village, medieval

In the Middle Ages, a typical English village would consist of a few dozen people living in a cluster of huts around a village green. The parish church would usually be the only stone building, as the medieval church was the centre of the community's social, farming, and religious life. The whole community would be engaged in agriculture; in medieval agriculture the most common form of farming was the open-field system, in which crops would be rotated over two or three fields. Under the feudal system, the villeins (serfs) would hold their land from the lord of the manor.

A medieval village had a subsistence economy – everything needed had to be produced within the village, with the exception, perhaps, of the goods supplied by an occasional passing tinker. If the harvest failed or was destroyed, there would be famine. Medieval English sources such as Langland's Piers Plowman (1367–86) and Pierce the Plowman's (c. 1394) give an impression of the hardship of peasant life, which contributed to the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. However, sources such as the Luttrell Psalter (1340; British Museum) also show that peasant life had its lighter moments. Pierce the Plowman's Crede and the Paston Letters (1422–1509) also give an indication of the life and place in rural society of medieval women.