[Music] [Applause] [Music] once upon a time there was a peasant he had a hard hard life working all year round little better off than a slave with no sane what went on he was diseased he was downtrodden and he was dead [Music] who on earth would want to have been a medieval peasant oh sure being a peasant in the Middle Ages must qualify as the worst job in history but of course we're only guessing because being peasant let it leave behind much record of their existence except once in the summer of 1381 the peasants left an indelible mark on the history of England the peasants revolt took everyone by surprise it was quite astonishing from out of nowhere it seen tens of thousands of peasants arrived in Blackheath on the outskirts of London and demanded the king abolish all forms of servitude taxation and the aristocracy the king who was only 14 at the time quite understandably said he'd need to think it over the peasants however wanted liberty equality and brotherhood and when did they want it now 400 years before the French Revolution talk about pushing the king who'd been talking to the rebels from the safety of a barge in the middle of the river decided to go home for his team the peasants obviously needed to make their point more forcibly so they rampaged through London killing lots of Flemish people I'm not quite sure how that helped one group broke into the Tower of London they burst into the Royal living quarters than there according to the tabloids of the time they sat on the beds and poked into everything with their filthy sticks some of them even tried to kiss the Kings mother they then dragged the Archbishop of Canterbury and the treasurer out of the White Tower and cut off their heads which they paraded around the town stuck on poles now it sounds to you like the lunatics have taken over the asylum people at the time but they weren't lunatics the peasants agenda was informed tactical and most of all political they targeted lawyers and court officials they made bonfires of legal and tax records they were deliberately amazing they're servile pass how could such a wretched group of underlings have organized such a sophisticated attack of all they're only a bunch of bloody peasants weren't they medieval feudal society was a pyramid with the king atop and the peasants at the bottom doing all the hard work nobody not even the Lord's own any land they simply had the use of it as long as they provided military service for the king the peasants toiled in the fields supporting those with more important things to do like praying and fighting each other yeah it's an excellent system you ask me stinking peasants but since the lord of the manor was often away from his estate fighting in the king's wars he had to be able to rely on his peasants to organize themselves in many ways our many evil peasant and more saying how his life was run the most people didn't now of course it's a way of life that's all gone we'll never know what it was really like to live under such a system except where the village of Laxton in Nottingham shamp is the only place in England that still works on the medieval system the centre of which is a so-called court leat elected every year by the village farmers in many evil towns it had the power to formulate bylaws collect rents and maintain law and order today the courts only job is to police the way the land is farmed once a year on Joey day the jurors head out to check that no one is breaking any of the rules the land is farmed in strips in the same way as it was eight hundred years ago and each farmers strip of land is separated not by fences but by grassy borders of common land known as six this little green strip of grass is the dividing for between the two strips this one belongs to mr. Dobson and that one belongs to mr. noble it's not straight I measure B going to be a big years I'm a couple of yards of nice grass and woe betide anyone caught ignoring these boundaries as soon as we got there an offence was spotted a stray of turn left this arrow Oh like in yeah called soil on the common land call surely men yeah but we don't put it back in the rivers doing it you done it oh that is a serious serious offense how much think they'll get fine for that and I know about two pounds I think yeah then down to the serious matter of marking out the boundaries of each farmer's land using these same high-tech methods developed in the Middle Ages which leaves plenty of room for debate today the owner is law [Music] [Applause] [Music] offenses such as plowing over boundaries are taken very seriously and will be judged at the meeting of the court a solemn affair which takes place as it has done for centuries in the local pub right then gentlemen I'll call the court to order oh yay oh yay oh yay all manner of persons who oh suit and service to the court lead to the Queen's Most Excellent Majesty journey and give your attendance god save the queen and the lord of this court late the presentment shows the dykes are satisfactory there's a fine of ten pounds on Stuart Rose for plying too far into the meadow ends sick sister Rose do you have any comment on yeah well that was a plan to an original pink which was already in the in the sick so I thought I was blowing in the right place and I think 10-pound finest a bit harsh it was the wrong place no yes lightly but I was plowing to where it's being marked out any comments from anyone else I think the fine should stand in medieval times a man could be tried for murder in this court right at the time well the proposal of the court then is to reduce the fine from 10 pounds to 5 pounds everyone in favor of course it suited the Lord's to leave all this petty legal stuff to the peasants to sort out for themselves but there was a snag the experience of dealing with the law and enforcing it sometimes meant that the peasants became minor legal experts in their own right and when they did they used that expertise to their own ends sometimes however they resorted to rather unconventional tactics for example in 1200 King John proposed a visit to the city of Nottingham with residents of the nearby village of Gotham realized that this meant he would pass through their village making it a Kings Highway and thus making them liable to new taxes so when the Kings messengers arrived what did they do well the entire village pretended to be mad since madness was considered contagious the idea of a whole village of lunatics was perfectly feasible the king wisely decided to make a detour but for all their cunning surely peasants were still nothing more than slaves in the same way that the lord of the manor had to provide military service to the king the peasants had to provide the lord of the manor with so many day's labor in return for the land they held from him historians have given this arrangement the catchy title of feudal burden but just how much of a burden were these feudal duties for example the peasants who plowed these fields six or seven hundred years ago bore one of the heaviest feudal burdens in the kingdom that is to say they had to work for the lord of the manor for something like fifty to sixty days in the year to provide their accommodation and pay their taxes nowadays most of these fields are occupied by the BMW car plant now to pay for their rent and taxes today and the assembly line worker has to work for something like 80 days in the year that's nearly a month longer than the worst of medieval peasant what's more the feudal arrangement was a two-way thing the Lord had responsibilities to his peasants in fact twice a year he was supposed to lay on feasts for them as a sort of thank you I can't remember the last time the taxman took me out for slap-up dinner or a picnic of course the lord of the manor lived like her lord but what kind of a stinking hovel with his peasants have called home the answer can be found at Britain's newest oldest village cosmo stood the outskirts of cardiff where a team of archaeologists have painstakingly recreated a complete medieval village there's a surprising range of properties on offer first up a medieval bachelor pad or rather an affordable studio apartment suitable for the single working peasant must be pretty unpleasant life it could be quite grim but again we've got to get rid of all of our modern views on what makes a good life so this is the how the lowest of the low would live yeah we're right at the bottom well that's right here's a nice little cottage but that's what all he has going for him so what does he do this he's a landless laborers ooh the chapel deeded land taken away right at the bottom and so he's got a fire yeah very basic pot here above his half tiny amounts of wood that be used none of the roaring fires the wheat think of because all of his wood has to pay the lord of the manor would penny go out into the woods and he could just collect what's fallen and he's got a bed I see delightful bed here with just a mattress full of straw thrown on top of it when a couple of rough old woolen blankets candy fleas I expect hopefully not too bad because hanging above them we have some fleabane so in theory that keeps the fleas away [Music] [Applause] [Music] if that was the bottom of the bottom of the heap what was it like on the top of the bottom of the heap next on the tour an upmarket semi-detached family home a decidedly des res for the upwardly mobile professional peasant couple every year the free men of the village vote who they want to be and the Reeve is almost like a village manager keeps an eye on things make sure that everybody's farming the land properly this is a wealthy man a wealthy villager he doesn't make his money out of being Reeve he owns a lot of land that's what he is the Land Rover three wellif are a very important special the Reeves wife the first thing you see as you come in is her fine pottery display so she's showing it off to him showing her jugs off to everybody which I am exactly we have some nice examples here this one is Sam Thomas batteries sounds French to me that's right this is cut from the Bordeaux region probably as part of the wine trade from the area anybody amongst the peasants is gonna be drinking wine it's gonna be the river his family could be a medieval peasant oh I'll think about it strip wood floors shelves of holiday knickknacks and a nice drop board a wine maybe the medieval ideal home wasn't so different from today's but I'm still a bit nervous about what they had to eat it's this pottage evidently the recipe for pottage is take anything and put it into a pan of water and boil it up for two hours the reason you have to boil everything you pick out of the fields for two hours is because they used human excrement on the fields so even lettuce had to be boiled which mainly salads rather soggy anyway let's try the pottage it's pretty disgusting um but you could have had chaired it up I suppose with them few herbs maybe even some garlic they also had an instant form of pottage and you take this into the fields with you and then you could lick was right with a bit of beer and eat that he wanted to anybody the good news is about being a peasant was that you got drink and you beer and they didn't have hops until 14 20 when they were imported from Flanders so before that you had to flavor the beer with other things like bog myrtle this one's flavored with it's basically the same sort of stuff that's her a taste of that of course they they tended to drink alcoholic drinks rather than water because the water was usually not very drinkable every village was dominated by its church and the peasants social life revolved around it the medieval church certainly knew how to attract a congregation it was the place where the peasants had their parties where they did their amateur dramatics and where they even held football matches oh and the local priest often used to brew his own beer just suddenly more of a draw than playing the guitar and the church expected its peasants to be duly grateful here in Painswick Gloucestershire the rather quaint ceremony has survived from medieval times peasants would show their love of the church I'm giving it a big hug this year's clipping service I think we have our arms right the way around the church and so now we're going to embrace so we're going to clip our lovely church another reason they were so fond of the church maintained that it provided plenty of holidays or other holy days if you thought we have more leisure time today think again nowadays we enjoy eight public holidays a year in the Middle Ages the church insisted on 80 well a clearer picture of peasant lifestyle seems to be emerging but I wanted to really get under their skin so I was introduced to some real-life medieval peasants far from being sickly and diseased forensic studies have revealed that the inhabitants of a remote yorkshire village received surprisingly sophisticated health care what about this chap here we've got a skull with a big hole of the middle of it right this absolutely extraordinary what this seems to be is a cranial injury that was treated by Neurological Surgery this individual suffered a blunt injury to the head just around the time the Norman Conquest where this hole is that would have been where the bone was shut into small fragments if you look carefully this you can see where the surgeon made his incision is it oh the guy's been hit in the head and the surgeon said I've got to get rid of those pieces of fragments of skull they knew that was bad to have the veins exactly yes so this guy's wandering around with a hole in his here oh yes yes I mean this this would have been covered by his scalp but his skin would have grown over it okay yes yes exactly as he won't have had a hole right through to the brain and he'd have been perfectly alright with the bones reveal that some peasants lived well into their 60s and whilst there are signs of malnutrition their diet did have its benefits one of the the upsides that they did have quite good dental health and there is very little tooth decay and we can see that's because they're not having sugar and sulfide they're not having sugar and also it's in a very coarse diet which seem to scour the teeth clean and we can see this here and that means that there's no chance for dental decay to get started another toothbrush still wouldn't have gone amiss in some cases if we look at this one here you can see this huge shaggy deposits on the teeth Oh disgusting but well this is actually mineralized then to plaque this is accumulate over the years of his life that shows quite clearly no effort at all yg knows these people oh god he must have had terrible breath chronic halitosis seems to have been a bit of an issue in Wales a peasant woman could divorce her husband on the grounds of bad breath clearly they weren't stupid and historians now believe that the peasant class wasn't as ignorant as was once assumed either he was all about getting your child in the right school which in the Middle Ages meant being snapped up by the church village priests often taught the sons of villagers their ABC and that's one in 10 of these boys were gone into the clergy some sons of peasants went on to become high-flying members of the intelligentsia like this chap here William of Wickham William may have been born a humble peasant but he rose to become the richest and one of the most powerful men in England his Lord Chancellor not once but twice and he put his fortune to good use he found in this place one of the oldest public schools in the country Winchester College very nice William never forgot his origins and he established this school to provide education for 70 boys from peasant backgrounds not so many peasants around here nowadays but Williams cryptic motto still hangs above today's pupils out disk' out de skating either learn or go and then he adds there is a third choice be beaten but we should be clear that literacy wasn't sought after by the peasants so they could do a spot of bedtime reading or improve their crossword skills what they wanted was to be able to make out enough words in Latin to check references to themselves and their land in the court rolls and checking court documents was something that was going to coming very useful for the peasants in the tumultuous times that lay ahead for most of the 13th and early 14th century England had an almost Mediterranean feel pampered props and a booming economy and the population doubled but then that old enemy of the English struck no I don't mean the All Blacks I mean the weather heavy rain and low temperatures caused crops to rot and entire villages to sing people were starving to death surely couldn't get any worse than this but it could on top of the famine came something even more dreadful the Black Death an already weakened population was devastated to many people it seemed that God had deserted them and they struggled to reconcile this terrible catastrophe with their beliefs here in the church at Asheville in heart Roger the plague has left its mark quite literally over 650 years ago the desperate local priest scratched these words onto the walls of his bell tower you can see here it says Primula pestis the first plague 13:49 and then below he's incised into the walls in deep letters a big em that's a thousand and then 350 in 1350 he puts misery and Farex he violenta miserable fierce and violent the plague has been and then below he writes the dregs of the population left behind bare witness and a mighty wind founders across the world [Music] the black death was a catastrophe but ironically those who survived found they were better off than they ever had been you see the population of England had been almost haft and labour was scarce and ordinary farm workers suddenly found they were in a position to call the shots peasants began to refuse to fulfill their feudal duties they started to negotiate wage increases and even began to be paid in hard cash some left their manners and acquired their own free land all this of course got up the noses of the aristocracy if there was more wealth around this or no reason why the peasant should have it so they introduced laws to restore compulsory labor and force wages back down to the levels before the Black Death especially irritated the aristocracy was the way the peasants were dressing this season's peasant ditch to grab work we're in favor of bright colors tighter hose and even fur some peasants were spending what was the same on clothes a certain nobleman so laws were introduced dictating what different classes could wear for example for any person below the level of craftsman pointy shoes were a fashion Christ list all of which stoked the fires of peasant resentment the final straw was when the Barons imposed a poll tax to pay for their war in France this was bitterly resented because it meant that everybody had to pay the same rich or poor and to make matters worse the government got its sons wrong they based their calculations on the population size before the black death so when they failed to raise the amount they expected they imposed a second poll tax and that was when the unthinkable happened the peasants took up arms and revolted from all over England they converged on Canterbury and marched to London maybe as many as 60,000 of them with no emails or mobile phones how could the peasants have organized all this could it be that they were making use of their newly acquired literacy to spread word of the revolt two of the chroniclers record what they claimed were letters that the peasants was circulating amongst themselves now the letters are written in English but they're very cryptic we don't really know what they mean they could be that they contain detailed coded instructions for the revolt this is the one in thomas wall seems chronicle and you can see here it says john sheep who eateth well john nameless and John the Miller and biddeth them chastise well hobbed the robber and look shape you to one head and no more knoweth your friend from your foe have it enough and say who now it may be that when they says chastise well hob the robber those are instructions to the peasants not to do any looting and only to destroy documents and records and then it says look shaped into one head and no more well it could be just instructions saying just only have one leader but on the other hand it made instructions to go on pilgrimage to Canterbury where the peasants assembled first and the focal point was the head of thomas a becket and finally it says no if your friend from your foe and say who these could be absolute rigid instructions to distinguish your friends from your enemy by the battlecry the climax of the peasants revolt must rank as one of the most extraordinary scenes in history tens of thousands of rebelling peasants confronted the country's aristocracy led by the king a fourteen-year-old boy the peasants leader what Tyler rode towards the boy King to make his demands and then took a swig from a jug of ale whereupon the mayor of London charged and cutting down it looked as if the huge throng were about to attack the aristocracy but the King's suddenly rode forward and shouted I'll be a leader follow me the king grounded the peasants pardons and promised to abolish serfdom but once the rebels had dispersed the Barons quickly said about slaughtering the ringleaders thousands of peasants died the peasants revolt failed however the ideal of freedom and of owing deference to no one was a lasting legacy of the medieval peasant but there's a sting in the tail to the peasant story the lords realized that if the peasants were now free from any labor obligation to them they were likewise free from any obligation to care for their peasants the social consensus of the feudal system had broken down and there was worse to come peasants were about to come face-to-face with their real enemy sheep you see your average Lord could make more money out of sheep than he could out of peasants understand there's a lot more wool on a sheep and you can eat them which is possible with peasants but socially tricky so the Lords started to throw the Troublesome and unbeatable peasants off the land and replace them with these chaps the social landscape of Britain changed forever there's nothing intrinsically terrible about the peasants life I thought there were times in the 14th century when it was pretty fine it deteriorated when the Lords fenced in the land and he got even worse in the industrial revolution and small farmers are still up against it the life of the peasant depends on the society but it's sobering to think that compared to a lot of people's lives today some medieval peasants had it pretty good [Music] [Applause] [Music]