What Was Actually In a Peasant’s House
When a medieval tenant died or fled the manor, the lord’s officials drew up a detailed list of what was in the house. Certain items, the “principalia,” belonged to the holding and had to pass on to the next tenant — not unlike a landlord’s inventory for a furnished flat today. For those who want to know what a medieval peasant household contained, those lists are a gold mine.
The smallest items at the bottom of the list might be a single brass pot worth sixpence, two chests (one without a lock, the other missing its base), and a trestle table. A slightly better-off half-virgater could expect a stand, a cupboard, a cart-horse with saddle and collar, and the whole set of ploughing tools. The genuinely comfortable virgater’s house had a towel, a silver spoon, a goblet, a blanket and two pairs of sheets, a mattress, and for luxury a kiln or oven of his own.
The silver spoon deserves a mention, because it wasn’t just there to look nice. In a world without banks, small valuables such as a silver spoon or a coin tucked into a locked chest served as a sort of portable savings, the medieval equivalent of a bit of money under the mattress. Houses were easy to break into, so anything precious stayed locked away rather than on display.
Everything else was refreshingly dull: coarse unglazed pottery for cooking, the occasional prized jug that might have come a hundred miles from a good regional pottery, baskets, wooden bowls, a broom that left a visible groove in the swept clay floor. Poverty and only slightly more modest comfort went hand in hand in the same village, sometimes in adjacent houses.
Step into 14th-century England—start reading The Draychester Chronicles today.