The Peasants: Advances in Agricultural Technology, 800-1000

1. The Medieval Village

Medieval farming was not based as it now is on individual family farms situated in fenced blocks of fields, woods, and pasture. In the year 1000, a bird's-eye view of Europe would have consisted of a green sea of forest with scattered brown islands of human habitation. Each of these islands would have consisted of a nucleated village surrounded by two large and unfenced open fields. The village would have consisted of several small huts. These huts were built with whatever local materials were most common. They might be built of whitewashed sod or wattle and daub (woven reeds plastered with clay). They often housed the family's animals also. There would be one or two rooms, with a loft for storage. The family lived in a single room, in the center of which was a few flat stones on which the fire was placed. The roof was thatched, with a hole at the top through which the smoke escaped. There were probably no windows, and light came in through the smoke hole and an open door. The floor was dirt, sometimes covered with leaves or rushes. The furniture was a trestle table, a few stools, and a storage chest or two for whatever pallets the family might spread on the floor as their beds. Attached to each hut was a messuage, about half an acre of land used by the family for a garden, chicken coop, pig pen, bee-hives and so forth.

The huts were sometimes grouped around a central open place, or green, in which the peasants might graze their animals. There was usually a source of water nearby, and a stream might run through the green, perhaps ponded to raise fish, ducks, and geese. Along the stream grew tall grass that the villagers mowed regularly to store for winter feed for their animals. Not too far away was the forest or brush in which the villagers pastured their pigs, gathered nuts, berries, herbs, and other things, and, when allowed to do so, picked up sticks and twigs to use as fuel.

Most villages had a church with its own grounds clearly distinguished, perhaps with a fence or even a wall from the village lands. There might also be a larger fortified house of the lord or his steward. If the villages were populous enough, the lord might have had built a stone mill along the stream and even a village bakery set apart from the peasant huts with their highly flammable thatched roofs.