The Medieval Year: Tenth Day before the Kalends of September, AD 1224

Otherwise known as Friday, August 23rd, (eight hundred years before) 2024.

The Medieval Year, a weekly feature of the Via Mediaevalis newsletter, gives us an opportunity to appreciate calendrical artwork from the Middle Ages, reflect on the basic tasks and rhythms of medieval life, and follow the medieval year as we make our way through the modern year. Please refer to the first post in this series for more background information!

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We’re approaching the end of August, month of the grain harvest, and the great paradox of medieval peasant life is on full display: Humble folk all over Europe walk out to the fields under the warm sun of late summer. They carry primitive tools and will perform a slow, simple task: cut the stalks of wheat or barley, bind them into sheaves, build the sheaves into stooks for further drying, and eventually haul the sheaves back to the village for threshing and winnowing.

If they look unimportant as they do this work, it’s because we cannot see what they are carrying on their shoulders: an entire socioeconomic world, encompassing the lowliest laborers, the mightiest monarchs, and everyone in between.

This painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder is an extraordinary window into late-medieval rural life. Stooks of cut grain are on the right. I have a favor to ask: Please click the image to enlarge it, and spend a few moments savoring its beauty and feeling the deeply human warmth that it radiates. Then spend another few moments enjoying the many charming details it contains (the tall ladder by the fruit tree, the sheaf used as a bench, the jug hidden among the uncut grain, the ships in the bay, the fully loaded wagon down the hill, the people playing in the field and skinny-dipping in the pond, etc.).

The end result of all this harvesting activity were, in addition to chaff and straw, the ripe, golden kernels that nourished the entire social pyramid of the Middle Ages. According to the usual stereotypes and exaggerations, feudal lords oppressed and exploited their serfs, finding various clever ways to ensure that they were cold in the winter, half dead with exhaustion in the summer, and hungry most of the year. If this were true (it’s not), then medieval noblemen were foolish indeed, and somehow failed to realize that in an age before supermarkets and semi-trucks and fifty-thousand-metric-ton bulk carriers, everybody’s food came primarily from the local peasants.

This late-fifteenth-century calendar page for August shows a pair of stout swains hard at work on the threshing floor. I want to call your attention to the building behind them, and more specifically, to its roof. That’s a thatched roof—in other words, it’s a roof made from a byproduct of the work that they are currently doing.

Is it any surprise that cereal grains have such an exalted stature in Western culture? The kernels themselves kept the body well fed, and the straw left over after threshing kept the body warm and dry. In the Middle Ages, prestigious buildings like churches and castles used slate or lead as roofing material, and wooden shingles were sometimes an option, but thatched roofs—inexpensive, effective, attractive, surprisingly durable, easily replaceable—were everywhere.

Below are a few more late-fifteenth-century depictions of thatched roofs. The houses that they’re attached to are lovely, well-built structures—not exactly the crooked hovels that so many medieval peasants supposedly lived in. (Though to be fair, not all homes were as nice as these, and artists would have lost customers quickly if they had decorated elegant devotional books with pictures of crooked hovels.)

“No other covering is so pleasing as thatch for a rustic building. Its colour and rough texture harmonise well with the natural wood, and all its associations are of a rustic character; no other covering so effectually excludes the summer heat, and nowhere can one find a retreat so suggestive of coolness, quiet, and repose, as under the low eaves of a thatched building.”

These words were written in the early twentieth century. Thatched roofs were in use long after the Middle Ages had ended—where good straw and skilled thatchers are near at hand, and where lifestyles haven’t outgrown the small, simple cottages that contented so many of our ancestors, thatch really does make a fine roof. The stalwart folk of the Outer Hebrides, a Scottish island chain not exactly known for its dry weather, were still covering their houses with this uber-sustainable building material in the 1930s. They grew the oat straw in their own soil and put it right back in the soil when their roofs were done with it:

The people live in … thatched-roof dwellings containing usually two or three rooms. The walls are built of stone and dirt, ordinarily about five feet in thickness…. The thatch of the roofs plays a very important role. It is replaced each October and the old thatch is believed by the natives to have great value as a special fertilizer for their soil because of its impregnation with chemicals that have been obtained from the peat smoke, which may be seen seeping through all parts of the roof at all seasons of the year…. Some of the houses have no chimney, because it is desirable that the smoke leave the building through the thatched roof.¹

I’ve never been to the Outer Hebrides, but I’m going to guess that the locals don’t live quite like this anymore. A lot can change in a hundred years.

Three angels are thatching the roof of Christ’s temporary shelter in this early-fifteenth-century German painting of the Nativity.

I admit that I wouldn’t want to be under a thatched roof during a midwestern thunderstorm, but I also miss the days when you could grow a roof in your own wheat field and then use it as fertilizer in your own garden. Or even if you didn’t have enough land to grow your own roof, at least you could make it with your own hands. Now the art of thatching is almost extinct, and we rely on poets to keep the old ways alive. Seamus Heaney wrote a poem entitled “Thatcher,” about a man who “eyed the old rigging, poked at the eaves,” took out his sheaves of wheat straw, and

Then fixed the ladder, laid out well honed blades
And snipped at straw and sharpened ends of rods
That, bent in two, made a white-pronged staple
For pinning down his world, handful by handful.

1. Weston A. Price, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration; see Chapter 4.