The medieval labourer

In the last instalment of this chronicle of Langham we saw how the Black Death, which struck Norfolk in 1349, caused a population crash that precipitated the end of the feudal system and the eventual emancipation of the serfs.

From Apostolides et al., 2008, English agricultural output and labour productivity, 1250-1850: some preliminary estimates (pdf)

Despite the reduced demand for food, labour was scarce. Labourers now had to be paid and they knew their value. This graph, from the same paper, reflects the steep rise in farm workers’ pay following the Black Death.

Output per labourer remained more or less steady throughout the medieval period, only increasing with the advent of technical improvements in equipment and particularly genetics.

There is variation over time between arable and pastoral outputs. Arguably, ploughing is more physically demanding than looking after animals, though of course arable work is seasonal and pastoral work less so.

By 1380 arable production had gone up and the number of farm workers had gone down, so how hard did they work?

Well, they had to do by muscle power what modern tractors do, aided of course by horses and oxen. We have no direct way of telling just how strong was the medieval labourer, but another branch of history gives us a clue.

The Hundred Years War had its origins in a dispute between England and France over the question of who should occupy the French throne. Two of its most famous battles, Crécy (1346) and Agincourt (1415) are notable for the successful English deployment of thousands of archers using longbows. The longbow has been described as the ‘medieval machine-gun’. A skilled longbowman could discharge as many as six arrows a minute, and massed ranks of archers could release the sort of deadly blizzard depicted in the Laurence Olivier film of Shakespeare’s Henry V.

In feudal England, military service formed a large part of the obligation of a vassal to his suzerain, and it was in the interests of the suzerain that his vassals were prepared for that.

Henry I passed a law absolving an archer if he killed another while practising; in 1252 Edward I ordered all Englishmen between the ages of 15 and 60 to equip themselves with a bow and banned all sports other than archery on Sundays; and in 1363 Englishmen were required by law to practise archery on Sundays and holidays. Areas for this, called ‘butts’, were set aside, often on common ground or at the edges of settlements. Where Langham’s men trained we do not know, but at Wells they are believed to have shot at a place called The Buttlands. ‘The Butts’ is is a place-name found in many parts of England, its etymology deriving from the Anglo-French verb bouter, meaning ‘to expel’; in Chaucer’s day the word ‘butts’ would have been pronounced more like ‘boots’.

The longbow originated in Wales but became especially associated with England. It is a formidable weapon, some six feet or more long, made of yew for preference, though other hardwoods have been used. No medieval longbows have survived, but specimens found in the wreck of the Mary Rose have provided military historians with information about the strength needed to draw old longbows. The draw-weight of a typical modern longbow is no more than 60 pounds-force (lb_f) or 270 Newtons. That is, the effort required to draw it roughly equates to lifting a 60-lb (27 kg) weight.

A hunting bow of 50-60 lb_f will kill all but the largest animal and is as much as most adult archers can manage with any hope of accuracy. Longbows recovered from the Mary Rose had a draw-weight of between 100 and 180 lb_f. Very few modern archers can shoot them accurately or even at all. To draw a bow of such power needs a special technique. G M Trevelyan says

The secret of that greater efficacy of which English archers had the monopoly in Europe lay in the fact that ‘the Englishman did not keep his left hand steady, and draw his bow with his right; but keeping his right at rest upon the nerve, he pressed the whole weight of his body into the horns of his bow. Hence probably arose the phrase ‘bending the bow’, and the French of ‘drawing’ one. (W. Gilpin in Remarks on Forest Scenery, 1791). This is what Hugh Latimer meant when he describes how he was early taught ‘not to draw with strength of arms as divers other nations do, but with the strength of the body.’ It was not an art easily learned. 

— English Social History, Longman’s, Green & Co., 1944

This is a still from the video below, in which researchers seek to replicate the effect of an English longbow on reconstructed medieval armour. The damage it causes strongly suggests that medieval bows were at least as difficult to draw as those from the Mary Rose, and confirms contemporary accounts of the carnage inflicted by longbows on the ranks of armoured French knights.

Given that the majority of English archers would have come from the ranks of farm workers, and given the fact that men in those days tended to be shorter than their modern equivalents, the medieval labourer, who from early boyhood would have been subjected to a heavy workload, must have been a very strong man indeed.