I 



LIFE IN THE MIDDLE AGES 53 



the Hst.^ The goods and chattels of a landless labourer in 

 1431 consisted of a dish, an adze, a brass pot, 2 plates, 

 2 augers, an axe, a three-legged stool, and a barrel.^ English- 

 men of all classes were hopelessly dirty in their habits ; 

 even till the sixteenth century they were noted above other 

 countries for the profuseness of their diet and their unclean 

 ways. Erasmus spoke of the floor of his house as inconceiv- 

 ably filthy. To save fuel, the labourer's family in the cold 

 season all lay huddled in a heap on the floor, * pleasantly and 

 hot ', as Barclay the poet tells us ; and if he ever had a bed it 

 was a bundle of fern or straw thrown down, with his cloak as 

 a coverlet, though thus he was just as well off" as his social 

 superiors, for with them the loose cloak of the day was 

 a common covering for the night. He was constantly exposed 

 to disease, for sanitary precautions were ignored ; at the 

 entrance of his hovel was a huge heap of decaying refuse, 

 poisoning air and water. Even in the sixteenth century 

 a foreigner noticed that ' the peasants dwell in small huts and 

 pile up their refuse out of doors in heaps so high that you 

 cannot see their houses '.^ Diseased animals were constantly 

 eaten, vegetables were few, and in the winter there was no 

 fresh meat for any one, except game and rabbits and, for the 

 well-to-do, fish, but we may doubt if the peasant got any but 

 salt fish. The consequence was that leprosy and kindred 

 ailments were common ; and we do not wonder that plagues 

 were frequent and slew the people like flies. The peasants' 

 food consisted largely of corn. In the bailiff''s accounts of the 

 Manor of Woodstock in 1242, six servants at Handborough 

 received 41^ bushels of corn each, 2 ox herds at Combe 



' Eden, Sfa^e of the Poor, i. 21. 



^ See Cullum, History of Hawsted. 



' Harrison, Description of Britain, Appendix ii, Ixxxi. In some manors, 

 however, there were careful regulations for the public health. According 

 to the Durham Hahnote Rolls, published by the Surtees Society, village 

 officials watched over the water supply, prevented the fouling of streams; 

 bye-laws were enacted as to the regulation of the common place for clothes 

 washing, and the times for emptying and cleansing ponds and mill-dams. 



