Chapter 6 - The Village (1)

Summary

Now that we are in a position to deal with ordinary life in greater detail, there can be little doubt as to the class with which we must begin. In the England of our period, at least 90 per cent, of the population were villagers; and the main features differentiating life in those days from life in ours were the ordinary differences between urban and rural civilization. Moreover, it is precisely these village communities to which modern reactionaries look back most fondly, and, on the whole, with most justice; since it must be the concern of all men that we should not lose anything that was of permanent value in that simple and patriarchal state of society. It would be well to take the evidence here mainly from about 1280 to 1380, as the century in which the manorial system is fully developed and for which trustworthy written business documents are abundant to check the literary evidence.

The general population at that time was probably about three and a half to four or four and a half millions, that is little more than one-tenth of what we have to-day. The villages were very small; the average for Western Europe would run from two hundred to 400 or 450 souls: that is, from forty to eighty adult males. Let us travel from Cambridge to Trumpington one day in mid-August.