Life in a medieval village

1) "In the modern world the village is merely a very small town, often a metropolitan suburb, always very much a part of the world outside. The 'old-fashioned village' of the American nineteenth century was more distinctive in function, supplying services of merchants and craftsmen to a circle of farm homesteads surrounding it.
The medieval village was something different from either. Only incidentally was it the dwelling place of merchants or craftsmen. Rather, its population consisted of the farmers themselves, the people who tilled the soil and herded the animals. Their houses, barns, and sheds clustered at its center, while their plowed fields and grazing pastures and meadows surrounded it. Socially, economically, and politically, it was a community.
In modern Europe and America the village is home to only a fraction of the population. In medieval Europe, as in most Third World countries today, the village sheltered the overwhelming majority of people. The modern village is a place where its inhabitants live, but not neccessarily or even probably where they work. The medieval village, in contrast, was the primary community to which its people belonged for all life's purposes. There they lived, there they labored, there they socialized, loved, married, brewed and drank ale, sinned, went to church, paid fines, had children in and out of wedlock, borrowed and lent money, tools, and grain, quarreled and fought, and got sick and died. Together they formed an integrated whole, a permanent community organized for agricultural production. Their sense of common enterprise was expressed in their records by special terms: communitas villae, the community of the vill or village, or tota villata, the body of all villagers."

2) "Where once the silent European wilderness had belonged to the wolf and the deer, villagers now ranged—with their lord's permission—in search of firewood, nuts, and berries, while their pigs rooted and their cattle and sheep grazed. Villages all over Europe parleyed with their neighbors to fix boundaries, which they spelled out in charters and committed to memory with a picturesque annual ceremony. Every spring, in what were known in England as the 'gang-days,' the whole population went 'a-ganging' around the village permieter. Small boys were ducked in boundary brooks and bumped against boundary trees and rocks by way of helping them learn this important lore."

3) "Early in the fourteenth century the population of England probably surpassed four million, as compared with the Domesday figure of a million and a half to two million. By far the greater part of the increase came from the villages, 'the primary seedbeds of population.' The Europe-wide demographic surge was halted by a series of calamities that began with the floods and famine of 1315-1317. Two catastrophic harvests in succession, possibly related to a long-term climatic change, sent grain prices to levels 'unparalleled in English history,' and, accompanied by typhoid, hit poor families especially hard. The lords added to the misery by cutting down their alms-giving, reducing staff, and halting livery of grain to their famuli, like latter-day governments and business firms responding to business depression by laying off workers and reducing purchases. Severe murrain and cattle disease added to the calamity. Thefts of food and livestock rose sharply, and bodies of paupers were found in the streets. Dogs and cats disappeared, and cannibalism was rumoured."

4) [Re: The Peasant Rebellion/Wat Tyler's Rebellion of 1381] "Another leader of the English rebels, the Kentish priest John Ball, preached that 'things cannot go right in England... until goods are held in common and there are no more villeins and gentlefolk, but we are all one and the same.' Unsympathetic Froissart, chronicler of the nobility, may not be recording Ball's words with reportorial exactness, but there is little doubt that the gist is accurate: '[The lords] are clad in velvet and camlet lined with squirrel and ermine, while we go dressed in coarse cloth. They have the wines, the spices, and the good bread: we have the rye, the husks, and the straw, and we drink water. They have shelter and ease in their fine manors, and we have hardship and toil, the wind and the rain in the fields. And from us must come, from our labour, the things which keep them in luxury.' And the fiery preacher's auditors, 'out in the fields, or walking together from one village to another, or in their homes, whispered and repeated among themselves, 'That's what John Ball says, and he's right!'' One chronicler credits Ball with the phrase, 'All men are created equal,' and with a declaration that villein servitude is 'against the will of God.'"