In medieval England everyone is expected to work, if they are able. God has ordained it so. For the king, his nobles and lords, work means administration, government, justice and defence of the realm. Apart from the last, it’s pretty much down to paperwork, so secretaries, clerks, scribes, judges and lawyers are involved. Churchmen work at saving souls by praying and preaching, running abbeys, priories, cathedrals and parishes, but more often than not they too are up to their elbows in paperwork. Everything has to be written down, longhand, and often numerous copies have to be made. It’s a slow business.
Those who don’t fit into these two categories have to do all the other jobs that keep the people fed, clothed, sheltered, clean and healthy, and, if possible, content with their position in society. Of course, few ever are content as everyone hoping to better themselves.
Top tip
Remember, God put you where He wants you to be, so to try and change that is going to upset the Almighty’s eternal plan and you won’t get much sympathy when you fail.
Only small children, the sick, the ‘obviously’ disabled and the very elderly are excused from working. By ‘obviously’ disabled I mean those missing a limb or crippled or totally blind. Being hard of hearing, having a dodgy hip or being on the autistic spectrum isn’t going to qualify anyone as being among the ‘deserving poor’. The deserving poor get sympathy, handouts of alms and licences to beg. Anyone fit enough to work but unable to find a job is undeserving, regarded as ‘idle’ and an abomination to society. It’s harsh, I know, but that’s how it is in medieval times, so you need to find employment of some kind urgently, to pay your way and earn respect.
What kinds of jobs are available?
Fortunately, before the Tudor period unemployment is almost unknown, especially after the plague has severely reduced the population. Unfortunately for you, you haven’t had the appropriate training for any of the good jobs, unless you have some sparkling talent that can’t fail to impress. In the countryside, agricultural labour will be available year round: ploughing and planting, weeding and bird-scaring, hoeing, reaping and harvesting, carting and threshing, each in its season and all hard, manual work. Perhaps being outdoors in all weathers will suit you, but maybe you had some less muddy employment in mind.
Do you fancy shoe-making, carpentry, book-binding or jewellerymaking? If you do, then you’ll likely have to live in town, but therein lies the problem. Every town will already have its own craftsmen and they like to keep it that way. Unless you can provide a new service or manufacture something that doesn’t exist there – and if it doesn’t that’s probably because it isn’t needed or there aren’t enough customers to keep it profitable – then as an outsider you will not be welcome. Worse still, you won’t be a member of the guild.
Smaller towns usually have one or two guilds, dedicated to chosen saints, to which the various craftsmen and traders belong. In larger towns and cities each craft may have enough members to form their own exclusive guild, company or fellowship, whatever they decide to call it. Guilds have many functions: overseeing the indenturing (enrolment) and training of apprentices, policing the behaviour of members – and their wives – quality control of the making and selling of goods, insurance for widows, orphans and loss of livelihood, social events, even providing mourners for members’ funerals. But one of the guild’s most important tasks is to prevent non-members like you from setting up in competition.
Becoming a member is almost impossible. You could choose a craft and pay to be indentured as an apprentice. Your master will give you food and lodging and teach you everything you’ll need to know about the craft, the trade secrets, but you won’t be paid. It may be seven years or more before you qualify. For example, the goldsmiths of London demand a ten-year term in order to learn the intricacies of their craft, unless your father is a goldsmith, in which case you could qualify sooner because you probably know your way around the tools having watched your father at work. Once you’ve qualified, you spend a few years working as a ‘journeyman’ in the craft, being paid a daily wage, but you now have to pay for your keep. You also have to pay your membership fee to the guild if you want to work in the town or city.
While you’re a journeyman you’ll work on your masterpiece. If you’re a goldsmith, it might be a gilded chalice or an exquisite brooch. A stationer dealing with books might make an illuminated manuscript. Whatever it is, your masterpiece has to demonstrate your skills and be made to the highest standard you can manage. When it’s finished, the officers of the guild will judge it, and if it passes their discriminating examination, you will be entitled to call yourself a master [or mistress] of the craft, set up your own business and take on and train apprentices. Even then, if you move to another town the guild there may not recognise your qualification.
Another way to become a member is to buy your way in. Money has a knack of opening doors and overriding regulations. If you can’t afford the sizeable donation demanded, if you’re a woman, there is another way: marry a man who is already a member and learn the craft from him as you go along.
What kinds of jobs are available to women?
Employers like to take on women because, though there are equal opportunities for girls in most trades or crafts – though not in the professions – equal pay for women is out of the question. Female labour is always cheaper. Women cannot be priests, lawyers or, officially, at least, physicians, but they can do just about anything else. Some of the heaviest work, like that of bell-founders and blacksmiths, employs a few women. In the fifteenth century two London widows took over their husbands’ bell-casting businesses. Johanna Hill ran the foundry in St Botolph’s parish, Aldgate, when her husband, Richard, died in 1440, and did so until her death a year later when John Sturdy seems to have bought the business. John ran the bell foundry until he died, probably in 1459, when his widow – also Johanna – continued to manage the business.
DID YOU KNOW?
In the twenty-first century at least sixteen bells in churches across southern England, from Norfolk to Devon, still bear the makers’ marks, showing they were made in the Hill-Sturdy foundry in London.1
We also know of a couple of women blacksmiths. A London woman bequeathed ‘all my tools and anvil of blacksmithy to my apprentice’ in her will. During the Hundred Years’ War against the French, there came an occasion when Katherine of Bury, wife to Walter and mother of Andrew – both employed as the king’s smiths at the Tower of London – was paid 8d a day ‘to keep up the king’s forge in the Tower and carry on the work of the forge’ following Walter’s death while Andrew was away with the king on military campaign. One of Katherine’s jobs was to repair and sharpen the tools of the stonemasons working on the royal Palace of Westminster at the time.
A woman blacksmith.
After her father, William Ramsey, died of the plague in 1349, his daughter, Agnes, continued to run his business as an architect and stonemason. Although Agnes was married to Robert Hubard, she kept her father’s surname because he was quite famous with an excellent reputation. Agnes continued to work with celebrities of the day, being commissioned to build an exquisite tomb for King Edward III’s mother, the dowager Queen Isabella, at the incredible price of £100.
Women working in less remarkable trades are difficult to identify, but because people sometimes took their surnames from their occupations and there are feminine forms of those surnames, you can sometimes discover what jobs women do. Here is a list of names:
Throwster – female silk weaver |
Webster – female textile weaver |
Huckster – female hawker of food & drink |
Brewster – female brewer |
Tapster – female ale-seller |
Spinster – female spinner of flax or wool |
Baxter – female baker |
Kempster – carder & comber of wool |
Tranter – female street trader |
Thaxter – female thatcher |
Pallister – female paling-fence maker |
Hewster – female hewer of wood |
Beggister – female beggar |
Whister – female linen-bleacher |
Lister or Dyster – female dyer |
Corvester – cordwainer [shoemaker] |
Barbaress – female barber |
Billingster – female agricultural worker |
Hucksters and tapsters are so numerous that the female name is generally applied to men doing the same job. In tax returns of the thirteenth century, women are also described as bellringsters, hoardsters, washsters and fillisters. What are ‘fillisters’? The OED describes a fillister as a tool used in carpentry; the Free Dictionary website says it’s ‘a hook and loop fastener’. Perhaps while you’re travelling back in history, you can discover what a fillister actually does. 2
This term, borrowed from the French, describes a category of women, particularly in larger towns, that have their greatest prominence from the fourteenth century to the late fifteenth. Most women are ‘femmes couvertes’, that is, in the eyes of the law, they are ‘covered’ by their husbands. This means that although they may work as, say, baxters, while their husbands have quite different occupations, if the women take on apprentices, owe or are owed money, or are found to be selling underweight loaves, the law deals with their husbands. The husbands hold the contracts of apprenticeship, any profits from the women’s trade goes to their spouses and it’s the husbands who are prosecuted for faulty bread sold and pursued for any debts their wives owe.
However, ‘femmes soles’ are women who stand ‘alone’, not covered by their husbands. Obviously, any widows who continue to run their deceased husbands’ businesses come into this category, but married women can also be femmes soles – with their husbands’ consent in the first place – responsible for their own business contracts, profits and debts. One woman who has made a great success of running her own business as well as taking on her husband’s after his death is Rose de Burford. Let’s ask her about being a femme sole:
Good day, Mistress Burford. Can you tell us about yourself?
I was born in London in King Edward I’s reign. My father was Thomas Romayn, Alderman and one-time Lord Mayor of London in 1309-10. He was a wealthy wool merchant and pepperer, importing spices, supplying King Edward II with exotic wares: cloves, cinnamon and sugar among them. I also had contracts with King Edward and Queen Isabella for exquisitely embroidered vestments and trimmings.
So, you’re an embroiderer?
No. I don’t do the stitching myself. I wouldn’t have patience for the couching of silken and gold threads. I employ out-workers and then supervise and coordinate the work. The king commissioned a cope that took a year to make and cost £100.
What’s a cope?
You don’t know? It’s a semi-circular cloak worn by bishops and the like. This one was rich indeed, spangled with coral beads – the finest in Christendom, I think – the queen sent it as a gift to the Holy Father in Rome. Imagine that: it’s being worn by the Pope himself! I’m most proud of that.
Did your husband approve of your business?
Of course. It brought in money; why would he not? John de Burford was my father’s business partner as a pepperer and wool merchant but was a mercer too. Seeing you’re so ignorant: mercers import the finest textiles. When I married John, I learned everything about his various trades too. He was an Alderman and a Sheriff of the City in 1303-04. We hoped he would be elected Lord Mayor in 1322 but he died before that happened, so Hamo de Chigwell, a fishmonger, was elected – again. Since then, there’s been a muddle over who’s the mayor, betwixt Hamo and the goldsmith, Nicholas de Farndon. It was Lord Mayor Farndon who sent a letter last September, addressed to the Mayor of Dover, demanding to know why Dover had confiscated a shipload of pepper, zedoary and nutmegs of mine, requiring payment of £9 for its release. This was despite a writ from the king, pardoning me of any customs duties in lieu of the considerable debt the Royal Wardrobe still owes me.
Was the dispute resolved?
It was and to my satisfaction, except for a barrel-load of zedoary that went missing whilst in their hands.
What’s zedoary, you ask? It’s a bitter spice from far off India – very expensive.
Thank you, mistress. I won’t waste anymore of your valuable time.
Just as well, I have a consignment of sugar to send to the king. Business can’t be interrupted for the likes of you. Get you gone.3
Rose de Burford was a very wealthy widow owning numerous properties, including tenements in London and country estates in Surrey, Kent and Sussex. Her own country residence was at Charlton in Kent, but I cannot discover whether that is now Charlton in south London (then in the county of Kent) or a place of the same name near Dover. Either would have been convenient at each end of her business: for sales to customers in the city, or for overseeing the importing of the goods. She could afford to pay for the construction of a chapel on the south side of the church of St Thomas the Apostle in Cullum Street, in Vintry Ward, in the City of London. Rose had a son, James, who became a knight, and a daughter Katherine, for whom I have found no further information.
However wealthy they are and successful in running their businesses, it is a rare thing for women to hold an official appointment. But one woman did so: Alice Holford. Her husband, Nicholas, held the important position of Bailiff of London Bridge, responsible for collecting tolls from ships passing through the drawbridge section of the bridge as well as from carts and wagons crossing the bridge itself. To make matters complicated, the tolls to be paid varied according to the goods being transported, who they belonged to and who was carrying them. When Nicholas died in 1433 Alice took over. The arrangement was probably supposed to be temporary until a new male bailiff could be appointed, but Alice was so efficient and trustworthy that she remained in this very responsible post, collecting the city’s customs revenues for twenty years.4 Not bad for a ‘mere’ woman, the London authorities must have agreed. Sadly, Alice’s success didn’t lead to any other women receiving important civic posts.
What do women do if they have no job?
Sadly, if a woman has no skills to offer an employer and cannot find some kind of work as a domestic servant, her options are limited. Weeding other people’s gardens is a possibility, but that requires a good knowledge of plants, to be able to tell the desirable ones from the invaders. Washerwomen are always needed, but that job also needs the know-how of soap-making, soaking, beating, stain-removal, linen-whitening, water-recycling, folding, drying, etc. Doing the laundry is hard work and a long process. As a twenty-first century traveller, ignorant of the intricacies of such mundane jobs, there may be one avenue left open to you. As a last resort to earn a living, you can always sell your body. Prostitution is said to be the oldest profession.
DID YOU KNOW?
If you’re wondering, the second oldest is spying – both are mentioned in the Bible.
Throughout history, prostitution is seen as a necessary fact of life, for the most part tolerated by civic authorities, if rarely approved. In medieval London the city tries to regulate the work of ‘common women’, confining them to Cock Lane, in the north-west, near Newgate. But better yet is to keep them outside the city, out of sight and, hopefully, out of mind, across the Thames in Southwark, where they won’t sully the city’s precious reputation. The Liberty of the Clink is an area in Southwark that comes under the authority of the Bishop of Winchester. Because the liberty lies outside the jurisdiction of the City of London, some activities forbidden there are permitted here.
In 1161 the bishop was granted the power to license prostitutes and brothels in the liberty and the women became known as Winchester Geese. To be ‘bitten by a Winchester goose’ means to contract a venereal disease and ‘goose bumps’ is slang for the symptoms. Clients come by boat from a jetty at Stew Lane in the city across the river to avoid being questioned if they pass through the gates at London Bridge, and of course the gates are closed after dusk. As clients approach Bankside, as it’s known, there are signs with the brothels’ names painted on the white walls: the Bear’s Head, the Cross Keys, the Bell and the Swan. Under the direction of the Bishop of Winchester there are some restrictions: the brothels aren’t permitted to open on Sundays or religious days. There is some attempt to stop things getting out of hand, with a fine of twenty shillings should any ‘woman of the bordello […] draw any man by his gown or by his hood or any other thing’.
John of Gaddesden, an English physician writing in the early fourteenth century, advised women how to protect themselves against venereal disease. Immediately after sex with any suspect man, he said, the woman should jump up and down, run backwards down the stairs and inhale some pepper to make herself sneeze. Next, she should tickle her vagina with a feather dipped in vinegar to flush infected sperm out of her body, then wash her genitals thoroughly in a concoction of roses and herbs boiled in vinegar. It’s hard to imagine anyone actually following this advice, let alone one of the girls in Southwark’s stews (brothels). It would have puzzled the customer she’d just serviced for one thing, and running backwards downstairs sounds an excellent way to break your neck. At least it was understood that diseases such as gonorrhoea were spread by sexual intercourse: a big step forward.
In 1321 King Edward II had founded the Lock Hospital in Southwark as a treatment centre for ‘lepers’, the name then used for anyone with sores and skin lesions. It was located less than a mile from the stews of Bankside and, unsurprisingly, it soon started to specialise in VD cases. ‘Lock Hospital’ can still be found in slang dictionaries today as a generic term for any VD clinic. Southwark’s lucrative trade gave it such place names as Codpiece Lane, Cuckold Court and Sluts’ Hole.
Of course, prostitution is by no means confined to London. Every city, town and village probably has an accommodating woman or two and York is no exception. In 1424 in York, Elizabeth Frowe and Joan Skryvener were presented as procuresses, specialising in supplying young women for the entertainment of friars and priests. The borough records of York, dated 12 May 1483, note that ‘the whole parish of St Martin in Micklegate came before my lord the mayor and complained of Margery Gray, otherwise called Cherrylips, that she was a woman ill disposed of her body to whom ill disposed men resort to the annoyance of her neighbours’.
What entertainment is available?
Fortunately, life isn’t all work in medieval England. The Church has numerous ‘holy days’, celebrating important Christian events such as Christmas, Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras), Easter, Whitsun and Ascension, as well as Church ‘inventions’, like Lady Day, Corpus Christi and Harvest Festival. Then there are the numerous saints’ days. Many of these celebrations, though not all, mean a holiday from work, far more than we have in the twenty-first century and Christmas alone is a twelve-day holiday. There are also a few pagan festivals, remnants of other religions from previous centuries: Hocktide, May Day and Lammas.
Holidays are an excuse for feasting, fun and celebration; along with the appropriate church service in most cases. Shrove Tuesday, on the eve of the forty-day season of Lent, is often celebrated with a football match. Forget City versus United, ninety minutes, eleven-a-side with a referee to see the rules are kept on a nice, neat playing field. This is a free-for-all through the streets; one village against another; fishmongers’ apprentices against the grocers’ apprentices; wives against unmarried girls (yes, women play as well). Anything goes: kicking (not only the ball), carrying, heading (other players as well as the ball), punching, tripping, hair-pulling and hiding the ball under your skirts.
The aim is to get the ball (an inflated pig’s bladder) in the ‘goal’; usually the parish church porch at either end of the ‘pitch’, which maybe a couple of miles apart. Games can have any number of players and go on all day, or until the participants drop from exhaustion and are required to be revived in the nearest tavern, and a great time is had by all. Tomorrow will be a day of sore heads, whether from butting the ball or each other, or drinking too much ale in celebrating victory or consolation in defeat. Casualties are many, with even the occasional fatality. Football is a hazardous sport.
For something less energetic, there is likely to be street theatre of some kind. Acrobats, minstrels, jugglers and mountebanks, even puppet shows delight spectators. Mystery, miracle and mummers’ plays are staged.
The popular medieval mystery plays re-enacted Bible stories and first appear in the tenth and eleventh centuries, acted out by monks, priests and choristers as a way of helping ordinary folk learn the biblical stories. However, the Church is soon worrying about churchmen performing certain parts in these plays. Should a monk play Eve or the Virgin Mary, or worse still, King Herod murdering the innocent babies? Is it appropriate to tell of a woman giving birth or mass murder in a church? Soon lay members are acting the parts – men only, so historians tells us – and the scripts become longer, the stories more involved, taking on a traditional form so a town has the exact same plays, year after year, with the scripts passed on by word of mouth only.
Gradually, more and more mystery plays are created and eventually the whole Bible story is told, from the Creation to Doomsday, including Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah’s Flood, the Nativity, Crucifixion and Resurrection, gathered together in cycles. The entire cycle is performed in one day, usually close to Christmas or Easter, though in York they choose the feast of Corpus Christi in June, which gives them more hours of daylight as the cycle takes place outdoors around the city.
Street performers.
The plays were originally performed in the churchyard and crowds would gather to watch, but, as you can imagine, the actors could get carried away and the plays became more and more rude. The clergy complained about the lewdness debasing the scriptural message, so the cycles are moved out of the churchyard and onto the streets, where they become worse still.
There are no stages so the actors devise two-tier pageant wagons that can be wheeled around to the required venue, the two levels providing performance space with the ground in front of the wagon forming a third stage. Each Bible story has its own scenery which is fixed to the wagon. In cities like Chester and York, each guild has their own pageant wagon and tells one particular story – the goldsmiths of York always do the Three Kings with their expensive gifts and jewellery, the water-drawers of Chester always enact Noah’s flood, though the ship-wrights do the building of the ark. The wagons trundle round town in the correct order, performing the story and then moving on.
When the dramas are performed by secular folk, professional actors are sometimes hired to play the roles; deductions being made from their pay for poor acting or forgetting their lines. These actors are considered the lowest of the low, along with beggars and vagabonds, and the Church frowns upon their involvement in religious plays. However, even the amateur actors throw themselves into their parts. When Father Nicholas de Neuchatel played Christ in the Easter Passion of 1437, he almost died on the cross and had to be attended by a physician and the local tavern landlady. It’s not recorded whose attentions had the greater effect upon his recovery.
Usually, there is little money, unless the guilds provide funds by taxing their members, so players perform in their everyday clothes, though characters such as God have special robes and a mask. There is a record of an actor paying a goldsmith’s wife for the loan of her best dress so he could play the part of Noah’s wife: the original pantomime dame.
DID YOU KNOW?
Noah’s wife is the original pantomime dame. On the Continent, hers is a very minor role, but in England she has a unique comedy role as the stereotypical cantankerous and obstinate wife, adding to the fun.
However the props and costumes are cobbled together, the plays provide a wonderful entertainment in the towns and cities, bringing colour and a sense of drama. The other kind of religious drama is the Miracle Plays which tell the stories of the saints and, obviously, their miracles. The earliest that survives is about St Catherine and was specially written by Abbot Geoffrey of St Albans in 1110 for his pupils.
For poorer villages and hamlets there is another form of spectacle; less expensive and of shorter duration. This less ambition form of play has its own class of actors, the mummers, and is quite different from the Mystery Plays of the cities. Mumming is an ancient form of street theatre dating back long before Christianity as a fertility rite, marking the death of summer and its rebirth in the spring. The word ‘mumming’ refers to the masks the actors wear to disguise themselves during the performance. This disguise is important because it’s thought that if a mummer is recognised, the magic of the ritual is ruined and the sun might not return. The tradition continues that mummers should be unrecognisable. Morris men are part of this same custom with their ribbons, bells and blacked-up faces, making them hard to recognise. It’s because of their blackened faces that they are called ‘Morris’ or more correctly ‘Moorish’, i.e., African men.
By the Middle Ages mumming has lost its pagan significance. People are no longer so worried that the sun might not return, though enough of the old practices are kept up, just in case. The mummers are now actors and their performances purely for entertainment and money. A hat is usually passed around the crowd to collect donations, not for charity but for the actors to earn a living. Medieval Christianity introduced new characters to the mummers’ plays. Beelzebub is now a popular baddie, but the most important new character was the hero, St George, who became famous after supposedly slaying a dragon in Egypt in the third century AD. St George is sometimes accompanied by his dragon, which symbolises evil of any kind, but since the dragon costume is difficult and expensive to make his place is often taken by other, less outlandish, villains. After the Crusades, this is often the Saracen or Turkish knight but can be any manner of wicked king, demon or thief; there were endless possibilities. Mummers’ plays always have a moral, that good will always, after many a set-back, conquer evil.
By the fifteenth century, as more people become literate, a new way of relaxing evolves: reading for pleasure. In England in 1481 William Caxton, using the first printing press in the country, publishes The History of Reynard the Fox. Caxton intends to educate his readers, using the short stories of Reynard to show them how to avoid the ‘daily deceptions’ of life. But this is far from a serious book. If you’ve ever watched and enjoyed the cartoon antics of the Roadrunner and Wily Coyote, or Tom and Jerry, you will love Reynard the Fox.
If you prefer romance and adventure novels with a dash of fantasy thrown in, Master Caxton has another printed gem for you: Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory. Despite its French title, don’t worry, Sir Thomas wrote his best-seller in English – well, Middle English, at least: a language you’ll be getting used to by now. The book is a collection of tales about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. You’ll hear about familiar characters such as Arthur, Guinevere, Merlin and Sir Lancelot, as well as some that may be new to you: Tristram and Isolde, Elaine, Sir Bedevere and Sir Gawain.
For something a tad more racy, there is The Romance of the Rose, marketed as ‘a handbook for lovers’ when it was first written, in French, in the thirteenth century. After Geoffrey Chaucer translates it into English in the fourteenth century, this bawdy ‘dream-tale’ becomes very popular. There are some exquisitely illuminated versions of The Rose still extant in the twenty-first century and, if you’re lucky, you may find other manuscript copies during your travels. The pictures are gorgeous to look at, even if you don’t fancy wading through the very wordy text.