The World Around Her
August 1316, Brigstock Court: Cecilia Penifader first appeared in the manor court when she was a teenager, still living at home under the authority of her father Robert. A neighbor named Richard Everard complained that Cecilia and her father had gone into his part of the Northmeadow, ignored his boundary stones, and taken hay from his land. Robert Penifader denied these charges, and he promised to prove his innocence. The dispute is not recorded in later courts, so Richard and Robert likely settled their differences out of court.
Cecilia Penifader was born into a sizable and prosperous family in Brigstock village, or more likely, the adjacent village of Stanion, then part of Brigstock manor. (Brigstock and Stanion were tied so closely together-—for example, Cecilia and her parents held lands in both—that I shall treat the two settlements as the single community of Brigstock.) Her parents, Robert and Alice, had a large number of children, at least three sons and five daughters (see Figure 3). Two children, Emma and Alice, seem to have died young, and only one child, Christina, lived long enough to witness the horrors of the Black Death when it arrived in Brigstock in 1349. Although it is impossible to reconstruct precise patterns of birth and infant mortality from medieval records, it is clear that the Penifaders were fecund and fortunate. If Cecilia’s mother married her father at the usual age of about twenty, she would have had twenty fertile years to produce her family (medieval women rarely bore children in their forties). Bearing eight children in two decades, she followed a biologically predictable pattern; if a peasant wife used no effective birth control and nursed her infants (an activity that delayed the resumption of menstruation), she usually gave birth at intervals of about 2½ years. Aristocratic women, who not only married at younger ages but also employed wet nurses (women paid to breastfeed the infants of others), usually produced larger numbers of children. Eleanor of Castile, who married Edward I when she was about ten years old, bore fifteen (or possibly sixteen) children; Philippa of Hainault, who married Edward III at the age of fourteen years, gave birth to twelve children.
Figure 3. The Penifaders.
Bearing eight children in twenty years, Alice Penifader made the most of her fertility as a nursing mother, and she seems never to have tried to prevent or terminate a pregnancy. This was not through lack of knowledge. Medieval women knew about a wide variety of plants that could discourage conception or sometimes induce early abortion. Their concoctions were not as effective as methods used today, but they sometimes worked. Artemisia, which inhibits ovulation, and rue, which causes uterine contractions, were among the plants readily available to women in Brigstock. Alice seems never to have resorted to such measures, but many women did. Alice and her husband Robert were also lucky enough to beat the odds of infant and child mortality. In most medieval villages, almost half of all children died before reaching adulthood, but most of the children of Alice and Robert grew to full age. All in all, the Penifader household was atypically large. Most of their neighbors in Brigstock, like most peasant couples, produced only three children who survived them.
House and Farmyard
Cecilia was the seventh of eight children, born into a house filled with three brothers and three sisters. Their house was comfortable by Brigstock standards but humble by the standards of our day. Like all the houses in Brigstock, it was dark. Some houses had no windows, but the Penifaders, as well-off tenants, might have cut a window or two into their walls. If so, the windows had no glass, and only shutters kept out the wind and cold. Like all the houses in Brigstock, the Penifader house was filled with smoke. A fire was essential for warmth and cooking, but, as chimneys were unknown among peasants, smoke was vented through a hole in the roof. Perhaps the Penifaders, like others who could afford it, built an especially high roof to draw up smoke to the hole in its apex and ease the smokiness. Finally, like all the houses in Brigstock, the house in which Cecilia grew up was small. Peasant houses were usually twice as wide as they were deep, and a prosperous family like the Penifaders probably lived in a house about 30 feet by 15 feet. Dark, smoky, and cramped, peasant houses were not welcoming places. It was no wonder people preferred, weather permitting, to sit outside on benches set against the walls of their homes.
Until recently, a stone house that dated back to Cecilia’s day stood in Brigstock. Its walls were built of rubble, not stone blocks, but even this was fine by the standards of the early fourteenth century. Most medieval peasants used rubble only for a low foundation a foot or two off the ground; they then built the walls by placing posts every few feet and filling in the gaps with wattle and daub, that is, sticks and twigs woven together with the gaps filled by clay, straw, moss, and other such materials. (Sometimes these walls were so flimsy that robbers literally broke into a house by avoiding the locked door and forcing entry through the walls.) Set at a low point in the walls of the Brigstock house were crucks, long curved timbers, that rose up to brace the wall and hold the roof. The roof was straw thatch; this was cheap and easy for medieval peasants and prone to disastrous fire. A house like this was built with a combination of family labor and hired labor. If a family could afford it, they were especially likely to hire skilled workers to lay the foundation, erect the timber frame, and set the thatch.
The interior of the medieval house that until recently stood in Brigstock had a second floor, but this was a later addition. In Cecilia’s house, there would have been one floor only, a packed dirt floor, possibly covered with straw (see Figure 4). Perhaps boards laid across braces of the crucks provided, at one end of the house, a loft for storage or extra sleeping. Furnishings were minimal: benches or stools for sitting; a trestle table that could be put away when not in use; a chest to hold bedding, towels, and other linens; a cupboard to hold jugs, bowls, and spoons. All these would have been pushed against the walls. When it was time to eat, the table would be unfolded, the bowls and spoons set out, the benches put in place.
The Penifaders’ diet was simple. Parents and children ate bread and drank weak ale at every meal, and they also ate, whenever available, such other foods as bacon, cheeses, eggs, fish, onions, leeks, garlic, cabbages, apples, and pears. Meat, cooked by boiling, was a rare treat, and pottage—a stew or thick soup made of whatever ingredients were to hand—was common. When it was time to sleep, the tables and benches were set aside, and bedding (at best, a cloth bag stuffed with either straw or chaff from threshed oats) was laid out in their place. The one immovable feature of the interior was the hearth, set in the center of the house, with its pots and trivets; it was around the hearth that everyone sat, ate, and slept. Perhaps the Penifaders’ house, like the main floor of the now demolished Brigstock house, was partitioned to create a small room on one side. This room was used for storage and sleeping; it offered a bit of privacy, but it was far from the hearth in winter.
Figure 4. Inside a Peasant House. With few windows and no chimneys, peasant houses were dark and smoky. Windows were fully closed, as needed for warmth or security, with wooden shutters, but they were not glazed. Some were entirely open to the elements when not shuttered, and others were covered by stretched cloth or animal hide. (Derived from a reconstruction found in Maurice Beresford and John Hurst, Wharram Percy: Deserted Medieval Village (1991), p. 40.)
Cecilia, in other words, grew up in a house that provided the essentials of life: a hearth for cooking and warmth; a shelter from wind, rain, and snow; a place to eat and sleep. But her house was not a place to linger, and whenever she could, Cecilia wandered into the farmyard around her house where her parents and siblings also spent much of their time. Sometimes houses stood together along a street, built with shared walls, and in such cases, farmyards ran behind the houses. More often, however, houses stood separately within their farmyards; in these cases, most of the farmyard ran behind the house, but some of it could also lie in front and along the sides. The farmyard was a large area, perhaps an acre or more, closed off by fences or ditches from street, lane, and neighbors. (An acre measures 43,560 square feet, roughly 75 percent of a football field in the United States.) In the Penifader farmyard, Cecilia sat with her family in the early evening, assisted her mother in many tasks, or watched over the safekeeping of some of the household animals. (In the winter, cows, pigs, chickens, and other animals were sometimes taken into the house to protect them from the elements and to add to the interior warmth. But in warmer weather, animals were usually kept in the farmyard, sometimes in a barn.)
The farmyard was a social place, especially in front of the house, where children like Cecilia found benches for sitting, fences for leaning, and a cobbled space for games (see Figure 5). The farmyard was also a place for storage: a barn for animals, a shed for tools or grain, a well or cistern for rainwater, a haystack or two, and certainly, at some distance from the house if possible, a dung heap where human and animal waste was carefully accumulated for spreading as fertilizer on the fields. Most importantly, the farmyard was a place of work, especially for women and children. Cecilia’s mother brewed ale in the farmyard; she milked cows and made cheese; she took advantage of outdoor light to mend old clothes and stitch new ones; she tended a beehive; she collected eggs from her roosting hens; she fattened her pigs; she cared for a few apple and pear trees; she cultivated a garden that yielded such products as onions, turnips, peas, beans, leeks, garlic, cabbages, flax, hemp, and herbs. The farmyards of Brigstock, small, readily fertilized, easily worked on an intermittent basis, and free of any communal regulation, were the most intensely cultivated lands in the community. The products that came from farmyards were valued for the variety they brought to diets and for the cash generated by sales in local markets.
As Cecilia grew up in the house and farmyard of her parents, she followed hygienic practices that today can seem crude. Bathing was rare, not only because of fears of drowning but also because baths were considered unhealthy—liable to lead to colds, fevers, or worse. On occasion, she splashed herself with water and soap, but more often than not, cleanliness meant clean hands, clean face, and little more. She also had no toilet, and she either walked out to the dung heap in the farmyard or used a bucket. Like her parents and siblings, Cecilia wore simple clothes: stockings and leather shoes; gowns made of wool or flax (men’s gowns stopped at the knee; women’s were longer); and for warmth in the winter, coats or cloaks and hoods or caps. All clothing fitted loosely. This made it slightly easier for Alice Penifader to clothe her family by stitching a new cloak or altering an old one for a hand-me-down.
Figure 5. House and Farmyard. This is a drawing from an archaeological dig, and at its center is a house much like the house whose interior is shown in Figure 4. Farmyards were large and well-used, with space for gardening, henhouses, storage, stables, and all sorts of domestic work. (Derived from an excavation drawing in Guy Beresford, “Three Medieval Settlements on Dartmoor,” Medieval Archaeology 23 (1979): 98–158.)
Arable, Pasture, Stream, and Forest
Outside the immediate house and farmyard of her family, Cecilia found a large and complex community. Brigstock lay in the heart of Rockingham Forest, a royal preserve for hunting. The Norman kings William II (1087–1100) and Henry I (1100–1135) hunted in the forest and maintained a lodge at Brigstock. Built of wood, it consisted of a hall, a chamber, and a stable. As far as we know, no kings visited the lodge after Henry I, but they kept it in good repair; Cecilia might have stared at these buildings and crept around them as a child. By the late fourteenth century, however, the lodge had fallen into ruin, and it was so thoroughly demolished that modern archaeologists have not yet succeeded in pinpointing its location. Local tradition holds that the manor house that now stands in Brigstock, an imposing structure of fine stone blocks built about 1500, rests on the site of the timber lodge of Cecilia’s day.
Brigstock and Stanion today are thriving villages, clustered in a gently rolling landscape. Both settlements are nucleated, with all the houses gathered into a central location. In Cecilia’s time, the Penifaders and their neighbors had already settled along the same main streets of Brigstock and Stanion that can be seen today, but their lives were different and much less prosperous from the lives of those who now inhabit these villages. The peasants of fourteenth-century Brigstock relied on an economy of makeshifts, responding flexibly to any opportunity that arose. They had to “make shift”—that is, to juggle many tasks and to manage with whatever materials, cash, and work they could find. Peasants often relied a bit on wages earned by working for others or on profits gained from selling ale, bread, wool, or other commodities, but they especially relied on what they could produce from the land. Two anchors kept this highly flexible economy going—first, the arable fields on which peasants grew wheat, barley, rye, oats, and other crops; and second, the meadows and pastures that fed their sheep, horses, and oxen.
Like many communities across northern Europe in the Middle Ages, Brigstock had open fields that were plowed, sown, weeded, harvested, and left fallow (that is, unplanted) according to common agreement. Brigstock had several such fields (each given a local name), and the Penifaders held bits of land in most of them—a half-acre here, a parcel there, another half-acre over there. (When Cecilia grew up she too would hold land scattered about the manor. In 1335, for example, she acquired an acre of arable that was distributed in three locations—“under the Sale,” “in Stitches,” and “between the Valkmill and the new dyke.”) Every year, the Penifaders’ use of each small bit of land, whether they planted it with wheat or rye in the autumn, or oats, barley, or beans in the spring, or left it fallow, was determined by the collective agreement of all tenants. Robert and Alice, in other words, were not able to sit on their front bench and plan what to plant where and when; instead, they had to use their land in ways agreed upon with their neighbors. This system of agriculture is different from the large blocks of land, farmed by single owners, that now dot the landscape of Europe. Yet it worked well at the time.
First, consider that many households held lands scattered throughout the fields of a manor, rather than compactly consolidated into one family farm. This arrangement is sometimes called strip farming because each field was divided into strips tended by different families. Scattering a family’s lands had several advantages. It spread risk, for if crops in one field had a bad year, crops in another might do fine; it facilitated the sharing of plows and draft animals, for several households could pool their resources to plow a field containing their strips; and it encouraged parental generosity to children, for instead of a block of family land that had to be held together for a single heir, parents held many strips that could, if they wished and their bailiff allowed, be more easily dispersed among many children.
Second, consider that boundaries between strips were unfenced (hence the term open field). Instead of fences, stones or other low markers marked boundaries between strips (in the court case that opens this chapter, Richard Everard accused Cecilia and her father of ignoring these markers). Boundary stones could be moved as well as ignored, and this was a serious offense. If one household could thereby gain a foot or two of land, it gained a great deal, especially if stones were moved ever so slightly again and again. Despite such problems, boundary stones were preferred for one reason: fencing would have obstructed the movement of plows during planting and animals eating stubble after harvest. With boundary stones lying close to the ground, more of the land could be cultivated more easily.
Third, consider that tenants had to cooperate with each other over how a field containing the strips of many people might be used. This limited individual initiative, but it was essential. If the Penifaders had decided to plant oats in a field where everyone else had planted wheat the autumn before, they would have created havoc. In the early spring, when they would have needed to prepare their strip for sowing oats, they would have dragged their plow through the maturing wheat of their neighbors. This would have made the Penifaders few friends and many enemies. Cooperation was eased by custom. It was not as if everyone had to debate every year about the use of every field; there was a set pattern of rotation that everyone expected and therefore more easily observed.
By Cecilia’s time, many open-field villages in England had adopted a threefield course of rotation. Peasants planted one field with a winter crop (wheat or rye) sown in the autumn, cultivated a spring crop (oats, barley, peas, or beans) on the second, and let the third field lie fallow. Every year they rotated the use of the fields; the winter field would then have a spring crop, the spring field lay fallow, and the fallow field was sown with wheat. The three-field system was an innovation of the High Middle Ages, and it improved on a variety of less efficient rotations, especially the two-field system (in which half the land was fallow at any one time). In the eleventh century, many villages in Northern Europe began to shift from a two-field rotation to one based on three fields. But the change was a slow one; in Cecilia’s day, the three-field system was used in Brigstock but probably not in Stanion. Although Stanion did eventually adopt a three-field rotation, many others did not. In villages with poor soils and in Mediterranean villages, where summers were too hot for spring crops, the three-field rotation was not feasible. On the rich plains of the north (including the midlands of England), however, the three-field system helped peasants not only to minimize fallow but also to sow a valuable second crop in the spring.
Fourth, consider that peasants left large portions of arable land—usually one-third or one-half—untilled every year. Fallowing was common because animal and human waste was insufficient for fertilizing the land, and few other alternatives were available. Since fallow land naturally replenished itself, the Penifaders and their neighbors carefully left each field untilled every two or three years. Also, they made sure that sheep grazed the stubble from the harvest and that other animals were turned out onto the fallow. The droppings from these animals helped further to replenish the soil. In many communities, fallow fields and pastures were considered to be common lands available for the flocks and herds of everyone, and in such instances, villagers often carefully specified how many animals each household could place on these commons. This was so that no single tenant could, as the Brigstock custumal of 1391 stated, “overcharge the commons.”
HOW DO WE KNOW ABOUT MEDIEVAL CLIMATE?
We have lots of weather reports from the Middle Ages, especially from chroniclers who complain about wet summers or bitterly cold winters. But for climate—that is, long-term trends in weather—we look to nature and science. Our main tools are tree rings and ice cores. Because trees have an annual cycle of growth and dormancy, each ring provides a proxy measure for that year’s precipitation and temperature, whether by its thickness (a good climate for growth) or thinness (poor climate). Tree rings also supply—in their concentrations of radiocarbon—information about solar irradiance (or sun-power) and especially sunspot activity. Because building timbers as well as recently felled trees can be studied in these ways, tree ring analysis (or dendrochronology) can extend back thousands of years (current analyses go back as far as fourteen thousand years).
Ice cores extend even farther back in time, and they tell us even more. Like tree rings, the annual deposit of ice found on cores taken from Greenland and Antarctica varies in thickness depending on annual precipitation and temperature. They also contain tiny bubbles of air trapped by the pressure of accumulated ice; by releasing these bubbles, we can capture and measure air that is centuries old. Some cores also contain pollen that tell us what plants then flourished, and some even have ash left from volcanic eruptions.
Climate historians use more than just these two measures—they also, for example, look at sediments on lake or ocean beds and at the minerals in stalactites and stalagmites in caves. But the basic principle is always the same: analyze the extent and content of natural deposits, made over time. This might sound simple but it is devilishly complex. You cannot just chop down a two-hundred-year-old tree and discover the last two centuries of local climate. Different species of trees react to climate in different ways; tree growth can vary by individual tree and also by setting and soil; and although tree rings indicate years of good and poor growth, they do not report the relative contribution to growth of temperature, precipitation, sunlight, and wind. Large and selective samples help; so, too, does careful analysis; and we can be most confident of all when completely independent measures—written records, tree rings, ice cores, and stalactites—corroborate similar trends.
Climate history (or paleoclimatology) has used these methods to establish the main features of the European climate during the Middle Ages. A Medieval Warm Period (or MWP) prevailed from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, with temperatures about 1°C higher than before or after. This might not seem like much, but this was enough warming to open the north Atlantic to commercial fishing and to allow Europeans to settle in Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland. By the 1260s, the MWP was winding down.
Less solar heat was reaching the earth, partly because the sun went into a quiescent phase (known as the Wolf Solar Minimum) and partly because a series of volcanic eruptions from as far away as Ecuador blocked the sun’s energy with ash and aerosols. Worse yet, the earth’s atmosphere was perhaps further clogged in the 1290s by an onslaught of meteors, as reported by chroniclers from China to Ireland and as suggested by telltale chemicals, especially ammonium and nitrate, in ice cores. Waning sun-power meant, of course, global cooling, but it also reshaped weather patterns in ways that differed regionally—less rain in Asia, for example, and more in Europe. Most of all, though, the climate between about 1250 and 1350 was everywhere unstable and more extreme.
Paleoclimatology illustrates how historians, immersed as we are in past times, are also creatures of their own times. Historians once paid little attention to climate, but as the earth has warmed over the past few decades, climate history has attracted much more interest. Historians, who are citizens as well as scholars, rightly turn to the past to understand present-day dilemmas. Thus, for example, the MWP features in modern debates about climate change. Some argue that just as the earth was slightly warmer before 1250, so our current warming might also be part of a natural cycle we do not yet fully understand. Others point out that the MWP makes a poor precedent for modern warming, because its temperature change was relatively small. In such ways, historywriting is about both past and present. Historians rightly respond to the compelling issues of our own times and places—by asking ever-changing questions and producing from those questions ever-new research.
TO LEARN MORE, see Richard C. Hoffmann, An Environmental History of Medieval Europe (2014), and Bruce M. S. Campbell, The Great Transition: Climate, Disease, and Society in the Late-Medieval World (2016).
The arable land of Brigstock was important and closely regulated, but it accounted for only one-fourth of the land of the manor. Most of the rest was given to the second anchor of Brigstock’s economy: pastures in which animals grazed and grassy meadows used either as hayfields or for further grazing. These lands were also held in parcels scattered through many fields. Elsewhere in England and Europe, some peasants supported themselves almost exclusively with animal husbandry, particularly if they lived in mountainous regions or areas with poor soils. In Brigstock, where the landscape rolled only gently and the soil richly repaid cultivation, animals still contributed critically to the economy. Horses and oxen pulled wagons and carried burdens; sheep produced wool that could be marketed to local merchants; cows and goats gave milk that could be turned into cheese (people rarely drank milk); pigs were raised especially for their meat. These animals supported peasant families directly with their wool, milk, and meat, and indirectly through their contributions to arable husbandry; their waste fertilized the fields, and their pulling power enabled peasants to plow those fields. As a result, the rural economy of villages such as Brigstock and Stanion is best considered an economy of mixed farming. Peasants raised crops and animals, and the two activities supported each other. No animals meant infertile fields; infertile fields meant no stubble for animals to feed on.
When Cecilia walked around Brigstock and saw open fields given over to arable, pasture, and meadow, she saw something else as well, especially on the outskirts of the fields. She saw small parcels of land, enclosed by fences or ditches, each of which belonged entirely to one family. The Penifaders might have held several of these, and if so, they called them, as did everyone else in Brigstock, newsets or, more commonly, assarts. The first word gives an important clue about how these private enclosures were formed, for they were newly cultivated lands, created when a family or a group of families decided to fell trees, clear land, and put it to productive use. Sometimes this was done surreptitiously; Brigstock peasants sometimes cleared edges of Rockingham Forest, doubtless hoping, often correctly, that the king’s foresters would either not notice or not care. Sometimes it was done with license, for holders of unproductive land were often delighted to see it cleared and, of course, to collect new rents on it. In either case, the assart was usually enclosed, kept distinct from the open fields, and used—like the farmyard around the house—for whatever purposes a family might choose. Bringing new lands into cultivation was an important strategy for medieval peasants everywhere. Between 1000 and 1300, peasants across Europe brought thousands of acres of previously untilled land—marshes, wasteland, moors, forests, and unpopulated territories—into cultivation. Often this was small scale, as with assarts. But sometimes, it was large scale, as in the case of the founding of Stanion by settlers from Brigstock.
Running through the fields and assarts of Brigstock was another important resource for Cecilia and her family. Harper’s Brook, which created the small valley in which Brigstock lay, yielded fish available to everyone. It was also a useful spot for washing clothes, rinsing tools, and playing. But Harper’s Brook offered danger as well. Few people in Brigstock could swim well, so if a young girl lost her footing or a man tumbled down the bank, she or he was likely to drown.
Beyond the fields and assarts of Brigstock lay a place just as dangerous and productive as Harper’s Brook: the forest. Some parts of the forest were heavily wooded, but other sections lay open for pasture or other uses. To Cecilia and her family, the wooded parts of the forest were places where outlaws, fairies, and other unknowns might be encountered. Perhaps they told stories, as did later generations, of a disastrous visit by the forest outlaw Robin Hood to Brigstock. The tale relates how Robin and his men, attacked while in Brigstock church, made a bold escape, but left behind a dead priest, inadvertently struck by an arrow while celebrating Mass. Despite the many dangers—human and supernatural—of the woodland, it was a place of industry too. More than six hundred medieval sites for burning charcoal have been found in Rockingham Forest, some of the charcoal used to fuel nearby iron-producing furnaces. We do not know whether any of the Penifaders were charcoal-makers or iron-smelters, but they surely went often into all parts of Rockingham Forest. It was as essential to their economy of makeshifts as their arable strips or their farmyard. With her mother and siblings, young Cecilia gathered fallen wood in the forest; helped in the digging of peat; checked on the Penifader pigs feeding wild in the underbrush; and collected nuts, berries, honey, and herbs. Whenever her father or brothers had the nerve, they also trapped hare and shot deer in the forest. If caught by foresters, they faced prosecution for poaching (animals on royal preserves were to be hunted only by the king or his friends), and if convicted, they faced fines or imprisonment.
So when Cecilia ventured outside her parents’ house and farmyard, she walked through a tight cluster of homes in Stanion, crowded on a few streets. She found the same whenever she wandered down Harper’s Brook to Brigstock village. Surrounding these twinned clusters of houses and outbuildings, lay arable fields, meadows, pastures, and forest, and in all of these, Cecilia worked and played as a young child. She went into the fields often to help with weeding, breaking clods of earth, tying bundles at harvest, or perhaps even moving ever so slightly the boundary stones that separated Penifader and Everard land; in the pastures around Brigstock, she watched animals or drove them to and from various fields; she played and fished in Harper’s Brook; and she accompanied her mother into the forest to forage for nuts, berries, fallen wood, and other necessities. This was the Brigstock and Stanion that Cecilia knew: within about 7,600 acres lay two nucleated settlements of about nine hundred adults total, several arable fields, extensive pasture and meadow, numerous small assarts, a stream full of fish, and a forest beyond.
The Wider World
Cecilia’s world did not end at the boundaries of Brigstock and Stanion. As a child, she would often have run into the road to stare at people passing through—pilgrims on their way to holy shrines; knights and ladies riding out for pleasure or hunting; peddlers offering goods for sale; carpenters and thatchers looking for work; beggars seeking alms; migrant laborers following the harvest; local folk walking to weekly markets in nearby villages and towns. Some of these people stopped for a while in Brigstock, to visit with kin and friends, or to take advantage of some occasional employment. Some even ended up settling in the community. Over the course of Cecilia’s life, about one-third of the people living on Brigstock manor moved there from elsewhere. Whether staying for a long or short time, these newcomers brought news and gossip of other places, new ideas, new fashions, new songs. From them, Cecilia learned early that there were villages, towns, and people far beyond what she saw with her own eyes.
Moreover, as she grew older, Cecilia saw many more people and places. Most peasants moved readily and often within a fifteen-mile radius of the villages in which they lived and worked. Brigstock was especially well situated, surrounded by nearby towns or villages, all within ten miles or less, that hosted markets on one day of every week. On any day, except Sunday, the Penifaders could easily reach a market—Rothwell on Monday, Thrapston on Tuesday, Geddington on Wednesday, Corby on Thursday, Kettering on Friday, and Oundle on Saturday (see Map 2). At these markets, the Penifaders bought and sold goods; hired workers and offered themselves for hire; gossiped about local news; and heard stories from other places. They traveled by foot, walking with an ease and speed that many hikers today might envy. At a pace of about four miles an hour, Cecilia’s mother could reach Corby in two hours, sell her eggs and cheese, and get back home well before dark. At the same pace, her father could get to Kettering market on a Friday, collect a new plowshare, and return within one day, and her sister Christina could walk to the village of Cranford, spend an afternoon with the man she eventually married, and be home for supper. By the time Cecilia reached the age of eight, she was probably accompanying her parents and older siblings on trips such as these. From then on, she was well aware of the world beyond the village of her birth. She talked with itinerant peddlers and laborers, she sold and bought goods at local markets, and she visited her married sister in Cranford.
Map 2. Brigstock and Its Region. On every day of the week except Sunday, Cecilia Penifader could easily walk to a market and back.
Cecilia never left Brigstock for an extended period, but one of her brothers did; to get an education, William Penifader left his home for almost a decade, and when he returned to Brigstock, he had the sophistication of a man who had walked the streets of such towns as Oxford, Cambridge, Lincoln, and, possibly, London. Perhaps Cecilia also traveled a bit too, and if so, she most likely undertook a pilgrimage to Lincoln, about sixty miles to the north. There, pilgrims prayed at the shrine of Little St. Hugh, a boy supposedly martyred by the Jews in 1255. When Hugh’s body was discovered in a well, hysterical townspeople accused eighteen Jews of his murder and hanged them; such hysterical accusations, known today as blood libel, first developed in twelfth-century Europe, but they soon became a common and dangerous expression of Christian anti-Semitism. At York in 1190, for example, 150 Jews—men, women, and children—were massacred after another spurious charge of child murder. For Cecilia, however, Hugh of Lincoln was not an unfortunate child whose death was explained away by false charges against Jews; he was a holy martyr whose cult attracted attention far and wide. If she did journey to Lincoln to pray at his shrine, her pilgrimage combined piety and pleasure. Like the pilgrims of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, she would have met new people, seen new places, and learned new customs and ideas.
Cecilia was further integrated into a wider world by the bureaucracy of the English realm. By the late thirteenth century, English kings offered justice to their subjects in a variety of forums including hundred courts (“hundreds” were subsections of counties), county courts, courts in Westminster, and most importantly, courts convened by itinerant justices who moved through the realm, bringing the king’s justice with them. Most of the crimes and quarrels of Brigstock were easily resolved in its three-weekly manorial court, but some crimes could only be adjudicated in royal courts. Any untimely death, for example, had to be investigated by the king’s coroner, and any accused murderers could only be tried before the king’s justices. The exchequer, the heart of the royal finances, also reached into the lives of Cecilia and other people in Brigstock. When the king’s officers arrived to collect taxes, they expected cooperation from local deputies and prompt payment by local taxpayers. And the military demands of England’s kings also touched the lives of ordinary peasants who were expected to contribute men and supplies to the army. As a woman, Cecilia never had to testify on a royal jury or serve in the king’s army, but she knew well the power of the king’s courts, his exchequer, and his army.
Cecilia met few foreigners. Living as she did in the heart of the English midlands, she seldom encountered anyone from Wales, Scotland, France, or even farther afield. She almost certainly never met a non-Christian, for few Muslims traveled into rural England and Jews had been expelled from England in 1290. Yet Cecilia lived in a multilingual culture. Lords and ladies spoke French; all clerics and clerks knew some Latin; and everyone was familiar with the Latin Mass, celebrated every Sunday and on other holy days, too. Cecilia’s mother tongue was English, but she possibly understood a few words or phrases in French and Latin. All in all, Cecilia’s horizons might not have been as broad as those of most modern people, but her world was not confined to the fields of Brigstock and Stanion.
Suggestions for Further Reading
For material culture, see Roberta Gilchrist, Medieval Life: Archaeology and the Life Course (2018); and Nat Alcock and Dan Miles, The Medieval Peasant House in Midland England (2014). For excavations of one village, see Maurice Beresford and John Hurst, Wharram Percy: Deserted Medieval Village (1990). For essays on a range of rural topics, see Christopher Dyer, Everyday Life in Medieval England (1994). For open fields, see his essay “Open Fields in Their Social and Economic Context: The West Midlands of England,” in Christopher Dyer et al., eds., Peasants and Their Fields: The Rationale of Open-Field Agriculture, c. 700–1800 (2018), pp. 29–48 (this volume includes essays on open fields in Scandinavia and the Low Countries). For more on European expansion and the cultivation of new lands, see Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (1993).
Brigstock during Cecilia’s day is more fully described in my Women in the Medieval English Countryside: Gender and Household in Brigstock Before the Plague (1987).
