234 EVERYDAY LIFE
With this we may compare the contents of a hall as given in an
early fifteenth-century book of vocabularies. They are: a board,
trestle, banquere (a piece of tapestry to throw over a bench), a
dorser (hanging), table dormant (standing table, as opposed to
the easily movable trestle-table), basin, laver, fire, hearth, brand,
logs, andirons, long settle, chairs, benches, tongs, stools,
bellows, "serene".1 Few peasants had such costly things as
tapestries or hangings or even chairs, and a "dormant" table
would have been a great nuisance in the restricted floor space of
a medieval cottage; but otherwise the list is a fair indication of
the kind of furniture and fixtures to be found in the ordinary
village home.
Thorold Rogers, in his well-known book Six Centuries of
Work and Wages, filled many pages in detailing "evidence as to
the condition of the English peasantry, in order, if possible,
once for all to show how untenable the opinion is which doubts
that, as far as the mere means of life were concerned, the English-
man of the middle ages lived in ordinary times in coarse plenty ".2
Yet, despite his efforts, obstinate doubts still assail us. We can-
not easily forget Chaucer's poor widow in the Nun's Priesfs Tale,
who lived in her little two-roomed house on a diet of "milk and
brown bread, singed bacon, with sometimes an egg or two";
or the still more poignant pictures drawn by Langland of the
peasants of his day. No chickens, geese, pork or bacon come
their way, but two green (new) cheeses, curds and cream, and a
cake of oats. This, together with bread of pease or beans for their
children, is all the food they can look forward to until harvest
comes.3 Langland sees the poor, "charged with children and
chief lord's rent", spending their small wages in milk and meal
to make porridge "to glut the maws" of their children that cry
after food. "Also in winter they suffer much hunger and woe.
.. .It would be a charity to help them: bread and penny-ale are
a luxury; cold flesh and cold fish is to them like baked venison;
on Fridays and fasting-days, a farthing's worth of mussels or so
many cockles were a feast for such folk." Such pictures as these,
1 A Volume of Vocabularies, ed. T. Wright, 197. a Op. cit. 63.
8 Op. cit. C. DC, 304. Cf. also 331. Cf. Gower's Mir our, 11. 26, 437 ff.,
where labourers of old ate beans or coarser corn washed down by water. Milk
and cheese were a feast to them, and they rarely ate other dainties.
4 Op. cit. C. x, 71.