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| Clothes burned by the Black Death are burned in the Medieval Europe c. 1347 (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images) Credit: https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/black-death-plague-epidemic-facts-what-caused-rats-fleas-how-many-died/ |
This is you in 1347 Europe:
You live in a village outside a town. As a peasant, you belong to the group in society that works on the land. Ninety percent of the population are peasants. Another group are the nobles. Their job is to defend people. A third group is the clergy. Their job is to pray and care for Christians.
You have never travelled far, not even to the next village which is 8 km away. Your social life revolves around your own village and market days in town. You speak in a language and accent that only people from your own area can understand.
The world consists of Europe and fringes of Asia. You have never heard of such a place as New Zealand. Or America. For a long time, the Church has taught that the Earth is flat. Although some educated people are starting to say that the Earth is round, you still think that if you sailed far enough, you would come to the edge of the world and fall into a bottomless pit.
There is no education for you. A school was started in town once but the teacher was ignorant and used a birch all day to keep order. So you can not read or write. The only books available anyway are those the monks in the nearby abbey have copied by hand. Some of these books are illuminated with brightly coloured drawings. Drawings and wood-cuts have a little perspective. This means, for example, that the people in them might be bigger than the buildings and ships they are standing beside.
The houses in town are crammed together in narrow streets. Many families keep animals. The town has walls around it. At night the gates are locked and guarded. Wealthy town houses have servants, and apprentices who sleep in them. People collect their water from wells or the river. Messengers carry letters and town criers shout out the latest news. At least once a week the town has a market. Your family can rent a stall and sell any spare produce.
The Lord owns the land on which your family works. There are almost a hundred servants living in the lord's castle. The family dresses in silks and has banquets. Even the females ride horses and hunt with falcons. One of the daughters had a marriage arranged for her when she was a child. She had been widowed two times by the time she was thirteen.
You live in a hovel. It is a single storey wooden house with two rooms. It has a thatch roof. Straw covers the floor. You eat porridge for breakfast, bread with maybe a bit of cheese for lunch and pottage for dinner. Your mother cooks over an open fire. She makes your bread at home and bakes it in the oven owned by the lord. You wear simple homespun clothes of linen and wool and a hood like a cowl. There are no fences or hedges on the land. The open fields are divided into strips. Each family is allowed a certain number of strips in different fields. This way every family gets strips of land in the good and bad areas and shares the jobs.
You call yourself a Christian. You think that non-Christians are infidels and Jews especially should be persecuted. The Pope is your spiritual leader. He lives in Avignon in France. Your village has its own church. The priest can make you go to church. If you refuse, the priest can get a special church court to punish you. The priest collects a tithe from your family. This is a tenth of everything that you produce from the land in one year.
The nearby cathedral and abbey have collections of relics. They are clothes and bones thought to have belonged to saints. Many people say these relics can work miracles. You plan one day to visit these shrines and believe that God will reward you for doing this.
You will be lucky to live past your thirties. Many children die at birth. You hardly ever have a bath. You sleep in the same room as the rest of the family. There is a communal family bed for most members of your family. You have no idea why you get sick. You are frightened of lepers even though they are not allowed to go into inns or bake-houses and are not allowed to wash in streams or walk on narrow footpaths. Every time you hear a bell or a clacker warning you that a leper is approaching, you run away and hide. Last year the city of London passed a law that said lepers are not allowed to go into London. You think this is a good idea.
Conditions all around you are unsanitary. Filth and rubbish are often left in the streets of the town. There are open street sewers. The public latrines have a bad smell. The castle and wealthy town houses have privies that jut out from an outside wall. There is a hole in the bottom which lets waste fall into the river or the ditch. Some town houses have cesspools in the backyard. The cesspools always smell bad and some of them seep into the wells and the river where you get your drinking water. Household urinals drain into street sewers. A law says privies cannot do this but it is often ignored. The abbey's latrine is in a separate building.
Last time you went to town, a baker who had sold underweight bread was in the stocks and a fishmonger who had been selling bad fish was in the pillory. You threw mud and rotten apples at them. A man who had been found drunk was having to walk through the streets wearing a barrel. But the best sight is when a nagging woman or ‘scold' is put in the ducking stool and ducked in the village pond. There is an outlaw living in the forest nearby. If he goes into a church he will find sanctuary and his enemies will not be able to touch him. But eventually, his hunger and thirst will drive him out.
