So the agricultural year was embedded in the ritual year. That is why, in the churches and cathedrals of England, the capitals and pillars were decorated with images of the months; the mowers are carved to celebrate the month of July, while a husbandman with sickle is the stone emblem of September. In Southwell Minster the pigs snuffle among the great stone oak leaves for the acorns of November. The natural world is familiar and immutable. The ease of summer and the woe of winter are part of the eternal order in which the humblest labourer participated; in medieval poetry, the ploughman was often considered to be holy. On sacred days the worshippers in the parish church, and the labourers in the field, were participating in complementary rituals. On the three rogation days preceding the Ascension Day, the parishioners would walk around the boundaries and bless the fields.
Murrain, the infectious disease that blighted sheep and cattle, was considered to be susceptible to prayer. A Mass in celebration of the Holy Spirit was sung, each parishioner offering up a penny. The sheep were then gathered in the field, and passages from the gospels were read out to them; then they were sprinkled with holy water while a hymn was chanted. This was followed by the recital of the Pater Noster and Ave Maria. Nevertheless animal mortality remained very high.
The nature of agriculture, month by month, hardly changed over the centuries. Open-field systems were common in the midlands, where large and unfenced fields were divided into strips which were owned by individual families; small enclosed fields were ubiquitous in Kent and in Essex; in the north and west rectangular fields were aligned one with another. From the thirteenth century there emerged the device of enclosure, whereby individual farmers exchanged their strips of land with one another; they could then create a larger portion that could be enclosed by hedges or fences.
Hamlets and small fields were typical of the north of England, while villages and large fields spread across the midlands. Considerable variety, however, existed within the counties. East Somerset was the home of open fields, while the west of that county was enclosed. East Suffolk was enclosed, and West Suffolk was open. The standard tenement of land was known in the south as yard-land, and in the north as oxgang, and its location is ascertained in documents by the position of the sun. The south and the east were considered to be the brighter part of the earth. The lie of the land, the nature of the soil, the patterns of the climate, all played their part in shaping the farming system of each small territory. Parts of Wiltshire were clay land and other parts were chalk; the soil of Hampshire was basin gravel.
An infinite variety of agricultural practice existed in every part of the country, enforced or determined by custom and tradition. The families of each village or hamlet could have been tending the same parcel of land for many centuries, living in intimate relationship with it. They were part of the soil. In an early book of law we find that a hamlet is defined as possessing ‘nine buildings, and one plough, and one kiln, and one churn, and one cat, and one cock, and one bull, and one herdsman’. The different kinds of field and pasture may also reflect the persistent influence of tribal customs that cannot be assigned a definite date. The communal history that allowed the partition into small fields or strips is also now irrecoverable; it is merely present as far back as we can look. Every portion of land had over the centuries acquired its own character of uses, rights and duties; it was a living thing, created out of custom and habit.
It was through land that a man gained honour and prestige as well as wealth; the extent of his lands measured the size of his military obligations. It was a commonplace that if you did not own a parcel of land you could not marry or raise a family. The landless man in the countryside was a nonentity. The law was essentially the will of the majority of those who owned land. Social life was dominated by the sale or purchase of land, in which 90 per cent of the population were involved one way or another. Castles were at the centre of military campaigns, from the eleventh century onwards, precisely because they dominated the surrounding land. The most severe form of punishment was the ravaging of the land. The pattern of landholding, rather than any administrative division, determined the nature and policy of each district and each shire.
Land was in fact the single most important cause of violence and social dissension. When one knight named only as Edward refused to do services to the prior of St Frideswide in exchange for a hide of land at Headington, the matter was resolved by judicial combat. ‘After many blows between the champions, and although the champion of Edward had been blinded in the fight, they both sat down and as neither dared attack the other, peace was established as follows …’ Less forceful means of justice could be tried. A farmer from Evesham claimed land from the abbey there; he took the precaution of filling his shoes with earth from his own estate so that he could swear in front of the monks that he was standing upon his own land.
Ploughing time, and the season for mowing, were earlier in some parts of the country than in others. Yet the rewards of labour were the same. The scythe and the sickle, the flail and the winnowing fan and the plough, were part of the common inheritance. A medieval folk song celebrated the appearance of ‘oats, peas, beans and barley’ that in The Tempest became ‘wheat, rye, barley, fetches, oats and peas’. In the great fields we would see fifty or sixty men working on the land, scattered over the strips, bent over with toil. Many illustrations of them can be found in calendars and books of hours, dressed in tight breeches with a smock or blouse made of cloth and tied at the waist by a belt; in cold weather they wore a hooded mantle of wool that covered the upper part of the body. Sometimes they wore woollen caps.
‘First thing in the morning,’ the peasant recites in a tenth-century treatise, ‘I drive my sheep to pasture and stand over them in heat and cold with dogs lest wolves should devour them, and I lead them back to their sheds and milk them twice a day and move their folds besides, and I make cheese and butter …’ On the common land of the village, the cattle would be watched by a boy.
The farm animals of the medieval period were smaller and weaker than their modern counterparts, and the productivity of the soil was far inferior. It was a continuing and earnest business of survival for the farmer and the labourer, who often lived in conditions of rank squalor. The world was not progressing; it was believed to be in a state of steady deterioration from the age of gold to the age of iron. This portrait of the seasonal year must not be taken as an advertisement for a ‘merry England’. Even the entertainments, those sports and games and rituals that are at the heart of the ritual calendar, were often brutal and violent. It was a life of sweat and dirt, but one that was quickly over.
19
The emperor of Britain
At the time of Henry’s death the Lord Edward was in Sicily, recovering from an attempted assassination. He had been in the Holy Land, where he had achieved nothing. He had been attacked in the city of Acre by a man wielding a dagger dipped in poison and almost died from the wound; the blackened flesh, corroded by the poison, had to be cut away in an operation almost as deadly as the original assault. But he survived, and sailed to safe harbour in Sicily. It was here that he learned of the death of his father.
He did not hurry back for his coronation. He had already been declared king in his absence, but he did not arrive in London for another eighteen months. He lingered in France until the summer of 1274. He had been born at Westminster, but he was by inheritance still essentially French; more pertinently, he was a member of the royal family of Europe. One of the reasons for the delay in his coronation had been his desire to put the affairs of Gascony in order. Gascony was, for him, just as important as England.