Villages

 We tend to think of medieval villages as small and compact, stone houses close together, with a castle and a church at the center.

Now in fact plenty of medieval villages were built with all the houses close together, along narrow streets, and preferentially built in stone from the late Middle Ages on.  A compact village made sense if one didn't want to waste good agricultural land with buildings and yards, and it provided at least some measure of protection against potential attackers, especially if it had a wall.

Most villages had twisty streets, such as seen above, because the streets just were the openings between the houses, but starting in the twelfth century there were also planned villages, where the streets were laid out in a gridwork pattern (and were still very narrow, forget getting a car down most of them).

But how about the church and the castle?  The church was much more likely to be there than the castle.  Starting in the twelfth century, bishops made a conscious effort to establish parish churches outside of the cities, so that the rural population would have readier access to the sacraments.  A village would get a church and a parish priest, who was usually of peasant stock himself.

 

But castles were a lot more expensive to build than a little parish church, so the idea of a castle in every village would not make sense.  Even more importantly, a castellan lord would normally have multiple villages in his territory, and it really was not worth having multiple castles close together.  (There are plenty of places, especially in southwest France, where multiple castles face each other, but these would have been built on the borders of the territories of rival lords.)  A village located in a strategic place (like a mountain pass) would probably have a castle, but in such a case the castle probably came first, and the village grew up around it.  (See more here on the problem of trying to see every village as coming with a standard castle or manor house.)

Villages were by definition devoted to agriculture.  For a compact village, the surrounding fields were usually divided up among the inhabitants, and they went out every morning to tend their fields.  This worked well in areas of rich soil, where the villagers shared in purchasing and (from the twelfth century on) in using a heavy mould-board plow.

But how about areas with poorer soil, where the lighter-weight aratum plow continued to be used? Here a "village" might not be compact but rather spread out.  It would still function as a village, often having a mayor and certainly having a social sense of identity, but each house and barn would be separated from the next, each being surrounded by its own fields.

Historians used to wonder why some parts of France (especially the southern parts) had the spread-out form of village structure, rather than the compact form, and there was a great deal of speculation about whether the difference marked areas where the original Celtic population remained in the majority versus those areas dominated by the (Germanic) Franks.  But village structure had nothing to do with ethnic identity.  It was based instead on agricultural techniques (and the mould-board plow became common only centuries after the Franks had settled in France).

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on peasants and medieval agriculture, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.