208Chapter 11
it was: a community made up exclusively of peasants,
which, after the family, was their chief protection
against a hostile world.
Cooperation was therefore an essential feature of
village life, though the relative wealth of individual
peasants varied immensely. At the very least, villagers
had to maintain a united front in negotiating with out-
side forces that might pose a threat to their prosper-
ity—their lord, the church, a city, or a neighboring
village whose inhabitants tried to encroach on their
lands or rights. If peasants seemed wily, grasping, and
suspicious to outsiders it was because the outsiders were
often trying to detach the peasants from their wealth.
Internally, some measure of cooperation was essen-
tial to the peasants’ daily pursuits. In villages where the
open field system was practiced, agricultural operations
from plowing to harvesting were usually undertaken in
common for efficiency’s sake. In grazing areas, the
rounding up and shearing of sheep was, and for the
most part still is, a cooperative effort involving the en-
tire population of the village. If the village possessed
common lands, their use had to be regulated to prevent
overexploitation, either by individuals or by the com-
munity as a whole. Peasants tended to be keenly aware
of the limits of their local ecology and took great care
to limit the number of animals that could be grazed on
a particular parcel or the quantity of wood, nuts, and
other products that could be harvested from woodlots.
If the commons were planted to row crops, the land
had to be allocated fairly. This was sometimes done on
a customary basis. In Spain and in many other places al-
location was often by lot.
The maintenance of what today would be called
the village’s infrastructure was also a community affair.
The construction and repair of roads, bridges, and
ditches may have been mandated by feudal obligation
and was typically discharged by teams of peasants
working in common. Villages were also capable of un-
dertaking public improvements on their own. Private
projects such as the construction or modification of a
house or the digging of a drainage ditch around the
close were usually undertaken with the help of friends
or relatives. Such help was intended to be reciprocal.
Labor exchanges were central to the peasant economy
and are in themselves an extension of communal bonds.
Peasant communities also tried to control the social
behavior of their inhabitants. The more prosperous vil-
lagers often sat on manorial courts that judged minor
disputes within the village. Where the influence of the
lord was weak, such matters might be dealt with by a
council of village elders. The selection of village lead-
ers, including those who supervised communal labor
and the allocation of common lands, remains some-
thing of a mystery. Some may have been elected. In
most places they seem to have been chosen through an
informal process of consensus building that avoided the
confrontation of a vote.
Criminals were apprehended by what the English
called a hue and cry, in which every able-bodied man
was supposed to give chase if a crime were committed.
This could be dangerous and was uncommon. Most vil-
lages were relatively peaceful, in part because everyone
knew everyone else’s business. Privacy, as in the towns,
was unknown and probably would have been impossi-
ble to achieve. If an individual’s behavior ran counter to
prevailing local standards, he or she would be subjected
to ridicule and abuse that in extreme cases might make
life insupportable. In general, public opinion was a
more powerful instrument of social control than courts
or the bailiff.The Peasant Family
The structure of medieval family life varied immensely
according to location, social class, and individual pref-
erence. It also varied over time as individual households
adjusted to economic change and to the life cycles of
their members. As a general rule, wealthier households
were larger than those of the poor.
In northern Europe, the nuclear family predomi-
nated, at least among peasants. A married couple and
their children lived together, rarely sharing their space
with other relatives. When children married, they left
the home and established a household of their own.
Old people tried to maintain their independence as
long as they could. The wasting diseases of old age
were not prolonged as they are today by the miracles of
modern medicine. If someone grew feeble or senile,
they sometimes moved in with one of their grown chil-
dren. That the elderly often preferred to board with an-
other villager is a tribute to the relative weakness of
kinship ties. Such an arrangement usually involved the
transfer of land or other payments.
The nuclear family was also the most common
form of household organization in Mediterranean Eu-
rope, but extended families in which adult siblings and
grandparents lived under the same roof were not un-
usual. Many others lived as nuclear units in close prox-
imity to their relatives and acted in common with them
when necessary. Such behavior indicates that kinship
obligations were more broadly defined than they were