The person who spent money like water series#

It was said that a peasant could expect to be fully bathed just twice in their life once, when they were born and when they had died! Face and hand washing was more common but knowledge of hygiene was non-existent. A rich person might have a bath just several times a year but to make life easier, several people might use the water before it was got rid of! Peasant hygieneīathing was a rarity even for the rich. Water in a town would come out of conduit which was similar to a modern day fountain.

The person who spent money like water series#

Water could be brought into a town using a series of ditches lead pipes could also be used. Villages that had access to a well could simply wind up their water from the well itself. It was usually the job of a wife to collect water first thing in the morning. A local river, stream or well provided a village with water but this water source was also used as a way of getting rid of your waste at the start of the day. Unfortunately, the water usually came from the same source. Water had a number of purposes for peasants – cooking, washing etc. Your toilet would have been a bucket which would have been emptied into the nearest river at the start of the day. Beds were simply straw stuffed mattresses and these would have attracted lice, fleas and all types of bugs. People would have been covered with dirt, fleas and lice. The houses would have had none of the things we accept as normal today – no running water, no toilets, no baths and washing basins. increasing the unhygienic nature of the house. They would have also brought in fleas and flies etc. However, they must have made the house even more dirty than it usually would have been as none of these animals would have been house-trained. If they were inside your house, none of these would happen and they were safe. If left outside at night they could also have been stolen or simply have wandered off. There is a very large one in Maidstone, Kent, which now has a collection of carriages in it. Some of these barns can still be seen today. The church collected so much produce from this tax, that it had to be stored in huge tithe barns. Either way, tithes were a deeply unpopular tax. A peasant could pay in cash or in kind – seeds, equipment etc. This may not seem a lot but it could make or break a peasant’s family. A tithe was 10% of the value of what he had farmed.

This was a tax on all of the farm produce he had produced in that year. He had to pay rent for his land to his lord he had to pay a tax to the church called a tithe. The one thing the peasant had to do in Medieval England was to pay out money in taxes or rent. This means that they are bound by law and custom to plough the field of their masters, harvest the corn, gather it into barns, and thresh and winnow the grain they must also mow and carry home the hay, cut and collect wood, and perform all manner of tasks of this kind.’ ‘It is the custom in England, as with other countries, for the nobility to have great power over the common people, who are serfs. The position of the peasant was made clear by Jean Froissart when he wrote: Because they had sworn an oath to their lord, it was taken for granted that they had sworn a similar oath to the duke, earl or baron who owned that lord’s property. The peasants were at the bottom of the Feudal System and had to obey their local lord to whom they had sworn an oath of obedience on the Bible.