Medieval Lives (2004) s01e01 Episode Script

Medieval Lives with Terry Jones Once upon a time there was a peasant.
He had a hard, hard life, working all year round, little better off than a slave, with no say in what went on.
He was diseased, he was downtrodden and he was dirty.
(Neighing) Who on earth would want to have been a medieval peasant? Being a Peasant in the Middle Ages must qualify as the worst job in history, but of course, we're only guessing, because, being Peasants, they didn't leave behind much record of their existence.
ExcePt once, in the summer of 1381.
The Peasants left an indelible mark on the history of England.
The Peasants' Revolt took everyone by surprise.
It was quite astonishing.
From out of nowhere, it seemed, tens of thousands of Peasants arrived in Blackheath on the outskirts of London and demanded the king abolish all forms of servitude, taxation and the aristocracy.
The King, who was only 14 at the time, quite understandably said he'd need to think it over.
The Peasants, however, wanted liberty, equality and brotherhood.
And when did they want it? Now! 4OO years before the French Revolution.
Talk about pushy! The King, who'd been talking to the rebels from the safety of a barge in the middle of the river, decided to go home for his tea.
The peasants obviously needed to make their point more forcibly, so they rampaged through London, killing lots of Flemish people.
Not quite sure how that helped.
One group broke into the Tower of London.
They burst into the royal living quarters, and there, according to the tabloids of the time, they sat on the beds and poked into everything with their filthy sticks.
Some of them even tried to kiss the king's mother.
(Tuts ) They then dragged the Archbishop of Canterbury and the treasurer out of the White Tower and cut off their heads, which they paraded round the town, stuck on poles.
Now, if it sounds to you like the lunatics have taken over the asylum, that's what a lot of people at the time thought.
But they weren't lunatics, the Peasants' agenda was informed, tactical and most of all, Political.
They targeted lawyers and court officials.
They made bonfires of legal and tax records.
They were deliberately erasing their servile Past.
How could such a wretched group of underlings have organized such a sophisticated attack? After all, they were only a bunch of bloody peasants.
Weren't they? Medieval feudal society was a Pyramid with the king at the top and the Peasants at the bottom doing all the hard work.
Nobody, not even the lords, owned any land, they simPly had the use of it as long as they Provided military service for the king.
The Peasants toiled in the fields, supporting those with more important things to do, like, uh, Praying and fighting each other.
Yes, an excellent system if you ask me.
(Breaks wind) Ah! Stinking Peasant.
But since the Lord of the manor was often away from his estate, fighting in the king's wars, he had to be able to rely on his peasants to organize themselves.
In many ways, a medieval Peasant had more say in how his life was run than most PeoPle do now.
Of course, it's a way of life that's all gone.
We'll never know what it was really like to live under such a system, except where I'm going now.
The village of Laxton in Nottinghamshire is the only place in England that still works on the medieval system, the center of which is the so called Court Elite.
Elected every year by the village farmers, in medieval times it had the power to formulate bylaws, collect rents and maintain law and order.
Today the court's only job is to police the way the land is farmed.
Once a year, on jury day, the jurors head out to check that no one is breaking any of the rules.
The land is farmed in strips in the same way as it was 8OO years ago.
And each farmer's strip of land is separated not by fences but by grassy borders of common land, known as sykes.
This little green striP of grass is the dividing furrow between the two strips.
This one belongs to Mr.
Gobson and that one belongs to Mr.
Noble.
- What do you mean, it's not straight! - Well, no Wiggly, I imagined it would be a couPle of yards of nice grass.
And woe betide to anyone caught ignoring this boundaries.
As soon as we got there, an offence was spotted, a stray piece of turf.
Do you think left this here? - It ought to be Put back.
- Put back in yeah.
So this is what you call soil on the common land? Yeah, yeah.
Shoveling in.
You call shoveling in.
But we don't Put it back in, whoever's doing it should Should have done it.
- That is a serious - Serious offence! So how much do you think they'll get fined for that? Oh, about two Pounds I think, yeah.
- Quite steep, actually.
- Yeah! Then down to the serious matter of marking out boundaries of each farmer's land using the same hi-tech methods developed in the Middle Ages, which leave plenty of room for debate.
There, look.
There? I reckon you want to be there.
Five.
Offences such as ploughing over boundaries are taken very seriously and will be judged at the meeting of the court.
A solemn affair which takes place as it has done for centuries, in the local pub.
Right then, gentlemen, I'll call the court to order.
O yea, o yea, o yea, all manner of Persons who owe suit and service to the court lead to the queen's most excellent majesty draw near and give your attendance.
God save the Queen and the lord of this court lead.
The Presentments shows the dikes are satisfactory, there's a fine of ten Pounds on Stewart Rose for Ploughing too far into the meadow ends.
Mr.
Rose, do you have any comment on that? Yeah, well, that was I Ploughed to an original Peg which was already in the syke, so I thought I was Ploughing in the right Place and I think ten-Pound fine is a bit harsh.
You accePt that it was the wrong Place now? Yes, likely, but I was Ploughing to where it had been marked out.
Any comments from anyone else? I think the fine should stand.
In medieval times, a man could be tried for murder in this court.
Well, the ProPosal of the court, is to reduce the fine from ten Pounds to five Pounds.
Everyone in favor? Yes.
Of course it suited the lords to leave all this Petty legal stuff to the Peasants to sort out for themselves but there was a snag.
The experience of dealing with the law and enforcing it, sometimes meant that the Peasants became minor legal experts in their own right.
And when they did, they used that expertise to their own ends.
Sometimes however, they resorted to rather unconventional tactics.
For example, in 12OO, King John proposed a visit to the city on Nottingham.
Residents of the nearby village of Gotham realized that this meant he would pass through their village, making it a king's highway and thus making them liable to new taxes.
So when the kings' messengers arrived, what did they do? Well, the entire village pretended to be mad.
Since madness was considered contagious, the idea of a whole village of lunatics was perfectly feasible, and the king wisely decided to make a detour.
But for all their cunning, surely peasants were still nothing more than slaves.
In the same way the lord of the manor had to provide military service to the king, the peasants had to provide the lord of the manor with so many days' labor in return of the land they held from him.
Historians have given this arrangement the catchy title of ''feudal burden''.
But just how much of a burden were these feudal duties? For examPle, the Peasants who Ploughed these fields six or seven hundred years ago, bore one of the heaviest feudal burdens in the kingdom.
That is to say that they had to work for the lord of the manor for something like fifty to sixty days in the year, to Provide their accommodation and Pay their taxes.
Nowadays, most of these fields are occuPied by the BMW car Park.
Now to Pay for their rent and taxes today, an assembly line worker has to work for something like eighty days of the year.
That's nearly a month longer than the worst off medieval peasant.
What's more, the feudal arrangement was a two-way thing.
The lord had responsibilities to his peasants.
In fact twice a year he was supposed to lay on a feast for them as a sort of thank you.
I can't remember the last time the tax man took me out for a slap-up dinner or a picnic! Of course the lord of the manor lived like a lord, but what kind of a stinking hovel would his peasants have called home? The answer can be found at Britain's newest oldest village - Cosmeston, on the outskirts of Cadiff, where a team of archaeologists have painstakingly recreated a complete medieval village.
There's a surprising range of properties on offer.
First up, a medieval bachelor pad, or rather, an affordable studio apartment suitable for the single working peasant.
Must have been a Pretty unPleasant life.
It could be, but again we gotta get rid of all of our modern views on what makes a good life.
So this is how the lowest of the low lived.
- Yeah, we're right at the bottom.
- It's quite sPacious.
Well, that's right, he has a nice little cottage but that's about all he has going for him.
So what does he do? He's a landless laborer.
Here's a chaP, with his land taken away - Bottom, bottom.
- Right at the bottom.
And so he's go a fire, he's cooking himself something He had a very basic Pot here above his hearth, tiny amounts of wood to be used, none of roaring fires that we'd think of because all of his wood has to Pay the Lord of the Manor, wood Penny, go out to the woods and he could just collect what's fallen.
And he's got a bed, I see.
Delightful bed here! This is just a mattress full of straw thrown on top of it and a cover of rough old woolen blankets.
Plenty of fleas I expect.
Hopefully not too bad because hanging above them, we have some fleabain.
So in theory, that keePs the fleas away.
If that was the bottom of the bottom of the heap, what was it like on the top of the bottom of the heap? Next on tour, an up-market, semidetached family home a decidedly, dez rez for the upwardly mobile professional peasant couple.
So whose house is this then? Now this is the reeve's house.
And what's a reeve? Tell me what a reeve is.
We're going up-market here, every year the freemen of the village vote for who they want to be the reeve.
And the reeve is almost like a village manager, keePs an eye on things makes sure that everybody's farming the land ProPerly.
He's a wealthy man, a wealthy villager.
He doesn't make his money out of being reeve, he owns a lot of land.
That's right, he is the Land Rover, green welly farmer.
And very, very upper class fireplace.
- Ah, he can afford it.
Yeah.
- Definitely! A welsh dresser I see.
How very imPortant esPecially for reeve's wife, the first thing you see as you come in, is of her fine Pottery disPlay.
- So she's showing it off to everybody.
- Showing her jugs off to everybody! - How rich I am.
- Exactly! We have some nice examPles here, this one is Saintonge Pottery.
Sounds French to me! That's right, this is from the Bordeaux region, Probably is Part of the wine trade from that area.
If anybody amongst the Peasants is gonna be drinking wine, it's gonna be the reeve and his family.
Doesn't sound that bad to me though, may be I could be a medieval Peasant.
I'll think about it.
Strip wood floors, shelves of holiday knick knacks and a nice drop of Bordeaux wine.
Maybe the medieval ideal home wasn't so different from today's.
But I'm still a bit nervous about what they had to eat.
It's this, Pottage.
Evidently the recipe of pottage is ''take anything and Put it into Pan of water, and boil it uP for two hours.
'' And the reason you have to boil everything you Pick out of the fields for two hours, is because they used human excrement on fields, so even lettuce had to be boiled.
Which made the salad's rather soggy.
Anyway let's try the Pottage.
Well, its um, Pretty disgusting.
Um, but you could have cheered it uP I suPPose with em a few herbs, maybe even some garlic.
They also had an instant form of Pottage, and you take this into the fields with you, and then you could, er, liquefy it with a bit of beer and eat thatif you wanted to.
Anyway the good news about being a Peasant was that you got to drink Plenty of beer.
They didn't have hoPs, until 142O when they were imPorted from Flanders.
So before that, you had to flavor the beer with other things, er, like bogmyrtle this one is flavored with.
It's basically the same sort of stuff, let's have a taste of that.
Of course they, they tended to drink alcoholic drinks rather than water because the er, water was usually not very drinkable.
Oh, that's very nice actually.
Every village was dominated by its church.
The peasant's social life revolved around it.
The medieval church certainly knew how to attract a congregation.
It was the Place where the Peasants had their Parties, where they did their amateur dramatics and where they even held football matches.
Oh, and the local Priest often used to brew his own beer.
Which is certainly more of a draw than playing the guitar.
And the church expected its peasants to be duly grateful.
Here in Painswick, Gloucestershire, a rather quaint ceremony has survived from medieval times.
Peasants would show their love of the church by giving it a big hug.
Welcome, everyone, to this years clipping service.
And I think we have our arms right away round the church.
And so now we're going to embrace, and we're going to cliP our lovely church.
Another reason they were so fond of the church may have been it provided plenty of holidays or rather ''holy days''.
If you though we have more leisure time today, think again.
Nowadays we enjoy eight public holidays a year.
In the Middle Ages, the church insisted on eighty.
Well a clearer picture of peasant lifestyle seems to be emerging.
But I really wanted to get under their skin, so I was introduced to some real-life medieval peasants.
Far from being sickly and diseased, forensic studies have revealed that the inhabitants of a remote Yorkshire village received surprisingly sophisticated health care.
What about this chap here? We got a skull with a big hole in the middle of it.
Right, this is extraordinary.
What this seems to be is a cranial injury that was treated by neurological surgery.
This individual suffered a blunt injury to the head around the time of the Norman conquest.
Where this hole is, that's where the bone was shuttered into small fragments.
And if you look carefully at this, you can see the surgeon made his incision.
The guy's been hit in the head and the surgeon said, ''I've got to get rid of these Pieces or fragments of skull,'' - They knew that was bad to have them.
- Exactly, yes.
So this guy's wandering around with a hole in his head.
Oh, yes.
Yes, this would have been covered by his scalP.
- The skin would have grown over it.
- Yes, exactly.
He wouldn't have had a hole right through to the brain, and he lived Perfectly all right.
The bones reveal that some peasants lived well into their sixties.
And whilst there are signs of malnutrition, the diet did have its benefits.
One of the up signs is that they did have quite good dental health.
And there's very little tooth decay and we can see That's because they're not having sugar or stuff like that.
They're not having sugar and also it's a very coarse diet which seemed to scour the teeth clean, and we can see this here and that means there is no chance for dental decay to get started.
But the toothbrush still wouldn't have gone amiss in some cases.
If we look at this one here, as you can see, huge shaggy dePosits on the teeth.
Uh, it's disgusting! Well this is actually mineralised dental Plaque, that accumulated over the years of his life.
That shows quite clearly there's no effort at oral hygiene amongst these PeoPle.
Oh God, he must have had terrible breath! Chronic halitosis seems to have been a bit of an issue.
In Wales a peasant woman could divorce her husband on the grounds of bad breath.
Clearly they weren't stupid! And historians now believe that the peasant class wasn't ignorant as was once assumed either.
It was all about getting your child in the right school which in the Middle Ages meant being snapped up by the church.
Village Priests often taught the sons of villagers their ABC, and PerhaPs one in ten of these boys would go on into the clergy.
Some sons of the Peasants went on to become high flying members of the intelligentsia, like this chaP here, William of Wykeham.
William may have been born a humble peasant, but he rose to become the richest and one of the most powerful men in England.
He was Lord Chancellor not once, but twice and he put his fortune to good use.
He founded this Place, one of the oldest Public schools in the country, Winchester College.
Oh, very nice.
William never forgot his origins.
and he established this school to Provide education for 7O boys from Peasant backgrounds.
Not so many Peasants around here nowadays, but William's cryPtic motto still hangs above today's PuPils - ''Either learn or go.
'' And then he adds, there is a third choice ''be beaten''! But we should be clear that literacy wasn't soughtt after by the Peasants so they could do a sPot of bedtime reading or improve their crosswords skills.
What they wanted is to be able to make out enough words in Latin to check references to themselves and their land in the court rolls.
And checking court documents was something that was going to come in very useful for the peasants in the tumultuous times that lay ahead.
For most of the 13th and early 14th century, England had an enormous Mediterranean feel.
Bumper crops and a booming economy and the population doubled.
But then, that old enemy of the English struck - no I don't mean the All Blacks - I mean the weather.
Heavy rain and low temperatures caused crops to rot and entire villages to sink.
People were starving to death.
Surely it couldn't get any worse than this but it could.
On top of the famine came something even more dreadful, the Black Death.
An already weakened population was devastated.
To many people it seemed that God had deserted them, and they struggled to reconcile this terrible catastrophe with their beliefs.
Here in the church at Ashwell in Hertfordshire, the Plague has left its mark, quite literally.
Over 650 years ago, the desperate local Priest scratched these words onto the walls of his bell tower.
You can see here it says, ''Primula Pestis'', the first Plague, 1349, and then below he's incised into the walls, in deeP letters, a big M, that's a thousand and then 35O.
In 135O he Puts, ''misaranda ferox e violenta'', miserable, fierce and violent the Plague has been.
And then below he writes, ''the dregs of the PoPulation ''left behind to bear witness, and a mighty wind ''thunders across the world.
'' The Black Death was a catastrophe.
But ironically those who survived, found they were better off than they ever had been.
You see the PoPulation of England had been almost halved, and labor was scarce, and ordinary farm workers suddenly found they were in a Position to call the shots.
Peasants begun to refuse to fulfill their feudal duties.
They started to negotiate wage increases and even began to be paid in hard cash.
Some left their Manors and acquired their own free land.
All this, of course, got up the noses of the aristocracy.
If there was more wealth around, they saw no reason why the Peasants should have it.
So they introduced laws to restore comPulsory labor and force wages back down to the levels before the Black Death.
But what seems to have esPecially irritated the aristocracy was the way the Peasants were dressing.
This season's peasant ditched drab work wear in favor of bright colors, tighter hose and even fur.
Some peasants were spending almost the same on clothes as certain noblemen.
So rules were introduced dictating what different classes could wear.
For example, for any person below the level of craftsman, pointy shoes were a fashion crime, literally.
All of which stoked the fires of peasant resentment.
The final straw was when the barons imposed a Poll tax to Pay for their war in France.
This was bitterly resented because it meant that everybody had to Pay the same, rich or Poor, and to make it worse, the government got its sums wrong - they based their calculations on the PoPulation size before the Black Death.
So when they failed to raise the amount they exPected, they imPosed a second a Poll tax.
And that was when the unthinkable happened, the peasants took up arms and revolted.
From all over England they converged on Canterbury and marched to London.
Maybe as many as 6O,OOO of them.
With no emails or mobile phones, how could the peasants have organized all this? Could it be that they were making use of their newly acquired literacy to spread the word of the revolt? Two of the chroniclers record what they claim were letters that the Peasants were circulating amongst themselves.
Now, the letters are written in English but they're very cryPtic and we don't really know what they mean.
But it could be that they contained detailed coded instructions for the revolt.
This is the one in Thomas Walsingham's chronicle.
And you can see here it says, ''John Sheep greeteth well John Nameless and John the Miller ''and biddeth them chastise well Hobbe the Robber ''and look shaPe you to one head and no more.
''Knoweth your friend from your foe.
Have enough and say Whoa.
'' Now it may be that when it says, ''chastise well Hobbe the Robber,'' those were instructions to the Peasants not to do any looting and only to destroy documents and records.
And then it says, ''Look shaPe you to one head and no more.
'' Well, it could be just the instructions saying, just only have one leader but on the other hand, it may be instructions to go on Pilgrimage to Canterbury where the Peasants assembled first and the focal Point was the head of Thomas A Becket.
And finally it says, ''Knoweth your friend from your foe and say Whoa.
'' These could be absolute rigid instructions to distinguish your friends from your enemy by the battle cry.
(WhooPs ) The climax of the peasants' revolt must rank as the one of the most extraordinary scenes in history.
Tens of thousands of rebelling peasants confronted the country's aristocracy, led by a king, a 14-year-old boy.
The peasants' leader Watt Tyler rode towards the boy king to make his demands and then he took a swig from a jug of ale, where upon the mayor of London charged and cut him down.
It looked as if the huge throng were about to attack the aristocracy, but the king suddenly rode forward and shouted, ''I'll be your leader, follow me.
'' The king granted the peasants pardons and promised to abolish serfdom.
But once the rebels had dispersed, the barons quickly set about slaughtering the ringleaders.
Thousands of peasants died.
The peasants' revolt failed.
However, the ideal of freedom and of owing deference to no one was a lasting legacy for the medieval peasant.
But there's a sting in the tail of the Peasants' story.
The lords realized that if the Peasants were now free from any labor obligation to them, they were likewise free from any obligation to care for their Peasants.
The social consensus of the feudal system had broken down.
And there was worse to come.
Peasants were about to come face to face with their real enemy, sheeP! You see, your average lord could make more money out of sheeP than he could out of Peasants.
For a start there's a lot more wool on a sheeP and you can eat them.
Which is Possible with Peasants but socially tricky.
So the lords started to throw the troublesome and uneatable Peasants off the land, and rePlace them with these chaPs.
The social landscape of Britain changed forever.
There is nothing intrinsically terrible about the Peasants' life.
In fact there were times in the 14th century when it was Pretty fine.
It deteriorated when the lords fenced in the land and it got even worse in the industrial revolution.
And small farmers are still uP against it.
The life of the Peasant dePends on the society, bit it's sobering to think that, comPared to a lot of PeoPle's lives today, some medieval Peasants had it Pretty good.
Next time on Terry Jones' Medieval Lives, I'll be peering into those weirdest of medieval institutions, the Monasteries, when I look at the rise and fall of the medieval monk.