Peasant rents

As I have discussed before, medieval peasants were not slaves.  By our standards they worked like dogs and died, worn out, at an age we would still consider young and fun.  But they had a perhaps surprising amount of control over their own lives, and in the High Middle Ages one might consider most of them agricultural tenants.

They paid rents, no more the slave of their landlord than people who rent an apartment now are the slave of their landlord.  The rents however were not the checks that we might write.  Rather, they were a mix of produce, other agricultural products (like wine or animals), manual labor, and coins.

A typical example is provided by a charter issued for the nunnery of Marcigny in 1104.  A widow named Rotrudis wanted to "take the habit" (as becoming a nun was called) and gave Marcigny all the land she had inherited from her father.  (Monasteries and nunneries expected entry gifts, because the monks or nun was going to be fed and clothed for the rest of their life.)  The land came complete with the peasants who lived on it.  They had been paying their rents to Rotrudis, and now they would pay them to the nunnery.  The charter spelled out what the nuns could expect to receive each year:  forty-two loaves of bread, forty-two bushels of oats, forty-two gallons of wine, four sheep, four piglets, four adult pigs, nine chickens (capons were specified), and twenty-three pennies.

(I note the recurring number 42--wasn't that supposed to be the "meaning of life, the universe, and everything"?  Credit The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.)

The peasants clearly had fairly prosperous farms, to be able to pay this amount in rent and have far more left to feed their families.  One will also note the mix of grain, animals, wine, and coin.  Although this particular charter did not mention labor dues, other charters from the same period often mentioned that a peasant family would send someone to work on the landlord's fields once or twice a week, or that the peasants might be expected to help with work at harvest time or provide carts for bringing the harvest from a distant field to the landlord.

Here the rents that Rotrudis had been receiving, and which the nuns would receive in the future, were spelled out in writing.  However, this was probably the first time that this had been done.  The peasants knew how much they owed.  Rotrudis knew, and presumably her father had known, back when the land in question had been his.  But since normally rent obligations were not written down (and the peasants would not have known how to read anyway), memory had to keep everyone honest.

One should also note that not all peasants were tenants.  Some held their property as "allods," land that they owned outright.  In practice, most peasants probably had some allodial land and rented other land, often from more than one landlord.  Memory was expected to keep track of a lot.

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on medieval peasants, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available from Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available as a paperback!

Medieval Farm Animals

Medieval peasants raised most of the same animals found on a modern American farm (though not llamas!).  Theirs were smaller, not having been bred to the enormous size of some modern pigs and cattle.  To be a good candidate for a farm animal, a creature had to serve more than one purpose.

So, for example, sheep produced wool, the most common source of cloth in the Middle Ages, and their skin also was used for parchment, the principal material of books and official documents before paper became common in the West in the fourteenth century.  Their meat was also eaten and their milk made into cheese.  Monks did not eat red meat, but they raised large flocks of sheep for wool and especially for parchment.  After all, a big book like the Bible needed a whole lot of sheepskins.

Horses were used principally for riding and, to a lesser extent, for pulling carts and plows.  Horsehide produced a heavy leather.  Horses, however, were fairly unusual before the spread of horseshoes (see more here), and aristocrats were always more likely to have horses than were peasants, who preferred the solid dependability of oxen for pulling.

Cattle, including both cows and oxen, produced milk and meat and cowhide for leather.  Most of the milk would be made into cheese or butter, since milk will not keep well without refrigeration, and cows produced milk only for a short time of the year anyway.  Most peasant families either had a cow or would have liked to have one.  (Click here for more on cows.)

Pigs were only semi-domesticated.  They generally ran wild, rather than being fed at the farm.  Their favorite food was acorns, so oak woods were prized as places to fatten pigs before the big November roundup and pig slaughter.

Chickens wandered around every farmstead.  We now wonder if chickens might be free-range; all medieval chickens were free-range.  They were used for feathers, for meat, and especially for eggs.  The free-range hens would try to hide their nests, and farmers would try to find the nests before the eggs started developing into baby chicks.  (Unlike modern eggs, medieval eggs would have been fertilized.)  The eggs were very small by today's standards, the size of what used to be called pullet eggs.

Chickens were especially prized for their ability to keep down insects.  A large part of their diet was the insects they would catch, though they would also get a little grain--as well as anything they could pick up in the farmyard.  (Click here for more on chickens.)

In areas with ponds or streams, families might also have domestic ducks or geese, again raised for their feathers, their meat, and their eggs.

Cats were kept on farms to hold down the mice, but they were generally not treated as pets.  Dogs, however, could be pets as well as helpful companions to the shepherds and cowherds and served as guards at night.  Small dogs were bred as pets, and ladies especially might have one as a companion.  Dogs, symbols of faithfulness, were often carved on late medieval tombs.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

For more on farm animals and other aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see the ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon.