Expert: Laura Trauth - 4/23/2004

Question
Do you know what the typical mood of the medieval peasant was? When you read about you can find their lives quite depressing (but that's just by our standards). Were they content, unhappy, or happy in general?

Also, did they value their families in a way similar to the way people do now?

Answer
Hi Scott,

Basically we don't know this.  No historian does.  Medieval peasants were generally illiterate, so we have no writings from them telling us how they felt about their lives.  We have to rely on middle and upper class writers from the times, and often their writings are full of stereotypes.  

Geoffrey Chaucer's a good example.  He's more-of-less what we'd call "middle class" today, and lived near London.  When he writes about villagers, his stories are good, but the people are cheerful, cheating Millers, devout, humble village priests, and so on.  What he's doing is the equivalent of writing a story about a con-artist used car dealer today.

We can probably assume that the villagers were used to living in the conditions they grew up in.  They'd be content in a two-room house of woven sticks and mud (wattle and daub) where we wouldn't, because that's what they'd seen everyday since they were children.  We can assume that, like people around the world today, they were happy sometimes and unhappy sometimes, and generally wanted stable lives with enough to eat and a little time or money left over for something luxurious or fun. Their "fun stuff" might have been a new shirt, some honey for a sweet treat, the big feast the Lord gave at Christmas time, and so on.

We can guess at their mood in other ways too.  We do know they played games -- team sports roughly like rugby or soccer.  We know they had Church Ales, or fund-raisers with contests of strength and the above sports, to raise money for the local church.  We know they decorated the village with greenery at the holidays.  We also know that occasionally they committed suicide, as the royal government kept track of such things.  Perhaps because of their religious beliefs, this seems to have quite rare -- I've only read one coroner's report of a suicide.

About families:  the view used to be that, since children went to work pretty young, and since so many died before reaching adult hood (about 50%) they were just seen as resources.  I don't think that's true.  Wills and other agreements of slightly richer people show that they went to great lengths to provide for their children and aging parents.  There is also a poem from the middle ages, again written by someone more "middle class," called Pearl, that is about a man mourning the death of his beloved 3 year old child.  Why wouldn't someone a step or two down on the social ladder in the same community have felt the same way?

Often spouses just married as a business arrangement too, but other times we know they loved each other.  More "middle-class" letters of a family called the Pastons include love letters, and show one girl running off to marry the man she loved without permission. We also have records of peasant marriage disputes -- where one partner says the two agreed to marry and the other says they didn't -- and these records occasionally indicate very strong feelings towards a potential spouse.  

So these little hints say to me that, while they were probably more acustomed to death and loss than we are, and might pragmatically keep working through the loss of a child or spouse, there's no reason to assume that medieval people wouldn't have loved their family members just like we do today.

Sincerely,
Laura Trauth