Back in my schooldays the sort of history that was taught in junior high school concerned monarchs and battles and dates; and power and politics and changing borders. Not at all uninteresting but, really, what was the relevance to an Australian schoolboy of some war or other that the British fought with the Dutch? By the time I studied history at senior high school the course subject was known as British History but, by some mangling of the mother tongue, the curriculum covered Australian history in one year alternating with English history the next. I was fortunate to be in my matriculation year when the British History bill of fare was Australian - so at least there was some relevance. Twofold fortunate, I believe, because the history of Australia has little to do with kings and princes (and their surrogate colonial state and national governors), and the focus of history in my matriculation course was mainly social and economic: white settlement of the continent, the rise of the wool industry, the impact of gold discoveries, the federation of the Commonwealth, economic growth. Then, at university, I was able to study "economic history" - which was taught as something useful to know, somewhat the antithesis of "political history" I suppose. While the princes and the potentates created the nations and changed the map, they were able to do so only within the constraints of their economic resources. The pharaohs built the pyramids (with a bit of poetic licence), but only because the Egyptian economy allowed them to do so. And what of the lives of those who actually did the building?
All of this is to explain why years later (in August 2005) I enrolled for a Council of Adult Education course on Daily Life in the Middle Ages, tutor Dr. Katrina Burge. What follows is both a distillation of Dr. Burge's material and some subsequent reading, and an expansion of the notes I made during Dr. Burge's eloquent presentation.
If, as L.P.Hartley would have it, "the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there", then the task of the historian is to describe and understand those differences. And, not only must the historian contend with the vertical slices of time, but also with the horizontal slices of society at different times. The "daily life" of the title clearly doesn't imply the daily life of the kings or the bishops enthralling though that may be, an area well traversed by the historical novelists. No, "daily life" refers to the ordinary people, the horizontal slices of society well below the upper levels of power. Political history cannot be ignored, but here the focus will be on what it was like to live and die - and be underprivileged - in the Middle Ages. Moreover, while the scope of the CAE course covered all of Europe, readers here will have to be content with some slices of English daily life only. But be not concerned, there's no scarcity of story to tell; there are countless publications devoted to English social history. The challenge (without delving into myriad sources) is to extract some of the more significant bits, and to make them interesting to the general reader. I guess I've just set myself up!
At the outset it's important to get a sense of what is meant by the Middle Ages. Look at it this way. There have been roughly 2000 years of what these days is known as the common era, formerly anno domini, A.D., since the birth of Christ. Think of four tranches of roughly 500 years each........and the Middle Ages occupied the two central tranches, 1000 years approximately. If, looking back from the 21st Century, we contemplate the most recent 500 years we are in no doubt that an enormous amount has happened: 500 years ago Henry VIII was on the English throne, science and technology as we know them barely existed, and to the people of that time today's world would have been incomprehensible. We accept, today, that change is occurring at an ever-increasing rate, and we like to think that in earlier times, the Middle Ages, say, things were pretty much unchanging. Is that really so? and can it really have been so for 1000 years?!
The historians' definition of the Middle Ages, by pretty general agreement, extends from the fall of the Roman Empire in the west in 476 C.E., to 1453 when Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire, fell to the Turks (although neither bookend is a moment in English history) - almost exactly the 1000 years mentioned above. And, not surprisingly given the huge time span, historians for convenience sub-divide the 1000 years, specifically into three: the 500 Anglo-Saxon years up to the year 1000 (or 1066) are known as the Dark Ages; the years from 1000 to 1300 are the Early Middle Ages; the years from 1300 to1453 (or a bit later) are the Late Middle Ages. (And, further confusion: the Middle Ages are also known as Mediaeval times - as opposed to the Renaissance, which followed.)
So what was English life like during this 1000 years? Earlier historians tended to regard the Middle Ages as a period of unbroken barbarism and superstition, and a cultural chasm. But in the late nineteenth century, influenced by the ideas of Darwin, historians came to view historical development as evolutionary: the Mediaeval period could not have been a period of no progress – because “history does not take leaps”. So there must have been social evolution; and even incremental adjustments must have produced some substantial changes over such a long time - inevitable change and inevitable growth, cannot be ignored. Nevertheless, the Middle Ages was an era without striking evidence of dramatic change, and not being able to provide an album of before and after pictures the best we can manage is a “typical” snapshot of the times.
* Population
It has been estimated that the population of the British Isles (not simply England) grew from half a million to three million souls over the 1000 years of the Middle Ages.
* Social Organization
There was a unified kingdom from the time of the Norman Conquest, but prior to 1066, in Anglo-Saxon times, there had been smaller kingdoms. In those earlier times there was significant peasant ownership of farmland, but the peasantry did not enjoy the independence and freedom of action that freehold implies – typically there were obligations to perform tasks for the local lord as demanded: cutting wood, repairing roads, cultivating the lord’s land (in addition to the peasant’s own); and, moreover, there was an obligation, for instance, to use and pay for the use of the lord’s mill, and bread oven. In practice, this system amounted to the feudalism that came to be the social structure after the arrival of the Normans, where land was no longer owned by the peasantry.
Feudalism was the social organization of that part of the Middle Ages subsequent to the Dark Ages, characterized by the manor and the attendant mutual social obligations. The land was occupied by, but no longer owned by, the serfs, and the serfs had obligations to the lord of the manor, who in turn was a vassal of a higher noble, in turn beholden to the king. The so-called “hierarchy of reciprocal obligations” imposed obligations on the serfs in the form of produce and labour; the return obligations were protection, and the right to share in the communal interests. The feudal system existed basically unchanged during the second half of the Middle Ages, although latterly breaking down somewhat through the growth of non-manorial villages, and trade outside the manor. The magna carta, flowing from the 1215 revolt of the barons against the king, re-balanced the obligations of the social order, but essentially feudalism remained.
The Catholic church was also a pervasive feature of Mediaeval times, in particular the rise of monastic institutions which led, in turn, to the consolidation of doctrine, the growth of power, and also to the Crusades (approx. 1100 to 1300) – to reclaim Christian holy sites from the Turks. The principal thrust of the Church was orthodoxy, and heretics were vigorously persecuted. The serfs did not stray far from that orthodoxy. The recognition of the Church as such an integral part of the social order leads to the so-called tripartite view of Middle Ages society as “work, fight and pray” (clearly a masculine concept). Additionally, there is a bold theory that regards the stirrup as the defining feature of the Middle Ages: the stirrup facilitated mounted conflict; and led to the class of knights, and to the concept of chivalry.
* Religion
England was a Catholic nation through the Middle Ages, and remained so until Henry VIII broke with Rome in the 1534 Act of Supremacy, and established the Church of England. By the end of the era there were perhaps 900 religious houses - monasteries, nunneries, friaries etc. - most established during a wave of monastic enthusiasm in the 11th and 12th Centuries. There were three categories of holy men: the local clergy, the mendicant friars, and the monks. Prayer was seen as "work", so to be a monk was a useful occupation; and it followed that it was entirely appropriate to pay a monk to pray for you. Having a local community of monks was seen as building up a fund of holy goodwill. Monasteries were also important because they provided succour and sustenance for others (and were retirement homes as well).
* Villages
Villages were established for safety and to facilitate trade. They spawned fairs and pageants, and community life generally. Villages led to the formalisation of job specialisation, division of labour. And to the establishment of churches, and the strengthening of religious practice.
* Built Environment
We tend to picture the past by the structures that we can see: the castles and the manor houses and the churches (but only those made of stone), and - despite Henry - some monasteries. The humble structures have not survived, but between the archaeologists and the historians we can reconstruct the simplest houses: two rooms, timber and clay construction, earthen floor. A “squalid, unhealthy hovel”, hot in summer, cold and damp in winter, and always smelly. Shuttered, unglazed windows, smoke struggling to escape through the thatch. Any upper storey reached by outside ladder.
* London and other major centres
It is estimated that in the Middle Ages, aside from London, there were in England four centres only with more than 1000 houses – Bristol, Coventry, Norwich and York. This is a startling proposition but, exaggerated or not, it gives an idea of the rural nature of the English economy. London had perhaps 50000 residents……..and possibly 100 churches – which gives a sense of the importance of the Church in the lives of the people. The streets of London were foul, not always paved, but where they were the cobbles sloped to the centre to create a sort of drain. There were no footpaths. Householders were expected to put out rubbish from the downstairs only, but frequently ejected slops from the upper windows. Domestic refuse was mingled with offal and blood from butchering done in the streets. The tide of filth eventually found its way to the Thames. The city authorities did what they could, with numerous ordinances and prosecutions, and by employing officials to supervise street cleaning, and carts and boats were commissioned, but recalcitrant citizens could not be deterred. London remained primed for epidemics throughout the Middle Ages.
* Time
The sun was the main regulator of time; and even where clocks were available they had no minute hands. The peasantry had no sense of historical time: the people did not picture the present as being so many years from the birth of Christ.
* Sounds
Human sounds and the sounds of farm animals were dominant. There were no farm machines. The most pervasive mechanical sound was the bell - the church bells from nearby and distant villages, and the bells from the local flocks and herds.
* Smells
When Alan Bennett describes the filthy living conditions of Miss Shepherd, "the lady in the van", it is not so much the chaos and disorder of her existence that arrests our sensibilities, but the imagined odours - the cast-off and decaying food scraps, the sanitary napkins (used for heaven knows what purpose) drying over the electric element, the plastic bags of daily excrement. So too in the Middle Ages - the body odour of the universally unwashed was part of the background to life. And the smells of human excrement. And animal manure. And cooking fires.
* Families
Big families equated to more workers and hence to more affluence, not the reverse – the mindset was to have more children, not fewer. Infertility was a great personal problem, because it denied the children to look after parents in old age. Marriages for affection were possible. Peasants typically married post-pregnancy, after the demonstration of fertility! The nobility usually had arranged marriages, and insisted on virginity (in the female only!).
* Health
While stone-ground flour contained the grit that tended to grind down teeth as well, there was generally no dental decay..........because there was no refined sugar. Women's health was reasonable, but worsened in later times when mobile doctors spread postpartum infection (puerperal fever remained a major fatal disease worldwide until it was identified by Hungarian physician, Ignaz Semmelweis, in 1847, and "cured" by cleanliness). Women living in cities, away from the sunshine of rural life, tended to develop rickets, leading in turn to pelvises that succumbed to the first childbirth, and death. A curiosity: the practice of wet-nursing among the affluent resulted in less healthy babies - because the milk of longer-term wet-nurses was not so nutritious as that of the natural mother.
As to life expectancy: always excepting death before adulthood and accidents, people seemed to live into their 60s. There was also bubonic plague, the Black Death. Arriving in England in 1348, with recurrences over the succeeding twenty years, the plague probably slashed the population by one-third.
* Diet
The many historical references to bakers and the price of loaves suggest that home baking was not so prevalent as we might imagine, doubtless because of the absence of home ovens. Meat was an important part of the average diet. Cattle likely provided a substantial percentage: the fattened beasts typically went to market, while the farm folk consumed the worn-out farm oxen. Because the supply of winter feed was limited many animals had to be slaughtered in the autumn. The absence of refrigeration meant that the surplus autumn kill was smoked or salted - smoking of pork for ham and bacon was the norm anyway; beef and mutton were usually salted. The harvesting of sea salt was a major industry. Pig-raising was widespread, because the pigs could forage in nearby woodlands requiring less husbandry; and, in addition to their meat, their fat was utilized as lard for the making of candles and soap. Dairy produce was an important part of diet. The low fat yield of cows’ milk led to supplementation with goat and sheep milk. Chickens, ducks and geese were year-round food (as well as the eggs); pigeons too. (Where ducks and geese were sent "on the hoof" to market they were first driven through wet pitch or tar, then through sand to crust their feet for the journey ahead - a precaution against lame ducks!). If rabbits, hares and deer were fair game they would be on the table, but - for instance - the poaching of deer from a royal forest usually incurred the death penalty, so venison was never a staple. The consumption of fish was commonplace - and, near the sea, crustaceans and shellfish. Historical references to root vegetables are rare, and they may not have been commonly eaten. The pickling of cabbages, and the drying of peas and beans, made them year-round fare. Onions and leeks and garlic feature a lot in contemporary accounts, as do herbs, something perhaps to do with the less than fresh meats. Tropical fruits were unknown, and oranges rare, but otherwise the range of home-grown fruits was as today, although mulberries and quinces were much more prevalent. Ale was the universal drink; cider and imported wine lagged well behind. (Tea didn't reach England until the mid-1600s; coffee a little earlier, in the 1630s.)
Wrap
After the end of the Roman occupation there came the era of the Anglo-Saxon kings. What we know to-day as England comprised a number of separate kingdoms through to the Norman Conquest; then the Norman/French kings – from William in 1066 – reigned over the unified kingdom until succeeded by the Plantagenet Henry III in 1216. And before the Middle Ages were over the Plantagenets, the Lancasters and the Yorks had all come and gone. Henry Tudor took the throne in 1485 after defeating Richard III in the final War of the Roses. That vast period after the Romans saw the set-backs of the Black Death and the Hundred Years War; but it also saw the invention of spectacles, of gunpowder, of the astrolabe, and of printing (triggering the demise of the monopoly on learning held by the clergy). It saw Chaucer, and the building of the great cathedrals. It saw the establishment of Oxford and Cambridge Universities. It saw some political evolution, notably the emergence of a form of representative assembly, and some limitation on the powers of the monarch. It saw the rise in the importance of the towns, and the spread of trade. But England remained a pre-feudal or feudal society throughout, and “daily life” remained much the same. The last word, perhaps, to historian, Sir John Clapham: “Conquests are not always of great significance in economic history.”
Gary Andrews
All of this is to explain why years later (in August 2005) I enrolled for a Council of Adult Education course on Daily Life in the Middle Ages, tutor Dr. Katrina Burge. What follows is both a distillation of Dr. Burge's material and some subsequent reading, and an expansion of the notes I made during Dr. Burge's eloquent presentation.
- ooOoo -
If, as L.P.Hartley would have it, "the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there", then the task of the historian is to describe and understand those differences. And, not only must the historian contend with the vertical slices of time, but also with the horizontal slices of society at different times. The "daily life" of the title clearly doesn't imply the daily life of the kings or the bishops enthralling though that may be, an area well traversed by the historical novelists. No, "daily life" refers to the ordinary people, the horizontal slices of society well below the upper levels of power. Political history cannot be ignored, but here the focus will be on what it was like to live and die - and be underprivileged - in the Middle Ages. Moreover, while the scope of the CAE course covered all of Europe, readers here will have to be content with some slices of English daily life only. But be not concerned, there's no scarcity of story to tell; there are countless publications devoted to English social history. The challenge (without delving into myriad sources) is to extract some of the more significant bits, and to make them interesting to the general reader. I guess I've just set myself up!
At the outset it's important to get a sense of what is meant by the Middle Ages. Look at it this way. There have been roughly 2000 years of what these days is known as the common era, formerly anno domini, A.D., since the birth of Christ. Think of four tranches of roughly 500 years each........and the Middle Ages occupied the two central tranches, 1000 years approximately. If, looking back from the 21st Century, we contemplate the most recent 500 years we are in no doubt that an enormous amount has happened: 500 years ago Henry VIII was on the English throne, science and technology as we know them barely existed, and to the people of that time today's world would have been incomprehensible. We accept, today, that change is occurring at an ever-increasing rate, and we like to think that in earlier times, the Middle Ages, say, things were pretty much unchanging. Is that really so? and can it really have been so for 1000 years?!
The historians' definition of the Middle Ages, by pretty general agreement, extends from the fall of the Roman Empire in the west in 476 C.E., to 1453 when Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire, fell to the Turks (although neither bookend is a moment in English history) - almost exactly the 1000 years mentioned above. And, not surprisingly given the huge time span, historians for convenience sub-divide the 1000 years, specifically into three: the 500 Anglo-Saxon years up to the year 1000 (or 1066) are known as the Dark Ages; the years from 1000 to 1300 are the Early Middle Ages; the years from 1300 to1453 (or a bit later) are the Late Middle Ages. (And, further confusion: the Middle Ages are also known as Mediaeval times - as opposed to the Renaissance, which followed.)
So what was English life like during this 1000 years? Earlier historians tended to regard the Middle Ages as a period of unbroken barbarism and superstition, and a cultural chasm. But in the late nineteenth century, influenced by the ideas of Darwin, historians came to view historical development as evolutionary: the Mediaeval period could not have been a period of no progress – because “history does not take leaps”. So there must have been social evolution; and even incremental adjustments must have produced some substantial changes over such a long time - inevitable change and inevitable growth, cannot be ignored. Nevertheless, the Middle Ages was an era without striking evidence of dramatic change, and not being able to provide an album of before and after pictures the best we can manage is a “typical” snapshot of the times.
* Population
It has been estimated that the population of the British Isles (not simply England) grew from half a million to three million souls over the 1000 years of the Middle Ages.
* Social Organization
There was a unified kingdom from the time of the Norman Conquest, but prior to 1066, in Anglo-Saxon times, there had been smaller kingdoms. In those earlier times there was significant peasant ownership of farmland, but the peasantry did not enjoy the independence and freedom of action that freehold implies – typically there were obligations to perform tasks for the local lord as demanded: cutting wood, repairing roads, cultivating the lord’s land (in addition to the peasant’s own); and, moreover, there was an obligation, for instance, to use and pay for the use of the lord’s mill, and bread oven. In practice, this system amounted to the feudalism that came to be the social structure after the arrival of the Normans, where land was no longer owned by the peasantry.
Feudalism was the social organization of that part of the Middle Ages subsequent to the Dark Ages, characterized by the manor and the attendant mutual social obligations. The land was occupied by, but no longer owned by, the serfs, and the serfs had obligations to the lord of the manor, who in turn was a vassal of a higher noble, in turn beholden to the king. The so-called “hierarchy of reciprocal obligations” imposed obligations on the serfs in the form of produce and labour; the return obligations were protection, and the right to share in the communal interests. The feudal system existed basically unchanged during the second half of the Middle Ages, although latterly breaking down somewhat through the growth of non-manorial villages, and trade outside the manor. The magna carta, flowing from the 1215 revolt of the barons against the king, re-balanced the obligations of the social order, but essentially feudalism remained.
The Catholic church was also a pervasive feature of Mediaeval times, in particular the rise of monastic institutions which led, in turn, to the consolidation of doctrine, the growth of power, and also to the Crusades (approx. 1100 to 1300) – to reclaim Christian holy sites from the Turks. The principal thrust of the Church was orthodoxy, and heretics were vigorously persecuted. The serfs did not stray far from that orthodoxy. The recognition of the Church as such an integral part of the social order leads to the so-called tripartite view of Middle Ages society as “work, fight and pray” (clearly a masculine concept). Additionally, there is a bold theory that regards the stirrup as the defining feature of the Middle Ages: the stirrup facilitated mounted conflict; and led to the class of knights, and to the concept of chivalry.
* Religion
England was a Catholic nation through the Middle Ages, and remained so until Henry VIII broke with Rome in the 1534 Act of Supremacy, and established the Church of England. By the end of the era there were perhaps 900 religious houses - monasteries, nunneries, friaries etc. - most established during a wave of monastic enthusiasm in the 11th and 12th Centuries. There were three categories of holy men: the local clergy, the mendicant friars, and the monks. Prayer was seen as "work", so to be a monk was a useful occupation; and it followed that it was entirely appropriate to pay a monk to pray for you. Having a local community of monks was seen as building up a fund of holy goodwill. Monasteries were also important because they provided succour and sustenance for others (and were retirement homes as well).
* Villages
Villages were established for safety and to facilitate trade. They spawned fairs and pageants, and community life generally. Villages led to the formalisation of job specialisation, division of labour. And to the establishment of churches, and the strengthening of religious practice.
* Built Environment
We tend to picture the past by the structures that we can see: the castles and the manor houses and the churches (but only those made of stone), and - despite Henry - some monasteries. The humble structures have not survived, but between the archaeologists and the historians we can reconstruct the simplest houses: two rooms, timber and clay construction, earthen floor. A “squalid, unhealthy hovel”, hot in summer, cold and damp in winter, and always smelly. Shuttered, unglazed windows, smoke struggling to escape through the thatch. Any upper storey reached by outside ladder.
* London and other major centres
It is estimated that in the Middle Ages, aside from London, there were in England four centres only with more than 1000 houses – Bristol, Coventry, Norwich and York. This is a startling proposition but, exaggerated or not, it gives an idea of the rural nature of the English economy. London had perhaps 50000 residents……..and possibly 100 churches – which gives a sense of the importance of the Church in the lives of the people. The streets of London were foul, not always paved, but where they were the cobbles sloped to the centre to create a sort of drain. There were no footpaths. Householders were expected to put out rubbish from the downstairs only, but frequently ejected slops from the upper windows. Domestic refuse was mingled with offal and blood from butchering done in the streets. The tide of filth eventually found its way to the Thames. The city authorities did what they could, with numerous ordinances and prosecutions, and by employing officials to supervise street cleaning, and carts and boats were commissioned, but recalcitrant citizens could not be deterred. London remained primed for epidemics throughout the Middle Ages.
* Time
The sun was the main regulator of time; and even where clocks were available they had no minute hands. The peasantry had no sense of historical time: the people did not picture the present as being so many years from the birth of Christ.
* Sounds
Human sounds and the sounds of farm animals were dominant. There were no farm machines. The most pervasive mechanical sound was the bell - the church bells from nearby and distant villages, and the bells from the local flocks and herds.
* Smells
When Alan Bennett describes the filthy living conditions of Miss Shepherd, "the lady in the van", it is not so much the chaos and disorder of her existence that arrests our sensibilities, but the imagined odours - the cast-off and decaying food scraps, the sanitary napkins (used for heaven knows what purpose) drying over the electric element, the plastic bags of daily excrement. So too in the Middle Ages - the body odour of the universally unwashed was part of the background to life. And the smells of human excrement. And animal manure. And cooking fires.
* Families
Big families equated to more workers and hence to more affluence, not the reverse – the mindset was to have more children, not fewer. Infertility was a great personal problem, because it denied the children to look after parents in old age. Marriages for affection were possible. Peasants typically married post-pregnancy, after the demonstration of fertility! The nobility usually had arranged marriages, and insisted on virginity (in the female only!).
* Health
While stone-ground flour contained the grit that tended to grind down teeth as well, there was generally no dental decay..........because there was no refined sugar. Women's health was reasonable, but worsened in later times when mobile doctors spread postpartum infection (puerperal fever remained a major fatal disease worldwide until it was identified by Hungarian physician, Ignaz Semmelweis, in 1847, and "cured" by cleanliness). Women living in cities, away from the sunshine of rural life, tended to develop rickets, leading in turn to pelvises that succumbed to the first childbirth, and death. A curiosity: the practice of wet-nursing among the affluent resulted in less healthy babies - because the milk of longer-term wet-nurses was not so nutritious as that of the natural mother.
As to life expectancy: always excepting death before adulthood and accidents, people seemed to live into their 60s. There was also bubonic plague, the Black Death. Arriving in England in 1348, with recurrences over the succeeding twenty years, the plague probably slashed the population by one-third.
* Diet
The many historical references to bakers and the price of loaves suggest that home baking was not so prevalent as we might imagine, doubtless because of the absence of home ovens. Meat was an important part of the average diet. Cattle likely provided a substantial percentage: the fattened beasts typically went to market, while the farm folk consumed the worn-out farm oxen. Because the supply of winter feed was limited many animals had to be slaughtered in the autumn. The absence of refrigeration meant that the surplus autumn kill was smoked or salted - smoking of pork for ham and bacon was the norm anyway; beef and mutton were usually salted. The harvesting of sea salt was a major industry. Pig-raising was widespread, because the pigs could forage in nearby woodlands requiring less husbandry; and, in addition to their meat, their fat was utilized as lard for the making of candles and soap. Dairy produce was an important part of diet. The low fat yield of cows’ milk led to supplementation with goat and sheep milk. Chickens, ducks and geese were year-round food (as well as the eggs); pigeons too. (Where ducks and geese were sent "on the hoof" to market they were first driven through wet pitch or tar, then through sand to crust their feet for the journey ahead - a precaution against lame ducks!). If rabbits, hares and deer were fair game they would be on the table, but - for instance - the poaching of deer from a royal forest usually incurred the death penalty, so venison was never a staple. The consumption of fish was commonplace - and, near the sea, crustaceans and shellfish. Historical references to root vegetables are rare, and they may not have been commonly eaten. The pickling of cabbages, and the drying of peas and beans, made them year-round fare. Onions and leeks and garlic feature a lot in contemporary accounts, as do herbs, something perhaps to do with the less than fresh meats. Tropical fruits were unknown, and oranges rare, but otherwise the range of home-grown fruits was as today, although mulberries and quinces were much more prevalent. Ale was the universal drink; cider and imported wine lagged well behind. (Tea didn't reach England until the mid-1600s; coffee a little earlier, in the 1630s.)
Wrap
After the end of the Roman occupation there came the era of the Anglo-Saxon kings. What we know to-day as England comprised a number of separate kingdoms through to the Norman Conquest; then the Norman/French kings – from William in 1066 – reigned over the unified kingdom until succeeded by the Plantagenet Henry III in 1216. And before the Middle Ages were over the Plantagenets, the Lancasters and the Yorks had all come and gone. Henry Tudor took the throne in 1485 after defeating Richard III in the final War of the Roses. That vast period after the Romans saw the set-backs of the Black Death and the Hundred Years War; but it also saw the invention of spectacles, of gunpowder, of the astrolabe, and of printing (triggering the demise of the monopoly on learning held by the clergy). It saw Chaucer, and the building of the great cathedrals. It saw the establishment of Oxford and Cambridge Universities. It saw some political evolution, notably the emergence of a form of representative assembly, and some limitation on the powers of the monarch. It saw the rise in the importance of the towns, and the spread of trade. But England remained a pre-feudal or feudal society throughout, and “daily life” remained much the same. The last word, perhaps, to historian, Sir John Clapham: “Conquests are not always of great significance in economic history.”
Gary Andrews
