. When the graveyard at Wharram Percy was excavated archaeologists found 687 peasant skeletons, enough for them to draw some firm conclusions about health and ageing. It is clear that these country dwellers had suffered fewer illnesses than their urban relatives. A lower rate of infection showed in their bones, and fewer cases of anaemia suggested fewer parasites.
    It is also clear, surprisingly, that they ate a reasonable amount of seafood. This is further evidence that trade networks penetrated deep into the countryside. And there was very little tooth decay – none in any of the children’s skeletons. In fact the medieval diet, with lots of coarse grains and grit in the bread, was much better for human teeth than our own. It meant they were worn down to a flat plane leaving no crevices for food to fester. But fossilized plaque in some skeletons’ teeth does suggest that many of the people at Wharram Percy had suffered from chronic bad breath. This was a bit of an issue in medieval times; in Wales a peasant woman could divorce her husband on the grounds of his halitosis.
    In both countryside and towns, babies were breastfed until they were 18 months old, which protected both the child (helping its immune system and keeping its diet free of germs) and the mother (it was believed that breastfeeding can act as a natural contraceptive).
    One further surprise at Wharram Percy was a skull with a big hole in it, the result of an injury caused by some kind of blunt instrument. This had clearly been operated on: the skin had been folded back, the wound was cleaned up and then the skin was stitched back again. The person had recovered from the injury. Even the inhabitants of a small village could hope for skilled and effective surgical help.
    Of course, the picture was not entirely rosy. Animals were small (smaller than they had been in Roman times) and grains were tall, low-yielding varieties. Pastures were overused and easily degraded. Village life may have been healthier than life in a town, but nevertheless infant mortality was high, childbirth was dangerous, agricultural labourers were old at 40.
    But the kind of peasant Froissart described – the servile villein obliged to work his lord’s land – was a diminishing class by the start of the fourteenth century. Most of the land newly taken into cultivation was farmed by freemen who paid rent for it, and they seem to have had larger families than serfs. There were now more of them than there were villeins. Villein duties had anyway often been replaced by money rents, so lords of the manor received nearly 90 per cent of their income in cash. The power of customary laws meant that a villein holding 15 to 30 acres for a fixed rent was often comparatively well off, especially as land was scarce, open-market rents were high, prices were rising and wages were low.
    VILLAGE AND CHURCH
    Village life was centred not just on work and home, but also on the church. Churches had been few and far between in Anglo-Saxon times, but the Church was an important element in Norman domination, and a village without a church became almost inconceivable.
    The building was the physical property of the manor, and the lord appointed the priest (who would be a commoner, but not a serf). The core of any church is the chancel with the altar, and this belonged to the lord. The nave and the tower belonged to the people of the parish, who stood in the nave to hear services. Each person was expected to give