Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England c.1200–1520

"Yes, this is the book that really knocked my socks off in the reading room of the British Library back in the early 1990s. I can remember opening it at random and reading about how Chris Dyer was measuring the size of ruined peasant houses from the 14th century. I thought ‘Gosh. This takes everything to a whole new level.’ Previously, I’d been reading social histories that were not really pinned on accounts or objects or houses. They’d been drawn up by Victorian or early-twentieth-century historians, who were really working from the literary sources. So they’d read Chaucer, or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , and then go on to tell you all about life in England based on these texts. This allowed no accuracy. They were full of impressions. The sources also tended to be written by the wealthy for an audience who were also wealthy, because they were the ones who were literate. I had never imagined that somebody would manage to revolutionize history to this extent—to look at how big a medieval peasant house really was. How was it heated? What did they make the door from? What was the calorific intake? Can you calculate, for a peasant family, what they had in calories every day? He did it, and it’s just extraordinary what he achieved. It also had repercussions. When it came to the Mary Rose excavation, the archeologists did the same thing. They worked out the calorific intake of all the sailors on the Mary Rose, given what was documented to be taken on board. This way of approaching history, this real insight into the past, was just mind-blowing. I can still remember that moment. After seeing the measurements of peasant houses, and then the calculation of peasant calorific intake, I just thought, ‘Yes! History like I want it to be possible, is possible.’ I was very excited, as you can probably tell. You’re right. It was difficult to get protein in the Middle Ages if you were low status. And, most importantly, this affects our understanding of what things were worth. In Mortimer’s A to Zs of English History , I refer to the difficulties of comparing prices over time. If you want to know, say, what the equivalent of five pounds in today’s money was in the 13th century, there are two reputable machines online for doing this. One is the Bank of England’s inflation calculator. The other one is run by the National Archives. Both start in the 13th century, around 1270, and go through to the present day. Now, if you take a median household income—which is £38,000 pounds today—and try to work out what that was 700 years ago, the Bank of England and the National Archives calculator will come out at around the same figure, around £60. This is totally wrong and misleading, because £60 pounds in 1325 was the equivalent to the manorial income from around 15,000 acres of land. You’d have had to be lord of three manors to have that sort of income in the past—and it’s one-and-a-half times as much money as you would have needed to be knighted in the early 14th century. The fundamental error is that these calculators have regarded all things as having equal value to society down the centuries. But you really can’t compare because food was so scarce and more valuable in the Middle Ages. So I use the unit of currency called the chicken. I point out that in the late 14th century, one day’s skilled labor—as, say, a thatcher or mason—would be the equivalent of one chicken. By Elizabethan times, it was about 10 pence for a day’s skilled labor, and about six pence for a chicken. By Restoration times, a day’s wage was about two shillings, and a chicken a shilling. In Regency times, you’re up to about ten shillings for labor and two and a half shillings for a chicken, so roughly a three-to-one ratio. Today, of course, a skilled laborer receives the equivalent of about 11-12 free range chickens for his money. Because food has become so much more affordable and is, in relative terms, less valuable, it’s thrown out all these figures. Now, I started that comparison in the late 14th century after the Black Death of 1347-51. Before that event, the population was roughly twice as high—but there weren’t many more chickens. Protein was really, really scarce. If it hadn’t been for cheese, what would people have done in the 13th and early 14th centuries? You would not have seen the population grow to the level it did, because getting protein was so difficult. In the 13th century, things were tough. The reason for so many gangs in the late 13th/early 14th century was simply starvation. People didn’t have enough food to live. After the Black Death, it was easier to get food. There is an irony in that the consequence of the Black Death was an increased life expectancy. You don’t think of animals being different in the 14th century, but they were. And not just the ones we ate. All the squirrels were red. None of the modern dog breeds existed—they had different dog breeds. Animals like cows, sheep and pigs have been bred and bred and bred all the way through. Sizes started changing in the 14th century, but in the 18th century they grew massively. A large Devon cow today—my local breed—is roughly 10 times the size of the average one from the Middle Ages. So I began the book with A for animals, because that was one way of opening the door to things being different in ways you can’t necessarily anticipate. I wrote four Time Traveller’s Guides , which are attempts to show what life would be like in a particular period of time, if you could go there. So if you could go to the 14th century or Elizabeth I’s reign or Restoration England or Regency Britain, what would you eat or drink? What would you wear? Where would you stay? It presents a whole range of aspects of everyday life that people might want to know if they could go there. I wrote all those books a number of years ago, and gave talks about each of them in the form of an A to Z of interesting things. There’d be big themes in there, and tiny things to make people realize all the things they didn’t know about the past. I wrote these talks expressly for people’s enjoyment, so one day I thought, ‘Why not publish them?’ I can include everything I’ve learned from this whole 25 years of looking at the past in the present tense. So writing Mortimer’s A to Zs of English History was just great fun. It includes five A to Zs: the medieval one, the Elizabethan one, the Restoration, the Regency, and then my conclusions on the whole lot. So I can ask questions like: When was the best time to be a woman in the last 700 years? How does the class system survive? What can we learn from glass? Questions addressing the last 700 years of this country’s history that you can’t ask as a traditional historian suddenly become possible. Now, definitely! I know too much about the past to want to go back there. I have no illusions. Some people think, ’Oh, you’d be alright if you were one of the wealthy.’ Well, consider this: between 1660 and 1700 there were 35 royal pregnancies. Of those 35 royal pregnancies, three children lived to adulthood. So you’re looking at less than 10% survival, and that’s for the royal family—who had access to the best physicians. We’re not talking about the Middle Ages here. We’re talking about the 17th century, the time of the Scientific Revolution! And when children die, it’s indicative of suffering throughout the whole family and society. It’s not just a lack of resources—though it is that for many families—it’s indicative of a lack of understanding, a lack of medical facilities to make things easier for everybody. It’s a real barometer of how much suffering there is. It was really tough surviving in the past. We are the descendants of survivors. We aren’t the descendants of the ‘ordinary person’, because the ordinary person had such a hard time getting by that most of them died without children. We are the descendants of the lucky ones. The median age was under 21, which is horrific. It means society was full of young people, on the one hand. It also means it was full of reckless people, because they didn’t have the life experience to calm them down. Some people lived to an advanced old age, but very, very few of them. Just 5% of the population lived to 60. I’m coming up 60 myself, so that’s a salutary thought… Things weren’t much better in the 16th century; the Little Ice Age of the late 17th century was particularly tough. The Industrial Revolution was even worse. Life expectancy dropped as low as 13 in the unsewered parts of the industrial towns in the north. Life expectancy in working-class areas was 13¾ in some places, the lowest recorded anywhere on Earth at any time. You were better off being a slave on the plantations than growing up in Ashton-under-Lyne or Preston in the 1820s and 1830s. So I have no illusions about the past being a wonderful place of freedom and exploration. It was a place of misery, and we are lucky that our ancestors survived to have us."