The food of country people in the fourteenth century was little different to that they use to-day, save that potatoes and buckwheat (so frequent in French rural diet) were then conspicuous by their absence. Then, as now, their meat was chiefly pork, in all its forms of bacon, ham, brawn, or blood-pudding; and pork was relatively little cheaper than it is in many a remote and rural place to-day. Butter, cheese, eggs were very plentiful; herrings were an article of almost daily diet (they cost a sol the hundred, about a halfpenny apiece), and in the north of France people consumed freely a kind of salted whale called craspois, a truly Viking dish, of which the popularity has wholly vanished.[29] In Normandy pea-soup was then, as now, a favourite food.[30] Wine, beer, and mead were drunk by all classes. In 1392, a homeless pin-maker on the tramp breakfasts off wine and fish;[31] workmen out of employment dine at the village inn off bread, meat, and red wine at fourpence the pint.[32] In the same year the provisions left in the house of the wife of the Duke of Bourbon’s minstrel were: bacon to the value of four sous or shillings, six large loaves of bread, a great pot full of green peas, two penn’orth of onions, and a shilling’s worth of salt.[33] But the best criterion we get of the daily food of the rural population is the record preserved in the accounts of manors and monasteries of the dinners afforded to labourers on corvée, or, doled out day by day in return for some bounden service. Thus, the smith of the monastery of Jumièges received in return for his occasional services a daily ration of two small loaves, a measure of wine of medium quality, and either six eggs, four herrings, or some equivalent dish.[34] A vintager of St. Ouen, on corvée, was supplied every day with two rolls and a mess of peas and bacon with salt.[35] A tenant of the monks of Bayeux, during his corvée, was entitled to a daily meal of a white loaf, a brown loaf, five eggs, or three herrings, with a gallon of beer.[H] The monks of Montebourg gave each of their men a loaf, a mess of pea-soup, three eggs, and the quarter of a cheese, or, if they chose, six eggs, and no cheese; on fast days they made shift with three herrings and some nuts: they washed down this ample meal with as much beer as they chose to drink.[36] A tenant of the monks of St. Ouen received, in return for his corvée, not only bread and wine, pea-soup and bacon, but fresh or salt beef and poultry. All this is in Normandy. In Anjou, the men on corvée dine more sparely off wine and bread and garlic; but the carpenters on a farm receive in addition to a daily wage of one sol eight deniers, five penn’orth of meat per person; the hedgers and ditchers also dine off bread and meat.[37] In almost every one of the numerous records that we have of the daily fare of the labouring class in fourteenth-century France, we find a dish of eggs, a mess of peas and bacon, half a chicken, a few herrings, or a generous slice of meat, added to the modern labourer’s too scanty nuncheon of bread and cheese and beer.
Our rural ancestors of every class went well and warmly clad. The farm labourers of the fourteenth century wore better garments than our ploughmen use to-day. Men of every class appear to have possessed linen shirts and linen drawers, hose of strong cloth, and leather shoes; a coat of warm russet or fustian, an ample cloak resembling the Limousin of Auvergne, or Tuscan Ferraiuolo, and (sometimes attached to this garment, sometimes separate) a long-tailed hood of cloth. Masons, labourers, workmen of every class, completed this costume by a pair of gloves: London gloves were held in high esteem. Bonis, the merchant of Montauban, sold them to his country clients at seven sols the dozen.
The women were as sensible in their attire. They all wore a long chemise of linen, and over this a garment called a doublet, in form resembling the linen bodice sewn to a white petticoat, which is still used in dressing little girls. The wedding doublet of the butcher’s daughter of Montauban took about five yards of fine white linen of Paris, costing fifteen sols the ell—a measure which exceeded the modern metre by about two nails. The butcher was evidently a man of means; for we find his wife ordering some doublets for herself at £3 10s. apiece, while a neighbouring noble’s wife spends not quite half as much on those selected for her wardrobe. The wife of another burgher chooses three and twenty doublets, delicate in quality and of a vermeil colour. Over this garment the women of the fourteenth century put a tight long bodice of strong cloth, to which they attached, by hooks or lacets, a pair of tight long sleeves, generally of some costly material, silk being used on great occasions even by the poorer classes. Over this, again, they slipped a very long dress, touching the ground on all sides, tight in the bodice, but sleeveless, or with loose hanging sleeves; it was generally much trimmed with silk and braid. A farm-servant buys a piece of red silk to trim her gonella, another chooses one of blue cloth worth one livre: the simplest that we find, which is made of a coarse pale cloth called blanket, comes, with the trimmings, to nearly fourteen sols. The gown was surmounted by a heavy girdle, richly ornamented, from which the purse and keys of the house-wife dangled. Out-of-doors a long draped mantle, trimmed to match the gonella, was usually worn.
The women of the later fourteenth century were fastidious in dressing their hair. We all know the hennin, the tall slender sugar-loaf of buckram, from which floated a gauzy veil. The peasants naturally did not wear this inconvenient and romantic head-dress. They braided their hair with ribbons and galoons intertwined in every plait. A woman with long hair would use about seven yards of ribbon; over this she placed a strong net of silk or thread; the whole was enveloped in a veil or mantilla of thin silk, the favourite ornament of country-women, and frequently given as a wedding-present. A very handsome veil of German silk would cost as much as seventeen sols; a commoner one, of good Aleppo silk, from five to ten sols; still a mantilla quite presentable in appearance, of a rougher silk, could be had as low as three sols (we may suppose about twelve shillings of our money). Almost every peasant in well-to-do circumstances afforded his wife and daughter this piece of elegance, probably only worn on great occasions. The artisans, small farmers, and farm servants of the fourteenth century were less economical in ornament than their descendants. The butcher of the little country town of Montauban gives his daughter, for her wedding day, a silver necklace, a purse, a girdle of silk, a string of amber beads, a pair of embroidered gloves, a veil or mantilla of German silk, two silk nets for her hair, and many-coloured silks and threads for the embroidery of her wedding-gown. An artisan affords his child a veil of German silk, a net to match, a string of amber, a purse and girdle, the whole expense coming to £1 6s., or about five guineas of our currency. A servant on one of Bonis’ farms buys for his wife a silk wimple; gloves, hair-ribbons, and ornamented hair-nets are common fairings.
We see all these good people, arrayed soberly or splendidly according to their rank, but almost always comfortably dressed, as we turn the pages of the Accounts of Bonis or the palpitating Registers of the Châtelet (the Newgate Calendar of an earlier age). Along the country roads the notary jogs on business, dressed in violet cloth richly furred, solidly seated on his ample cob. He passes the country squire (the grandchild of the last rich semi-noble vavassour) hooded in black parti-coloured russet, and wrapped in a houppelande of English green, furred with squirrel, the long end of his cloak thrown over the left shoulder. The shepherd on the hill drives his flock; he is warmly clad in strong brown woollen. The thatcher, as he steps across the fields from his daughter’s churching, is dressed all in his best in a large check of brown and white and blue. There stands the farmer, all in sombre russet, with an elegant hood striped black and yellow; there are gold rings on his hand, worn over his gloves; there are gold clasps to his girdle. At the little village inn, the serving-maid comes out, dressed in iron-grey, with a bunch of pink roses in her hands. The mason of the hamlet stands at his gate, chatting with a fellow of his craft, and with a tramp in search of work; the home-staying workman is well clad in whitish-grey, with darker grey hose and grey-blue hood; the traveller has a long brown cottehardie, lined with an old coat, a brown hood buckled under the chin, brown hose, and strong leather shoes with steel buckles. At the corner of the road a wandering beggar waits for alms, dressed in a mantle of faded russet patched with an older light-blue garment, and a hood of Heaven knows what colour, not worth two deniers. His wife squats beside him, slovenly dressed in an old patched cassock tied round her waist with a reed. She has no hair, and a strip of dirty cloth tied round her head but half conceals her baldness. They are the only really shabby people that we meet (save the wandering friars, who make a virtue of it); but few are so magnificent as the drover, a person of importance, it would appear, from the quality and the quantity of his purchases. The goat-herd and the shepherd are all in russet; but see the drover as he comes home from market resplendent in his mantle checked with black and green: he sports a hood striped with grey and yellow; hood and cloak are in accordance with the most fashionable standard of the day. Here out in the fields we seldom use such brilliant colours: russet, blanket, grey, blue, and English green are our usual wear. It is only when the knight, the doctor, or the merchant from the town is drawn this way that we see the real taste of the bon ton: the parti-coloured green and vermeil, white and blue, vert perdu and slate colour, yellow and black, white and vermeil, that are, with the universal black and green, the last cry of the mode. Both check and stripe are popular alike in town and country.
VI
If not in every village, at least in every châtellerie, there was a doctor, a surgeon or a barber surgeon;[38] the labourers appear to have used their services freely and to have rewarded them with liberality. One of Bonis’ day-labourers falling ill, sends to Montauban for the physician of the place, and pays him for several visits the sum of 4 sols 2 deniers—which we may compare to nearly £1 15s. of our money. Another pays his doctor as much as 18 sols, say £3 12s. And in the Accounts of Bonis we find frequent mentions of drugs and medicinal spices of an expensive sort, sold to the agricultural labourers of the district.
The doctors of the Middle Ages and later, even so late as the middle of the fifteenth century, were chiefly inspired by the theories of the Arabs. Louis XI., as we know, ordered the Paris University to copy in extenso the great work of Aboo Bekr ibn Zacaria er Razi, the famous physician of the tenth century, whose masterpiece, El Mansoori, is a compendium of Arabian therapeutics. This book, commonly known as “Razi,” was very popular throughout the fourteenth century. A copy of it, bought by Bonis for four livres, assisted him in the preparation of his drugs, and of the plasters, unguents, electuaries and tisanes especially in request among a fourteenth-century rural population.
It may be interesting to examine a few of the remedies employed. Rheumatism, that special misery of those that work in the wintry fields, was treated externally by the application of a plaster of cordials and aromatic gums spread on a thin piece of silk. The part affected was also rubbed with an ointment (costing seven sols) made of four ounces of turpentine and two ounces of white wax, one ounce of resin, one ounce of myrrh, two ounces of bol d’Arménie, and two ounces of oil of roses;[39] it was then covered with a sheet of wadding. Complaints of the skin were treated by an unguent composed of a quarter of a pound of marsh-mallow, a quarter of a pound of white wax, a quarter of a pound of olive oil, an ounce of incense, and an ounce of turpentine; medicated baths were also recommended. Sulphur was freely used. Aniseed was given as a specific against indigestion, with camomile, Quassia amara, camphor, and essence of cinnamon. Coughs and colds were cured by a sudorific tea of rose and camomile; by a milk of almonds mixed with starch and sugar, almost exactly resembling the delicious looch of modern France: by an infusion of pectoral flowers (mallow, violet, &c.), as well as by lozenges of gum arabic and barley sugar[40]. In severe cases the physicians of the Middle Ages administered the famous theriac of Nero, the Theriacus Andromachi, composed of opium powdered with some tannic bitter substance, together with sulphate of iron, and some two and forty active aromatic essences, such as turpentine, Cingalese cinnamon, valerian, citron, rose, etc.[41] A labourer at Bloxham, in Oxfordshire, was treated for bronchitis in 1387, with a syrup of oxymel and squills[42]. Disorders of the intestines were pretty generally combated by starch water, alum, and the astringent bol d’Arménie. Senna tea was also an ingredient in the humblest medicine chest. Besides the remedies we have mentioned, cordials of cinnamon, camphor, resin, and oil of pinks, electuaries of liquorice, dried prunes, and honey of roses were constantly employed. Oxide of zinc mixed with camphor[43] was also given, but I do not know in what especial case. The hot bath and the vapour bath were highly esteemed, though less frequent, perhaps, than in the earlier Middle Ages, when hot baths were hourly cried through all the streets of Paris. Still, in the fourteenth century there was no town in any way considerable without at least one établissement de bains. We find in the Registers of the Châtelet that a hot bath was a somewhat expensive luxury, costing several sols. The prolonged warm baths in honour at the Court of Charles VI. were a scandal to the Church, and are denounced in a famous sermon of Jacques le Grand.
Besides the remedies we have quoted, it must be allowed that others more fantastic were occasionally used. Last week, at Aris, a little boy informed me that I need never suffer from migraine, for I could tie a live pigeon on my head, and let it depose its excrement on my hair: a certain remedy. He assured me also that his sister, whom the doctor from Vic had declared to be dying from congestion of the lungs, had been saved by the presence of mind of his mother: she slit up a live cat, placed half the palpitating creature on the back, half on the breast of the patient, who immediately recovered. Doubtless these medicines were known in the fourteenth century. An equally absurd but more elaborate sort were used especially at court and in the treatment of great personages. But our agricultural labourers, who thought twice before they changed their silver sou, though they may have split up a cat, were not accessible to fashionable quackery. In all the Accounts of Bonis, we find only two receipts that are patently unreasonable; and these are the most expensive. One of them is a powder of ground seed-pearls, the other an ointment of honey of roses, olive oil, white wax, pounded with “half an ounce of mummy.” But the cold creams and cosmetics of the present day are not always conspicuous for science; we might find nostrums as inefficacious on the shelves of Madame Georgine Champbaron. And, indeed, it may be doubted whether the most fantastic remedies of the Middle Ages were not sometimes as successful against the nervous maladies in which they were most often used, as the Lourdes water, the hypnotising-mirrors, and the various patent medicines so capriciously infallible in our century. The poor and needy, with their humble, painful, everyday disorders, knew, then as now, the virtues of friction and wadding against lumbago; the peppermint tea that calms the colic; the plaster of boiled poppy-heads applied against the raging tooth. The old man, struggling with his asthma, had almost as good an opiate; the feverish child, tossing under its doubled blanket, a potion almost as sudorific, as we should find in any country place to-day.