peasant customs

Peasants were at the bottom of the Feudal system and had to obey their local lord to whom they had sworn an oath of obedience on the Bible. Because they had sworn an oath to their lord, it was taken for granted that they had sworn a similar oath to the duke. The one thing the peasant had to do in Medieval Europe was to pay out money in taxes or rent.They had to pay rent for his land to his lord; he had to pay a tax to the church called a tithe. This was a tax on all of the farm produce he had produced in that year. A tithe was 10% of the value of what he had farmed. It was possible that it could make or break a peasant’s family. A peasant could pay in cash or in seeds, equipment etc. Either ways, tithes were an unpopular tax. The church collected so much produce from this tax that it had to be stored in huge tithe barns. Peasants lived in cruck houses.Families would have cooked and slept in the same room. Children would have slept in a loft if the cruck house was big enough.These had a wooden frame onto which was plastered wattle and daub. This was a mixture of mud, straw and manure. The straw added insulation to the wall while the manure was considered good for binding the whole mixture together and giving it strength. The mixture was left to dry in the sun and formed what was a strong building material.There would be little furniture within the cruck houses and straw would be used for lining the floor. The houses are likely to have been very hot in the summer and very cold in the winter. Windows were just holes in the walls as glass was very expensive. Doors might be covered with a curtain rather than having a door as good wood could be expensive.The houses would have none of the things like no running water, no toilets, no baths and washing basins. Soap and shampoo were unheard of. People would have been covered with dirt, fleas and lice. Beds were simply straw stuffed mattresses and these would have attracted lice, fleas and all types of bugs. Water had a number of purposes for peasants cooking, washing etc. Water usually came from a local river, stream or well provided a village with water but this water source was also used as a way of getting rid of your waste at the start of the day. It was usually the job of a wife to collect water first thing in the morning. Water was collected in wooden buckets. Villages that had access to a well could simply wind up their water from the well itself.It was said that a peasant could expect to be fully bathed just twice in their life; once, when they were born and when they had died. Face and hand washing was more common but knowledge of hygiene was non-existent. The lives of peasant children would have been very different to today. They would not have attended school. Very many would have died before they were six months old as disease would have been very common. As soon as was possible, children joined their parents working on the land. They could not do any major physical work but they could clear stones off the land which might damage farming tools and they could be used to chase birds away during the time when seeds were sown. Peasant children could only look forward to a life of great hardship.