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- [00:01]
Ian Mortimer
What can we learn from history's most powerful people? Join me Mike Suiter, author of NextGen
- [00:06]
Narrator
CEO, in History Extra's new podcast series, History's Greatest Leaders.
- [00:12]
Ian Mortimer
To find out, listen wherever you get your podcasts.
- [00:18]
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- [01:46]
Narrator
Do you think you'd have been able to survive a day in 14th century England? In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Ian Mortimer puts that to the test. Speaking to Charlotte Vosper, he guides us through a typical day in the 1300s and reveals why it would have been so difficult to stay alive.
- [02:06]
Charlotte Vosper
Today we are immersing ourselves in the 14th century, and we're going to be discussing how to survive a day in England in the 1300s. We thought a great way to do this would be to think about how people experience medieval England through their senses. So Ian, imagine I've just woken up in an ordinary English home in the 14th century with what is the very first thing I'd feel or sense?
- [02:28]
Ian Mortimer
It has to be said, it depends which end of the 14th century you're talking about being ordinary, because the living standards changed remarkably over the course of the 14th century, principally because of a certain thing Right in the middle of it, called the Black Death, which I'm sure we're going to talk about later. But if you're waking up in an ordinary English home In, let's say, 1301, the start of the century, you're probably going to be sleeping on an earth floor, on a straw mattress, around a fire in the middle of the hall. In an ordinary house, yes, people of wealth and prestige status were living in chambers in manor houses and castles, but your ordinary working man and woman were sleeping on the floor of their hall around the fire. And at the end of the century, as you're getting into 1390s, 1400, those same people, the great grandchildren probably of the people in 1301, they'd been living in an upstairs chamber. So most houses by the end of the 14th century had upstairs chambers as well as ground floor halls, and people had started sleeping upstairs. So things are all getting a little bit more civilized and a little more private. And fewer wisps of straw in your ear as you wake up.
- [03:34]
Charlotte Vosper
Yeah, you definitely don't want a bit of straw in your ear when you wake up first thing in the morning. So you mentioned there about sleeping near a fire, particularly in the earlier 1300s. How did people try to stay a comfortable temperature in the 14th century?
- [03:48]
Ian Mortimer
It's practically impossible. I mean, there's very little you can do if you're an ordinary family. Yes, you are looking for comfort if you're of any status, but clothes are disproportionately valuable. To start to appreciate what life is like in a distant century like the 14th, you need to remember their values aren't the same as ours. We think of food as being easily available and cheap. You go along and buy it for them. Food is really difficult and so it's hard to get hold of. I'm sure we'll come on to that in a minute. But same is true for clothing and wool. At the start of the century, there are quite a lot of peasants who probably don't have a change of clothes. So there's a struggle all the way through. People who are working class who are really struggling to sort of stay warm through, through blankets, through clothes, et cetera. They're largely keeping themselves warm through activity, through getting up and getting out. You've got to remember that if you're waking up that early first thing in the morning, you're not gonna have any glass in the windows, so your shuttered windows are gonna be letting in draughts. There'll be the fire, but overnight it will have burnt down. Etc so you're not gonna get much warmth. Being active, grabbing the blanket is probably the best bet.
- [04:55]
Charlotte Vosper
Yeah, so definitely feeling quite cold in the morning then when you wake up. So obviously staying warm and comfortable is important for survival, as you've said. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about what kinds of clothing people were wearing in the 1300s. Were they quite practical clothes?
- [05:12]
Ian Mortimer
Now, 14th century sees a complete revolution in clothing. I mean, we talk about revolutions, we think about the big ones like the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, Russian Revolution, but think about the revolution in clothing. Until the 14th century, everybody wore a garment which simply goes on over your head, two pieces of fabric stitched together. So it's very difficult to get your arms into the sleeves through a garment like that. If you think of the basic pattern of a smock, that's effectively what everybody is wearing all the time and with a belt. But if you have buttons, then you can have an item of clothing which hugs your body and you can put your arm into your sleeves without too much difficulty and therefore everything is tighter to the body and more showy. So the 14th century is a revolution where you see people's clothing basically become male. Clothing especially becomes sexually sort of provocative in shorter skirts and tighter clothing. And women's clothing too becomes more figure hugging. Now for most ordinary people at the bottom of society, yes, the clothing is very practical. The only items of underwear a woman would wear would be a chemise or a sort of smock underneath a kirtle or long gown and that would be practically it. All shoes were of course flat heeled. So when you're walking along you won't have raised heel at all. So everybody would have seemed much shorter. Even though they were actually shorter, they looked shorter too. Men, underwear, they would have worn braids which were like a sort of underpants, if you think that way, and then your tunic over the top of that. Men did have sort of long headdresses with blipes which came down the back. You see a lot of images of peasants with their sort of headdresses, as it were. So people did keep their heads warm if they could. But people didn't have that many possessions. Cloth was expensive, people would pass down cloth. People would inherit it from their bosses if they were servants, and look after it. And even though the clothes they inherited from superiors was of a status they couldn't possibly wear, they refashioned it to make it something they could wear, whether out in the fields or working in the home. So yes, the clothing is practical but it varies over the 14th century. So it all hangs from your shoulders at the start of the 14th century. By the end of the 14th century you might have the equivalent of home and lots of trousers and a very short tunic if you're a man. And so it's equally practical because it allows more freedom of movement.
- [07:35]
Charlotte Vosper
Yeah, it's really interesting. I don't think that we often associate a clothing revolution with the 14th century.
- [07:40]
Ian Mortimer
No, the medieval period surprises you at every turn. And buttons are what makes it happen.
- [07:45]
Charlotte Vosper
Yeah, exactly. It's interesting to pull out that change.
- [07:48]
Ian Mortimer
It's around 13:27, if you want to have a mental picture of when buttons came in, it's around 1327. And by 1360s most people are able to access this sort of clothing.
- [07:59]
Charlotte Vosper
Okay, so imagine we are up dressed in a practical outfit, most likely. Now the next thing that we might sense is hunger. What sorts of things did people eat for breakfast in the 14th century?
- [08:13]
Ian Mortimer
Well, they didn't. Breakfast is part of our three meal sort of mental way of thinking about the world, which really dates from the 16th century as a result of clock time coming along and regulating everybody's time. So if you think 1514, there's a statute of labourers which stipulates that people who are employed should work in winter months from dawn till dusk and summer months from 5am until 7pm now those are very long working hours. So then you really do have to have something before you go to work, something in the middle of the day and something when you get home. Now when you're operating on a less clock regulated basis, so by the sun going up, the sun coming down, and when you're working on the land, people tend to stick to a two minute meal cycle. So you don't have breakfast, you would have your main meal of day, your dinner, in the late morning, sort of around 10:30 to 11:00'. Clock. And that would be a long meal, that would be your main meal of the day and you would eat your supper a much smaller meal sort of five to six hours later. So that two meal cycle is what almost everybody in the Middle Ages is programmed. Oh, that's the way they think. Now there are some exceptions, there are some breakfasts. So if you're heading off on a long journey and you're going to be setting off at dawn and you know you've got a long way to ride, then you may well have a breakfast before you set out. And similarly, if you are working on a substantial manor, where the lord of the manor has some customs such as at harvest time, because he's expecting everybody to start work at dawn at harvest time, there would be a breakfast to see everybody through a 16 hour working day. So there will be exceptions like that. There are also some ceremonial breakfasts. They're called jantaculum. And you have these noble households on special occasions or in towns, you might have a gentaculum as part of a St. George's Day feast or something like that. But on the whole, your ordinary person doesn't eat breakfast in the 14th century.
- [10:16]
Charlotte Vosper
Not a very nice start to the day, then, in the 14th century. No breakfast.
- [10:19]
Ian Mortimer
Sorry. Disappoint you? Shot? Yes. It's miserable. No breakfast, no shredded wheat. Yeah. Just get on and work.
- [10:26]
Charlotte Vosper
Yeah, it really is. And I suppose part of that. Then we need to talk about how hungry were people in the 14th century. What kind of hazards did people face when it came to food?
- [10:37]
Ian Mortimer
Oh, yeah, food is really difficult to get hold of. I mean, at the start of the century, before the Black Death, even harder. The chances that the majority of your ancestors in the 14th century were eating meat every day is zero, because the vast majority of people couldn't afford to eat meat. The peasantry would probably only eat meat in any substance, substantial quantities, at Christmas, Whitsun and Easter, and then not because they could afford it for those special occasions, but because there were manorial feasts given out to their workers and peasants by the lord of the manor. And if there wasn't that custom, that's it, you might not eat meat at all. People would strive to get hold of meat because they realized that they needed the protein. Everybody loved eating meat, there was a real passion for it. But most of your protein would have come from cheese and you'd have really made up your diet heavily with beer and ale. The rest of the duck would be supplied by pottage, which is a sort of thick soup or stew. In this case, it would be filled with beans, leeks. But you've got to remember, famine is still very much part of English society or ordinary people's way of life in the 14th century. I have to say, the Black Death improved the standards of living for those who survived, because, of course, there were so many more assets, so much more land, so much more cultivatable land. Simply more animals to go round amongst the survivors. So your chances of eating meat at the end of the 14th century were considerably higher than they were at the start. In fact, where I'm living here on the edge of Dartmoor, northeast edge of Dartmoor, there's quite a big business in taking animals into Exeter to be butchered for all the newly wealthy beef eaters that there were in the city. So yes, by the end of the 14th century, those who were able to escape the bonds of servitude were able to make that much more money and eat meat on, on a regular basis.
- [12:28]
Charlotte Vosper
That's quite surprising, isn't it, that actually your chances of eating meat increased post black death.
- [12:33]
Ian Mortimer
Life expectancy generally increased as a result of the black death. It works as a sort of thinning out of society. So if you're lucky enough to survive, your standard of living goes up. Now you take it to an absurd level. If you cleared out half the population today, all the assets of everybody now would be enjoyed by half as many people. So they'd be in, in real terms of twice as wealthy in their assets. So that's the way the mass death, for want of a better word, mass death works. It sort of combs through the population and leaves the survivors wealthier. But of course, it's indiscriminate. The plague in whom it kills.
- [13:14]
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- [14:39]
Charlotte Vosper
Okay, so let's imagine we've got up, we're dressed, we've skipped breakfast, sadly for 200 years. Now let's talk about smell.
- [14:48]
Ian Mortimer
Yeah.
- [14:49]
Charlotte Vosper
What Sort of smells would fill the air in 14th century England, right?
- [14:54]
Ian Mortimer
Well, let's imagine you're waking up in the early 14th century on that straw rush covered, packed earth floor of your hall, and you're waking up with the smells of rotting food that has been dropped or discarded that's got into the rushes. Then you normally have dog or maybe a cat in the house. Well, the excrement would sort of linger in those rushes. But the most prevalent smell is simply the smoke, the smoke from the fire which is kept going all the time, remember, because the trouble of lighting another fire when they haven't got matches, so the trouble of lighting the fire all over again means that for cooking purposes, you just keep the fire going. You like to burn down overnight and then build it up in the morning. So wood smoke is the prevalent smell. Now at the end of the century, when you're up upstairs in your chamber away from the fire, obviously you haven't got the heat of the fire there, but you also haven't got the smell of the smoke pervading the room. So you'd have a very different smell then how easy it was to wash bedding and clothing. Well, that's a debatable point. They did have liquid soap. They could get things clean. But you'd probably have smelt those natural smells that occur when things haven't been washed for quite as often as we might wash them. And you wouldn't have smelt the soap on things, they didn't have fragrance soap. So the natural smells that accrue to your clothing through not washing and sweating, et cetera, but then stepping outside your front door, if you're in a nucleated village, as it were, a village all gathered together in, say, the middle of England, you're going to wake up and you're going to smell all those smells of the outside area. So it's going to be a lot of dung, because people had dung piles. Dung obviously got left in the street by animals passing. And animals are very much part of people's working lives and they would keep animals close to the community for security reasons. So you're going to smell dung also when people's cesspits have overflowed or they've got into a stream or something like that. Frequently manorial records are talking about excrement sort of polluting a watercourse and things like that. Now, those manorial accounts obviously are saying, this is terrible, we must clear this up. And so therefore you probably can expect it to be cleared up fairly regularly. But it's mentioned so often that you think, yeah, you'd have smelled a lot of shit if you were around the 14th century.
- [17:04]
Charlotte Vosper
Yeah, absolutely. I'm not sure it'd be that pleasant.
- [17:06]
Ian Mortimer
No.
- [17:06]
Charlotte Vosper
But then I suppose part of that question is, did unpleasant smells usually mean something genuinely unhealthy, a threat to survival?
- [17:15]
Ian Mortimer
They certainly believed it. You know, the idea that something smelt bad, they assumed, meant it was bad. And that's a fairly safe assumption, I think so, yes. They did associate bad smells with ill health and disease. Basically, the idea of miasma, that fetid substances create a miasma which then infect individuals. That's very much part of people's thinking. But they know it's not the only way you can can get a disease. There are many other diseases that they knew they couldn't work out through smell. So with plague, for example. Yes. They knew they didn't need to smell something bad in order to fear it. And likewise with leprosy, that was the most feared disease there was. Before plague, there's this horrible walking death whereby parts of your body would atrophy and your nose would turn into this mess and the ends of your fingers would lose any sensation and men's penises would atrophy and drop off and you'd get ulcerated. Eyeballs and hair would fall out. The living death, as they called it. They knew they didn't have to sort of smell something awful to fear.
- [18:14]
Charlotte Vosper
That you've mentioned there about illness. I wonder if we could talk about that a little bit more. And that sense of fear. What other threats induced a sense of fear in people in the 1300s?
- [18:24]
Ian Mortimer
Think about occupational health. The number of ways you can injure yourself. When you look at medieval skeletons, quite often they've lost five or six teeth. The violence that somebody deliberately knocked your teeth out. But then there's also the accidental occupational health of bashing yourself over the jaw with a scaffolding pole or something like that. A lot of people, a lot of men especially, are working very physical lives. A lot of women are working very physical lives as well, because the distinction between male and female labor here isn't quite as distinct as it was after the 17th century. So a lot of people working the land would have occupational illnesses or problems from cutting themselves or getting run over by a cart or something like this. Just moving around. Being physical in the 14th century with very little help, meant that there were lots of things to look out for, things to fear. I mean, you find accounts talking about people falling off a cart as they were crossing A river, bashing their head and drowning in the river and things like that. So there's lots of accidental deaths associated with travel and occupation, but generally people are much more violent. If you look at the homicide rates for the 14th century, you realize that they were way more violent than we were. Many, many more people were killed. And you can see this in the manorial records from the late 13th century, where people would get irate at losing a bet over a game of chess or something like that. And because everybody's walking around with a dagger on their belt, they draw the dagger and stab the person and then think about it afterwards, after it was too late. And of course, if you got caught, then it was a felony, so you would hang. Third of the people taken to court were hanged. But violence is. I mean, to give an idea, there are places in the world today that are more violent in terms of homicides than the Middle Ages. Medieval England wasn't that bad. But we're talking about 20 to 25 killings per 100,000 adults every year. And in places like Oxford, where you've got lots of young men with knives on their belts, you're talking about levels of violence which probably compare with Dodge City at the height of the Wild west. Sort of like 100 to 140 homicides per 100,000 people. Europe, continental Europe's more dangerous, more frightening, especially Italy. And of course, this is before you got onto the whole hierarchy of society and the manorial bailiff telling you what to do and threatening you with whatever punishment if you don't. So there is a lot to be frightened about in the 14th century.
- [20:45]
Charlotte Vosper
Definitely a lot of threats. That sense of fear would have been activated quite frequently by the sounds of it. So as we progress through our day in the 14th century, we come to what people did for work. I know we've referenced this a little bit already. What kinds of labour did people do in the 1300s? You mentioned that men's and women's work was actually surprisingly quite similar. Could you tell us a little bit more about that?
- [21:07]
Ian Mortimer
Well, in a peasant society, a married couple is there to produce on the manor the long standing tradition of the peasantry. All work together to produce enough food for the community and the lord of the manor and the priests, etc. That are attendant on the manor. That's very much about a joint action, a joint labor, the male, the female and their children. So the family is all part of this manorial structure. If they're unfree peasants and the majority of people before the Black Death were unfree they've got to stay on the manor. They can't go. They are working together in all these respects. So if the harvest needs to be brought in, then that's all hands on deck. You know, the men, women, children, all working all the way through the day. Now, there are certain things you don't see many women. I can't think of any women portrayed as ploughing. And likewise, men never do any cleaning activities in the Middle Ages. It's almost taboo. Some people would say it still is in some households. But the hard labor of working the fields, working the land, working with the grain, et cetera, is much more shared than you imagine. The idea that men go out for a wage and women stay home and look after the household, that's something that grows. In the 16th and 17th centuries, as Mormon people were free, they could sell their labor. Men can get more money for their labor because they're bigger and stronger. And therefore it became useful for women to stay at home and look after young children and men to go out and get the wages. That's not really there in the Middle Ages and certainly not in the unsettlements. So there's a lot of hard working on the land, and it's not just the fields, it's building the barns for the lord of the manor and building the fences and things like that. So your peasantry is much more communally engaged with all the things they have to do as a community.
- [22:54]
Charlotte Vosper
It's important to remember that actually, that division of labour wasn't quite as black and white as we might assume. Now, for our listeners who'd like to know more about what medieval life was really like, we've got a new History Extra series with Ian. Across six videos, he'll be guiding us through a fascinating A to Z of medieval life. So if you'd like to find out more about that and give those videos a watch, I'll pop a link to them in the description of this episode. But back to trying to survive a day in the 1300s. One sense that we haven't talked about yet is sound. If we stopped and listened, what would you hear in a village in the 14th century?
- [23:29]
Ian Mortimer
Ah, this is a lovely question to think about. And if you think about it for yourself and just concentrate, it's not difficult to imagine the soundscape. I mean, you've got to start off with the bell. The church bell is going to, in the 14th century, reach everywhere across the parish, and you're going to live your life very much by that church bell. If it's Ringing unexpectedly and repeatedly. You know, there's some reason for it, there's some danger somewhere. It might also mean a knell for somebody who's died. And you think, yes, who. Whom does a bell toll? You'll hear. I mean, the hunting horns in the hills is one that I often think of. You'd also hear the noises of animals because, of course, animals are so much more integrated with people's lives and their communities. So in your own home, you may well hear the lowing of cattle, you may well hear the sheep across the fields. It's amazing how far the sounds of sheep and cattle carry. I mean, I must be about three quarters of a mile from the nearest sheep, and yet I can hear them bleating every so often. You wouldn't hear many threatening noises unless you were in a town, and in which case you could well hear shawms, which are wind instruments and other loud bagpipes being used to. Partly to entertain people. Loud music was used to entertain people in towns. So these instruments as sort of warnings as well. The range of sounds you'd have in the town would be quite considerable. You'd have the blacksmiths working away at leather forges, perhaps an armorer in a city. You'd have obviously many people coming and going of high status on horseback. So you'd hear their hooves. Obviously, you're unlikely to hear the drumming of many hooves together, unless an army's approaching, in which case you probably already made yourself scarce. But. But the idea of a soundscape is extraordinary. The noise of dogs barking and cats. Anybody who's got a cat will know, or a series of cats will know. You get to know the sound of your own cat. You recognize their voice. And likewise with dogs. Now, in a community, a small medieval community where there's not that many overriding sounds, you probably get to know quite a few cats and dogs by their voices, which ones they were. So the more you think about it, the more sounds there are to hear and the more they mean something, whether they warning bells or dogs barking and whatever. So, yes, imagining the soundscape is a delightful occupation.
- [25:44]
Charlotte Vosper
It's quite immersive, isn't it? You mentioned it a little bit there, but I wonder if we could just pull out. Are there any sounds which indicated danger explicitly?
- [25:53]
Ian Mortimer
People use instruments to alert each other, so we all know about bells ringing. But wind instruments are used very much to alert people to danger. So you think of the horn being blown. So the warning horn, or in later centuries, stagecoach horn being blown to alert. The stagecoach is approaching. They want to have sustenance, etc. That sense of using noise, using music to alert people to something about to happen, is common throughout the whole of society. Obviously drawn to the community I live in myself, which is still quite rural, on the edge of Dartmoor, and here it would have been quite unusual to hear somebody using an instrument in that way. But if the community needed to be roused, for example, if there'd been a theft. Yes. You'd have heard people get their instruments out and all go in the hue and cry, whereby people get their instruments out and start charging off over the countryside in pursuit of a malefactor down at Dartmouth. So not that far away. Well, Teignmouth, that noise could well mean the French have arrived, they're about to burn the town down. I mean, several towns in south coast of Sussex got burned down in the 14th century, so places like Rye, Winchelsea got regularly attacked in the 14th century. So if you heard the loud noise of shawms and bagpipes and bells ringing there, you really had to make sure that you really were safe.
- [27:10]
Charlotte Vosper
Yeah. That's important to remember, actually, isn't it, that sometimes these senses and the things you would experience would vary very much depending on your location.
- [27:17]
Ian Mortimer
Absolutely. When we're talking these terms, we're talking very general terms. Perspective is everything. And the book I've just recently finished on a history of England from the point of view of the people who lived in my house, that's brought that home so vividly, because things are really relevant here, which would not apply if you're in Manchester and vice versa. And threats like this, if you're near the coast, you are vulnerable because, well, as the Vikings demonstrated, they could just turn up at the drop of a hat, and then you are vulnerable because you do not have a ready army to defend yourself against them. To a lesser extent, that is true in the 14th century, but remember, we are at war for most of the 14th century with France and the piracy war at the end of the century is still, you know, bloody Dartmouth got attacked. So you need to remember that there are these vulnerabilities you just can't imagine. Society is always peaceful.
- [28:03]
Charlotte Vosper
Yeah. So we've been progressing through our day. At the end of a hard day's work, people returned home if they weren't already based there or working from there. And I think one thing that's really important for us to pull out is what, or rather how much they would have been able to see. How dark did life become after sunset? And what kind of dangers did darkness bring in the 14th century.
- [28:26]
Ian Mortimer
Wow. I mean, this is one thing that separates us from the Middle Ages in such a major way. Twilight hours, the darkness hours, we don't think very much about them. You go to a play or go to the cinema or go to the pub or something like that after dark, you don't think twice about it. But of course they are living around a curfew most of the time. You would rely on flames to light your way rather than daylight. That is an important end of the day for many medieval people. You get very little light in an ordinary house at either end of the 14th century because they don't have glass in them. Aristocrats, the well to do, had glass in their houses from the really late 13th century. It was very sought after, very valuable. They would often take their panes of glass with them between their various houses and install them anew in a new house when they moved there. And they would do that on weekly or monthly basis. So extraordinary approach to glass. But most people didn't have glass in their windows until really the late 16th century. So 14th century people have shutters and they have doorways. So if you're working from home, if you're a weaver or needle woman or a brewer, you're going to be working quite a lot of the time with the wind coming in, the shutters open, or working your doorway, if you're a needle woman, sitting doorways, because that's where the most light gets in, through the largest aperture, through the doorway. So you'd be sitting near a natural light source, which means no surprises that for half the year you've got less than 12 hours of daylight. And of course in the winter months you got 16 hours of darkness. So how do you cope with that? Well, the Hollywood would suggest you have banks of candles burning day and night, you know, all the way through, which you simply didn't do. No one did that. I mean, it's a huge fire risk and you don't have a fire brigade who's going to come to the rescue if you set light the straw on your floor. So you could easily lose everything very, very quickly. I remember most houses are thatched. Once you get the a flame into the thatch, you've lost everything. So you do not leave unattended lights. But also it's very expensive. I mean, aristocrats can afford beeswax candles, poor people can't afford beeswax candles. You have to make use with rush lights, which are stretches of straw which have been soaked in tallow and held on a metal frame to Burn. So they're like a primitive sort of light and they are smelly, so they add to the smells. You'd get the smell of tallow burning animal fat, but also they don't give that much light. And nor does the fire in the middle of your room because if you build it up too much, obviously sparks fly around, it can burn the thatch. So you have only a controlled fire in the middle of your hall. So the, the light sources are minimal for most people for most of the autumn and winter months and spring months. So this means that people are feeling their right way around their house. It's much more than they're seeing their way around. And we talked about the value of blankets and clothing earlier and the way these things feel is also important. One of my books I it's Elizabethan England. I put in 12 different descriptions for types of wool and linen being described in just as many words. So you might have In a late 14th century household, linen sheets, but then there'll be different sorts of linen for wearing. So people's sense of touch becomes that much heightened in this dark environment. And the threats after dark, well, if you didn't know somebody about after dark, that was reason to be scared of them. The town, if it's a walled town, the gates would be shut at curfew and then the only people allowed out of the houses would be people who have good reputation, men of good reputation. I have to add dangers to women are obvious, but it'd be men of householders of good reputation who'd be allowed out. There'd be night watchmen, groups of them going around patrolling the town to make sure there was no disorder, that there were no burglaries taking place, there was no violence taking place. So it'd be a very much quieter existence in town or a city at nighttime because people were cautious and you'd bar the door and things like that. In a more rural community or a village, night is seen as this dark time and people are suspicious at night. And their attitudes tonight are very different from our enlightened times of streetlights.
- [32:31]
Charlotte Vosper
So darkness has fallen on our day in the 14th century. And we've been talking about the threats that people faced in the 1300s and how they lived their lives to survive. So finally, I want to ask you just how many people actually did survive in the 14th century in England?
- [32:49]
Ian Mortimer
How to put this, the median age in 14th century England is about 20. Half the population never reaches what we would call adulthood of 21. Etc traditional age. There are 5 times as many people under 15, as there are over 60 people, just don't get the chance to grow up. If you make it to 20, you've got a 50% chance of making it to 40. So about quarter of the population makes it to the age of 40, and you do get to 40, then you have something like a 20% chance of making it to 60. So there are very, very few very old people. Some do get to 100, not many. Very, very few indeed. So in terms of how long could you expect to live? Well, life expectancy at birth was between 25 and 35, depending on which year you happen to be born in which the famines and plagues you're likely to have to put up with. But really, life is likely to be short, and it's a time of suffering pretty much for everybody, because the illnesses are. They're not discriminating. They're not just things that happen to the poor. Wealthy people don't tend to live that much longer than the poor. A little bit. They have a better diet, but not that much longer. So you are likely to have an early death if you're in the 14th century.
- [34:07]
Charlotte Vosper
But it wasn't all misery, was it? Ian, I wonder if you could explain to us how people got by.
- [34:13]
Ian Mortimer
Well, they got by basically through entertaining each other. And there's the singing and the dancing and we know from Chaucer and how much fun was had. And I think, therefore, there's this one other sense we should look at or consider, which is a sense of sense of humor. And the sense of humor can get you by in the most terrible adverse circumstances. And if you've got to get through the Black Death, then you probably need a really good sense of humor. And you come across in the records of the time, people expressing that says human, the jokes. I mean, there's one that sticks to mind about Edward II writing to the king of France, where he sends him a present of a pair of greyhounds, which can, well, catch a hare if they find it asleep. He adds sarcastically, and. And my favorite bit of humor from the whole of the 14th centuries, in the very last year, 1400, where Sir Thomas Blount, he's being executed, he's being hanged, drawn and quartered, he's dragged to the gallows, he's hanged, he's cut down while still alive. They open his entrails, they cut off his penis, they burn his intestines and his penis in a fire in front of him. And the executioner says, would you like a drink? And Sir Thomas Blount quips. No, because you have taken away the place I was intending to put it. So, I mean, if you do that in that sort of torturous situation, a sense of humor is really all important. And I think this is what we tend to forget. The sense of fantasy, the medieval imagery, the medieval imagination. Well, if your life is drudgery and misery and short, perhaps that imagination and humor, that sense of the fantastic is what you really need to get by.
- [35:44]
Charlotte Vosper
That's brilliant. Thank you for guiding us through our day in the 1300s and helping us survive. It's been really interesting.
- [35:50]
Ian Mortimer
Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Charlotte. Thank you.
- [35:54]
Narrator
That was Ian Mortimer speaking to Charlotte Vosper. Ian is a historian and author of the Time Traveller's Guide series. As Charlotte mentioned, his new History Extra Academy series will guide you through an A Z of medieval life from animals to. Well, you'll have to wait and see what Z stands for. So if you'd like to check out those videos, you can click the link in the description to this episode.
- [36:28]
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