Peasants in the fifteenth century

The Peasants' Revolt was crushed in 1381. Life did get better, though, for the peasants in the next hundred years. Those who did best were the freemen and the richest villeins, who by now were called yeomen. Yeomen added to their own strips in the village fields by buying land from other peasants. Then they rented more land from the lords of the manor.

There were clear signs that the yeomen had money. They built new, bigger houses, sometimes in stone instead of wood and clay. They could afford better clothes and furniture. They kept servants. Some of them even sent their sons to school.

Times were better even for the poor peasants. (People had stopped using the name 'villein' by the year 1450.) They no longer had to do unpaid work for their lords. They had some land of their own, and they earned wages by working for the lords or the yeomen as well. And wages were quite high in the fifteenth century.

But peasants' lives were always hard. Their families were often hungry. The men (and often women as well) worked in the fields, six days a week, from dawn to dusk. The women also milked the cows and sheep, made butter and cheese, looked after the children, and cooked what food there was. Not many peasants lived to be more than fifty.

Walter Robson: Medieval Britain; Oxford University Press, 1991/2000, page 58