Chapter 21
The Middle Ages
The rise of kingdoms during the Middle Ages continues the progression of earlier times but an added ingredient is the phenomenon of self-aggrandisement on the part of individuals and organisations which finds its expression in royal and ecclesiastical palaces and castles and monasteries and papal courts. Conspicuous consumption becomes the norm with those who could afford it and it is to this that we owe the survival of the great structures of the high Middle Ages and the unfortunate destruction of many earlier ones that were rebuilt at the time in a more modern style and on a greater scale.
Emphasis on ceremonies like that of knighthood, of retinues like those of the Popes and English kings, extravagances like tournaments and elaborate clothes were all part of the desire to be as showy as possible. It is against this facet of upper-class life that many of the secular writers protested. William Langland is an example and one can cite many examples of religious reformers like St Francis as well. The dichotomy between wealth and 'holy' or, indeed, unholy poverty runs right through the Middle Ages.
Another characteristic of the earlier part of the period is the phenomenon of conquest and/ or colonization. Europe’s heartland of France, Germany west of the Elbe and northern Italy, Charlemagne’s erstwhile Frankish Empire, to which by courtesy England can be attached, expanded to the east by virtue of the German movement into eastern Europe, to the west by virtue of the Norman rulers’ conquest of England, Wales and Ireland, to the south in Spain by the reconquest of the lands occupied by the Moslems and, briefly, to the south-east by the Frankish capture of Constantinople and the Holy Land. This expansion was necessarily accompanied by an increase in population. Furthermore, the latest research seems to indicate a long-term growth during the earlier period comparable to that of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was brought to a halt by the traumatic occurrences of the fourteenth century.
In 1066 William, Duke of Normandy, claimed that he was the legal heir to Edward the Confessor and therefore the proper king of England. As a consequence he insisted that traditional English institutions and customs should continue unchanged as though there had been no conquest. So the Saxon system of coinage carried on but bore William's head instead of Edward the Confessor's and the English legal system remained in place and, as always, the life of the ordinary people was hardly affected. The Saxon landowners suffered most, the great majority losing their estates that were granted by William to his followers in exchange for their continuing military service. This is the arrangement known as the Feudal System.
It is clear that the new Norman landlords expected trouble from their English tenants for they utilised strongholds to protect themselves and their farmyards in the shape of the motte(mound)-and-bailey (defended yard) castles, a cheap and easily-built refuge in time of emergency. Research into the origin of this type of castle has now decided that it lay in the low-lying marshy region between the Loire and the Rhine some time during the tenth century and may have developed from earlier ringworks such as Der Husterknupp in the Rhineland. In Anjou early castles of the tenth century took the form of stone towers like that of Langeais (Centre) built round about 992 which is really an enormous fortified first-floor hall (see below). As such, Langeais is one of the first examples of that concept.
Grand castles were built of stone in England by the king and the magnates who needed seats of power in their territories. These castles of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were quite a different political and military statement from the earlier earth and timber structures that could be thrown up in a matter of days. . For one thing, they were hugely more expensive and took decades to build. Between 1168 and 1189, Henry II spent £6,500 at Dover castle while Edward I spent around £80,000 on his Welsh castles. Castle building expenses mounted steadily – Henry spent around £700 a year, his son John £1000 per annum and his grandson Henry III £1,500. (Bartlett) Together with the demand for church masonry, this brought about a renaissance in stone quarrying. Many quarries of the period have been destroyed by later mining in England but kilometres of galleries under the city of Paris still survive and bear witness to the demand for stone for great buildings at the time. There must have been many thousands of smaller quarries all over Europe for stone carriage overland was prohibitively expensive; it doubled the cost of the load over twenty kilometres. It was very much cheaper on water. Caen stone from Normandy came to England by sea and was used to build Canterbury and Norwich cathedrals.
Two kinds of masonry castles were introduced by the Normans. The first Great Tower in England was put up as the White Tower in the Tower of London. A series of floors built into a huge block with stair towers at the corners comprised a secure basement with no exterior access, a hall on the first floor with a main entrance approached by exterior stairs, and floors containing chapel, barracks for soldiery and private quarters for the seigneur and his family. Fireplaces were built into the walls for most floors were of timber and latrines were provided off the stairs at each floor level. It is likely that this triumph of architectural innovation was developed from towers like Langeais (Indre et Loire).
The other type of masonry castle, just as costly, was the enclosure castle like that of Richmond in Yorkshire. This fine building encloses one hectare with a high curtain wall slung between mural (wall) towers with one tower, the gatehouse, enlarged to act as a residential keep or donjon. Defensive enclosures of this type had been around for centuries and indeed the Roman Saxon Shore forts of the third and fourth centuries AD are early examples in England.
Motte-and-bailey castles appear in England along with their humbler cousin, the simple ringwork, as the defended homesteads of the foreign landlords as a corollary of the Norman re-assignment of English land after the Conquest. The motte was normally a protective 'skirt' around a stone or timber tower while the bailey was the ringwork alongside in which the homestead was built. Excavation at Hen Domen in Montgomery (Powys) in Wales has demonstrated that it consisted of timber buildings packed together to house both the household and the farm of the Norman lord inside a high banked and palisaded enclosure with fortified gateway. Some earth-and-timber castles were rebuilt in stone later on but most were abandoned when landlords realized that they had nothing to fear from their Saxon tenants and moved outside the claustrophobic enclosures to more comfortable quarters in manor houses, some moated or surrounded by a palisade. But motte-and-bailey castles and the ringworks had a brief renaissance in the twelfth century during the civil war between Stephen and Matilda when lords built 'adulterine' or unlicensed castles as a protection against the uncertain times.
Further inspiration for castle-building in Britain was provided during the reign of Henry III with the construction of the concentric castle at Caerphilly in South Wales. The type makes its earliest appearance in the Holy Land with the splendid structure at Krak des Chevaliers in Syria. Edward I built examples of the type at Beaumaris, Conway, Kidwelly and Harlech but they were not restricted to Wales; there is an example at Leeds in Kent. A concentric castle was basically a castle within a castle, giving the attacker a double set of curtain walls to scale. At the end of the Middle Ages castles were still being built but more as status symbols than regular fortifications and they certainly provided more comfort than the earlier castles. As time went on these homes took on more of the appearance of fortified manor houses like Stokesay Castle in Shropshire.
Another addition to the landscape in medieval times was the large stone-built monastery. This new-style complex of church and accommodation was first introduced during the Norman period with the Benedictine monastery built by William I at Battle on the site of the Battle of Hastings and by the Cluniac monks at Lewes, also in Sussex, when they were invited to England from Cluny (Burgogne) by the Norman magnates. A fine example of one of these grand new monasteries was at Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk where the Benedictine monks began an ambitious new building programme in 1081. Later on, in the twelfth century, other orders of monks followed the Benedictines and the Cluniacs to England and one order, the Gilbertine Canons, originated in Lincolnshire.
A study of the plans of monastic sites provides information about the activities and life-style of the inhabitants. The earliest plan was that of the Benedictines and was used with variations by most other Orders. But Carthusian monks were housed in individual cells while Cistercians added to their monasteries accommodation for lay-brothers who were lesser folk recruited to minor orders and used for menial tasks about the monasteries.
Buildings constructed for the use of the monks themselves were often very grand. The dining-rooms (fraters) at Battle in Sussex and Easby in Yorkshire were virtual banqueting-halls and even the cosy example at Cleeve in Somerset with its large open fireplace was finer than similar rooms in noblemen's houses at the time. The dormitories (dorters) were extensive, by the fourteenth century divided by partition walls into study bedrooms. At Castle Acre in Norfolk, the rere-dorter (bathrooms and toilet-block) is immense and seems far too big for the few dozen monks who lived there. Chapter-houses were often grand. At Bristol the Norman chamber is a triumph of Romanesque decoration while at Wells and Salisbury the octagonal roofs demonstrate the beauty of early gothic vaulting.
The monks, with this magnificent accommodation and servants, lived a country-house existence and were often surrounded by monastic estates. But they would be required to perform duties as obedientiaries, that is, heads of departments in the monastery. A sacristan would be needed to look after the church, a precentor to oversee the liturgy, a cellarer to take charge of the monastic estates, and a hosteller to look after guests and the pensioners (corridans) who paid good money to lodge in the monastery. These and others were important officials and were often provided with junior monks as assistants.
Beyond the claustral buildings, there is more evidence of monkish activities. In Thetford Chase in Norfolk, the gamekeeper's fortified house is proof of the Thetford Priory monks' love of the hunt, at Meare in Somerset a water-bailiff's hall still stands and was occupied by the guardian of Glastonbury Abbey's water-birds and fish while a possible falconry in front of the prior’s lodging and the fish-ponds at Castle Acre, Norfolk, are evidence of the same activities.
Apart from their religious and educational activities, the monks were innovative builders, patrons of architects and other artists, agriculturalists, fishbreeders and industrialists. They were even inventors - they developed the mechanical bell to toll the hours of the offices (la cloche) during the fourteenth century which later, with the addition of a face, became the church clock. Some of their greatest churches survived the Dissolution in England in the 1530s to become cathedrals. Ely is an example. Medieval architectural developments were often pioneered in monastic churches like Montierender (Champagne-Ardenne) (c998), St-Etienne, Nevers (Burgogne) (1097), Cluny III (Burgogne) (1130) and Durham (1133) during the earlier medieval period and St-Denis in Paris (1144) and the abbey of St-Ouen at Rouen (Haut-Normandie) (1339) later on.
Activities such as the management of great estates echoed those of the villa-owners of Romano-British times but the monks seem to have been more innovative than their predecessors. At Castle Acre Priory, for example, there is a complex of buildings custom-built for processing grain from the monastic estates and a canal for carrying away the final products. The Cistercian monastery of Citeaux (Burgogne) planted vines that became one of the world's greatest vintages, the Clos-Vougeot. Another, at Eberbach (Baden-Wurtenburg) in Germany, exported its large wine crop down the Rhine to Cologne and other markets. In South Wales, monasteries were brewing and selling beer retail, in one case, at Strata Florida, from a pub within the monastery, and also supplying local pubs with their supplies (Williams).
Granges, consisting of outlying monastic estates with farm buildings, can still be identified today for they survive in the guise of modern farms and on some stand the great barns used for storing the produce of the wool harvests. The fourteenth-century stone barn at Bradford-on-Avon in Wiltshire is one of the finest examples. Hard by is a contemporary granary which demonstrates that the Cistercian nuns from the nunnery at Shaftesbury in Dorset who owned the estate were not just interested in the wool crop. The largest granary so far identified is that in the grain complex at Castle Acre.
Cistercian monks, apart from being agricultural entrepreneurs, particularly with sheep, were also exploiting mineral resources on their estates. In Wales, iron, coal and lead were mined but so far no industrial buildings similar to the great forge at Fontenay (Burgogne) in France have been unearthed in Britain. At Clairvaux (Burgogne), waterpower was used to mill wheat, sieve flour, full cloth and tan leather.
Some of these initiatives were copied by secular entrepreneurs. In Domesday Book 5,624 watermills are mentioned, many concentrated to a remarkable extent on minor streams. On the Wylie in Wiltshire, for instance, there were thirty mills along ten miles of water. One wonders whether, even in this grain-producing region, they would all have been used for grinding corn. Mills were expensive to build and can be used as an indicator of the relative wealth of different parts of England and can provide some information about local enterprises as in Somerset where two Domesday mills were paying their rents in 1086 with iron blooms, suggesting that they were used for forging iron. Paper mills are known from the early-fourteenth century in France, the idea probably coming from either Spain or Italy. Hemp was processed in the same way. The introduction of the fulling mill into England in the thirteenth century brought about a revolution in the textile industry and was the key to the take-off of cloth-making as the major activity in the later middle ages.
Tidal mills appear in Europe during the twelfth century and steadily increased in number up to the nineteenth century. No medieval structures are available for study today but a post-medieval example can be seen at Carew in Dyfid and there are several in France.
The appearance of the windmill in England around 1185 is an example of the willingness to adopt new initiatives and so is the response of landowners, both ecclesiastic and lay, to the effects of the 'terrible century', the fourteenth, in which Europe was struck by a series of disasters. Over-population, soil exhaustion, climatic deterioration, plagues and monetary crises altered the whole basis of the later medieval economy. A proportion of the labour-intensive arable land was enclosed in smaller parcels and rented out to individual peasants, while more was turned over to sheep farming giving a great boost to rural industry. Other rural industries burgeoned alongside the wool trade: iron and coal mining, charcoal burning and pottery-making are some examples. The shortage of labour necessitated greater emphasis on machinery in the second half of the medieval period and wooden machines like the windmill became common and the watermill was increasingly adapted to other uses like those described above.
A manor house could be surrounded by a wet-moat containing, like monastic fishponds, the commonest domestic fish of the period, bream, but there is no evidence for commercial production of fish at these sites. Sea-fish was available in its dried form but evidence is sparse in archaeological contexts for fishbones, apart from cod vertebrae, are too fragile to survive except in loo-pits. Also close to a manor house could be long mounds averaging between 10 and 20 metres in length and about half a metre high known today as pillow-mounds. They were artificial rabbit warrens for housing the exotic creatures perhaps introduced into England by the Normans.
An important constituent of medieval manors was the woodland which provided firewood and timber and was a feeding ground for pigs and a refuge for birds. In the Domesday book, woodland is listed in every manor. As a renewable resource it was carefully tended, the trees being coppiced to provide a regular harvest of timber. In modern times such ancient woodland can be recognized by the presence of plants like Herb paris (Paris quadrifolia) and Dog's mercury (Mercurialis perennis). Evidence of medieval agricultural activities can still be seen in the landscape. From the air the ridge-and-furrow marks which record the medieval method of draining arable land, the humps and bumps that mark the site of a deserted medieval village with its hollow way following the line of the village street, its rectangular house platforms and ditch around the manor house, can often provide enough information alone to draw a map of a medieval vill.
When studying a medieval manorial estate it is often useful to have some idea of the date of the hedges that survive in the modern landscape so as to know which were used to enclose the earlier medieval common fields and which were added when the common fields were enclosed either in the later middle ages or the nineteenth century. Hedge counting is a method of distinguishing between the ages of hedges by counting the number of shrub species along ten-metre stretches and taking an average. One or two species indicate a nineteenth or twentieth-century date, four to six, medieval planting and a greater number, hedges that originated at an earlier time.
Medieval rural vills were basically collections of peasant farmhouses consisting of longhouses divided into two parts by a passage linking doors in the middle of the opposing long walls. On one side of this through-passage was a byre with a drain running down the middle and perhaps with animal stalls on either side. The other part of the house contained the living quarters of the family, sometimes partitioned off at the end to provide a sleeping-room for the parents. The common feature in this half was the central hearth used for heating and cooking. Outside could be a lean-to hut for tools and a loo positioned over a large hole in the ground.
Some such settlements, abandoned during the Middle Ages or later, have been excavated The famous site at Wharram Percy in Yorkshire is an example where the investigation came to an end after thirty annual seasons of work. These abandoned sites are known as deserted medieval villages (DMVs). Sometimes the villages have not completely disappeared but migrated a short distance from their original sites or were moved by landscape designers during the eighteenth century.
In the crowded parts of the heartlands of Europe and in England, peasant holdings were diminishing in size and this would have been a spur to migration in Europe to the areas east of the Elbe where German knights and magnates were actively engaged in colonization. There was a demand for peasants and they were offered low rents and taxes and substantial holdings. One such colonial village was excavated at the deserted thirteenth-century site of Pfaffenschlag in south-western Moravia where sixteen houses were built on either side of a stream. The houses had stone foundations measuring 60 feet by30 feet with three rooms and a hearth and compared well with peasant sites further west. Proof that the inhabitants were equipped with modern tools was found in the shape of a ploughshare.
Occasionally it is possible to find present-day farms that contain buildings dating back to the Middle Ages. Some farmhouses, even if modernised, may still in essence be the medieval hall with smoke-blackened beams and high-pitched roof. Barns in particular are worth examination. Numbers of them, as already stated, started off life as monastic or secular buildings storing the produce of an estate. They were expensive buildings to build. At Cagnoncles near Cambrai (Nord-Pas-de-Calais), after a fire that destroyed the village in 1298, the barn was valued at 300£ while the cottages were each valued at between 15£ and 20£.
The medieval hall-house was the home of the wealthier peasant or minor lord but, during the earlier medieval period the first-floor hall, entered from the outside at first-floor level with a secure ground-floor undercroft only reached by ladder from above, was popular and is to be found in castles, monasteries, towns and as manor-houses in the countryside. With the first-floor divided into public room and private chamber, with built-in lavatories and fireplaces, the compact first floor hall only declined in popularity when the demand for greater space dictated the resurgence of the ground floor hall where the fireplace in the middle dominated the public room which had a dais at one end for the high table and a screen at the other to hide the entrance door and the doors into the kitchen and buttery (provision store).
By the end of the Middle Ages the dais end of the ground-floor hall was usually two-storied and increasingly so was the screen end over the kitchen and buttery leaving only the central area open to the roof. Later this hall-space is also made into two floors and fresh windows were inserted in the walls at appropriate levels. The clue to the origin of such a building is the smoke-blackening of the beams in the roof above the middle of the building where the hall used to be.
In England, during the earlier medieval period, the town or, to put it another way, the urban vill, continued to develop from its origin or renaissance in Saxon times. Some larger places like Lincoln suffered a setback immediately after the Conquest when castles were built inside their walls but by the late-eleventh century new foundations (planned towns), were being established mainly by the Crown. By the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries monasteries and landowners were following suit and the period saw an unprecedented urban expansion and proliferation of market-places and trade both in England and all over Europe.
Industries were established. In Beverley, Yorkshire, for example, iron smithing, hemp, flax and shoe manufacture were established during the later eleventh and early twelfth centuries. By the end of the latter century entrepreneurs in the town were organising the surrounding rural woollen producers to provide the raw materials for an urban dyeing industry that lasted for two hundred years.
Other established towns grew even more rapidly during the early period. A good example is Florence in Italy whose walls surrounded an urban area of 80 hectares in 1172. By 1284 the circuit enclosed over 600 hectares. As well as these established vills, new towns sprang up. In England alone 132 new towns appeared during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and some villages acquired town status. Many new boroughs in Wales and Ireland were modelled on the Norman town of Breteuil (Bartlett). In the same way, 132 places between the Rivers Oder and Vistula in eastern Europe had town law modelled on that of Neumarkt which in its turn had adopted the provisions that governed Halle in east Germany and Lubeck had a similar position in relation to German trading cities in the Baltic. Towns grew in population by natural increase and by migration from the countryside or in the case of the colonial towns by immigration from other lands as in the German examples above or in Spain from across the Pyrenees or in Wales and Ireland from England. The inhabitants were producers of simple manufactured goods for distribution to the rural hinterlands, consumers of agricultural surpluses and together with the entrepreneurs in village market-places they were agents of exchange between town and country. In some counties in England like Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire village market places outnumbered those in town. Elsewhere they are a feature of the later Middle Ages as in Wiltshire where wool markets grew up in places like Lacock and Corsham.
Most towns in Britain and Europe were very small by modern standards. Not many were contained more than 10,000 inhabitants and most housed fewer than 5000. Trade was not continuous as today but was restricted to market days although, in some places, fairs of several weeks' duration attracted merchants over longer distances. The fairs of Champagne in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries at the towns of Lagny, Bas-sur-Aube, Provins and Troyes (Champagne-Ardennes) brought merchants from Italy who exchanged silks and spices for the products of northern Europe. In England fairs that also attracted foreign merchants were held at Boston, Northampton, St Ives and Winchester.
Pack horses were used to carry goods to market over short journeys but four-wheeled carts drawn by teams of two to five horses could be seen on the roads travelling greater distances. The increase in trade during the latter part of the Middle Ages can be gauged by the appearance of large churches paid for by pious woollen merchants in Cotswold and East Anglian towns in England, in the great Hanse towns of the Baltic and the wool markets in Flanders. Rich merchants built themselves fine houses in towns like Thomas Paycocke's house at Coggeshall in Essex and Jacques Coeur's house in Bourges (Centre). Country mansions like Stokesay Castle in Shropshire and Penshurst Place in Kent sprang up.
Towns were founded by a partnership of king and landowner/abbot with an eye to the profits from rents, market tolls and the income from mercantile courts. For the king there were augmented moneys from custom dues and taxes but profits declined as urban recession set in during the fourteenth century due in part from the growing competition of rural-based industry. Not until the late sixteenth and early-seventeenth century did many towns revive. Only one type of town appeared to have been relatively unaffected by this recession and that was a town with a wool market.
Most medieval towns were furnished with defensive walls, sometimes built on the line of earlier walls. Portions of walls and town gates survive in places all over Europe as at Carcassone (Languedoc-Rousillon) and at York, but many fine circuits have been damaged or demolished as a result of road widening and town expansion.
Inside the medieval town would have been a network of narrow streets around a wide market-place which was usually provided with a market-hall or covered structure where deals could be struck. Large areas of some towns were occupied by a castle and/or monastery as in Norwich and the layout in the pre-Conquest foundations would have been divided into a number of small parishes each with its tiny individual church serving a few families. Nowadays most of these have vanished together with their parishes. Planted towns usually had only one major church but important trading towns like Kings Lynn in Norfolk could have another adjacent to a second market-place used on another day of the week.
A feature of some large towns was a friary. The friaries were established in order for the Church to proselytise amongst the urban poor rather like the Salvation Army in the early twentieth century. No complete friaries survived the Reformation in England but there is a fine example of a Blackfriars church still standing in Norwich. The rest, like the monasteries, were sold off to builders' merchants and partly or completely demolished at the Reformation. The friaries, being situated in towns where there was a greater demand for building materials than in the countryside, suffered worse than most monasteries in this demolition.
Internal trade during the middle ages was normally carried on only in the market-places of towns. Kings attempted to restrict trade to such places where it could be supervised by their reeves. Peasants would come to sell their produce and buy what few commodities they could not provide for themselves. In the markets traders would attempt to sell them ready-made goods. Producers like potters bringing their wares into the local towns on market days must always have found customers and blacksmiths too must have been kept busy repairing tools or even, on rare occasions, selling the careful peasants new ones. Perhaps, in the course of time, ordinary people bought some clothes readymade together with leather goods like footwear, hats and working-gloves. Luxuries like salt and dried fish would have been an occasional purchase perhaps by the richer peasants.
Roads were notoriously poor during the Middle Ages. Even the high roads, the routes, for example, that led to pilgrimage centres like Compostella in Spain or to Rome itself, were almost impassable in a wet winter. During the winter season, indeed, heavy traffic was brought to a standstill all over Europe. It was then that the rivers came into their own. Minor streams were flush with water and could be used for moving heavy loads on shallow-draught vessels or rafts. The River Nar, at Castle Acre, used for bringing up loads of building stone for the building of the castle and the priory and for carrying processed cereal products from the priory down to King's Lynn, is only 0.45m deep during the summer but, during the medieval winter, with the aid of flash locks, one of which was discovered in an excavation of the monastic drain (also used for transport), the river was apparently perfectly adequate for the carriage of considerable cargoes. In practice the rivers were the 'winterways' while the roads performed as 'summerways'.
Overseas trade for the greater part of the Middle Ages was in the hands of particular merchants. During the eleventh century, the Swedish routes dominated northern Europe. Their merchants expanded the earlier North Sea traffic in fish, wine, beer, salt and metals and extended it to the Atlantic. They were probably the first to supply English wool to the Flemish industry when it began to outrun the supply from France. As time went on more English wool was taken by the Flemings to their weaving towns and subsequently sold as finished cloth throughout Europe. Second in importance to wool was dried fish whose main source was the Baltic Sea.
It was the Flemings, in fact, who later inherited the western Swedish routes while the Germans began to dominate the Baltic area. They developed a vessel known as the cog, an example of which was excavated in the River Weser in 1962 in a more or less complete state. Built of oaken planks, with a square stern and square sail, the Bremen cog is not a thing of beauty, but she carried 80 tons of cargo. Hundreds of these sturdy vessels, some carrying up to 250 tons, plied the northern seas in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The excavated example can be seen in the Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum, Bremerhaven, in Germany.
The Hanse, a German-inspired conglomerate of merchants, had taken over the northern European trade-routes by the thirteenth century. Danzig was the eastern terminus of their main trading artery that stretched as far west as London where the Hanseatic steelyard (trading centre) was on the site now occupied by Cannon Street Station and the German merchants trading there became important figures in the 'City'. However, the Black Death put a stop to market growth by population increase. After 1380 the Hanse was on the defensive and the Dutch took away part of the German trade and the English began to weave more of their own wool although it was still finished off in the Low Country.
Medieval pottery is a frequent archaeological fieldwalking find for pottery-making became a common industry in the countryside where clay, water and a ready supply of fuel were available. The potters sold their pottery in markets within a two-hour or thereabouts journey from their kilns so the distribution range of most wares is no more than a sixteen-kilometre overland radius. The only medieval pots that travelled further overland were the glazed jugs that every medieval housewife loved to have on her table. Their distribution range can be up to forty-eight kilometres.
But, by water, pottery, like other goods, could travel much greater distances. Products of the Minety kilns in north Wiltshire turn up in medieval excavations in Ireland, undoubtedly carried there on the River Avon as far as the port of Bristol and by sea for the remainder of the journey along the well-established waterway route of the Bristol Channel.
The pottery of the British medieval period is best regarded as a facet of the European pottery scene in which kitchen or coarse wares were produced alongside better-class pottery. It was probably in imitation of pottery from the eastern Mediterranean that potters in Hamburg and Stamford began to put glaze on their traditional ranges of pottery during the tenth century. This glaze is usually attributed to the use of lead. At about the same time slipped ware was being produced at Pingsdorf in Germany. Pots could also be decorated with applied pellets or strips of clay. This fashion spread to Rouen and to England by the twelfth century and, when a clear lead glaze was developed, these wares, which were usually jugs, were given a coating. Jugs in a white body were painted with slip colours placed inside crudely-drawn black-outlined birds, coat-of-arms and leaves. Under a clear glaze these jugs with parrot-beak lips looked very attractive and those made at Saintonge (Bordeaux) in western France found a ready market alongside the Bordeaux wine in England. English potters began to use coloured clay bodies and to apply faces, sprigs and figures to their products to compete with the numbers of continental jugs that were coming into the country as a concomitant of the wine trades from both Bordeaux and the Rhineland.
Most tableware in England and on the Continent was made in wood or metal so that the majority of the pottery found in excavations apart from jugs is kitchenware. Pitchers, cooking-pots, bowls, skillets, pipkins, storage-jars, tripod-jugs and long 'fish-dishes' are amongst the commonest forms. Splashes of glaze appear on some of these vessels, perhaps an accidental occurrence, for it is rare for them to be fully glazed.
Potters also produced roof-tiles and floor-tiles to order. The floor-tile was often decorated with inlaid (encaustic) patterns produced with white slip or sometimes printed with a surface pattern. In Wiltshire the Naish Hill potteries near Lacock supplied all the small local monasteries with such tiles. As well as within monasteries both sorts of tiles are common finds in castles and excavations on similarly grand establishments all over England but they are seldom found in villages.
During the late-medieval and early post-medieval periods, medieval pottery forms continued in use but now were glazed internally rather than externally and the glaze is used for kitchenware and storage containers. Imported pottery from the Rhineland is in a new stoneware fabric usually covered with salt glaze. It is still mainly in the form of jugs, very often in the individual drinking-jug sizes that Falstaff was so fond of calling for when he wanted drink. These and the larger Bellarmine face-jugs from the Low Countries were later produced in England.
Chronological pegs apart from pottery for the post-medieval contexts in excavation are stamped wine-bottles and clay tobacco pipes, both dateable to a limited extent. Neither show up in excavations until after c1620. In later times the most one can expect are Woolworths A and B ware and aluminium lager-cans!
That just about wraps up this scamper through the millenia. After all, when, after 1780, land and agriculture are replaced by mass-employment industry as the basis of the economy, the archaeology with which we are familiar is no longer important. Its place is taken by a study known as Industrial Archaeology that is really practical Economic History. So, as 1066 and All That has it, our study comes to a .
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