Guest Author - Alessandra Diridoni Grigsby

Sheltering

From earliest times, man has sheltered. He protected himself against the elements in caves, dugouts, under dense forest canopies, and even under animal hides. The migratory people who roamed the earth in the early days of the Dark Ages often traveled in very small groups, probably consisting of family members or refugees from advancing invaders. They would build tiny gatherings of small tents and earthen structures with roofs of thatch. In the extreme northern reaches of Europe, such shelter was necessary to ensure survival. In the more temperate areas of southern Europe, bordering the Mediterranean, sheltering was useful politically and socially. Still, in those early days of the Dark Ages, the manner of construction was crude and impermanent. A tent could be deconstructed quickly, and a hut could be abandoned without any remorse if the need to flee was critical.

Community

When we think of a village today, we might picture a quaint seaside vignette, complete with little row houses, flowering gardens, cats in the window, and revitalized storefronts with fancy woodwork, painted gaily to invite the tourist. Or, perhaps, we might envision a quiet and bucolic country setting, with its wooden barns and farm houses, all circling a small town with tree-lined streets, white-washed shops and a town center where historic sculptures remind of historic citizenry.

The villages and hamlets of the early Renaissance, however, bore little resemblance to either of those scenes, or even to what we might find at a Renaissance Faire (even though great care be taken to faithfully recreate the shire at today’s events, there simply is not enough space to do so with complete accuracy). The earliest medieval communities more closely resembled large modern farms and ranches in the heartland of the United States – large open spaces of grazing land, arable land.

End of the Migrations

With the great migrations and invasions at an end, relatively speaking, there followed a more favorable time during which people could reestablish roots and form communities of more than just a single or slightly extended family. The quiet times spawned small hamlets and villages. These were usually a cluster of homes and utilitarian out buildings surrounding which was situated what was known as open field agriculture. The “open fields” were long strips of land, usually an acre in overall size, belonging to various families in the village. Sometimes they were marked as to ownership and sometimes not. Families knew which strips of land were theirs.

Usually, the land belonged to those connected as kin in some way and, by the 11th century, inheritance of such land was a serious and detailed process, as complex as it is today. Extended family units were useful in cooperative labor efforts, in defense, and in sharing and alternating use of crop land. Croppers had learned the necessity and proper facilitation of fallow (allowing land to rest between plantings), but they would not learn how to grow food for their livestock for another two hundred years, so wintering the animals remained a struggle for quite some time.

Houses in the early 11th century were made largely of wood with thatched roofs, where wood was plentiful. When wood was in short supply, clay blocks were made from the earth, or stone was collected, to build the houses. From earliest times, houses could be quite large, as much as 60 feet in length, usually rectangular, in a style known as the “long house”. Sometimes, the houses were smaller, round enclosures. Neither was very secure, either from the elements or from thieves, both of whom could fairly easily penetrate thatch and destroy, or steal, whatever the contents of the home. Further, life in the long house must not have been terribly pleasant as the huge enclosure served as home to many families, barn to many animals, and hearth to many cooking fires. At least, however, there was not the added unpleasantness of a toilet facility in the long house. The privy in those days consisted of a long trench dug outside, complete with a drainage ditch that ran away from the house, or the privacy of bushes some distance from the house entrance. In either case, however, these early facilities did not make for particularly sanitary disposal of waste or great and luxurious creature comfort.

Water was provided from nearby streams, if fortune placed the village in such proximity, or from wells dug somewhere in the vicinity of the village hub. Water, as food, was a precious commodity and tended to encourage the cooperation of all the villagers. Everyone left the home each morning to tend the fields, or raise barns, or dig a new well, since everyone would share in the eventual bounty they would bring at harvest.

Eventually, a spirit of cooperation began to be part of everyday life. Each person helped the next, who helped the next, the result of which was that everyone enjoyed the larger harvests, the bigger, more nutritious meals, the better sale of crops at the markets, the first opportunity at free enterprise and the promise of wealth if accounts and resources were well managed. The beginnings of craft guilds (small groups of craftspeople who made tools and other implements, who wove fabric, etc.) sprouted in the little villages and hamlets even as the creativity and promise of the Renaissance was but a few short decades in the future.