The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century

by Ian Mortimer

The high circling walls, the statue of the king, the great round towers, and—above it all—the immense cathedral collectively impress you with their sheer strength. And then you notice the smell. Four hundred yards from the city gate, the muddy road you are following crosses a brook. As you look along the banks you see piles of refuse, broken crockery, animal bones, entrails, human feces, and rotting meat strewn in and around the bushes. In some places the muddy banks slide into thick quagmires where townsmen have hauled out their refuse and pitched it into the stream. In others, rich green grasses, reeds, and undergrowth spring from the highly fertilized earth. As you watch, two seminaked men lift another barrel of excrement from the back of a cart and empty it into the water. A small brown pig roots around in the garbage.

It is not called Shitbrook for nothing.

You have come face-to-face with the contrasts of a medieval city. It is so proud, so grand, and in places so beautiful and yet it displays all the ...

Welcome to a place of pride, wealth, authority, crime, justice, high art, stench, and beggary.

on the city bridge.

Some clergymen rail against such immorality, of course, but few directly allude to Southwark. Most of the bathhouses are rented from the bishop of Winchester.

You will also find a communal running water supply—fed through a series of conduits—even though the pressure is sometimes low, as a result of all the siphoning off to private houses.

On certain special occasions the conduits are even made to run with wine—for example, on the arrival of the captive king of France in 1357, or to celebrate the coronation of Henry IV in 1399.

This preponderance of young people leads to social differences in every community and field of activity. The average man or woman in the medieval street has seventeen years’ less experience to draw on in every aspect of his or her lives. He or she has many fewer elders to ask for advice. When you consider that societies with youthful populations are more violent, tend to be supportive of slavery, and see nothing wrong in holding brutal combats in which men fight to the death for the sake of entertainment, you realize that society has changed fundamentally.

Medieval society thinks of itself like this: there are three sections of society, or “estates,” created by God—those who fight, those who pray, and those who work the land.

It is a neat concept and particularly attractive to those doing the fighting and praying, who use it to justify the gross inequalities in society. But it is a concept that has been increasingly outdated since the twelfth century. Between 1333 and 1346 it is systematically shredded by the English longbowmen, who, although ranked among “those who work,” show that they are a far more potent military force than the massed charging ranks of “those who fight.” In those few years, “those who work” become “those who fight,” thereby threatening to make the old aristocracy redundant.

Lordly status loosely correlates with income. In theory each earl should receive at least £1,000 from his estates. Most have between £700 and £3,000. The richest is Thomas of Lancaster, who has five earldoms and an income of about £11,000 in 1311. This is exceeded by only two people over the whole century. Second on the fourteenth-century “Rich List” is Queen Isabella, who allocates to herself 20,000 marks (£13,333) per year in 1327-30. First place goes to John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, whose gross income from his English and Welsh estates in 1394-95 is in the region of £12,000, in addition to a pension from Castile of about £6,600.10 Most barons have an income of between £300 and £700, but in a few exceptional cases—Lord Berkeley, for instance—a baron may receive as much as £1,300 per year.

The hierarchy of the English clergy is similar to that of the secular lords. There are spiritual noblemen—archbishops, bishops, and the abbots of the major religious houses—and subordinate levels: archdeacons, deans, canons, and the lesser clergy.

Most remarkable of all, in 1383 Bishop Henry Despenser of Norwich invades Flanders. He claims to be fighting a “crusade” against the French supporters of Pope Clement but instead he attacks the Flemish supporters of Pope Urban (whom the English also recognize). If it is too much to expect an aristocratic bishop to turn the other cheek, you would have thought at least he might obey the commandment “Thou shalt not kill.”

Add all these groups together and you begin to realize that “those who pray” are as rich and numerous as “those who fight.”

As you have to be eighteen to enter a monastery or to become a priest, this means that more than 2 percent of adult males in England are clergymen.

The idea of all the peasants pulling together as one, equal in rank and wealth, is a modern myth.

The franklins who take on such an estate further blur the distinction between the gentry and the peasantry by marrying the daughters of esquires. A man who appoints his own bailiff, is attended by servants, has cousins among the gentry, and lords it over his fellow villagers in the manorial court hardly fits the usual image of a peasant.

The people who fall outside the three estates are among the most interesting you will meet. Consider the servants. You might assume that a servant is the lowest ranking person of all, beneath even those who work. But as any servant will tell you, service has its reward, and the level of that reward depends on whom you serve and in what capacity.

Unlike men, women are not usually described by what they do but by their marital condition.

It is not that they are second-class citizens—class has got little to do with it; high-status females are just as highly respected as high-status males—it is that women are blamed for all the physical, intellectual, and moral weaknesses of society. It was a woman who first persuaded a man to take a bite from the forbidden fruit, with the result that all humanity was cast out of Paradise, and that is a difficult thing to live down. The fact that the Bible is “a text wherein we find that woman was the ruin of Mankind” (as Chaucer puts it) presents a fundamental platform upon which all manner of prejudices are founded (although Chaucer himself is remarkably free from these).

Many women consider that this male-dominated society is simply the way things are, and the way that God intended the world to be, as a punishment on women. For if anyone looks anywhere for guidance in such matters, they look in the Bible, and Genesis is not the only book with a sexist slant. In addition, the intellectual developments of the thirteenth century—which increasingly form the basis of educated opinion in the fourteenth—have spread the Aristotelian dictum that women are basically “deformed men.”

You therefore have a society in which men are led to believe that their wives are constantly aching to have sex as often as they can. At the same time the women are led to believe that they are the physical manifestations of lust and that their wombs will suffocate with excess seed unless they have sex regularly. For unmarried women this presents something of a problem. John Gaddesden—one of the leading medical lights at Oxford in the early part of the century—recommends women suffering from a superfluity of lust should find a man and marry him quickly. If this is not possible, they should travel, exercise frequently, and take medicines. If this regimen does not work, and the lust brings on a fainting fit, a woman should find a midwife who should lubricate her fingers with oil, insert then into her vagina, and “move them vigorously about.”

To relieve the monotony the soldiers start drinking and flirting with some of the nuns. Unsurprisingly the nuns refuse their advances and lock themselves in their dormitory. Undeterred, the soldiers force their way in and rape them.

They draw their swords; remove the newly married bride from her husband, family, and friends; and take it in turns to rape her too.

Arundel gives the order for all the women to be thrown overboard, to lighten the load.

Nor is this violent loyalty confined to secular lords. On one occasion in 1384, after the bishop of Exeter has refused to let the archbishop of Canterbury visit his diocese, three of his household esquires force the archbishop’s messenger to eat the wax seal of the letter he is carrying. 4 several members of the archbishop’s household exact revenge by seizing one of the bishop’s men and making him eat his own shoes. It is not exactly behavior appropriate for the servants of the highest-ranking clergy in the realm.

The lack of distinction between fact and fiction with regard to distant countries is understandable, but it should alert you to a wider failure to distinguish between the real and the fabulous. At times it seems that medieval people pride themselves on the quantity of their knowledge, not its quality or correctness.

People do not understand the laws of physics, the nature of matter, or even how the human body functions. Hence they do not see limitations on how the world operates. Their sense of normality is thus somewhat precarious.

Ships may be made to move without oars or rowers, so that large vessels might be driven on the sea or on a river by a single man, and more swiftly than if they were strongly manned. Chariots can be built which can move without any draught animal at incalculable speed . . . Flying machines might be made in the middle of which a man might sit, turning a certain mechanism whereby artfully built wings might beat the air, in the manner of a bird in flight. Another instrument could be made which, although small, will lift or lower weights of almost infinite greatness . . . Again, instruments might be made for walking in the sea, or in rivers, even to the very bottom, without bodily danger . . . And very many things of this sort might be made: bridges which cross rivers without pier or prop whatsoever, and unheard-of machines and engines.

It is from the same belief that anything is possible that the greatest discoveries are made.

Walk into any of the churches and chapels up and down the country, and you will see that many of the walls are painted with scenes from the Bible. But it will take you a moment or two to realize they are biblical scenes, for the figures are not wearing clothing from the time of Christ. All of the people in every single one of these images of the Holy Land look as if they have just stepped out of medieval England. The Romans are dressed in medieval clothes. Christ and the disciples are similarly medieval in appearance. If there are pictures of boats or soldiers, then these too are medieval.

There is simply no understanding of cultural development in medieval England, no understanding that people in different ages look and act differently, and no sense of Ancient Rome or Roman Palestine being culturally different.

Very few high-ranking members of society are fluent in English.

The change is largely due to the nationalist outlook of King Edward III, who speaks English, expresses a pride in the language, and even has his own mottoes emblazoned in it.

“Your shithouse rhyming isn’t worth a turd.”

Before Edward III introduces the first mechanical clocks to his palaces in the 1350s and 1360s, there are none in England—with the exception of an experimental one devised by an enterprising abbot of St. Albans, Richard of Wallingford.

there are two sorts of time in use simultaneously: clock time and solar time. So it is necessary to specify “hour of the clock” (our “o’clock”), if that is what you mean, in order to differentiate between the two.

When the ostentation of the wealthy is so great, and the wages of those who labor so low, it is not surprising that a great many people turn to crime.

Prostitutes are tolerated in London as long as they wear the yellow hood of their trade and abide by the city regulations.

Convenience, you will soon realize, is not something to which aristocrats aspire. The more impractical the clothing, the higher the status of the wearer.

While the traditional image of knights in armor is accurate and widely accepted, the equally representative image of knights wearing corsets and garter belts is perhaps less well known.

At the other extreme you might prefer the “courtpiece” or courtepie, a very short doublet that not only reveals the wearer’s bottom but hangs barely two inches lower than the belt around his hips, so he can show off the bulge in the front of his tights as well as the roundness of his buttocks.

But the end of the century marks the pinnacle in the sexualization of men’s clothing. We have come a long way since the reign of Edward I, when lords still wear tunics which hang from the shoulders like a pair of velvet curtains.

On both sides of the Channel noblemen seem to be in competition to wear the longest shoes. Whatever the cause of this trend (length of feet and manhood?) by 1350 the artificial lengthening of the toes is well under way—six inches long, seven, eight—with the points being partly stuffed with wool to make them semi-rigid.

In the modern world, in which female clothing is more often designed to attract the attention of the opposite sex, the radical sexualization of men’s clothing is doubly surprising. It is not women’s skirt lengths which change with the times but those of men. No wonder monastic chroniclers feel obliged to pass comment: they blame the men for displaying very short skirts and well-packed hose, and they blame the women for being delighted by what they see.

It might all seem slightly bizarre—that you can wear deadly weapons in Trumpington but not in Cambridge—but it all goes to show that, while medieval society might appear brutal and frightening, it is not unsophisticated in its brutality and fear.

One notorious spot is the road between Egham and Staines. In bad weather it will look as if you are heading into a series of flooded stretches of road; there is nothing to warn you that the water is between eight and twelve feet deep. In 1386 a man drowns in one of them. The abbot of Chertsey, who is responsible for keeping the road in good repair, has the audacity to claim the man’s goods, on account of the death occurring on his land.

Note that blind horses are usually worth only about half their usual price. In case you are wondering why there are so many blind horses, it is because they have been stolen, and blinding a horse is one way to prevent it from finding its way back home or recognizing its true master.

There is a romantic notion that the sea is timeless, never changing, crashing on the shingle beaches of this world relentlessly. Global warming is just beginning perhaps to alert us to some of the shortcomings of this view, but even so we tend to think in terms of the sea being something which was once timeless.