Judging by most film and TV depictions of Europe in the Middle Ages, one peasant looked much like another. A face, probably grubby, peeks out from beneath a hood; below, the body is clad in a tunic and woollen hose. Shoes – if feet are shod at all – are spattered with mud, from the farmyard or the quagmire of a road along which they’re tramping. Such was the lot of the ordinary man or woman.
Whether in Britain or Brittany, Essex or Aachen, a common assumption is that the everyday lives of ordinary medieval people were fairly homogeneous – that their status, wealth, health, diet and, yes, clothing was largely the same across much of the continent. Yet even a brief look at records and chronicles from that period – which, of course, covers a vast timespan – gives the lie to that idea.
Take the denizens of Ruislip, now a district in west London. In 1246, it was a small farming community in Middlesex. Here lived Roise, the miller’s wife; Nicholas Brakespear, a freeholder who flouted the local authorities’ orders; and Hugh Tree, whose flock kept getting into the lord’s garden. If you wandered through 13th-century Ruislip, you might also meet brewers such as Alice, the widow of Salvage; or Agnotta, the amica (“friend”, or mistress) of the shepherd.
Some locals were richer than others. One, Roger Hamo, was sufficiently wealthy that he could afford to pay 20 shillings for a jury of 12 local men to investigate his rights to a plot of land claimed
