The Abbey owned the land. That was the most important thing to understand. The fields around it, the barn, the animals, even the people who worked the soil, all of it belonged to someone else. By the thirteenth century, the Abbey had been here for generations, and the peasants who worked for it were, for the most part, serfs.
They worked strips of land they rented from the Abbey. They could not move. They could not leave. They were treated as part of the property, passed from lord to lord along with the fields.
For most, this was a life of bone-tired labor. They plowed, sowed, and harvested. They kept cattle and sheep and pigs. The land was drained and worked so hard, year after year, that it needed a rest.
That’s why the fields were rotated. One year wheat, one year fallow, one year a crop that put the goodness back into the soil. But even with all this work, the peasants were at the mercy of the seasons. The medieval warm period had made life a bit easier for a few centuries.
Winters were shorter. Harvests were better. Some peasants even managed to rise above the worst of it. A man named Thomas Collins did well for himself.
He had fifteen acres, cattle, sheep, and a wife who brewed beer. For a while, life was good. But the good times did not last. The climate turned.
The rains came. The cold came. The harvests failed. And when the harvest fails, everything fails.
Thomas Collins was no longer a wealthy peasant. He was a desperate one. He could not pay his debts. He had pledged his name, his word, and his land to cover friends, and when those friends did not pay, Thomas was left to cover the cost.
He owed five shillings to a man named Walter from Oldbury. Five shillings. For a man who had owned fifteen acres, it was nothing. But stripped of his money, his crops already mortgaged to pay off other debts, Thomas could not scrape together even that.
He had no choice. He had to sell his land. But he did not own his land. The Abbey did.
And an Abbey does not negotiate. It did not need to. It simply paid what it wanted. Two pounds.
That covered the five shillings and the rest of the debts. But it left Thomas with nothing. His wife’s dowry land was the only thing that kept them alive. She had brought it into the marriage, so it was hers.
She could not be forced to sell it, and she would not. But it was not enough to feed nine mouths, and it was not enough to give Thomas back his place in the world. He spent his last years in debt, a shadow of the man he had once been. When he died in 1312, his lands passed to his wife and daughters.
But the world was still turning cold. The Great Famine came. The rains did not stop. The crops did not grow.
People starved. By the time the famine ended, the Collins sisters were gone, and all I can say is that we are not sure how. They may have moved away. They may have died.
In the records, they just disappear. The peasants were breaking. And out of that breaking came the greatest rebellion of the age, led by a man named Wat Tyler. Wat was a peasant himself, and he wanted something impossible.
He wanted the peasants to be treated as people. A preacher named John Ball stood with him, and the words of that preacher were a weapon: “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? ”
The peasants marched on London. They took the city.
They burned the Savoy Palace but took nothing from it. They said they were not thieves. They wanted a new society where everyone was equal. But then Wat Tyler went to meet the Lord Mayor at Smithfield, and there was a scuffle, and Wat Tyler was stabbed.
He died. And without him, the rebellion crumbled. The King gave a speech. He called the peasants rustics, and told them rustics they would remain.
They were meant to serve. They were meant to dig. They were meant to know their place. And on Smithfield, where Wat Tyler died, there was no memorial to the rebellion until 2015.
Six centuries without a single stone. I look at the Abbey barn and I see it is beautiful. I see the craft in it, the stone, the timber, the years. But I also see that it was built by people like Thomas Collins.
They were the ones who did the work, who paid for the prayers, who fed the monks and the nobles, and they lived and died without leaving a single mark in history. The peasants were eighty percent of the population. And they are the ones we know the least about. In the city of London, there was power of a different kind.
The guilds ran the city. They were part union, part monopoly. If you wanted to sell fish, you had to join the Fishmongers’ Guild. If you wanted to sell cloth, the Drapers.
If you wanted to deal in the most precious and expensive commodity in Europe, you joined the Grocers, who traded in spices from the East. London was surrounded by walls. You could not build more of it. So the land inside was precious, and the guilds owned most of it.
They were rich beyond measure. They could not be touched. The Grocers had a bell in their hall, the oldest working bell in the city. It was made in Flanders, and its inscription reads: “My name is Martin.
May my sound be God pleasing. 1458. ”
I rang it. It was pleasing.
The guilds were also political. If you were in a guild, you had the right to vote for the Lord Mayor. You were a freeman. You could drive your sheep across London Bridge without paying a fee.
You could walk into the King’s court and sit among nobles because you were as rich as they were. There is one family I want to tell you about. The de Cartaign family. They were mercers.
The Mercers’ Guild was the first, the most important guild in London. The de Cartaigns lived on Soper’s Lane, a street that no longer exists. It burned down in the Great Fire of 1666. They brought apprentices from Lincolnshire.
These apprentices lived in the household, worked for free, learned the trade. The de Cartaigns were wealthy, respected, and they had power over their own lives. They were so powerful that when the Great Famine was killing the peasants in the countryside, the de Cartaigns only got richer. One of them, Hugh de Cartaign, was elected Sheriff of London in 1314.
He was a witness in a murder trial in 1324. He was considered an upstanding member of the community. And he was also a thief. Hugh de Cartaign joined a gang and robbed his neighbor.
He took two hundred pounds. To put that in perspective, Thomas Collins sold his entire fifteen acres of land for two pounds. That means Hugh de Cartaign stole a hundred times what a peasant’s whole life was worth. But nothing happened to him.
He was let off. Completely. The King protected him. Hugh had done the King favors, carried messages and money across the country.
The King trusted him. And so, the man who robbed his neighbor of a fortune was allowed to walk free. A peasant who stole five pounds would have been hanged for it. Hugh de Cartaign stole two hundred and never saw a cell.
This is what the guilds were. They were the men who mattered. And the rest of the city, the bakers, the fishmongers, the people driving the swine down the streets, they were invisible. We know about the de Cartaigns because they were rich and they wrote things down and they were important enough for people to record.
We do not know anything about the bakers or the fish salesmen or the ordinary workers. We know about the men who were protected by the King. When I stand in the Grocers’ Hall, I see powerful men. I see the camels on the crest, the spices from the East, the seal of the barge, the centuries of money and power.
It is a beautiful thing. But I cannot help but think about the peasants who made it all possible, who were called rustics and told they would remain rustics, and who vanished without a trace. The peasants worked the land. The guild men worked the city.
They were both part of society, but they lived in different universes. One universe could fall into debt and lose everything, or starve when the rains came, or die in a rebellion that no one remembered until 2015. The other universe could rob a neighbor of a fortune and be forgiven because the King liked him. I want to know more about the common people.
But I cannot find them. The records are full of the rich. The records are full of the nobles. They are full of the guild men and the kings and the bishops.
But the people who made everything run, the ones who grew the food and built the barns and worked the land, they are just gone. I think about Thomas Collins, selling his land for two pounds so he could pay a debt of five shillings. I think about his daughters, disappearing into the famine. And I think about Hugh de Cartaign, carrying money for the King, robbing his neighbor, and never being punished.
In the medieval world, there were people who worked and people who earned, and they were not the same people. The ones who worked were the ones who fed everyone. The ones who earned were the ones who took what was made and handed out a few crumbs in return. The Abbey barn is still standing.
The Grocers’ Guild is still standing. But the people who built the barn and the people who sold the spices are gone now. I still wonder if the system that made them, that gave everything to the rich and nothing to the poor, is truly gone with them. I think about it every time I see a beautiful old building.
I wonder if we ever really learned the lesson.
