A Day in the Life of a Peasant

In Brief

In our effort to bring you the very worst of the Middle Ages, we've compiled a day in the life of a French peasant who encounters such giggly things as ergot poisoning, leprosy, starvation, and the eventual overthrowing of his lord. Cat torture! Strange religions! Self-flagellation! All this and more.

Party On

You might also be interested in: A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century by Barbara Tuchman (5/5) Barbara Tuchman explores the tragedy, political intrigue and occasional dark comedy that surround the infestation of the Black Plague in medieval Europe. She tells the tale from the perspective of a rather obscure French nobleman (Enguerrand de Coucy VII), a fresh approach and one that is rewarded well. The book is steeped with arresting details. The Black Death chapter is fascinating, and in her introduction Tuchman makes some interesting comparisons between medieval and latter-day behavior. It's good (and depressing) to see some things never change. Read more at Amazon.com Water to Wine? I Get Fifteen Percent Successful medieval saints, such as William of Norwich and Thomas Becket, required the efforts of public relations specialists. Hangin' with the Peasants Russian peasants had no need for well-meaning city-slickers.

History has never halted for want of peasants. But crucial as they may have been to Europe's agricultural well-being, they weren't exactly well loved by nobility. Barbara Tuchman, in A Distant Mirror: the Calamitous Fourteenth Century, tells us they were considered

aggressive, insolent, greedy, sullen, suspicious, tricky, unshaved, unwashed, ugly, stupid and credulous... in satiric tales it was said the [peasant's] soul would find no place in Paradise or anywhere else because the demons refused to carry [him] due to the foul smell.

Unfortunately for our intrepid subsistence workers, literature of the time is similarly uncharitable. A contemporary author laments

... by what right does a [peasant] eat beef? ...Rather let them eat thistles and briars, thorns and straw and hay on Sunday and peapods on weekdays... they should chew grass on the heath with the horned cattle and go naked on all fours.

The Sacking of Grammont, from the Chronicles

Not a pleasing prospect, but we do note that the peasant actually got his hands on some meat now and again. Tuchman reports he "also had access to eggs, salt fish, cheese, lard, peas, beans, shallots, onions, garlic... etc," which doesn't sound all that bad. What did the fourteenth century peasant do to deserve such a bad reputation? While obviously illiterate [the peasant, not us], we will attempt to bring his daily experiences to life by producing a fictional account of his day: a peasant's diary, if you will. For historical context, editorial comments will appear in brackets. We've also taken the liberty of cramming about thirty years together, so 'today' could be anywhere from 1327 to 1358. Trust us, most peasants wouldn't get this much excitement in a decade.

Dear Diary,

Woke up this morning. Little Jacques lost some more teeth in the evening; so did I. Marie has dysentery, the less said about that, the better. Julianne continues to breast-feed Robert, even though he's four years old [Extended breast feeding lowers fertility, at the cost of introducing some Freudian issues. -HH]. Michel showed up this morning with my spade; he'd buried four of his plague-stricken children himself. He was unable to hire gravediggers as they won't bury diseased dead. I'm not sure I want my spade back.

Went to town. Left seven-year-old Jacques to borrow one of Lord Foix's oxen and plow the field. He's a tough little bugger. Saw a large party, maybe 300, striding through town, beating themselves with iron-studded leather whips in front of sobbing townspeople. Pretty strange bunch. They must have a lot of free time. [The flagellants, as they were later called, felt corrupt clergy could no longer save mankind and decided self-abuse was the proper way to absolve humanity's sins. Tuchman tells us "they were forbidden to bathe, shave, change their clothes, sleep in beds, talk or have intercourse..." without their leader's permission. "Evidently this was not withheld, since the flagellants were later charged with orgies in which whipping was combined with sex." While originally possessing religious fervor, the flagellants grew secular and attempted to usurp power from the Church. Failing that, they settled for slaughtering some 10,000 Jews before France's Philip VI hanged and beheaded them. -HH] After the crowd moved through, saw neighbor Jean, covered with red rashes, staring openmouthed at the sky, talking about demons, frogs, and wildflowers. He looks different. His wife tells me his left arm fell off last week [Jean has St. Anthony's Fire, a poisoning caused by the ergot fungus in rye flour kept over winter. Ergot contaminates grains in the field, causes wild hallucinations, blood vessel constriction and limb loss and is still a threat to modern agriculture. -HH].

A Beheading from Jean Froissart's Chronicles

Ran into friends Charles, Philip, and Gaston in the center of a large crowd, playing the village's favorite game with Marat's cat. They had their hands tied behind their backs, and they were trying to beat it to death with their heads. It was nailed to the post in the middle of town, and Guillaume played his trumpet. Gaston had his eye put out by the cat. After a few beers it was an awfully good laugh. He bit its paw off, and finally killed it. Well done, fellows. [Tuchman refers us to Origo's Merchant of Prato, which details this and other horrific peasant games. - HH] Smells pretty bad in town, and I don't think it's just the decapitated bodies from last week's inquisition. Seems like the last time I was in town it was to watch old Louis get flogged, hanged and quartered for something or other. [In 1327, Avignon's public sanitation was so deficient that the stench forced historian Petrarch to move out to nearby Vaucluse "to prolong my life." It also caused a visiting ambassador from Aragon to faint. In addition, Tuchman notes that "torture was authorized by the Church... in everyday life passersby saw some criminal flogged... passed corpses hanging on the gibbet and decapitated heads and quartered bodies impaled on stakes in the city walls." -HH].

Game over, we went to church. Before Jean went mad, he had organized an Indignation Meeting for tonight, and we met in the cemetery. The nobles have been treating us rather poorly[While the codes of chivalry prohibited killing unarmed men, knights reasoned peasants did not abide by the codes and were thus fair game. Pillage, rape, and slaughter by local nobility were common. -HH]. What's more, they have contributed to the capture of our beloved king. We found out last week that some local knights fled Jean II while fighting the English in Poitiers without actually fighting. Cowards. [Jean II was captured in the Battle of Poitiers against Charles of Navarre in 1358. -HH] We all got pretty riled up, went to Lord Foix's castle, raped then killed his wife and daughter, saving him for last, and then burned the castle. I guess Foix won't get his ox back. It was pretty nuts. Went home, drank a gallon of ale, and went to bed. Long day.

[Our protagonist had joined a movement started in 1358 that eventually encompassed tens of thousands of peasants in France who pillaged and raided cowardly nobility. However, a large garrison of nobles eventually met the peasants in Meaux and killed a bunch of them, giving new license to the slaughter of commoners, and the original order was swiftly returned. Because this site is made in America, where we believe in the happy ending, our hero survived the retribution of the nobles and the Plague and died of pneumonia at the ripe age of 35. -HH]

Bibliography

1. Barbara W. Tuchman. A Distant Mirror : The Calamitous 14th Century. Ballantine, 1987.

 
Discuss this article in our forums