The English

A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only)

Christopher Hibbert

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780586084717
• eBook ISBN:
  9780007438303
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

(This ebook does not include illustrations.)

This social history records the daily life of the English people from the time of the Norman Conquest to our own.

Based on diaries, letters, memoirs, official reports, the works of modern social historians and the literature of every period, it traces the development of English society over 900 years.

The chapters range over life in the castles, palaces and monasteries, in the homes of rich merchants and in the hovels of peasants, describing the work and play of the inhabitants, their clothes, food and possesions, their servants and animals, their pleasures and suffering, their beliefs and attitudes, their schools, fairs, shops and markets, hospitals and prisons, theatres and churches, farms and factories, taverns and brothels covering every aspect of medieval and modern life.

PART ONE
The Middle Ages

1 • Castles, Lords and Chatelaines

The castles to which the horsemen ride in the fourteenth-century poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, are like fairy palaces, with painted pinnacles and crenellations, cusped turrets and chalk-white chimneys, with ‘carven finíais curiously chisel’d’ and ‘many a lovely casement that closed full clean’. The reality was very different. Most of the castles by which the Normans helped to establish their rule in England were built at first of wood. On some commanding site a deep ditch or moat was dug, the earth removed being thrown up to create a mound or to increase the height of an existing hill upon which a timber tower was constructed. Around the tower above the ditch a palisade was made with felled trees whose ends were sharpened to points; and, enclosed by this palisade, at the foot of the mound, a large yard or bailey was formed with huts for the garrison, stables for horses, workshops, granaries and cattle-sheds. The bailey was usually entered by way of a drawbridge across the moat. This led to a gatehouse from the upper floors of which a portcullis could be lowered to keep out enemies and intruders.

Gradually the palisades were replaced by curtain walls and the wooden structures by buildings of stone or of flint or rubble faced with stone. The walls of the tower or keep were immensely thick and pierced at intervals by windows which, very narrow at the bottom, might grow wider on the upper floors where they were more easily defended during times of siege or assault. The lower floor, where the castle’s well was dug, was usually used for the storage of food and military equipment and for dungeons; the guard room, chapel and the great hall were on the floor above; and, as castles became homes as well as fortresses, sleeping chambers were formed on the upper storeys and approached by circular staircases within the corner towers. These towers led on to the battlemented roof from which the castle guard could keep watch over the surrounding countryside. In some castles, as at Kenilworth, the staircase was on an outside wall and led to a well-protected door opening directly into the hall.

By the beginning of the fourteenth century castles were no longer being built primarily for intimidation and defence, although a castellated appearance, complete with battlements, gatehouse and portcullis, was still imposed upon manor houses erected for great families, as it was to be upon sixteenth-century Oxford and Cambridge colleges and Victorian prisons. At the same time licences to crenellate were sought from the king by owners of existing manor houses who wished to strengthen and ornament them by building a tower and curtain wall and digging a moat as the owner of Stokesay in Shropshire had done at the end of the thirteenth century. Over 180 licences to crenellate were issued in the reign of Edward III from 1327 to 1377; but only sixty were granted in the next reign; and no more than seventeen in the first eighty years of the fifteenth century, towards the end of which brick walls began to replace stone as a favourite building material, it being recognized that thick stone walls were no protection against determined battering by heavy artillery and that to withstand a siege was far less conclusive than victory in a pitched battle beyond the castle walls. Nevertheless, both with new castles and those stark Norman keeps which were being developed into huge and rambling structures, their builders, bishops as well as lay lords, wished to present a formidable aspect to the world so as to reflect and emphasize their power and riches.¹

The larger of these castles covered extensive tracts of land — in Henry II’s time Windsor Castle extended over thirteen acres – and they comprised upper and lower baileys, inner and outer courtyards and numerous outhouses. The main stone buildings were often roofed with lead, and, looking down from the battlements, the guard would have seen an extraordinary variety of structures inside the long curtain wall. As well as stables and workshops, pigsties and byres, there were farrieries and dovecotes, kitchens and hen-coops, and perhaps a chapel in addition to the small one in the keep. Covered passages and corridors led to chambers set aside for guests who could not be accommodated elsewhere and to those series of rooms known collectively as the wardrobe in which clothes were kept and tailored and valuable household stores, including expensive spices, were kept in locked chests with jewels and plate.²

Most Norman halls, like most early Norman castles, were of wood; but some, like that at Oakham in Leicestershire, were of stone and have survived. Oakham’s hall was built in about 1190 by the rich Walkelin de Ferrers. Although exceptional in its finely carved stonework, its design was common to most halls of the period. Since builders could not at that time roof a wide span, it was constructed like a church with a nave and two side aisles. Light came from small windows in the walls of the aisles; warmth from a fire burning in a central hearth such as the one which can still be seen at Penshurst Place in Kent, wall chimneys being virtually unknown until the fourteenth century. In one of the gable walls three doors led respectively to the buttery, where the yeoman of the buttery served out bread, the pantry, where the yeoman of the pantry issued candles and beef, and the kitchen which, like that preserved at Stanton Harcourt in Oxfordshire, was a building detached from the hall because of the dangers of fire.

The smoke from the hall fire escaped through a hole in the roof which was fitted by the thirteenth century with a pottery louvre; and, so as to prevent the smoke from blowing about the hall when the doors were opened, screens, at first movable and later fixed, were placed in front of them. Over the passage formed by the fixed screen a gallery might be built so that minstrels could play their pipes and tabors while the lord had his dinner at a table on a raised platform at the other end of the hall, the walls of which were covered with paintings and hung with tapestries. Below him sat the members of his household. They sat at trestle tables in the main body of the hall, the floor of which was more often of rammed earth than of stone and was so littered with scraps of food as well as with straw and rushes that it was commonly referred to as ‘the marsh’. As late as the 1520s Erasmus described such floors as being ‘usually of clay, strewed with rushes under which lie unmolested an ancient collection of beer, grease, fragments, bones, spittle, excrements of dogs and cats, and everything that is nasty’.³

Whatever the state of the marsh, dinner in a great man’s hall was a formal occasion, announced by ‘blowynges and pipynges’ and conducted with due ceremony. It was generally eaten before noon, supper being served at about four o’clock in the afternoon. Two meals a day were then considered ‘suffycyent for a rest man’, though a ‘laborer may eate three tymes a day’: ‘he that eate often lyveth a beestly lyfe’.

First, cloths were drawn over the tables, then spoons and cups or tankards laid out. Utensils were usually of earthenware or wood, pewter being rare until the fifteenth century; but on side tables or cupboards there would be displays of gold and silver, of bowls and dishes and ornamental pieces to demonstrate the lord’s riches.

From the kitchen beyond the hall, where cooks had sweated by the heat of the roaring fires, and scullions, in dirty rags if not entirely naked, had turned the handles of the spits and washed up urgently-needed pots and pans, the food was carried across the courtyard or along the covered passage to the door which led into the hall by the screens’ passage. Then the door, the centre one of the three opposite the lord’s dais and larger than the doors on either side, would open and, as in the hall into which ‘the largest man alive’ rides unannounced in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:

Then comes the first course with loud trumpets’ blare,
(Those golden reeds which painted banners bear)
The noble pipes, the little kettles sound,
Wild warbles wakening startle the clear air
Till the heart leaps for joy, and all around,

Grave seneschals direct bright platters overground

So plenteously ‘twere hard to set arights
One silver dish the more, clean upon cloth,

Fresh food was there, abundance of delights,

To each twain dishes twelve and, nothing loth,
Goblets of beer and of the bright wine both.⁴

The procession of servants bearing food was led by the marshal of the hall, carrying a white staff, or, on the occasions of the grandest banquets, by a household officer on horseback. The procession approached the lord’s table which usually stood beneath a canopy. And, after the lord and his family had been served, dishes were carried to the table where the gentlemen of the household sat with the steward, then to those tables where the lesser servants sat, presided over by the marshal of the hall and the clerk of the kitchen. The food was served on trenchers, thick slices of bread or scooped-out crusts which might afterwards be distributed to the poor or the family’s dogs. Grace was said by the almoner and then all fell to, grabbing the spoons on the table -forks were then unknown — or using the knives which each man carried to the table with him in a case in his belt.

Table manners were far from meticulous and the noise was tremendous as dogs barked under the boards; falcons sitting on perches behind the benches uttered their sharp cries; and the ushers of the hall marched up and down between the tables calling out, ‘Speak softly my masters, speak softly’. Even noble pages in the fifteenth century had to be advised in books of etiquette such as The Babees Book that wine must not be drunk when the mouth was full; that the upper part of the body must not lean forward over the table with the head hanging into the dish; that neither nose nor nails must be picked at meal times; that salt should not be flicked out of the cellar with a knife; that dirty spoons should not be put down on the cloth; that the knife should not be used to carry food to the mouth; that meat should not be cut in the manner of ‘field men who have such an appetite that they reck not in what wise, where or when or how ungoodly they hack at their meat’, and that when the meal was finished, the guest must ‘ryse uppe withoute lauhtere, japynge, or boystrous words’.⁵ In his Booke of Nurture, John Russell, marshal of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, thought it necessary to add that young gentlemen must not spit or ‘retch too loud’, or put their fingers into cups ‘to seek bits of dust’, or lick dishes with their tongues. Another well-known book of etiquette, the Booke of Courtesy, cautioned against spitting on the table, cleaning the teeth with the tablecloth, wiping the hands on skirt or tippet after the nose had been blown into them, and against playing with the animals that scratched about under the table eating scraps:

Whereso thou sitt at mete in borde, Avoide the cat at on bare worde, For yf thou stroke cat other dogge, Thou are lyke an ape teyghed with a clogge.⁶

The food served was various and plentiful, for it was considered that the provision of good fare was essential to a great lord’s standing in the world. Provisions would be transported from other manors or bought in a wide variety of markets. At Blakemere, Lord Talbot’s home in Shropshire, one of several Talbot households, supplies were purchased not only from the local market at Whitchurch, but also from Nantwich, Shrewsbury, Chester, Worcester and Gloucester as well as from London. Even when Lord Talbot was away in 1417–18 fighting with the king in France, his steward recorded that, at an average cost of 2½d each, over 15,700 meals were served at Blakemere, well over 2000 of them to ‘strangers who turned up at various times’.⁷

By the beginning of the sixteenth century three meals a day had become more common than two. In the Northumberland Household Book, which contains the regulations drawn up for the household of the fifth Earl of Northumberland, this Lenten ‘Braikfaste for my Lords and my Lady’ is prescribed: ‘Fürst a Loaf of Bread in Trenchers; two Manchetts [fine white loaves], a Quart of Beer; a Quart of Wine; two Pieces of Saltfish; six pieces of baconed Herring; three pieces of white herring or a dish of Sprats.’⁸

The Earl’s two eldest sons were served much the same, though they had no wine and a dish of butter instead of the baconed herring; while the children in the nursery had bread and butter, salt fish, herring or sprats, and beer.

After Lent was over the Earl allowed himself half a chine of boiled beef or mutton for breakfast instead of the fish; the two boys had chicken; and the smaller children in the nursery boiled mutton bones.⁹

At other meals in the Northumberland household and in other grand houses, the food served was divided into portions, known as messes, by the server and distributed to each person according to his rank, a distinguished guest having a whole mess all for himself. Less distinguished guests had a mess for two, while others helped themselves to a mess for four.¹⁰

Bread, baked by the household’s own baker, was eaten at every meal, usually the fine white bread known as wastel, though coarse loaves, dark and gritty and made from scraps which even hungry scullions found unpalatable, were sometimes given to visitors. Meat was served in large quantities, beef and mutton regularly, pork and veal almost as often, venison more rarely. Poultry, too, was a common dish, geese and capons as well as ordinary fowl, though partridge appears to have been too expensive for regular consumption and peacocks were rarely seen except on the tables of the very rich. Gallons of milk and pounds of butter were regularly supplied to the cooks in the kitchen; so were large quantities of cheese which was mostly made on the farm but also bought elsewhere, and enormous quantities of eggs, not eaten on their own but used extravagantly in cooking. The accounts of Eleanor de Montfort, Countess of Leicester, which have recently been studied by Margaret Wade Labarge, show that no less than 3700 eggs were consumed by the countess’s admittedly large household and guests in a single week of 126s.¹¹

Fish, a staple diet during Lent and on fast days, came from the manor’s fishponds or, more commonly, in the form of salted herrings, smoked mackerel or dried cod. On manors near the sea the range of fish was naturally wider; and while a household of an inland manor might have to content themselves with bream or pike or eels, usually salted and dried or boiled in paste, households by the coast enjoyed fresh sole and mullet, crabs and oysters, sturgeon, porpoise and even whale, a dish then highly prized. ‘Wolde to Gode I wer one of the dwellers by the see syde’, wrote a fifteenth-century schoolboy, expressing a common sentiment, ‘for ther see fysh be plenteous and I love them better than I do this fresh water fysh.’¹²

The variety of vegetables, though it became much wider from the fourteenth century onwards, was far narrower than it is today. Dried peas and beans were served often enough, so were onions, leeks, turnips and garlic; but the early medieval gardener was much more likely to concentrate on herbs, and the medieval cook on spices, than they were on the kinds of fresh green vegetables which were enjoyed in France. Sage and parsley, fennel and borage, were all widely grown in England; while the amounts of spices handed over to the cook from the wardrobe were immense. Both mustard and pepper were used lavishly in cooking; so was ginger which was valued for its medicinal properties as well a...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• A Note on Money
• Chronology of Reigns
• Prologue
• PART ONE • The Middle Ages
• PART TWO • The Ages of Shakespeare and Milton
• PART THREE • From Defoe to Cobbett
• PART FOUR • From the Victorians to Modern Times
• Keep Reading
• References
• Sources
• Illustration credits
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects
• About the Author
• About the Publishers