Home, History, Daily Life, Portrayal, Clothing, Baggage, The Compagnies, Timeline, 15th C Money, 15th C Names, Group Regulations, Events, References

Daily Life

Social Order and the Three Estates:

The three estates of man; Clergy, Nobility and Commoners.
 
Each estate, is internally divided by degree, the clergy have the pope, archbishops, bishops, cardinals, priests, deacons, fathers, brothers or nuns.  The members of the clergy come from the other two estates, nobility and commoners, and either can climb the social ladder of degree, although certainly the clergy who come from the nobility have the greatest chance of holding a high office.

The nobility, emperor, king, duke, count, baron, knight bannerette, knight bachelor, squire.  The nobility and often the degree within the nobility is hereditary, however it is possible to be elevated into the nobility and for your degree to go both up or down.  The nobility were traditionally the largest landowners, the main rulers and legal body.  Historically the nobility enjoyed privileges above the commoners, such as tax exemption, and preference in legal matters.

The commoners are the largest estate, making up between 90 – 98% of the population. They can be classified in two groups, urban (bourgeois): Mayor, aldermen, guildmaster, merchant, master, journeyman, apprentice, and servant. Rural: Landowner, tenant farmer, servant, laborer, migrant worker.  The most flexible estate as far as degree goes, particularly amongst the urban guilds, where, with aptitude and luck, you can raise through the guild hierarchy to be in position to become an alderman of a town or city.  Also amongst the merchant class where a lot of wealth was possible to accumulate, or lose.  With the accumulation of wealth, came the possibility of buying ones way into the nobility. 

The three estates did not exist in a vacuum, totally separate from each other, but rather had a dynamic interaction between them.  Certainly some orders of the clergy were isolated from the rest of the world and there would have been many commoners, particularly amongst the bourgeois, who had very little to do with the nobility, but for the rest each estate interacted with the others in greater or lesser amounts.  The Nobility in particular could not exist outside of the support by the commoners, who made up the tenants who paid rents on the use of their land, worked for them as their servants, laborers and soldiers, and sometimes as their doctors and lawyers.  They commissioned works from artists and craftsmen, and purchased expensive luxuries from the merchants. 

Education:

Education which had initially been the domain of the clergy was another area where the three estates came together, often on equal terms.  By the mid 15th c there were already professional clerks, accountants, lawyers and doctors of medicine being employed outside of the clergy.  Tutors were sometimes being employed by the wealthy to teach young boys instead of the clergy, and universities had taken over teaching the higher arts, such as medicine, law, astronomy and theology.  The universities were attended by members of all three estates, and in particular for wealthy commoners, sending a son to university to get a degree in law was sometimes a good first step towards elevating the family to the nobility over time.  For the nobility it was a way to keep a son occupied, particularly if the family no longer had large estates requiring managing.

In the Burgundian Netherlands the largest centre of learning was the University of Leuven. At the begining of the 15th century the city of Leuven requested for a university and John IV, Duke of Brabant gave his support to the request. With a papal bull signed by Pope Martin V on 9 December 1425 the Louvain University was founded as a Studium Generale. In its early days this university was modeled after the universities of Paris, Cologne and Vienna.

Time:

By the late 15th century daily life in western Europe was still heavily influenced, and to a degree controlled, by the Christian religion and in particular through the Roman Catholic Church.  The largest buildings in this period were still mostly churches and Cathedrals, that dominated the skyline around village, town and city.  While clocks were starting to become used in the more advanced cities slowly being incorporated into the tower of the town hall or church, it was still the ringing of the bells to indicate the canonical hours for prayer that was the most common way of dividing the day and telling the time.  

The canonical hours of:

Matins (Midnight), 

Lauds (Dawn), 

Prime (Morning), 

Terce (Morning, Nine o'clock (Tertia: prayer of the third hour)), 

Sext (Noon (Sexta: prayer of the sixth hour)), 

None (Mid afternoon, Three o'clock (Nona: prayer of the ninth hour)), 

Vespers (Sunset), 

Compline (evening before retiring), 

were in many ways more suited as a way of keeping track of the working day.  In  particular since Lauds, Prime and Vespers  changed with the seasons and the length of day which was important in a society where a large part of the population still worked the land or in a guild with restrictions on working only in daylight, in order to maintain the quality of the workmanship.

 

Fasts:

 

Friday was an obligatory "fish day".  The religious significance being so that you would be reminded of Jesus who died on the cross on what is called "Good Friday".  

Other "fish days” that might be observed were Wednesday (because of Judas' treason) and Saturday (to honour the Virgin Maria).

There was also an annual cycle of fasting days: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/

Ember Days (corruption from Lat. Quatuor Tempora, four times) are the days at the beginning of the seasons ordered by the Church as days of fast and abstinence. They were definitely arranged and prescribed for the entire Church by Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085) for the Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday after 13 December (S. Lucia), after Ash Wednesday (beginning of Lent), after Whitsunday (fifty days after Easter) and after 14 September (Exaltation of the Cross). The purpose of their introduction, besides the general one intended by all prayer and  fasting, was to thank God for the gifts of nature, to teach men to make use of them in moderation, and to assist the needy.

Advent (the four weeks before Christmas) is a time of fast and abstinence, from a period beginning with the Sunday nearest to the feast of St. Andrew the Apostle (30 November) and embracing four Sundays until the Nativity. The first Sunday may be as early as 27 November, and then Advent has twenty-eight days, or as late as 3 December, giving the season only twenty-one days.

 

Lent is the forty-day period between Shrove Tuesday (or Carnival) and Easter,  (representing the forty days of the withdrawal, of Jesus, into the wilderness).  It begins on Ash Wednesday (25 Febuary 2004 / 3 March 1473), and ends at sundown on Holy Thursday (8 April 2004 / 15 April 1473), with the beginning of the mass of the Lord’s Supper.  During Lent, not only meat, but also milk, butter, cheese and eggs were banned from the table. 

 

Feasts:

 

Some important feast days were…

Annunciation 25 March,

Pentecost the weak before Whitsunday (fifty days after Easter)

Christmas 25 December,

The Pope:

Situated in Rome, during this period:

Prayers:

Ave Maria:

Ave Maria, gratia plena: Dominus tecum: Bendicta tu in maulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui Ieuses.  Amen.

 

Pater noster:

 

Pater noster qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum.  Adveniat regnum tuum.  Fiat voluntas tua sicut in caelo et in terra.  Panem nostrum cotidianum da nobis hodie.  Et dimitte nobis debita nostra sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris.  Et ne nos inducas in tentationem sed libra nos a malo.  Amen.

 

Anecdotes of daily life:

 

Power, Eileen.  Medieval People.  J. W. Arrowsmith Ltd, Bristol.  1986.

Pg. 76.  “And the nuns were full of complaints.  A modern schoolgirl would go pale with horror over their capacity for tale-bearing.  If one nun had boxed her sister’s ears, if another had cut church, if another were given to entertaining friends, if another went out without a license, if another ran away with a wandering flute player, the bishop was sure to hear about it; that is, unless the whole convent were in a disorderly state, and the nuns had made a compact to wink at each other’s peccadilloes; and not betray them to the bishop, which occasionally happened.

 

Pg. 83.  “Indeed, a holy Cistercian abbot once interviewed the poor devil himself and heard about his alarming industry; this is the story as it is told in The Myroure of Oure Ladye, written for the delectation of the nuns of Syon in the fifteenth century:  ‘We read of a holy Abbot of the order of Citeaux that while he stood in the choir at matins he saw a fiend that had a long and great poke hanging about his neck and went about the choir from one to another and waited busily after all letters and syllables and words and failings that any made; and them he gathered diligently and put them in his poke.  And when he came before the abbot, waiting if aught had escaped him that he might have gotten and put in his bag, the Abbot was astonished and afeard of the foulness and misshape of him and said unto him:  What art thou?  And he answered and said, I am a poor devil and my name is Tittivillus and I do mine office that is committed unto me.  And what is thine office? Said the Abbot.  He answered:  I must each day, he said, bring my master a thousand pokes full of failings and of negligences and syllables and words, that are done in your order in reading and singing and else I must be sore beaten.’

 

The Family Unit:

 

Prevenier, Walter.  Blockmans, Wim.  The Burgundian Netherlands. Cambridge University Press.  1986.

 

“THE FAMILY UNIT Generally speaking, rural families were larger than urban families; the average size must have been respectively about 5 and 4.5 during the late Middle Ages.  Nevertheless, this is also a variable which depends upon several factors.

There are regional differences: in the villages of Flanders the size of families varied between an average of 3.7 and 5.5 members, in the villages of Brabant the corresponding figure was 4.7, and in the Veluwe 5.8 (with local variations between 5 and 5.6)…

…In a medieval textile centre in prosperous times many new young inhabitants would be attracted from other towns, villages and outlying areas; financially unable to support a family, they would marry later and there were consequently many single-person households, which in turn kept the average size of the household at a low level.  In times of crisis these workers, like the poor who  rightly or wrongly expect work and support in prosperous towns, quickly drift away to other centres, since they are not restricted by strong social or economic ties.

It is difficult to be precise about incomplete families (widows and widowers) and about the number of unmarried adults.  The latter category seems to have been large during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the Netherlands.  Probably periods of recession led to the conscious postponement of marriage.  The purchasing power of the weaker groups in the economy was, during normal times, just sufficient to support an unmarried individual, but not sufficient to allow him to support a family”. Pg. 36.

 

“The considerable numbers of migrants often moving to the towns indicate that many people (namely of course in the Nederlands, the marginal groups such as unskilled workers, the poor and the single) moved continually between the towns and the countryside, or from one town to another, in accordance with the real or supposed opportunities in these towns and villages”. Pg. 43.

 

Vaughan, Richard.  Charles the Bold.  The Boydell Press. 2002.

 

In May 1471 ducal officials in Brabant received instructions to enrol volunteers to join the new ordinance compagnies, and to send them to Arras for 15 June 1471, however this was subsequently differed until 1 August 1471. Pg. 212.

 

  Notes: 

 

It appears that the 5^th company was formed at the muster in Arras 1 August 1471.

 

I believe that some of the “volunteers” enrolled by the Brabantse officials were not so much volunteering as forced to join, as a way of dealing with the itinerant workers mentioned by Prevenier and Blockmans above.  Others of the lower classes may well have chosen to join as the pay was good.  This would also be supported by the fact that the positions that required more expensive items of gear such as the Culvineers and Crossbowmen were frequently below the ordinances stipulated numbers.

 

Some of the high social level soldiers, such as Hommes des Armes may have been in Burgundian military service before the companies became official.  Particularly as there were large numbers raised under the old feudal levy for the military campaigns against Liege in 1468, then the short war with France in 1470.  For those with less personal income from land titles or holdings, joining the standing companies was financially expedient.

Therefore some of the soldiers and civilian support may well have come into the companies as part of a Hommes des Armes household.

   

Fire Wood:

 

Often taken for granted these days, firewood was important as a source of heat for cooking and keeping the home warm.  However, different woods have different properties when they burn, some producing hot fires, some smokey fires, some woods burn very fast leaving nothing but ash and others burn slower leaving hot coals.  So choosing the best wood for a fire was important, but often the best woods would only be available nearby in a forest owned by a local lord, who generally guarded his right to not only the beasts in the forest, but the wood as well. There are accounts of anual quantities of wood being granted as part of an officials payment, or as a reward for certain favours.  Other sources of fuel for fire was charcoal, although this was fairly expensive due to the intensive labour required to make it, it was ideal for cooking as it was easier to control the fires temperature.  Also Peat was in common use in Holland however it gives a very acrid smoke when burned. 

 

Beech wood fires are bright and clear

If the logs are kept a year.

Chestnuts only good, they say

If for long its laid away.

But ash wood new or ash wood old

Is fit for a queen with a crown of gold.

Birch and fir logs burn too fast,

Blaze up bright and do not last.

Is by the Irish said

 Hawthorn bakes the sweetest bread.

Elm wood burns like churchyard mould –

Een the very flames are cold;

But ash wood green and ash wood brown

Is fit for a queen with a golden crown.

Poplar gives a bitter smoke,

Fills your eyes and makes you choke.

Apple wood will scent your room

With an incense like perfume.

Oaken logs if dry and old

Keep away the winter cold.

But ash wood wet and ash wood dry

A king shall warm his slippers by.

 

And Another   

Oak logs will warm you well,

If theyre warm and dry.

Larch logs of pine wood smell

But sparks will fly.

Beech logs for Christmas time;

Yew logs heat well.

Scotch logs its a crime

For anyone to sell.

Birch logs will burn too fast,

Chestnut scarce at all.

Hawthorn logs are good to last,

If cut in the fall.

Holly logs will burn like wax,

You should burn them green.

Elm logs like smouldering flax;

No flames to be seen.

Pear logs and apple logs,

They will scent your room.

Cherry logs across the dogs

Smell like flowers in bloom.

But ash logs all smooth and gray,

Burn them green or old,

Buy up all that come you way,

Theyre worth their weight in gold. 

 

From Tree Farm by John Estabrook

 

Home, History, Daily Life, Portrayal, Clothing, Baggage, The Compagnies, Timeline, 15th C Money, 15th C Names, Group Regulations, Events, References