What was village life like in medieval Europe?

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Boarstall Manor, BuckinghamshireIn 1440, Edmund Rede, lord of this estate, had a map made showing his ancestor receiving the title from King Edward I (bottom). Note the manor house, church, and peasants’ cottages along the central road. In the common fields, divided by hedges, peasants cultivated on a three-year rotation cycle: winter wheat, spring oats, a year fallow. We don’t know whether peasants were allowed to hunt the deer shown in the forest. (Buckinghamshire Record Office, Aylesbury)

TTHE VAST MAJORITY OF PEOPLE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE were peasants who lived in small villages and rarely traveled very far, and the aristocratic monks and clerics who wrote the records that serve as historical sources did not spend much time on the peasantry. Today’s scholars are far more interested than were their medieval predecessors in the lives of ordinary people, however, and are using archaeological, artistic, and material sources to fill in details that are rarely mentioned in written documents.