Free The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century by Ian Mortimer

all over the south of England. The great Benedictine houses of Glastonbury Abbey and Westminster Abbey have incomes well in excess of £2,000, and more than £3,000 in a good year. Most abbeys have an income of between £30 and £300. 15
    There is huge variety and range to the clergy in England. In addition to those mentioned above, there are hundreds of chaplains and priests in the seven hundred hospitals and chantries up and down the country. Add all these groups together and you begin to realize that “those who pray” are as rich and numerous as “those who fight.” In total there are about 650 monasteries in 1348 (350 houses of monks, three hundred of regular canons). There are about two hundred friaries and 150 nunneries, making a total of one thousand religious houses. In 1348 these contain at least twenty thousand men and two thousand women. Add the hospitals—each with a complement of chaplains and other religious staff—and about ten thousand parish incumbents, plus an unknown number of religious hermits, privatechaplains, chantry priests singing Masses for the souls of the dead, university theologians, as well as priests serving nuns, and you will see that there are at least thirty thousand full-time religious people in England. As you have to be eighteen to enter a monastery or to become a priest, this means that more than 2 percent of adult males in England are clergymen.
Those Who Work
    You would have thought that the last of the three estates would be the most straightforward. “Those who work” equals “peasants.” Not much call for hierarchy there, you might suppose. But you would be wrong. There are as many grades of wealth and status among the peasantry as there are among the aristocracy and the clergy combined. The status of a franklin or a yeoman who has a whole yardland (thirty acres) and his own plow team of eight oxen is far higher than that of a villein who is bound to serve his lord and has just one or two acres to his own use. If that franklin’s daughter marries a younger son of a gentleman, his status is even higher. If his family provide the officers for the manor—the reeve (manorial overseer), for instance—his status is further enhanced. The idea of all the peasants pulling together as one, equal in rank and wealth, is a modern myth.
    It is a moot point whether there actually is a group of people called “peasants.” To a manorial lord there is such a group: it is not of great significance to him if one peasant is richer than another; they are all his tenants. However, the word “peasant” is not used at this period. Ask a “peasant” if he
is
one and he will probably just scratch his head and wonder what on earth you are talking about. A clerk will refer to him and his companions as
rustid
(countrymen),
nativi
(those born to servitude), or
villani
(villeins), but these peasants do not refer to one another as
rustid
and not all peasants are villeins. It is not what they have in common which gives them their identity but what sets them apart from one another. Uppermost in their minds are questions such as, Where are you from? How much land have you got? Do you have any practical crafts or skills? Can you play a musical instrument? Were you born out of wedlock? And most of all—more important than every other question of status—Are you a free man?
    Freedom is the biggest single division in the peasantry (let us continue to use the word as a catchall for the sake of convenience). Those who are not free are villeins or bondmen. Villeins work the lord’s land for him according to a set of customary expectations, normally three days’ work per week. In addition they have to perform set tasks, such as plowing and harrowing a certain acreage of the lord’s land, or collecting firewood or nuts for the lord from the manorial woods. In return for their service, they have the use of some land, for which they pay rent. At the beginning of the century, about 70 percent of all