Transcript THE MEDIEVAL SOCIETY IN ENGLAND: THE LIFE Medieval Age 1066-1500 GIOANNI-HELIAS-MEUNIER-REIX Medieval London: Organization and every day life Medieval London  twisting streets and lanes. Most of.

THE MEDIEVAL
SOCIETY IN ENGLAND:
THE LIFE
Medieval Age 1066-1500
GIOANNI-HELIAS-MEUNIER-REIX
Medieval London:
Organization and every day life
Medieval London  twisting streets and lanes.
Most of the houses  half-timbered, or wattle and daub, whitewashed with lime.
A 13th century  law required new houses to use slate for roofing.
The government of the city  Lord Mayor and council elected from the ranks of
The merchant guilds (ran the city and controlled commerce).
Each guild  own hall  own coat of arms.
the Guildhall (1411-40) various guilds met in common.
Plague  constant because of the rudimentary sanitation.
The Fleet River (= Holborn) was navigable  boats and dock (were set up at
what is now Farringdon Street) .FR covered over in the 18th century.
Social activitie important.
MEDIEVAL VILLAGE
Most Europeans in the Middle Ages lived in villages
-> communities that consisted of a few hundred people who were primarily engaged in farming.
The village was the fundamental social and economic unit of medieval society.
Two types of villages dominated the European countryside:
nucleated and dispersed.
The former was found in the most fertile areas such as river valleys, and were mainly in northern Europe.
Nucleated rural village in the North.
Dispersed village.
Dispersed villages were more common in southern Europe, and any place where the soil was light and sandy.
There were other variations as well, all determined by climate and soil.
In certain areas, the dominant activity was ranching, in others it was fishing, while elsewhere it
might be olive groves or vineyards.
Each village was surrounded by unfenced farmland divided into two equal parts: those lands
under cultivation, and those lying fallow.
Each field was divided into narrow strips, and each villager held several strips in each field.
A second type was closed-field farming, found mainly south of the Loire and in the
Mediterranean regions in general. Here, land was divided into closed rectangular plots.
Dispersed settlements were found in regions of poor soil, such as Scotland, Wales, Cornwall,
Brittany, and the central highlands of France.
In these settlements, each household had a small plot of land close by, the "in-field". They grew
garden crops, fertilized with manure, and these fields were the more heavily cultivated.
They also had open land, the "out-field", which they farmed for a year or two and then
abandoned for another patch.
The surrounding wasteland was used for grazing.
MEDIEVAL TOWN
Normally enclosed by protective walls, access to medieval towns was regulated through gates.
An image of Constantinople that is based on an English town: surrounded with a curtain wall
punctuated with towers and arrow slits, the city is crowded with buildings. At the centre is the tall spire of a
church.
The glamour of the town is suggested by the dancers emerging from
one of its gates, watched by admiring ladies. Successful towns were
often sited on major roads or waterways, facilitating trade and
transport.
Bridges were important points of access to towns, and were often
themselves embellished with chapels and buildings.
Religious houses, parish churches and other religious
foundations were an important feature of the townscape, and
from the thirteenth century, mendicant friars - whose mission
was to preach to the people rather than to live cloistered lives
(monks) - became central to the spirituality practiced in towns.
THE MEDIEVAL MANOR
- Manor = Manor House (great hall, solar, servant’s quarters, kitchen) + land around the
manor (fief)
- Lord lived in the manor house with his wife and family
Checked his manor from his house and had a comfortable life. It was for men who were at
the top of the feudal system.
- Lord was the headmaster, had all powers.
Could hunt someone and gave or gave not
freedom to peasants.
- All people who were on his land had to give
him dues in return, he protected them.
- Vassal : free man who lived on manor land. He had to work for him then (for wars and
protect population)
- Bailiff : second headmaster of the manor
- Serf : had to work 3days/week on manor’s land. He had more liberty than peasants or
villains who were only laborers or workers.
- Servant : worked in the manor house (cooking, cleaning…)
Laborares:
Those who work
Those who pray were the priests; those who fight were the knights; and then there was everybody else.
The laborares are people of the lower class.
Notice the designation— laborares.
The word does not mean merely to work, it means to labor. To work at some higher
calling, such as to write literature or to study medicine, was operare. Peasants labor, but
an educated man produces an opus . . .
Peasants were what most people meant when they though of laborares, and peasants
made up the great bulk of the population of Europe.
So, if we sum up we just have to notice that in the medieval society there were 3
categoris:
The bourgois, the clerge, and the 1/3 etat.
Laborares lives on manor land. They sent a small area of earth and they can : be protect
by the lord but they have to respect his laws. we have to notice that to rent a land they
have to pay. For there social categorie, there only way of earn money is to labor the
earth. They can pay then the lord and the church. They can keep the rest of their food
for them and eat it.
Because they labor the earth during all of their time, we called them the laborares ;
“those who work” .
PEASANT’ S
LIFE
Ploughing - a vital farm job
Harvesting (is the process of gathering mature
crops)
a crop using sickles (
is a hand-held agricultural tool typically used for
harvesting grain crops or cutting).
The lifestyle of peasants in Medieval England was extremely hard and harsh.
Many peasants in Medieval England worked the land and, as a result, farming was
critically important to a peasant family. Most people lived in villages where there was
plenty of land. Farming dominated the lives of most Medieval people, it was a way of
life for many. Medieval towns were small but still needed the food produced by
surrounding villages.
Medieval farming, by our standards (level of quality), was very crude, difficult.
Medieval peasants had no access to tractors, combine harvesters (is a machine
that harvests grain crops) etc.
Many peasant did’nt work on their land. This belonged to the lord of the manor. In
this sense, peasants were simply tenants (locataire) who worked a strip of land or
maybe several strips.
The most common tools used by farmers
were metal tipped ploughs for turning
over the soil and harrows to cover up the
soil when seeds had been planted. The
use of manure was basic and artificial
fertilisers as we would know did not exist.
Metal tipped ploughs
Growing crops was a very hit and miss affair and a successful crop was due to a lot of hard work but also the
result of some luck.
In the summer (the growing season) farmers needed sun to get their crops to grow. With no substantial harvest, a
peasant still had to find money or goods to pay his taxes.A spring frost could destroy seeds if they had been
recently planted.
The winter did not mean a farmer had an easy time (there were plenty of tasks to do even if he could not grow
crops at that particular time)
Peasants had a hard life, but they did not work on Sundays or on the frequent saints' days, and they could go to
nearby fairs and markets. Besides labor, peasants had to pay taxes to their lord in money or produce. The lifestyle
of peasants in medieval england was extremely hard and harsh. Many worked as farmers in fields owned by the
lords and their lives were controlled by the farming year.
Their lives were harsh but there were few rebellions due to a harsh system of law and order.
In 1381 there is Peasants revolt, is one of the
most dramatic events of English history.
Black Death from 1348 to 1350
workers wanted to go in town to be safe.
So, lords had no workers any more so, they gave them privileges and more freedom to keep
few of them on their land.
35 years later :
- lords wanted to take back their privileges
- peasant started to work for free on Church land and they had less liberty
- Richard II, headmaster of French country had to paid for war so he
created a new tax.
So they could not feed their family because they were not working on their land.
At the beginning of 1381 :
Wat Tyler, headmaster of this revolution went to London and
began to burn government house. Some of the peasants were drunk and others were dunce and they
started to kill archbishop and also foreigners. Richard II asked two times to peasant to go back in their
country and he promised them new privileges. Some did but the others continued to destroy the city.
At the end of 1381, revolt was over but the president did not give them what he said and
pleasant life came back at old time, they were now under the control of the lord of the manor.
Who lived in towns?
Townsmen are men who are living in town.
A medieval townsman's rank was based on money and goods rather. He
worked usually in some kind of a store in order to earn money to pay taxes.
At the top of the social scale were merchants, lawyers and property owners, who occupied
responsible administrative positions. Below craftsmen and traders, and at the bottom of the pile were
relatively unskilled workers. Then, as now, towns included a mixture of residential and commercial properties,
though often these were one and the same: craftsmen's workshops were often on the ground floor, with the
family residence upstairs.
In many towns, medieval commercial activities have left their mark in streets with names like Shoe Lane, Pie
Corner and Apothecary Street. Medieval commercial buildings are relatively rare, but images can sometimes
offer a record of what they might have looked like, as seen in the illustration of an apothecary shop in a
thirteenth century French manuscript.
The Black Death
1348 to 1350
The black death come from Est. of Europe. Rats were infected by the bubonic plague. Then,
came by boat. Arrived in West. of Europe in 1348
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Strike England 6 times in the fourteenth century
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Killed about 20-25 millions people because no medical technique
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People were terrified so Peasant revolt
Sources:
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/england_medieval.htm
http://history-world.org/peasant.htm
http://library.thinkquest.org/10949/fief/hipeasant.html
http://www.camelotintl.com/village/peasant.html
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/medieval_peasants.htm
http://www.castlewales.com/life.html
http://www.boisestate.edu/courses/westciv/medsoc/17.shtml