Customer Reviews

Life in a Medieval Village

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Life in a Medieval Village by Frances and Joseph Gies. Recommended.

Life in a Medieval Village is one of a series, including Life in a Medieval City and Life in a Medieval Castle, written by Frances and Joseph Gies. This series rarely touches upon the great people and events romanticized by Hollywood and numerous fiction writers (and perhaps even a few historians), but focuses on the basics of everyday life for the average person or even the average lord or cleric. The Gies use a number of primary and secondary sources, the latter of which reveal how the historian's view of the medieval village has changed in the 20th and 21st centuries and how flexible historians must be in interpreting the evidence.

Researched and written for the layperson, Life in a Medieval Village is more accurately about life in an English medieval village, with most of the detail coming from the records of Aethelintone/Aethelington/Adelintune/Aylington (Elton) in Huntingdon, one of Ramsey Abbey's manors. The Gies provide a history of the village concept and its definition; its role in the manorial system (contrasted to the seigneurial system); a description of its people, physical structure, buildings, administration and administrators, judicial system, family and spiritual life, and work; and the background behind its decline.

The world of Elton and similar villages is not found in movies or novels. Social and economic statuses are not always clear cut, economic upward mobility is possible primarily through acquisition of land, and even the distinction between "free" and "unfree" is not distinct. Life revolves around the manor and the villeins' and cotters' obligations to the mostly absent lord and the manor, which come in the form of work, rents, fees, taxes, and fines. The administrative structure of the manor is somewhat like that of a modern corporation, with the lord as CEO of multiple manors (and primary consumer of goods) who "wanted the certainty of rents and dues from his tenants, the efficient operation of his demesne, and good prices for wool and grain." His steward, or seneschal, serves as senior executive, while the bailiff, reeve, beadle, woodward, and others are the manor's day-to-day managers and supervisors.

As the villagers acquire surnames (from where they live, what they do, the offices they hold, and personal characteristics), patterns emerge from the records. Some families become dominant economically and politically (e.g., holding many offices such as reeve or juror many times); others decline; while yet others show a propensity for violence and petty crimes. Such infractions are punished primarily with fines rather than corporal punishment; the stocks and hanging are resorted to only in the most egregious cases. The judicial system is often compassionate (or at least practical); many fines for minor trespasses are lowered or forgiven by the court because "she is poor." When laws are broken, a jury hears the case, but the entire village decides.

The Gies also provide an excellent overview of the passing of the medieval village, which began with a sustained famine and the Black Death. The labor-intensive manorial system simply could not survive the depletion of workers, the increase in expenses, the onerous taxes brought on by wars, and, perhaps more importantly, the sense of change and discontent that began to pervade the villein class.

The challenge for the Gies as authors is to take the minimal material available (ranging from books about estate management written for lords and stewards to court and ecclesiastical records) and to bring the village to life from these records. What emerges are people who live in fragile houses; are rarely well fed from a nutritional perspective and whose food supply is always in doubt; work hard and are not above trying to wheedle out of work; who drink and fight and are sometimes brutal; fornicate (primarily a woman's crime but not a particularly reviled one); vandalize; commit petty crimes against the lord and their neighbors; and in short live lives of struggle every day without the expectation or vision of change in the future.

The Gies focus on Elton, with supplemental material from other English villages, so the reader who is interested in village life on the continent will need to explore other works to flesh out the picture. Because the mostly illiterate villagers themselves left few personal records, it is up to the thoughtful reader to discern the village's character and personality and to conceive of what day-to-day life must have been, based on the little that is known-to put oneself into the worn shoes of the working villein and to imagine his or her thoughts, feelings, and aspirations. Life in a Medieval Village is a good beginning.

Diane L. Schirf, 30 October 2003.

Renowned scholars of medieval history, the Gies credentials are impeccable. However, in this book, they seem to relish in providing piece after piece of redundant references, notes, and other bits of trivia to tirelessly pound the reader into submission as they seem determined to impress with their knowledge and research capabilities. If nothing else, the work provides the reader with a comprehensive bilbliography and reference list of places to go if they are that interested in life in a medieval village. The result of this style is a dry work that ofter reads like paragraph after paragraph of a census roll or register. It's dry, it's well researched, but it's dry. Oh, did I say that already?

The Gies have made a career out of filling a niche in the medieval history market. Life in a Medieval Village gives a very detailed view of everyday medieval life to the casual reader. As a result, they walk a fine line. Some casual readers may find the text to be dry, and to lend too much detail to seemingly trivial matters, while specialist historians may find the work too general and superficial (not scholarly).

I find their work to be engaging, and to provide a fairly good picture of the subject matter. In terms of medieval studies, it's useful to provide a general knowledge base prior to more detailed analysis.

I recommend this book as well as their other works.

Years ago I checked this book out of the library. I bought a copy the day the book was returned to the library. I have used it so much for my research that it is now held together with tape and glue. (I am a published author of short fantasy stories that have as their framework some of the information on village life from this book.) Thanks are due to these fine people for opening up the past to our modern eyes.

I was very torn when thinking about what to give this book. I felt, as a research tool, it was indispensible. However, It also was dry far more than neccesary and suffered from what I will call 'reader expectation'.

'reader expectation' is, from my point of view, the success of a book by measure of ambition, but falling short of the mark by gauge of the reader. Allow me to clarify;

LIFE IN A MEDIEVAL VILLAGE is a very well researched account of the breakdown of life in a subsistence agrarian collective. It backs up all statements and is, by all accounts, accurate in it's portrayal. Where it fails is two-fold: It is both a painfully accurate chronicle of the mundane life of the peasant, as well as a perhaps too specific in scope.

I originally picked this up as an account of medieval life, and by technical standards, I got what I wanted. However, to any future readers let me iterate what others have said in this page; this is SPECIFICALLY life in the 1300's in England, and not a reference material for people wishing to know how life was for the many centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire. You will find this book very succinct in life and political breakdown in villages of 1300's England, but you will be left wanting as far as general Feudal life was for Europe as a whole. Which was what I wanted to know on a more general level.

I guess you can chalk that up to reader expectation. It is by no means a bad book but I was hoping it would tell me more about life in all post Roman rule, not merely the administrative ledger-notes of clerks in the 1300's. Altho, if this is what you want to know about, add another star to my review. It's definitely THAT.

Gies&Gies discuss the nature of an "open field" village, which was a distinctive feature of the "manorial" or feudalism (more or less). It was not just a small town; the nature of the agricultural and legal systems made it unique.

Lots of material, and well worth reading, but occassionally dry and pedantic.

This book is so densely packed with miniscule details and examples that the information's significance becomes blurred, if not obsolete. The authors show they are very knowledgable on the subject, but they fail to analyze the information they present. The reader is left to interpret the meaning of details and ponder why they are included. The authors also use repetitive examples that become tiring and ineffective. The only minutely important information is presented in the topic sentences of each paragraph, and the book can be reasonably well understood just by reading the introductory sentences. While this book could be a treasure house for someone researching the relationship between manors and their respective villages, the average reader's attention is never captured. Students, beware! Before embarking on an excruciatingly dull explaination of medieval village life, reconsider your other options of reading material. (One option is another book by these authors that has gotten better reveiws.)

On the positive side, this book contains an enormous quantity of well-documented detail and scholarship. On the negative side, the writing is colorless and, to my eye, devoid of any unifying theme. Even someone seriously interested in the history of the period will find it soporific. Having struggled to the end, I still cannot decide if the juice was worth the squeeze.

A fascinating book of all sorts of interesting information of this period from work routines and marketing to medicine with it's bizarre remedies and treatments. Did they work or is it just survival of the fittest?
Religious life, superstitions and education are also covered from the perspective of being written in the 1200's.

This book is a great introduction into the lives of the common people in the middle ages. The concept of focusing on one village (Elton) throughout a protracted period of time provides a common thread throughout the dissertation and allows for the reader to identify with the people.