A World Lit Only by Fire (11 page)

The hearth excepted, the home of a prosperous peasant lacked these amenities. Lying at the end of a narrow, muddy lane, his

Home of a medieval nobleman

rambling edifice of thatch, wattles, mud, and dirty brown wood was almost obscured by a towering dung heap in what, without
it, would have been the front yard. The building was large, for it was more than a dwelling. Beneath its sagging roof were
a pigpen, a henhouse, cattle sheds, corncribs, straw and hay, and, last and least, the family’s apartment, actually a single
room whose walls and timbers were coated with soot. According to Erasmus, who examined such huts, “almost all the floors are
of clay and rushes from the marshes, so carelessly renewed that the foundation sometimes remains for twenty years, harboring,
there below, spittle and vomit and wine of dogs and men, beer … remnants of fishes, and other filth unnameable. Hence, with
the change of weather, a vapor exhales which in my judgment is far from wholesome.”

The centerpiece of the room was a gigantic bedstead, piled high with straw pallets, all seething with vermin. Everyone slept
there, regardless of age or gender—grandparents, parents, children, grandchildren, and hens and pigs—and if a couple chose
to enjoy intimacy, the others were aware of every movement. In summer they could even watch. If a stranger was staying the
night, hospitality required that he be invited to make “one more” on the familial mattress. This was true even if the head
of the household was away, on, say, a pilgrimage. If this led to goings-on, and the husband returned to discover his wife
with child, her readiest reply was that during the night, while she was sleeping, she had been penetrated by an incubus. Theologians
had confirmed that such monsters existed and that it was their demonic mission to impregnate lonely women lost in slumber.
(Priests offered the same explanation for boys’ wet dreams.) Even if the infant bore a striking similarity to someone other
than the head of the household, and tongues wagged as a result, direct accusations were rare. Cuckolds were figures of fun;
a man was reluctant to identify himself as one. Of course, when unmarried girls found themselves with child and told the same
tale, they met with more skepticism.

If this familial situation seems primitive, it should be borne in mind that these were
prosperous
peasants. Not all their neighbors were so lucky. Some lived in tiny cabins of crossed laths stuffed with grass or straw,
inadequately shielded from rain, snow, and wind. They lacked even a chimney; smoke from the cabin’s fire left through a small
hole in the thatched roof—where, unsurprisingly, fires frequently broke out. These homes were without glass windows or shutters;
in a storm, or in frigid weather, openings in the walls could only be stuffed with straw, rags—whatever was handy. Such
families envied those enjoying greater comfort, and most of all they coveted their beds. They themselves slept on thin straw
pallets covered by ragged blankets. Some were without blankets. Some didn’t even have pallets.

Typically, three years of harvests could be expected for one year of famine. The years of hunger were terrible. The peasants
might be forced to sell all they owned, including their pitifully inadequate clothing, and be reduced to nudity in all seasons.
In the hardest times they devoured bark, roots, grass; even white clay. Cannibalism was not unknown. Strangers and travelers
were waylaid and killed to be eaten, and there are tales of gallows being torn down—as many as twenty bodies would hang
from a single scaffold—by men frantic to eat the warm flesh raw.

However, in the good years, when they ate, they
ate
. To avoid dining in the dark, there were only two meals a day—“dinner” at 10
A.M
. and “supper” at 5
P.M
.—but bountiful harvests meant tables which groaned. Although meat was rare on the Continent, there were often huge pork
sausages, and always enormous rolls of black bread (white bread was the prerogative of the patriciate) and endless courses
of soup: cabbage, watercress, and cheese soups; “dried peas and bacon water,” “poor man’s soup” from odds and ends, and during
Lent, of course, fish soup. Every meal was washed down by flagons of wine in Italy and France, and, in Germany or England,
ale or beer. “Small beer” was the traditional drink, though since the crusaders’ return from the East many preferred “spiced
beer,” seasoned with cinnamon, resin, gentian, and juniper. Under Henry VII and Henry VIII the per capita allowance was a
gallon of beer a day—even for nuns and eight-year-old children. Sir John Fortescue observed that the English “drink no water,
unless at certain times upon religious score, or by way of doing penance.”

T
HIS MUST HAVE LED
to an exceptional degree of intoxication, for people then were small. The average man stood a few inches over five feet and
weighed about 135 pounds. His wife was shorter and lighter. Anyone standing several inches over six feet was considered a
giant and inspired legends—Jack the Giant Killer, for example, and Jack and the Beanstalk. Folklore was rich in such violent
tales, for death was their constant companion. Life expectancy was brief; half the people in Europe died, usually from disease,
before reaching their thirtieth birthday. It was still true, as Richard Rolle had written earlier, that “few men now reach
the age of forty, and fewer still the age of fifty.” If a man passed that milestone, his chances of reaching his late forties
or his early fifties were good, though he looked much older; at forty-five his hair was as white, back as bent, and face as
knurled as an octogenarian’s today. The same was true of his wife—“Old Gretel,” a woman in her thirties might be called.
In longevity she was less fortunate than her husband. The toll at childbirth was appalling. A young girl’s life expectancy
was twenty-four. On her wedding day, traditionally, her mother gave her a piece of fine cloth which could be made into a frock.
Six or seven years later it would become her shroud.

Clothing served as a kind of uniform, designating status. Some raiment was stigmatic. Lepers were required to wear gray coats
and red hats, the skirts of prostitutes had to be scarlet, public penitents wore white robes, released heretics carried crosses
sewn on both sides of their chests—you were expected to pray as you passed them—and the breast of every Jew, as stipulated
by law, bore a huge yellow circle. The rest of society belonged to one of the three great classes: the nobility, the clergy,
and the commons. Establishing one’s social identity was important. Each man knew his place, believed it had been foreordained
in heaven, and was aware that what he wore must reflect it.

To be sure, certain fashions were shared by all. Styles had changed since Greece and Rome shimmered in their glory; then garments
had been
wrapped
on; now all classes
put
them on and fastened them. Most clothing—except the leather gauntlets and leggings of hunters, and the crude animal skins
worn by the very poor—was now woven of wool. (Since few Europeans possessed a change of clothes, the same raiment was worn
daily; as a consequence, skin diseases were astonishingly prevalent.) But there was no mistaking the distinctions between
the parson in his vestments; the toiler in his dirty cloth tunic, loose trousers, and heavy boots; and the aristocrat with
his jewelry, his hairdress, and his extravagant finery. Every knight wore a signet ring, and wearing fur was as much a sign
of knighthood as wearing a sword or carrying a falcon. Indeed, in some European states it was illegal for anyone
not
nobly born to adorn himself with fur. “Many a petty noble,” wrote historian W. S. Davis, “will cling to his frayed tippet
of black lambskin, even in the hottest weather, merely to prove that he is not a villein.”

Furred (and feathered) hats were favored by patricians; so were flowered robes and fancy jackets bulging at the sleeves. It
was considered appropriate for the nobly born to flaunt the distinguishing marks of their sex. This had not changed since
the death of Chaucer a century earlier. Chaucer himself—who as a page had worn a flaming costume with one hose red and one
black—nevertheless deplored, in
The Canterbury Tales
, the custom of wearing trousers with codpieces over the genitalia. This flaunting of “shameful privee membres,” he wrote,
by men with “horrible swollen membres that they shewe thugh disgisynge [disguise],” also made “the buttokes … as it were,
the hyndre part of a sheape in the fulle of the moone.”

He was even more offended by “the outrageous array of wommen, God wot that the visages of somme of them seem ful chaste and
debonaire, yet notifie they” by “the horrible disordinate scantinesse” of their dress their “likerousnesse [lecherousness]
and pride.” Both sexes were advertising, not flirting, and they were certainly not bluffing; when challenged, by all accounts,
they responded eagerly.

I
T WAS A TIME
when the social lubricants of civility, and the small but essential trivia of civilized life, were just beginning to re-emerge,
phoenixlike, from the medieval ashes. Learning, like etiquette, was being rediscovered. For example, the arithmetic symbols
+ and − did not come back into general use until the late 1400s. Spectacles for the shortsighted were unavailable until around
1520. Lead pencils had appeared at the turn of the century, together with the first postal service (between Vienna and Brussels).
However, Peter Henlein’s “Nuremberg Egg,” the first watch, said to have been invented in 1502, is now regarded as a myth.
Small table clocks and watches, telling time to the hour, would not begin to appear in Italy and Germany until the last quarter
of the century. Bartolomew Newsam is said to have built the first English standing clock in 1585.

In all classes, table manners were atrocious. Men behaved like boors at meals. They customarily ate with their hats on and
frequently beat their wives at table, while chewing a sausage or gnawing at a bone. Their clothes and their bodies were filthy.
The story was often told of the peasant in the city who, passing a lane of perfume shops, fainted at the unfamiliar sent and
was revived by holding a shovel of excrement under his nose. Pocket handkerchiefs did not appear until the early 1500s, and
it was midcentury before they came into general use. Event sovereigns wiped their noses on their sleeves, or, more often,
on their footmen’s sleeves. Napkins were also unknown; guests were warned not to clean their teeth on the tablecloth. Guests
in homes were also reminded that they should blow their noses with the hand that held the knife, not the one holding the food.

There is some dispute about when cutlery was introduced. Apparently knives were first provided by guests, who carried them
in sheaths attached to their belts. According to Erasmus, decorum dictated that food be brought to the mouth with one’s fingers.
The fork is mentioned in the fifteenth century, but was used then only to serve dishes. As tableware it was not laid out in
the French court until 1589, though it had appeared at a Venetian ducal banquet in 1520; writing in his diary afterward, Jacques
LeSaige, a French silk merchant who had been among the guests, noted with wonder: “These seigneurs, when they want to take
the meat up, use a silver fork.”