As a rule, then as now, the person who made the largest profit on his land was the very small landowner. Many circumstances combined to favour him in the end of the Middle Ages. The cost of labour was high; he with his family could run the farm without paid assistance. The raising of cattle is nearly always more profitable than the growing of crops, and the man with little land might yet possess considerable herds. A very slight tax, paid either in labour or in kind to the lord of the manor, secured him the right to pasture his cattle on the wide grassy borders of the lanes and in the interminable forests that still covered half of France; the sheep were driven to pasture in the salt-marshes, one in every flock being yielded, as a sort of tithe or rent, to the owner of the land; while in winter-time the right of pasture in stubble or aftermath was common to all the cattle of a commune. The tenant who owned all these flocks of swine and sheep, which fattened on the acorns and grasses of the manor, had probably round his humble cabin nothing more than a few acres of harvest-land for his own use. He possessed neither draught oxen nor horses for ploughing, but paid one of his wealthier neighbours to perform this service. Over and over again we find the records of similar transactions; the price given varying naturally according to the extent and quality of the fields to be furrowed.[17]
At harvest-time, then as now, the peasant farmer could engage a man by the day to help him in the stress of work; the labourer usually received his meals and about one sol per day,[18]—say five francs—which is much what he would receive at the present time.
We have now a fair idea of the expenses of farming. The profits then as now were mainly the sale of wool and hides, of beasts, of corn, of wine or cider. The price of these articles, due proportion being guarded, has not varied in any surprising fashion. The average price of corn (which in the terrible years that followed Poitiers rose to thirty sols) was fifteen sols the septier, let us say thirty shillings the hectolitre; owing to the quantity of foreign corn imported, it does not fetch more than half as much to-day, but on the other hand, owing to our improvement in agriculture, an acre nowadays yields twice as large a harvest, so that the profit to the farmer is about the same. The commonest vin ordinaire appears to have been worth thirty-two deniers the septier—a little more than a halfpenny the litre; but the wine usually served in country taverns cost four deniers the pint[19] (about 1s. 3d. the bottle, shall we say)—which is more than a “Gladstone claret” commands in France to-day. (That used in our kitchen, the common household wine of France in 1903, costs, if bought by the barrel, a little more than fourpence a litre; but were it not for the extravagant tax paid to the State, it should cost no more than two-pence, at most.) To return to our fourteenth century: In 1371 a butcher at Evreux values two small oxen at four livres five sols; while a large ox of Tallevaude, in 1383, is worth six livres—about four and twenty pounds—which is just five pounds less than the average price given by French country butchers for a fine full-grown beast to-day.
The houses of the farmers and the country people differed (then as now) according to their rank and prosperity, and also according to the district they inhabited. The yeoman farmer, and even the well-to-do husbandman, dwelt in a solid house of brick or stone, tiled or slated, with a paved yard separating it from the barns, the outhouses, the dairy, and cattle-pens. The farm-house—which, in England, was always constructed with a southern aspect—as invariably faced the east in Aquitaine, while to the rear, well open to the west, was a long tiled verandah, where, in winter afternoons, the hemp-picking, the wool-carding, the threshing, &c., was done.[20] Within, the vast kitchen glowed in the light of the fire—almost as unextinguishable as the vestal virgin’s; peat, coal, and wood were each abundantly employed; and for a trifling rent, generally paid in kind or labour, the lord of the manor would permit the farmers on his land to cut their turfs from his bog, or their boughs from his forest. Fuel was not only actually, but relatively cheaper in the Middle Ages than to-day; for the bogs were not drained in those days, the forests covered great expanses, and the cost of carriage made it almost impossible to transport their produce. In nearly every part of France and England the supply of fuel was in excess of the demand.
This hospitable fire flared up a chimney proportioned to its size, lighting the huge brick oven, the iron fire-dogs, the bellows, shovel, gridiron, ladles, cauldrons, saucepans, mortar, tin pails, and other utensils that stood on the brackets of the hearth; and irradiating the brass and copper pots, the metal candlesticks, the lamp, the lantern, the not unfrequent silver beaker, and the glass drinking-cups, that were ranged on the chests and cupboards round the walls.[21] Near this fire stood a high-backed settle, the master’s ingle corner; and under the great mantel of the chimney narrower benches were set in the brick. Within easy reach of the hearth, a deep oak chest held the logs for burning. It was generally matched by a handsome wedding-chest with carved or painted front, long enough to contain a grown person full-length (as the readers of Ginevra will mournfully remember), but more usually filled, it must be admitted, with the best clothes, the trinkets, and the savings of the household. The Registers of the Châtelet record no crime so common as the breaking open of such wedding-chests; and it is surprising how many clasps or jewels, girdles of pearls, golden head-dresses and rings, and purses full of gold, were stolen from quite humble households. Our forefathers lived in times when the letting out of money at interest was insecure and considered a deadly sin, so they invested their capital in cups or trinkets of precious metal, pretty to look at, easy to hide, and readily converted into cash when necessity demanded a sacrifice.
The windows of this great kitchen were almost always small and rarely glazed: conceive it as a great stone cavern lit up by an undying fire that played on glittering surfaces. The light came chiefly from the hearth, or from the home-made rushlights of the north, the flaring pine-torches of the south, which lit the spinning wives and maidens, when at close of day they clustered round the fire. In the daytime the kitchen was a dusky place, as indeed it is still in most French country places, where its aspect has singularly little altered. Sometimes the only aperture, besides the door and chimney, was such a small square window as may be seen to-day in the cottages of Savoy, pasted over with a piece of oiled linen, impervious to the air. Often a heavy shutter, made of one slab of polished oak, protected a small uncovered lattice, shutting with a spring. These houses, so hygienically built to face the rising or the mid-day sun, could receive scarce a ray of its purifying light. Doubtless the vast chimney and the day-long fire sufficed to ventilate their dark recesses.
In one of the deepest of these recesses, well out of the way, was placed the bed—a bed such as we can barely imagine, a family four-poster! Here reposed the father and the mother, several of the children, and—(readers of the Heptameron will remember this striking custom, which continued into the sixteenth century)—and the stranger within their gates.[22] A share of this ample couch was considered a special honour offered to a guest of note. The bed, if little private, was generally comfortable. The invoice of a day-labourer’s widow, taken at Montauban in 1345,[23] proves her to possess two feather-beds, with pillows, fifteen linen sheets, four striped yellow counterpanes. In much poorer households the bed was sometimes stuffed with straw,[24] but nearly every mention we have of the bedding of the time proves it to have been no less ample, comfortable (nor, indeed, less cleanly) than in country places at the present day. In this respect the French were, and are to-day, far before the English, whom Mr. Thorold Rogers shows us sleeping on a rude and sheetless bed, covered by night with the garments in daily wear.[25]
Such was the house-place of the well-to-do: one room, but well furnished and spacious. Yet in 1417, Petit Pas and Isabel his wife, labourers of Vaux (Oise), have two rooms in their “ostel” (our Cantal ostiau), a “foyer” and a “chambre” (a but and a ben, as we might say), separated by an earthen wall. The rich yeoman was more amply lodged; and the manor-house contained, as a rule, three rooms: the hall, the dormitory, and the parlour.[26] But the cottars dwelt in far humbler habitations. The small thatched cabins of Normandy were replaced in the centre of France by mere huts, generally built of plastered wattle, but sometimes no more than a rude lattice, of which the interstices were bunged with straw or hay; such a refuge as Nicolette built for herself in the forest, weaving it of boughs in their green leaves; such as to-day the summering shepherds construct, in an hour or two, on any down. Three such huts—one for the peasant, one for his cattle, one for his crops—stood round a paven yard.[27] The door of the hut in which the cottar lived with his family was divided laterally at about six feet from the ground, so that, while the lower part was closed, the upper door or shutter might remain open to admit the air and let out the smoke. For in these cabins there was frequently no other window. There was often no chimney, save a hole in the roof. The food was cooked over a brazier of charcoal, a scaldino, such as the poor people use to-day in Italy; but owing to the rising of the fumes, save in very windy weather, there was little smoke.
The people who lived so simply had better tools and more numerous implements than we suppose. Most countrymen possessed a ladder, a hand-mill, an axe, a crowbar, nails, a gimlet, hedge-clippers, a branding iron, a wheelbarrow, and often a light cart, a plough, harness, reaping-hooks, scythes, a hoe, spade, rake, flail, sieve, bushel, knife, hammer, a long ferruled staff, a bow; many owned a lance, and some a sword and buckler.[28] The Gascon labourer’s widow already mentioned possessed a corn-mill, a tin washtub, a metal warming-pan, two brass water-jugs, two pint pots, a metal bowl, two metal pots, four bottles, a cauldron, a pestle and mortar, a salt-box, a pail, two iron tripods, a copper box, two large chests, a cupboard, a box, four trestle-tables, a bench, a carpenter’s bench and tools, two baking-tubs, one kneading-trough, two corn-chests, and a large table, besides two axes, four lances, a crossbow, a scythe, and other arms and tools. We doubt if she would be better off to-day. The inventory of a farmer’s stock of the same date and place (Montauban, 1345) contains four kneading-troughs, a large funnel, one winepress with screws, four tuns, eight casks, three barrels, and two kegs; a lead alembic for distilling, a cauldron, two metal water-jugs, cooking utensils; two wool-cards, three carding-combs for hemp, two spades, two flails, three reaping-hooks, one scythe, one crossbar, two carpenters’ benches and tools, one shovel, two iron goads; a cart and harness; two oxen, one horse, one ass, two pigs, two sows, and a swarm of bees. Probably many a squatter’s ranch is little better stocked.