FAMILY LIFE 237
the lack of any widespread knowledge of methods of re-fertilising
the soil. Further, he notes that agricultural instruments were
still comparatively undeveloped, and difficulties of communica-
tion encouraged attempts to grow things in climates and soils
quite unsuited for them.1 Add to this the hazards attendant on
weather, and it is not difficult to realise that the peasant was
frequently near to starvation,2 and, perforce, eked out a difficult
existence as best he could, especially through the long winter
months.
With so much else in medieval times the details of married
life escape us. The fortunate survival of The Paston Letters and
The Stonor Letters, or the indiscreet memoirs of a Pepys, allow
us to glean innumerable facts concerning the relations between
husbands, wives and children in the fifteenth and the seventeenth
centuries. No such aid is forthcoming for the historian of
thirteenth- or fourteenth-century peasant life. The earliest
manuals of behaviour, and rules for the upbringing of children
do not date before the fifteenth century; and, even if they did,
would be of little help, for they are concerned with the behaviour
of people and of children of considerably higher status than the
peasant. Documents, again, will not help us, for they are almost
invariably concerned only with the peasant's relation to his lord.
His personal concerns are of little interest to the lord, save
where, as in his choice of a wife, they are liable to aifect the
lord's interests. But his home life, and his daily routine therein
matter nothing to the lord, and as a result these figure nowhere
in any records which have come down to us. Our ignorance of
these conditions remains profound.
The nearest we can now hope to get to such conditions, per-
haps, is when we have a few minutes inside the dwelling of a
peasant family, not in England, for things have changed so
radically here, but in some tiny French or Swiss hamlet, where
1 Op. rit. p. 540.
3 Conditions do not seem to have been so severe in England as in France.
A. Luchaire, in his Social France at the time of Philip Augustus, asserts that in
the twelfth century "men died of hunger, on an average, one year in every
four'* (and adds that 48 famine years are recorded in the eleventh century
(p- ?))• I11 England we have no evidence of such appalling conditions: indeed
Thorold Rogers asserts that he knows " of only one distinct period of famine
in the whole economic history of England", i.e. 1315-21 (Work and Wages,
62; cf. 217).