Medieval Rise and Grind Sample

Dr.

Z came into the studio recently and recorded the third part of our series on medieval urbanization, and it was a lot of fun.

We ended up talking for about two hours, which I think is our longest chat yet, and we covered pretty much everything.

Here's a small sample: Dr.

Z, what do you have for us today?

All right, today we are finishing our little series on urbanization in the early 12th century.

And we're going to talk about daily life inside a town.

And I'm not going to follow like a, like pick a fake person and try and follow it through because I think we'd miss too much detail of what's going on.

But if towns had a vibe that was distinct.

Infection and infestation, I would imagine, would be that vibe.

I'm not going to say that's not there, but that wasn't the one I was going to pick.

It's hustle culture.

Like people in towns are hustling all the time.

As we drive towards this cash economy and a rent economy, there is now a structural incentive to always be making cash.

Either because you're on the lower end of this and just trying to survive, because again, money is just going to be going out of your pockets all the time to pay for your living.

Like the five layers of people who are all paying rent to

the bishop.

And it seems like there's a practice of renting even small things.

Like you're renting your room, you're renting the stall at a market if you're selling at a market.

And there's also just a lot more buying of goods continually rather than like making stuff in your own home that was happening out in rural areas.

Right.

So money's going out the door constantly.

So you've got to be constantly making money.

Yeah.

Like the last couple episodes, you've made it sound pretty great to live in cities.

You get more rights and everything.

But it does sound like you own nothing and everybody is picking your pocket.

In this context, if you're a peasant out in an agricultural area, that's also still true.

But there is something faster-paced about the cash economy that's happening in towns.

And because they have these rights to fee farms, which is you pay your taxes just as a chunk of money at certain times of year, you can make that any way you want.

It's not in the number of turnips that are going out the door.

Okay, so that's where the hustle culture comes in.

That's part of it, yeah.

They just go full rise and grind on this stuff.

Because you can, and there's a, there's, you're incentivized to.

People who come into the towns are often looking for some sort of opportunity to come up in the world or establish themselves in a way that they weren't able to where they're coming from.

Okay.

I'm just going to jump right into this then.

If you have that many people going full rise and grind and operating in like the city's kind of like nightmare medieval TikTok line.

No one's saying nightmare.

It's just that your

town, your daily life centers on making money.

And that is ordering both the town activity and your daily activity.

But okay.

So if you're trying to maximize profit and everybody in the town is essentially doing the same thing and your productivity is going to be bunches of goods coming in and getting transformed in some way through your labor into something else or

you buying something and selling it on to somebody else.

How bad was inflation then?

Because if everybody is trying to scrape profit off of that, the prices are going to go up through the roof.

Profit creates inflation.

Yeah, there was some of that, but it stays low, partly because population stays low, and partly because part of the reason we know all of this detail is through regulations.

Okay.

They show up in laws strictly regulating the price and quality of things.

And then there's an additional layer that comes online from the guilds themselves that also regulate these things.

So, medieval life kind of was a planned economy?

I would not say that.

Just that there are regulations.

You're not allowed to just rip people off by doubling the price of your goods in a way that it's completely different from a similar good being sold elsewhere.

How is Kroger supposed to stay in business if they are not allowed to do that?

But this is what's, this is, that is part of the controls there.

And they are strict controls.

People go to jail.

when they try to do that.

And that's how we know what's happening.

Another thing that happens is if goods are, and I'm going to get into this in a very nitty-gritty way in the fall when we talk about economic structures.

Is it going to leave me wanting us to go back to a medieval economy?

Because so far you're selling it pretty good where

you're not allowed to price gouge.

No, it's a,

you know,

everything has its benefits and its drawbacks.

This was neither a nightmare world nor was it some, you know, utopia where no one was getting ripped off.

However, you can see that these pressures were there and they were, they would deal with it through regulation, basically.

Your officials would put a stop to it if it was getting out of control.

And there was a couple layers of that.

You'd have the formal government making regulations, and then you'd have an additional layer as we move forward with a guild set of regulations.

And it's because you could see it would get out of control really fast.

And the way these things worked is that these towns were in low-key competition with other towns because your town did well if your market did well.

If you've got a bunch of scam artists in your town town making shitty products that are too expensive, people aren't going to go to your market.

They're going to move down the road to a better market.

But given the nature of how these cities worked, though, these towns worked, it's not like you could just pick up and move because you need to actually be able to get somewhere to stay within the town, right?

So can the invisible hand actually function there where it's like, oh, well, we've got a really corrupt as hell market here, but that just means that everybody's going to move to Birmingham.

I'm not talking about the people who are inhabitants of the town moving.

I'm talking about the people who would come into the market, buy, and then leave.

But you're going to come into the market that's close to you, right?

Ideally, but if you make it so that you're always getting ripped off, you'll move on.

Because that's everyone else's livelihood, too.

And there were enough towns popping up that people would eventually have another option, and it would be worth it for them to move on.

And especially at the 12th century, where a lot of these towns were newish or growing and people were seeing the benefits of these markets, there's kind of a hot competition for who's going to be the established market area in a given place.

You want to be drawing people to you.

This is just to say there's a counter pressure to being ridiculous with your sales and with the quality of your goods.

And it is sort of this competitive pressure between other towns and between other craftspeople.

You'll lose your business.

And remember how we talked about the lords did have control over these towns.

They would own towns.

They'd be drawing income from these towns.

They're not about to let the people living in these towns let their market fail because they're being too greedy or ridiculous.

Right.

So they regulate it.

Okay.

And is it the shire reeves who regulate it?

Yes.

There is a series of administrators that live in each town.

There's a different setup in a lot of towns.

And it gets a little confusing because often towns in different regions are using very different words for what looks like the same activity.

But bailiffs, sheriffs, reeves, and coroners were all types of administrators that were present.

Coroners, as if

like body examiner, that type.

Fascinatingly, this is where the term for that, like the modern function, we only use coroner for someone who's doing a death investigation.

Yeah.

This does come from that, but that was not their only job, though it was weirdly their job.

So coroner,

we're jumping ahead, but I'll give it to you.

Coroner, like corona of the crown.

So a coroner is someone who's tasked with taking care of the

crown's interest in a town.

Oh, that's fascinating.

And so if there was a suspicious death, it was their job to figure out whether or not there was some sort of law that had been broken or if someone needed to be processed through the crown's law, the king's peace.

But they were also...

So CSI was also just just like...

Mostly a tax administration.

Yeah, making sure that you're not price gouging your neighbors.

Yes.

That's awesome.

Yeah.

Or that even you think of it as the king's man in a town.

So he's also sort of like

watching the activities of the local lords or the church that was involved too to make sure that like

the, you know, things weren't happening that were against the king's interest or the king's law.

Even if the king didn't directly own a town, because the king directly, they are royal towns where the king just owns it.

A lot of these towns are not like that, so they had a coroner to keep an eye out for the king's interest in the town.

That's fascinating.

Okay, but I completely derailed you.

You wanted to talk about rise and grind culture and how Unfirth was an Uber driver in addition to being a cobbler.

That's essentially what's happening.

So just think about towns as

a rise and grind hustle thing.

And not to make this a nightmare, this could be both exciting and led to prosperity for a lot of people as well as being stressful and ruinous for others.

The entire spectrum is here.

But just know that this drive towards a cash economy and as crafts get specialized, there's a new economy that comes up to serve the craftspeople in terms of services.

So there's just a lot of opportunity to go in and make cash however you can and either just take care of yourself or rise up in the world.

Okay.

Do you want to get into this?

Yeah.

So let's talk about what happens when you just wake up in the morning in a town.

You were going to be living in one of these houses that are probably on a burgal

plot.

These houses were broken up into a bunch of different rooms with a bunch of different purposes.

The bottom, and we talked about this before, the bottom is usually workshop space or selling space.

So it's a work area.

And that bottom area often wasn't even fully like closed.

It was often kind of open to the street in various ways, especially depending on the kind of workshop that it was.

If you're working with metal, say,

that thing is paved with stone and just opens up.

So it's basically like a house on big pillars or stills.

Yeah, because you got your forge going.

And these things were dangerous.

They caught on fire a lot, a lot.

Like just so much.

Was there a livestock kind of situation?

Like, did you have like horse merchants where the

ground floor was where the the stables were, that kind of thing?

No,

in general, one thing to picture in your mind, okay, know that like the drive of the town was like a hustle culture thing, but the feel of the town, if I were to drop you into this era in a town, in the most urban, urban area, I could drop you into London, it would still feel like you were camping.

Like these, these buildings are way more open than you expect.

way more rustic than you expect.

And honestly, there's way less population than you expect, right?

Like even the biggest town at this time was maybe 15,000 people in London, and the rest were way less than that.

So it's smaller than like your average summer camp

today, and it would feel like camping to you.

Okay, can you fix this in my head then?

Because I, okay, I've been in Portland most of my life.

Our neighbors on all sides of us, I think the

furthest distance is maybe 12 feet between our buildings.

I'm used to really close living, and I also think of Portland as a small town.

So, fix my image of, because when I imagine something like medieval London,

I imagine like this level of density.

The density in terms of the buildings isn't far off.

So, the buildings were built very close together, especially at the center of town.

Everything crouched around these markets.

But these burgo plots are really long.

So it's crowded towards those fronts.

And that's part of where you would wake up is in the towards the front of these houses, most likely, with that workshop space that would open out into the street, the front street.

And then up above, you'd have rooms.

And the houses are stacked pretty close together at that point.

But then they go back and back and back.

And at a certain point, the house stops and you have these longer yard areas.

So it's like New Orleans.

New Orleans, I think, has more courtyards.

Right, but they have, like, the front is,

the front is really tight, and then

they just kind of close it off.

And then the back is where the garden is, and it just goes back for miles.

I mean, honestly, it's a lot of like a lot of British areas of day.

They still have this.

You have these really long, narrow yards in the back.

And yet, if you walk down the street, it's just house after house after house.

That still exists.

But because you have that long back area,

people were keeping light livestock back there.

So you might have

some pigs.

Pigs were kind of dangerous, but they were super dangerous, actually.

But

50 to 60 feral hogs.

Yeah.

But pigs were a good way to like, like you feed them your kitchen waste.

That kind of kept things cleaner in the sense that they would eat stuff, but then they produced their own mess.

There were people keeping pigs, though.

We know that.

Geese would have been handy.

You can eat them.

Their feathers are useful.

They breed as pigs.

They're less likely to actually actually eat your toddler, though, which is not something we could say for pigs.

Some people were clearly keeping maybe a couple sheep.

Horses were more common.

There is a

record of a guy dying.

This is later.

But he dies because he was trying to break up a fight between two stallions and a mare in his kitchen.

So they had come in from that yard and gotten into his kitchen.

He tries to, he gets in between this because

maybe he just woken up and he wasn't thinking about it.

I don't know.

Coffee doesn't exist yet here, so we know that he didn't have that.

And he dies predictably.

So that, so this is what I'm saying: is like it's more rural than you think because there are animals around constantly.

You have.

How are you going to explain that to your ancestors?

Where you just, you, you, uh, you get into the afterlife, and they're all like, yeah, I died at Hastings.

Oh, yeah, I died at Stamford Bridge.

And then you're like, I got stamped to death by Glitter Hoof.

In my kitchen.

In my kitchen.

I don't think that your ancestors would be impressed, but

things happen.

All right.

As I said before, this goes on for another about an hour and 45 minutes.

We cover a lot of material.

We talk about what life is like within these towns and how the economic structure works, what your day would look like, how you get food, how you eat, how the markets work, the whole shebang.

And if you'd like to hear that and all the other members' episodes, you can get instant access by signing up for membership at thebritishhistorypodcast.com.

Thanks for listening.