One medieval life pathway that I’ve ignored so far is that of the peasant farmer. He hasn’t entered into our stories yet because his life had so few transitions from infancy to adulthood. He didn’t go to school or get formal training, nor did he join an organization. He just started going to work and kept on working.
The peasant typically had two types of field; his own, and the lord’s. The rent for his field strip was a work requirement to plow and sow the lord’s. Peasants did some of their work individually and some together, in particular when they yoked six or eight oxen to get all of the plowing done. They were usually organized to work certain days on the lord’s land, with their time free on other days. In addition to farm work, peasants owed the lord a certain number of days to help with roads, bridges, or walls.
Peasants spent their lives on the land, literally. As horses became more common in the 12th century, some could travel to the nearest town and back for market. They were free to sell whatever they produced on their own time and land, so some peasants got ahead. As towns grew, peasants began saving to buy a son’s freedom from service. With a fee paid to the lord, the son could go to town and find lodgings while he attended school and then apprenticed for a craft.
It’s a myth that the lord slept with a bride on her wedding night; if that famous custom was ever practiced, it certainly was not widespread. (In fact the custom’s earliest mention is in the Epic of Gilgamesh.) But the peasant did have to pay a tax when he got married. Getting married was a sign of prosperity, and it also robbed the lord of a field or house servant when a girl became a wife. So to compensate the lord, the peasant paid some customary or negotiated fee of animals or grain.
Then there’s the death tax; the dead man’s family had to give the lord his best horse or some such fee. This makes no sense at all. Why ask a bereaved family to become poorer? But the idea came from much higher up in society. In the Magna Carta, we find that the king’s death tax on his lords had to be limited. “If any of our earls or barons, or anyone else holding from us in chief by military service should die, and should his heir be of full age and owe relief, the heir is to have his inheritance for the ancient relief, namely the heir or heirs of an earl for a whole county £100, the heir or heirs of a baron for a whole barony 100 marks, the heir or heirs of a knight for a whole knight’s fee 100 shillings at most, and he who owes less will give less, according to the ancient custom of (knights’) fees.”
With the king and his barons, the idea was that the heir had to swear loyalty to the king, and in doing so, he paid a “relief” tax that established his gratitude to the king for continuing his rank and property after his father. It makes a little sense if you think of him bringing a gift to the king when he swears fealty for the county or barony. Perhaps that’s how the barons and knights thought of it when a peasant died: that his heir had to swear fealty and bring a gift. And after all, without money flowing upward from the farmers to the landowner, how was the knight or baron to pay his own “relief” to the king? Or perhaps that year there was a special tax for the king’s son being knighted, or for the king to go on Crusade. Money didn’t grow on trees but at the bottom level it did come from crops and animals.
Peasants lived right on the edge of survival, mostly living on bean porridge. They suffered from bad weather; the end of the Medieval Warm Period was a curse to their lives as the Little Ice Age dropped the average winter temperatures while peasants still could not afford fur coats.