Where Roger’s family slept on bags of flock, she made do with a few handfuls of straw on the mud floor; cider and beer were an unknown luxury in her house and, as against Roger’s well-organized messuage and commodious barn where he stored fodder for his cattle, she had only a tumbledown shed where her pigs jostled for standing room. But she never complained about her lot and comforted herself with the thought of her good luck compared to those unfortunates at Preston Stautney who often had not got a single pig or even a chicken to their name. Besides, her relationship to Roger gave her a standing among the élite of the village: a select group which included the families of such worthies as the manorial clerk, the miller and the reeve.
Though Roger himself made a point of keeping the domestic animals out of the house this was by no means an invariable rule. In some of the houses goats, sheep and sometimes even cows lived jumbled up with the family, spreading their fleas amid the soiled straw and adding their smells to the rich compound which the medieval household could generate even without such extra help. Washing was a luxury and probably weakening to the constitution – to be indulged in with caution and only at long intervals. Bathing was unheard of. Needless to say, in such conditions, almost everyone had some sort of skin disease. Eye infections were also common and the lack of green vegetables led to a certain amount of scurvy. But in spite of the risks which the lack of hygiene involved for the new born baby or the nursing mother, the average villager was still reasonably healthy: his complaints more irritating than dangerous. The older inhabitants liked sometimes to recount tales which they had heard from their fathers about fearful pestilences which carried away great numbers of the villagers but the young were openly bored by this tedious romanticizing.
To the casual visitor from the present days the first impression of Blakwater might well have been that of a little village of some green upland in Swaziland or Zululand. The stone church with its round Saxon tower and Norman nave would have struck an unfamiliar note but the mud and wattle cottages with roof of reeds or hide and smoke seeping from every pore were superficially very like those to be found today in many of the less developed countries. The manor itself, with its large timber hall, where the court was held, its thatched wall of earth, and the big room above the gate reserved for the visits of the lord or his representative, was by far the most conspicuous group of buildings in the village. Within the wall it had a dovecot, a large fish pond and a well-stocked orchard, thatched hay-ricks, barns, stables and hen-houses: all the appurtenances, in fact, of a well run farm. The water mill lay just outside the walls; stoutly built on a frame of timber and sheltering the brand-new mill-stone from Northern France which was the miller’s pride. All the land around was part of the lord’s demesne.
The church was the other side of the manor with the parson’s house beside it. Then came a group of houses belonging to the richer villeins, Roger’s prominent among them, another row of houses similar in size but with rather less in the way of garden and out-buildings, where the less important villeins lived and finally the one-room huts of the cottars. For the most part the freeholders also had their houses in this part of the village. These paid rent to the lord instead of doing work for him and felt themselves to be far superior to their fellow villagers who were still bound to work on the demesne an average of three days a week.
But as Blakwater was richer than Preston Stautney, so the villeins of Blakwater were richer than the free tenants with the solitary exception of the miller who somehow contrived to unite independence with affluence. Their poverty was a source of constant chagrin to the freeholders, but, since the Bishop clearly intended that they should do no better while he remained their lord, they saw little hope of remedying the position.
Finally, on the fringe of the village, a ramshackle hovel provided shelter of a sort for poor Mad Meg; deformed from birth, shunned by her contemporaries and now grown crazed in squalid loneliness. Some said that she was a witch and the children used to enjoy chanting rude slogans outside her hut but nobody seriously believed that she could make successful mischief.
