Fig. 73 The medieval Exe Bridge, Exeter, Cornwall, built in 1200 through the efforts of Nicholas Gervaise, a wealthy merchant who was four times mayor of the city. Like many medieval bridges, it was endowed with property to provide an income for its upkeep.
Fig. 74 Thomas Hearne, view of Durham from the northeast c.1783. Elvet Bridge was rebuilt and extended in 1228 and incorporated St James’s and St Andrew’s Chapels, one at each end. In the background is the tower of the cathedral and, on a mound, the Castle Keep.
The Countryside
The Norman invaders came to exploit the English countryside. While they did not introduce a new system of social obligation on the population (Saxon lords had received all sorts of service from their dependants), the Conquest did result in the tightening and redefinition of the bonds of lordship. Norman landlords of the first generation were interested in labour obligations from their tenants, but later generations were more interested in cash from rents and fees, made possible by the fact that many tenants were generating a healthy cash surplus from agriculture by 1100. Villages were occupied by what we call peasants. The term is unfortunate as it gives the impression of poverty-stricken and down-trodden illiterates eking out a living from the soil. Villagers, who made up 80 per cent of the population, were in fact smallholders farming anything between 5 and 40 acres. Half held their land in villeinage; that is to say they owed their landlord payment, labour services and required permission to marry. The rest were freemen, who often had smaller landholdings. Villeins and freemen alike cooperated in the common-field system, where it existed (p. 54), but were also engaged in market activities: buying, selling and making money. By the 1180s the economic stability of the richer peasants started having an impact on the places in which they lived. This impact varied hugely across the country and even between adjacent villages. Dwellings were normally set in a banked or hedged toft of about a quarter acre within this (fig. 26). In some parts of the country – particularly the south-west – a single building or long house contained space at one end for people and at the other for animals. This arrangement was becoming less common by the 13th century; by then most tofts in the midlands and the south-east had a principal cottage grouped with a barn or granary and sometimes a byre. Richer peasants might also have a separate kitchen, a freestanding bake-house and even a dovecot or cart-house.
The crucial development in the period between about 1180 and 1320 was the introduction of various types of foundation, either for the full length of a building or just for its principal posts. The abandonment of earth-fast building (posts sunk in the ground) over most of England opened up the possibility for a variety of superstructures that in some parts of the country saw stone walls up to the eaves but more commonly saw a variety of timber structures resting on low or buried stone foundations. In the midlands, the west and north, most of these were crucks. A cruck is essentially an A-shaped truss made of large, slightly curving, timbers. A number of these could be erected on a timber base (or sole) plate and then be joined together at the top (ridge) and along their sloping side with beams called purlins (fig. 75a).
Fig. 75 As with all issues to do with medieval construction, techniques were highly regionalised and are resistant to easy categorisation. Yet a) cruck; b) box frame and c) post and truss construction are the most common categories found in the Middle Ages in England.
Alternatively, walls could be constructed with a box frame. Simple upright beams were jointed into a sole plate and capped by a top plate on which the roof trusses rested – this method was more common in the east and south (fig. 75c). A more sophisticated variation of this was the post-and-truss construction, essentially a timber-framed grid upon which the roof trusses rested, found in the west and south (fig. 75b). In all these cases the gaps were filled with wattle and daub – to make walls impervious to the elements – and the roof covered with thatch. Windows were small, glassless and furnished with shutters. Chimney stacks were rare, and fires would be lit in grates or boxes on the beaten-earth floors.
Most of these constructional systems resulted in framed units of about 15ft, making most houses either 30ft or 45ft by 15ft wide. So although peasant houses were dark and smoky, they were not smaller than workers’ housing in Victorian cities.19 They were also more private than might be imagined. Although the whole basis of village life was communal, especially where common-field systems predominated, the tofts – with their hedges and banks, which often rose to head height – and cottages with stout, locked doors, gave peasant families individuality and privacy. At Steventon, Berkshire, there are a number of cruck-built cottages of about 1270 to 1280 associated with a medieval causeway, but surviving peasant houses of this date are rare and most of our knowledge comes from archaeology.20
These cottages could not have been built by unskilled labour. It was necessary to employ a carpenter and have access to properly cut timber showing that by the 13th century there were thousands of carpenters working in villages as well as for the aristocracy, Crown and the Church. Nor did a house come cheap. It is likely that a straightforward cottage would have cost a peasant a year’s income, a sum that was probably borrowed and paid off like a modern mortgage.21
Fig. 76 The Psalter of which this is a page was commissioned by Geoffrey Luttrell, lord of the manor at Irnham in Lincolnshire in 1320–40. Uniquely, it shows scenes of everyday rural life, including this image of a typical 14th-century water mill. (from The Luttrell Psalter, c.1325–35, British Library. Shelfmark: Add. 42130, f.181)
Fig. 77 An early 14th century stone frieze from the infirmary hall at Rievaulx Abbey, Yorkshire. A contemporary windmill is shown with steps up to the door and a pivot for the whole building to move to catch the wind.
Fig. 78 Temple Cressing, Essex: a longitudinal section of the wheat barn of the 1290s. The barn is remarkably unaltered, and would have originally had wooden boarded walls.
The aristocracy gained about 60 per cent of their income from rents and fees but they were much more interested in agriculture than their continental counterparts; between 1184 and 1214 almost all took their demesne land into direct management. This they did with some success, refining crop rotation and exploiting existing sources of income more efficiently. One of the most important of these was milling, which, as we have seen, was very profitable. After 1100 landlords were busy building new mills and refurbishing old ones, doubling their number to perhaps 12,000 by 1300. In this there was one really important invention: the windmill. It is likely that the first one was built in East Anglia not long before 1185, but they took some time to perfect and construction only boomed in the east in the 1240s, followed by other parts of the country where fast-running water was scarce. A new windmill cost about £10 but they tended to have greater repair costs than watermills, which were cheaper to run though expensive to build. The water engineering alone could cost £15 or more. Watermills were of the type shown in the Luttrell Psalter (fig. 76); the mill building was like any normal timber-framed building and had a thatched roof. The windmill was much more specialised as it had to turn and face the wind. This meant that it had