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Funny you can be so lonely with all these folks around. When I come out of the country hither to the City methinks I come into another world, even out of darkness into light. The popular culture of cities and towns is, by its nature, a derived culture. Towns were a relatively late development; they could arise only when agriculture had been sufficiently developed to yield a surplus for their support, and the ratio of urban to rural population in traditional societies has always been low. Towns derived not only their basic food supply from the countryside, but also their population. Urban death-rates were generally higher, and birth-rates lower than in the countryside, and the net reproduction rate was for much of the time less than unity. There thus had to be a migration from the country to the town, and the vast number of locative personal names, indicating a village or place of origin, gives some idea of the distances covered by the migrants. Many towns had no precisely known point of origin. They had grown in response to human needs, and in some form or other seemed to have existed from time immemorial. Some had been established by the Romans, had decayed and had been abandoned, leaving only an infrastructure of roads and the rumour that there had once been a city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To exist, one had to belong to an association: a household, a manor, a monastery, a guild; there was no security except in association, and no freedom that did not recognise the obligations of a corporate life. One lived and one died in the style of one's class and corporation. Few people lived alone, or, indeed, had any desire to do so. Everyone looked to membership of a group for mutual help in bad times and support in old age. Even the state in medieval England required people to be linked in small groups or tithings, so that each could vouch for the others' good behaviour. It is not that man is a particularly sociable animal: association has been forced upon him by the physical conditions in which he lived. Almost everyone is, by the accident of birth, a member of a family, of a more extended kinship group and also of a local or village community. One might leave the latter, and, perhaps with difficulty, gain acceptance in another, but family and kinship could not be replaced. Members of a family and families within a community were bound together by ties of mutual dependence. Although no family or community was ever without its internal frictions and disputes – the records are full of them – as a general rule they were never pursued to the point at which they interfered with the operation of community institutions and the performance of the agricultural routine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

… the traditional beliefs and customs of the medieval and modern peasant are in nine cases out often but the detritus of heathen mythology and heathen worship … village festivals … are but fragments of naive cults addressed by a primitive folk to the beneficent deities of field, wood and river. Les fêtes, les jeux, la danse, la musique, le théâtre, les repas de noces ou de funerailles et surtout l'activité rituelle des groupes de la jeunesse locale et des défunts du village ont pour fonction … de redéfinir fréquemment pour chacun le sens d'appartenance au groupe. In chapter 8 brief mention was made of the games and rituals with which people in a local community enlivened their dull lives and induced a sense, if not of well-being, at least of camaraderie. It is appropriate to examine the assumptions and beliefs, the mentalité of ordinary people, which subsumed these activities, and, in so far as this is possible, to trace their origins as far back as practicable. The world-view of traditional peoples was underpinned by the tacit assumption that there were forces external to mankind which could in some way shape human destiny. Both the regularities of nature, the rising and setting of the sun, the phases of the moon, the movements of the planets and the procession of the seasons, no less than its irregularities, like the apparent randomness of weather and the incidence of epidemic disease, called for explanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Times of great sickness and illnes, agues abounding more then in all my remembrance, last yeare and this also; feavers spotted rise in the contry; whether it arise from a distempered and infected aire I know not, but fruite rottes on ye trees as last yeare, though more, and many cattle die of ye murraine. People in pre-industrial Britain saw themselves as living always in ‘the valley of the shadow of death’. Life was dominated by the prospect of death. Disease was rampant; malnutrition general, accidents frequent, and the expectation of life short.1 Nowhere was this expressed more powerfully that in medieval iconography and illustration. And, since the only examples that most people were ever likely to see, at least before the later sixteenth century, were to be found in their local parish churches, it is to wall-paintings and stained glass that we must turn in the first instance. They all display a restricted number of motifs. Window-glass was made and the designs composed in urban workshops, but wall-paintings were spread over the rendered interior walls of churches by craftsmen who travelled from parish to parish with their limited repertoire of motifs which they repeated with little modification from one church to another. Representations of mortality These motifs were redolent of death. The wheel of fortune was a symbolic representation of the ages of human life, ending with death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The family is the first refuge of the individual when the state fails him. The family was an open-ended, low-keyed, unemotional, authoritarian institution which served certain essential political, economic, sexual, procreative, and nurturant purposes. In 1676 the Reverend William Sampson was inducted into the living of Clayworth in Nottinghamshire. From the first he kept a diary in which he recorded significant events within his parish. Very wisely, he began by compiling a list of his parishioners. He counted 401 heads, and noted that there were ‘no popish recusants … nor are there (thanks to God) any other dissenters’. Twelve years later he compiled a second list, this time with greater care and ‘according to ye Order of Houses & Families, down ye North side of ye town, & up ye South-Side, and lastly those of Wyeston’, a hamlet nearby. In his second census he was at pains to give the occupations and interrelationships of those who made up the 91 households within the parish. The result is a complex pattern of familial structures. Of the 91 households the great majority were nuclear, each consisting of parents and children with at most a servant living in. Thirteen were headed by a widow or widower with children. There were only four single-person households, three of them widows, one with a servant living in. There was little evidence in Clayworth that the extended family included grandchildren and other relatives, but in no less than 26 there were servants, some of whom must have been farm labourers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Such a run of wet seasons as we have had the last ten or eleven years would have produced a famine a century or two ago. In traditional Britain the choice of foodstuffs was severely limited. Most people ate only what their local area produced, and even then, they largely confined themselves to what it could produce most easily and abundantly. The volume of the crop was more important than its quality, for they lived for much of their lives on the edge of starvation. It was cereal crops which, under conditions prevailing in traditional societies, yielded most abundantly and most reliably, and it was on the breadgrains that most people depended for the greater part of their food supply. The bread throughout the land [wrote William Harrison] is made of such grain as the soil yieldeth, the gentility commonly provide themselves sufficiently of wheat for their own tables, whilst their household and poor neighbors in some shires are enforced to content themselves with rye or barley; yea, and in time of dearth, many with bread made either of beans, peason, or oats, or all together and some acorns among … The factors governing diet, that is the variety and the relative abundance of foodstuffs, were many. Among them the local soil and terrain were of foremost importance. Without anything beyond an empirical knowledge of agronomy and soil science, people had learned to adapt their cropping systems as far as was practicable to local conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Except in summer, the traditional house was cold and draughty, and at all times dark and gloomy. Its doors and windows admitted more air than light and gave little protection against the intruder. For most people their security lay in the paucity of goods worth stealing. People spent much of their time out of doors. Houses were for eating and sleeping, and only during the dark days of winter would people have spent much time within them. In the course of the later Middle Ages and early modern times, however, household furniture increased; domestic comforts, like cushions and curtains and decorated walls, became more common, and by small increments a house was slowly turned into a home. The central hearth Before the sixteenth century most homes had only a single hearth, centrally placed within the hall. A midde the halle flor A fier, stark and store Was light and brende bright. It was usually made of small stones set on edge, but sometimes of stone slabs, and occasionally of fire-hardened clay. Here a fire smouldered and was rarely allowed to go out because there was no ready means of lighting it again. Should it be extinguished, it had generally to be relighted with embers carried from a neighbouring house. This was a hazardous undertaking, and the rolls of the coroners's courts occasionally contain references to the disastrous consequences of the careless handling of a burning brand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]