With men so often gone to fight, their wives managed the household alone. The typical wife had maidens of equal class to whom she taught household management, spinning, weaving, carding wool with iron wool-combs, heckling flax, embroidery, and making garments. There were foot-treadles for spinning wheels. She taught the children. Each day she scheduled the activities of the household including music, conversation, dancing, chess, reading, playing ball, and gathering flowers. She organized picnics, rode horseback and went hunting, hawking to get birds, and hare-ferreting. She was nurse to all around her. If her husband died, she usually continued to manage the household because most men named their wife as executor of their will with full power to act as she thought best. The wives of barons shared their right of immunity from arrest by the processes of common law and to be tried by their peers.
For ladies, close-fitting jackets came to be worn over close- fitting long gowns with low, square-cut necklines and flowing sleeves, under which was worn a girdle or corset of stout linen reinforced by stiff leather or even iron. Her skirt was provocatively slit from knee to ankle. All her hair was confined by a hair net. Headdresses were very elaborate and heavy, trailing streamers of linen. Some were in the shape of hearts, butterflies, crescents, double horns, steeples, or long cones. Men also wore hats rather than hoods. They wore huge hats of velvet, fur, or leather. Their hair was cut into a cap-like shape on their heads, and later was shoulder-length. They wore doublets with thick padding over the shoulders or short tunics over the trucks of their bodies and tightened at the waist to emphasize the shoulders. Their collars were high. Their sleeves were long concoctions of velvet, damask, and satin, sometimes worn wrapped around their arms in layers. Their legs and hips were covered with hosen, often in different colors. Codpieces worn between the legs emphasized the sensuality of the age as did ladies' tight and low- cut gowns. Men's shoes were pointed with upward pikes at the toes that impeded walking. At another time, their shoes were broad with blunt toes. Both men and women wore much jewelry and ornamentation. But, despite the fancy dress, the overall mood was a macabre preoccupation with mortality, despair, and a lack of confidence in the future. Cannon and mercenaries had reduced the military significance of knighthood, so its chivalric code deteriorated into surface politeness, ostentation, and extravagance.
Master and servants ceased to eat together in the same hall, except for great occasions, on feast days, and for plays. The lord, and his lady, family, and guests took their meals in a great chamber, usually up beneath the roof next to the upper floor of the great hall. The chimney-pieces and windows were often richly decorated with paneled stonework, tracery and carving. There was often a bay or oriel window with still expensive glass. Tapestries, damask, and tablecloths covered the tables. The standard number of meals was three: breakfast, dinner, and supper. There was much formality and ceremonial ritual, more elaborate than before, during dinners at manorial households, including processions bringing and serving courses, and bowing, kneeling, and curtseying. There were many courses of a variety of meats, fish, stews, and soups, with a variety of spices and elaborately cooked. Barons, knights, and their ladies sat to the right of the lord above the salt and were served by the lord's sewer [served the food] and carver and gentlemen waiters; their social inferiors such as "gentlemen of worship" sat below the salt and were served by another sewer and yeomen. The lord's cupbearer looked after the lord alone. A knights' table was waited on by yeomen. The gentlemen officers, gentlemen servants and yeomen officers were waited on by their own servants. The amount of food dished out to each person varied according to his rank. The almoner said grace and distributed the leftovers to the poor gathered at the gate. The superior people's hands were washed by their inferiors. Lastly, the trestle tables were removed while sweet wine and spices were consumed standing. Then the musicians were called into the hall and dancing began. The lord usually slept in a great bed in this room.
The diet of an ordinary family such as that of a small shopholder or yeoman farmer included beef, mutton, pork, a variety of fish, both fresh and salted, venison, nuts, peas, oatmeal, honey, grapes, apples, pears, and fresh vegetables. Cattle and sheep were driven from Wales to English markets. This droving lasted for five centuries.
Many types of people besides the nobility and knights now had property and thus were considered gentry: female lines of the nobility, merchants and their sons, attorneys, auditors, squires, and peasant-yeomen. The burgess grew rich as the knight dropped lower. The great merchants lived in mansions which could occupy whole blocks. In towns these mansions were entered through a gate through a row of shops on the street.Typically, there would be an oak-paneled great hall, with adjoining kitchen, pantry, and buttery on one end and a great parlor to receive guests, bedrooms, wardrobes, servants' rooms, and a chapel on the other end or on a second floor. A lesser dwelling would have these rooms on three floors over a shop on the first floor. An average Londoner would have a shop, a storeroom, a hall, a kitchen, and a buttery on the first floor, and three bedrooms on the second floor. Artisans and shopkeepers of more modest means lived in rows of dwellings, each with a shop and small storage room on the first floor, and a combination parlor-bedroom on the second floor. The humblest residents crowded their shop and family into one 6 by 10 foot room for rent of a few shillings a year. All except the last would also have a small garden. The best gardens had a fruit tree, herbs, flowers, a well, and a latrine area. There were common and public privies for those without their own. Kitchen slops and casual refuse continued to be thrown into the street. Floors of stone or planks were strewn with rushes. There was some tile flooring. Most dwellings had glass windows. Candles were used for lighting at night. Torches and oil-burning lanterns were portable lights. Furnishings were still sparse. Men sat on benches or joint stools and women sat on cushions on the floor. Hall and parlor had a table and benches and perhaps one chair. Bedrooms had beds that were surrounded by heavy draperies to keep out cold drafts. The beds had pillows, blankets, and sheets. Clothes were stored in a chest, sometimes with sweet-smelling herbs such as lavender, rosemary, and southernwood. Better homes had wall hanging and cupboards displaying plate. Laundresses washed clothes in the streams, rivers, and public conduits. Country peasants still lived in wood, straw, and mud huts with earth floors and a smoky hearth in the center or a kitchen area under the eaves of the hut.
In 1442, bricks began to be manufactured in the nation and so there was more use of bricks in buildings. Chimneys were introduced into manor houses where stone had been too expensive. This was necessary if a second floor was added, so the smoke would not damage the floor above it and would eventually go out of the house.
Nobles and their retinue moved from manor to manor, as they had for centuries, to keep watch upon their lands and to consume the produce thereof; it was easier to bring the household to the estate than to transport the yield of the estate to the household. Also, at regular intervals sewage had to be removed from the cellar pits. Often a footman walked or ran on foot next to his master or mistress when they rode out on horseback or in a carriage. He was there primarily for prestige.
Jousting tournaments were held for entertainment purposes only and were followed by banquets of several courses of food served on dishes of gold, silver, pewter, or wood on a linen cloth covering the table. Hands were washed before and after the meal. People washed their faces every morning after getting up. Teeth were cleaned with powders. Fragrant leaves were chewed for bad breath. Garlic was used for indigestion and other ailments. Feet were rubbed with salt and vinegar to remove calluses. Good manners included not slumping against a post, fidgeting, sticking one's finger into one's nose, putting one's hands into one's hose to scratch the privy parts, spitting over the table or too far, licking one's plate, picking one's teeth, breathing stinking breath into the face of the lord, blowing on one's food, stuffing masses of bread into one's mouth, scratching one's head, loosening one's girdle to belch, and probing one's teeth with a knife.
Fishing and hunting were reserved for the nobility rather than just the King.
As many lords became less wealthy because of the cost of war, some peasants, villein and free, became prosperous, especially those who also worked at a craft, e.g. butchers, bakers, smiths, shoemakers, tailors, carpenters, and cloth workers.