The Time Traveller's Guide To Medieval England: A Handbook For Visitors To The Fourteenth Century Quotes
"Despite the wooden scaffolding at its west end, the long eighty-foot-high pointed lead roof and the flying buttresses and colossal towers is simply the wonder of the region."
"The city as a body is a caricature of the human body: smelly, dirty, commanding, rich, and indulgent."
"To visit an English town in the late fourteenth century is a bewildering and extreme sensory experience."
"A major town is an intimidating place... These remains remind you of the power of the king, a greater and more ominous shadow behind the immediate authority of the mayor and aldermen."
"The city is so alive, so full of busy people, that within a short while you have forgotten about the decapitated traitors."
"It is here, among the city’s shops, that your preconceptions of medieval England will begin to fall apart."
"The streets are muddy, rutted, and uneven, the center of each one being a drain carrying whatever detritus has been discarded by townsmen and market visitors."
"The fundamental problem is that of scale. London is a walled city spilling over into its suburbs."
"Forget, if you can, the noxious smells and obstructive rubbish of the city and concentrate on its virtues."
"In summer the roads are dusty. Carts and packhorses trundle along, overtaken by groups of pedestrians and the occasional galloping messenger."
"In the modern world, an English field is a small square patch of ground... They are very different in the fourteenth century."
"The gentle slopes where oats once grew are now increasingly manured carefully so that they can yield wheat."
"A fourteenth-century village is far from picturesque."
"Villeins work the lord’s land for him according to a set of customary expectations, normally three days’ work per week."
"Those royal estates which are kept in the king’s hand bring in an annual income from which the king pays for the royal household, including the various departments of government."
"In total there are about 650 monasteries in 1348."
"The majority of freemen are not as well off as farmers of manors."
"For all these reasons, when you trot into a village on your palfrey, and see one villager’s wife leaning over a wall talking to another, and think to yourself how harmonious everything seems to be, just reflect that there are many inequalities, tensions, and fears which you cannot see."
"The general philosophy—especially in the early part of the century—is that the harsher a lord is towards his tenants, the more he will be feared and respected, be he an abbot or a knight."
"The people who fall outside the three estates are among the most interesting you will meet."
"A royal sergeant-at-arms is a servant but, as a man-at-arms authorized to act as a king’s enforcer, he commands a great deal of authority—more than the rich merchants whose merchandise he may be sent to impound."
"The inequalities of wealth in a town, coupled with the domination of the manorial lords in the country, might make you yearn to escape the whole medieval hierarchy."
"Unlike men, women are not usually described by what they do but by their marital condition."
"From birth until widowhood they are living under the control—nominally, at least—of someone else, in most cases a man."
"The paralyzing factor in male–female relations at all levels of society is the inability to understand and control sexual desire."
"When lords fall out with each other, all their retainers and servants fall out with their opposite numbers too."
"The passions of a violent society spill over into the sense of humor you will encounter."
"You might now be thinking that the medieval English character is composed of cruelty and violence."
"Just as a biographer only begins to understand his subject when he comes to terms with the contradictions and tensions within the character, so too you will only begin to understand the medieval mind when you begin to realize its contradictions."
"To be modestly religious in the fourteenth century is to be fervent by modern standards—you will find the depth of religious feeling in daily life quite astonishing."
"For example, the supreme masters of violence are those military commanders who can direct sudden and overwhelming force at their enemy."
"To what extent is character a result of education? In the Middle Ages it is arguable that the answer is 'not very much.'"
"Another myth often repeated in the modern world is that ordinary medieval people never travel more than five or six miles from their homes."
"The lack of distinction between fact and fiction with regard to distant countries is understandable, but it should alert you to a wider failure to distinguish between the real and the fabulous."
"At times it seems that medieval people pride themselves on the quantity of their knowledge, not its quality or correctness."
"The problem is that not all such knowledge is wholly wrong."
"Fourteenth-century Englishmen do know what elephants and crocodiles look like."
"As soon as you start to think of all the many different activities which entail travel, you realize that freemen regularly travel distances of ten or twenty miles or more."
"In a large city like London, where many bells are rung for a wide variety of reasons, knowing the sound each bell makes represents a third method of telling the time."
"As for the seals of the kingdom, one of the king’s two great seals is kept by the chancellor for sealing Chancery documents, and the other by the treasurer for sealing Exchequer documents."
"When you go by the streets, and you meet anyone you know, or anyone of your acquaintance, be swift and ready to greet him or them first, if he or they be men of valour."
"If it is a market day, then the traders in the market too can start doing business."
"A town market is held primarily for the purpose of supplying goods to those who live in the town and its surrounding parishes."
"The market also serves as a hardware shop."
"Towns which have weekly markets normally have an annual fair as well, usually held on a feast day between July and September."
"Caveat emptor (buyer beware) should be engraved in big letters over the entrance to every marketplace."
"Wherever you are shopping, you will find opportunities to have your grievances addressed."
"The basic unit [of currency] is the pound (£1), which should be the equivalent of a pound in weight of silver."
"If you take the purse hanging from the belt of any moderately wealthy townsman and inspect the coins you find inside, you will see how much variety there is in the design and size of medieval coinage."
"Prices are relatively static by comparison with modern inflationary standards."
"Earning an income in medieval England is not easy."
"In the modern world, the English are not accustomed to haggle."
"The fourteenth century sees greater changes in clothing styles than any previous period of a hundred years."
"Clothing remains a key means of preserving the social order."
"In medieval society, what you wear denotes what you are."
"The sumptuary laws impose no restrictions on what the royal family can wear."
"Most people carry a knife which they use for daily tasks as well as cutting their food."
"Long-distance travel is something to be carefully planned."
"The highway structure of the kingdom is based on the network of Roman roads."
"Your first problem is to establish exactly which route to take."
"The great age of stone bridge building begins in the reign of King John (1199–1216)."
"All the foregoing are the results of natural phenomena."
"The dangers of being lost at sea diminish rapidly with the improvement of mathematical tables and astrolabes."
"In 1300 many people find the idea of being out of sight of land psychologically disturbing."
"Naval victories... mark safer trading and easier journeying for everyone."
"Traveling by sea is not necessarily safer than traveling by land."
"Hulks and cogs... both have a single large square sail hanging from a yardarm on a central mast."
"Genoese ships... are very sought after for naval defense."
"Food does not keep well, no one washes, no one shaves."
"If one man murders another on board, the penalty is to tie him to the corpse and fling him into the sea."
"A Dominican friar who once traveled to Jerusalem explains it thus."
"Hospitality is considered a work of charity."
"Inns are businesses built on necessity—the very opposite of luxury hotels."
"If the king’s court or a nobleman’s retinue is about to arrive at the same town, you will have even greater problems finding accommodation."
"The hall where you find yourself having this conversation is very high, open to the roof beams."
"The hall tends to be a gathering place for people on the move."
"The beds themselves are made of wooden frames strung with rope."
"If you arrive on horseback... you will have no difficulty obtaining a place to stay."
"The poorest town dwellers are not people with whom you are likely to stay."
"The layouts of merchants’ houses vary hugely."
"Food and drink in a lord’s residence is based on a series of rules and regulations far more complicated than seasonal availability and economic necessity."
"Do you rank as high as a gentleman? If you do, you can expect to be seated alongside the gentlemen of the household and fed accordingly."
"The food is actually prepared in 'messes' of two or four portions, which are then shared at the table."
"Food in a nobleman’s household is not just about sustenance, it is a matter of honor."
"As you can see, food in a nobleman’s household is not just about sustenance, it is a matter of honor."
"The religious prohibition against eating meat is seen as no obstacle to culinary excess by the majority of England’s nobility and gentry."
"Accompanying all this meat and fish is an array of vegetables and herbs."
"The prime reason to avoid medieval England is not the violence, the bad humor, the poor roads, the inequality of the class system, the approach to religion and heresy, or the extreme sexism. It is the sickness."
"In almost every respect fourteenth-century life is unhealthy compared to our own."
"Medieval people are not ignorant, in the sense of having no knowledge. It is simply that their knowledge is very different from our own."
"Medicine as taught in the leading Christian universities is heavily influenced by the teachings of Galen and Hippocrates."
"The relationship between cleanliness, identity, pride, and respectability requires individuals to pay attention to their personal appearance as well."
"Given that public bathing establishments are more for pleasure than purity, how does the common man, woman, and child stop building up their own miasma within their clothes?"
"Everywhere you go in medieval England you will see disturbing signs of the rigid and frequent application of the law."
"Justice is very visible in medieval England."
"The sheriff is the king’s chief officer in a county."
A surprisingly large number of indicted men choose to accuse other people of crimes, or of complicity in their own crime. This system is known as "approving."
"If you are a criminal and you know you are going to die, then why not accuse your enemies of complicity in your crimes when you face the judges?"
"You can see how important it is to be considered of good character in your hometown. If your enemies accuse you, often it will only be your good reputation which saves you from the gallows."
"How guilty all these men are is a moot point; many of them have probably been accused simply because the people who live in a village are cautious of strangers, and fearful of them, and thus very quick to point the finger at them when a crime is committed."