Richard Muir On English Village Life In The 13th Century

Richard Muir, The English Village (New York: Thames and Hudson Limited; 1980), p. 124.

‛The population of England in the middle of the thirteenth century was buoyant and increasing, and although we cannot be certain within a million, it probably numbered around five million.

Prosperity too was increasing, and for many country folk there was at last a glimpse of a better life.

Even so, what passed for villages were agglomerations of filthy hovels, whose inhabitants wore the same threadbare collections of rags for months on end, had bodies which crawled with vermin, who drank from the same streams that served their cattle and pigs, and whose huts were havens for rats, fleas and lice.

Nine-tenths of the population lived thus, and most of the remainder lived in towns which at their biggest and worst were congested stinking deathtraps in which any disease worth its salt could spread quickly and disastrously.

These people did not seek to live in filth, but they possessed neither the means to avoid it nor the knowledge of its consequences: they believed that mice appeared spontaneously in bags of flour, that cheese and not the fly gave birth to maggots and that disease could be caught by speaking its name.

For living in conditions of squalor and ignorance, they paid a steady contribution to the graveyard, which they doubtless accepted with medieval resignation; but nothing could have prepared them psychologically for what was about to befall [that is, the Plague].’

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