Lesson video

Hello, this is Mr Cooper tuning in for your second lesson of six in this inquiry that we are currently doing on mediaeval world through the eyes of Margery Kempe.

The life of Margery Kempe.

So I hope you've done the quiz just now just to refresh your memories to bring back the stuff into your heads before we start this lesson and then as we always do.

First of all hide your phone, put it in the corner under a box, don't care, just don't see it.

That's the key thing cause if it starts flashing at you, your going to be distracted.

Your friends will be fine without you for just an hour or so when you are doing this lesson so, piece of paper or your books, whatever you are using.

Date of what time of day you are doing this lesson on and the title which will appear in a moment.

Underline both just so that you can then organise your notes clearly and then when you've done that restart the video and we will continue with today's lesson.

So this is the second of our six lessons and today we are going to be looking at The Mediaeval Village and life.

What life was like for most people in mediaeval England.

Could you please just make sure you've got the date of whatever day you are doing this and the title which is The Mediaeval Village underline both and then we will start with the lesson.

Pause now, get that done and then we will crack on.

One of the tricky things we have which we talked about in the last lesson is how do we find out about people who didn't read and didn't write and didn't leave many traces of themselves.

We are talking about a period of time many hundreds of years ago.

We know quite a lot about the Kings and the Queens and the important people and the battles there before but it's difficult for us to know exactly how the millions of people who weren't Kings and Queens, how did they live? And so what we rely on are things like the book of Margery Kempe, but also things like this on your screen.

Now this is a very old book and it's called the Luttrell Psalter, also in the British library and this book is truly one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.

It's a prayer book.

So the Pslter is a prayer book and it was made by a very wealthy man called Sir Geoffrey Luttrell.

And Sir Geoffrey Luttrell, he was the Lord of a manor and we will talk about the role of the manor in a moment, but he was a rich man and he was in charge of a village.

A village in the North of England and he wanted to make this book and he decided to do it in a very beautiful way.

It was for praying but as we'll see, there were lots of beautiful images some of which are hilarious others less so.

So what we are going to do now, we are going to go.

I'm going to show you my favourite bits my favourite pages first of all actually.

So this is Sir Geoffrey Luttrell.

You will see two women looking up to him and you will see him.

He is a knight so he is a.

Its a very clear.

He claimed he wants to come across as this very valiant brave knight on a very big horse.

This is how.

This is Geoffrey Luttrell and we see him looking down probably at his wife and his daughter.

This is an image and this is what the book looks like.

But if you open that book, these are the.

This is what you will see.

Every single page about 25 pages I think and the words are in Latin, the language of the church, these are prayers and then around the margins, we have all of these beautiful beautiful images.

I'm just going to zoom in to some of my favourite ones this particular page.

That is.

And I don't know what these are just to be clear.

Its a total mystery to me.

We can see the knights that we.

We can see what the knights are but we have two men carrying a blue person on a piece of wood.

We have a, I think a mermaid actually.

But the mermaid it seems to have wings and this guy, again no idea.

This is a really beautifully made book and the images in the paintings, they are just giving idea of the.

They are just giving idea of the fun, its actually quite fun, I think its meant to be quite fun.

Now moving on.

again, these are actually just very.

I find these images to be really, really quite funny.

So on the next page now, and here we have this very small person with no body just a head and he looks quite angry I think, this is in the blue circle.

The pink circle we have a woman slapping a man around the head with a piece of wood and then at the top we have.

I have no idea, it's just a guy with a rather impressive heady and no body.

His body turns into a plant.

So this is fantastical stuff, crazy stuff.

Now we are going to move on and this is sorry, last last one before we actually look at the interesting things.

Well they are all interesting but think for the purposes of this lesson, they are probably more useful.

This is my favourite.

This is a monkey driving a waggon.

Again, lets just zoom in to the monkey.

We are going to zoom in.

All right, I think this is great.

Now actually what is interesting is that claim there were no zoos at this point and we are talking about the thirteen.

I think it was made in the thirteen forties.

So a little bit before Margery was born and.

But clearly monkeys had been seen because how on earth do you paint a monkey if you've never seen a monkey.

So this monkey has a really cool hat on and the monkey is driving a waggon.

So just, you know, great, I love it.

I think its really really entertaining.

So now we are going to be looking at something else however.

We have.

its difficult for us to now how.

What life is like but what we do have are these kind of books and these images.

And what we are going to look at now is what was farming like because England, in fact most of Europe at this time was mainly.

was farming.

Farming was what most people did.

90% of people were peasants farming the land.

And we get some clues about what farming was like in the Lutterall Psalter.

The first one here we have a woman giving seeds to some birds.

I think there is some chicks, I don't think birds were that big at the time.

This is probably.

yeah I think that.

I don't think there is an actual giant bird this big cause if there was I think she probably would be running away while feeding it but clearly this is one activity that she was doing.

You will also see that she is holding something.

It's like a stick with a bit of a bulging thing at the top.

This is a loom.

So women were.

Typically, they made their own clothes, also food or a hemp and here we have her giving some seeds to some chicks and a giant bird.

Birds were not that big.

Historians and archaeologists have not Found evidence that birds were giant birds.

However, we get a good idea.

This is a really beautiful image of what women might have been doing at this time.

Then we have on this same page, we have two men pulling up with some oxen pulling a plough.

So what's interesting about this is, the ploughs, clearly this is not.

There had been technology or machines developed not machines, tools developed to make farming easier.

Here we have a plough and you can see the detail.

Its a very complicated tool.

We have the different stages we are about to see of how farming took place.

The next one we have here.

This is a man sowing seeds.

The fields have been ploughed as we just saw.

This now we have a man sowing seeds, he is carrying a box with the seeds in.

We also have a dog trying to attack a bird and on the left hand side we have a crow trying to get into the bag of seeds.

Then we have, another.

This time, this is a horse pulling it and this was to get the seeds in to the earth.

And what's really interesting actually, I spent a lot of time with my mum and I grew up in the countryside and a lot of these tools they still exist.

Now the difference is, the tools exist but now they are pulled by tractors rather than animals.

We have the.

And I have just noticed that I didn't see this when I was zoomed in.

The guy on the left he is got a bag of stones and a sling shot and he is trying to get rid of the crows.

So clearly the crows are causing a lot of trouble and if you look at the previous slide, the crows are stealing the seeds and here we have the man trying to get rid of the crows.

Next one, so now the wheat is grown and we have the.

By hand we have the wheat being harvested.

Now interestingly women are doing this as well and look they are like right killed over.

This was a really hard job.

Interestingly its women doing this not the men.

And in the last bit we have the men carrying the wheat or whatever crop it is and stacking it up.

I think this gives us a really nice idea of the way the farming took place in Mediaeval England and this was.

I mean if you look.

If you have the book at frontal view most of the book aside from these slightly weird cartoon characters of maultism and fantastical creatures.

Loved most of these Luttrell Psalter is about what village life was like.

So what I'd like you to do now, just based on what you've just seen, write down three things or two things or four things whatever, about what Mediaeval farming was like based on the images in the Luttrell psalter just for memory what you've just seen and write them down.

A monkey driving a waggon, funny, but its not about mediaeval farming.

So I don't want you to take a look at this lesson that monkeys drove waggons in mediaeval England, they didn't.

It would be hilarious if they did but they didn't.

Here are a few things that I wrote down.

Women fed birds with seeds and used looms to make clothes.

There were no machines, although there were ploughs and there were tools.

People sowed seeds and harvested wheat by hands.

so there weren't machines to do these jobs which are now done by machines.

Both men and women farmed the fields.

So this is interesting cause men were not equal at this time and women had to do all the home stuff as well as harvesting the fields.

So the whole village went out into the fields to harvest in the.

And then lastly men carried the wheat to be stacked in bales.

And you can also add, they had a problem with crows and the solution was to get the dog to attack the crow or to use a sling shot to get rid of the crow.

These are all things that we can pick up from looking at this source.

This historical source, remember we talked about sources last lesson.

And this allows us to get an idea of what mediaeval farming, mediaeval life was like at this time.

So now we are going to be looking at different things.

On the screen we have a picture of a field with lots of lines in it.

For a long long time, the countryside wasn't divided into fields sorrounded by hedges like it normally is.

The hedges were added later on.

The English countryside was lots of forests, we have open meadows and also we have.

This could have been a very common site.

Individual areas of land were divided into strips and each strip, you can see the different strips there each line represents a strip and villages were given a couple of strips for their own and then they had to form the strips of the local lords and this was all part of the fieldal system which you would have hopefully seen in the previous inquiry, now this kind of thing doesn't really exist anymore because obviously machines are not ploughed over this humps and this is a really good image of the.

It gives you an idea of how farming looked in mediaeval living.

so what you would have seen just imagine the Lutterall Psalter images, you would have had people walking up and down there with oxen and horses, soaring the seed trying to get rid of the quarries and actually this is great, I stayed with my mom during lockdown and we went for a walk and low and behold I saw some mediaeval field ridges.

That's my mum on the right, I put the arrow over her face coz she doesn't like people taking pictures of her.

In this village just outside this ridge, there are still mediaeval ridges.

I got really excited about this and told all my friends and my friends thought I had gone completely mad but I was really excited about this.

Maybe if you live near a field, you could ask your parents or your carer to go hunting for some mediaeval field ridges.

I think that would be very cool.

Perhaps other people would disagree but we don't mind about that, do we? And then now on this screen we have a map of a typical village ,a mediaeval village and this is hopefully going to explain what I have just been talking about.

So you see there are lots of fields divided into strips.

The strips.

Some strips belonged to the lord, but it was lords, all belonged to the lord and the the lord gave a few strips to the villages and then the lord had control of all of the yellow strips.

There was also something called common pastures.

So you see that green splodge, top right this would have been open for sheep farming so mediaeval Englands it was where people grew crops and they also farmed sheep we will look at that more in the next lesson.

And then very importantly actually we have the village down here.

So the centre of the village was the manor house, this is where the lord lived, we have the church and then after that just cut it out with the pebbles the pink circling fortunately, the village would have been right next to it, so every single village would have had a manor, a church and a small village.

If you travel in the countryside there you'll find, especially Norfolk where I used to live you will find this beautiful churches absolutely everywhere.

This churches were all over the countryside.

Lots of them have been destroyed or they are not used anymore but at this point, we will be looking at mediaeval religion ,the mediaeval church in much more detail later on in this inquiry.

This was a very typical site.

So I'd like you to do now, I'd simply like you to write out this sentences and work out which of the following.

Which of them is true or false, any thought and then we will move to the next part of the lesson so pull out now and have a go.

So first one, most people never left the villages they were born in.

True they didn't travel much at all and the village was where they were.

where they would spend most life.

Just think about how difficult.

how long it takes to travel anywhere that fast they knew what it cars and it was not possible to travel around the territory.

In mediaeval England ,most people lived in towns.

False.

So now most people live in towns ,back then most people lived farming, they lived in villages and they spent most of their lives farming.

Almost everyone in mediaeval England farmed the land for crops like wheat.

True.

90% of the population were peasants and 90% of them were most.

the vast majority spent their life farming as we've seen in the Luttrell Psalter.

And so peasants owned their land and could grow what they liked.

This is false.

The peasants didn't own their land although they started to change around the time that Margery was alive and peasants were given land by their local lords and they were then able to grow what they wanted but they didn't own it and this is something that started to change but was not the case at this time.

So comprehension questions.

Five questions and this is what you will hopefully have done several times now.

What you are going to do is pause the video, close the video, click next in the bottom right hand corner of the screen, you are then going to move to the next part of the lesson ,you are going to read through the slides and then you are going to answer the five questions at the end of those slides and when you've done that.

and very important four sentences, there must be four sentences.

When you've done that come back to this video and we will go through the answers together.

So pause the video now, read the slides, answer the questions and resume the video once you are finished.

So first question, where did most people live when Margery Kempe was born? The acceptable answer, in the countryside.

Good answer, when Margery Kempe was born, most people lived in the countryside.

Usually in small villages of no more than a hundred and fifty people.

There is a clear difference between the acceptable answer and a good answer, the good answer is a four sentence and its given me a lot more information.

And just to remind you, if your answers don't look like this exactly, that is fine ,its just to give you an idea of what your answers should be looking like.

Two.

Why did it take so long to travel around England? Acceptable answer, there were no cars.

Well that is stating the obvious, therefore what is the good answer? Well the good answer, the reason it took so long to travel around England was that there were no tarmacked roads and the fastest way to move was on horse back.

Even then, only the wealthy could afford horses so most people had to walk.

This is actually something that we see described in Margery's book.

She is walking all the time.

She does occasionally.

And she travels very very long distances as well but typically, she is on foot.

Even though she is quite wealthy.

So even wealthy people also were walking.

Three, what was life like for peasants? The acceptable answer, not very nice.

Actually that is not an acceptable answer its just, I mean its really true but I mean really, come on.

The good answer, for peasants life was challenging.

The average lifespan of a peasant was only 30 years old, and they spent most of the year farming in difficult conditions.

They also had little freedom and had to work for their lord.

They didn't meat because the animals were too valuable.

So this is really important.

Most people, they weren't vegeterians, but eating animals.

The animals were very useful.

So for example, a cow was more useful as something that produced milk, the cheese than it was for meat.

People didn't eat meat because the animals were very special, they were important.

Four, why did peasants start to question their situation? The acceptable answer, the black death changed things.

The good answer, after the black death killed a lot of people, the surviving peasants started to demand higher wages.

Some peasants started to buy up empty land becoming known as yeomen.

The lords reacted by trying to limit their freedom which made the peasants angry.

So this is quite complicated to get into a few sentences.

Basically what happened, the black death hit the country, the peasants that didn't pass away were able to ask for more money and that was exactly what they did.

Some peasants started to buy public land and this is a new group of them known as yeomen and the lords felt threatened.

They didn't like the situols so they tried to limit their freedom which made the peasants unsurprisingly quite angry.

Five, why was white bread only eaten by rich people? Myself I only learnt this quite recently.

White bread was harder to make so it's more expensive.

Good answer, white bread was only eaten by rich people because only rich people could afford it.

White bread is harder to make because it requires all the brown parts of wheat to be removed.

This made it more expensive to bake.

White bread, the reason it's white is it's all of the case of the wheat, the wheat pod of the wheat seed had been taken out.

The browness comes from the whole of the wheat.

That is why it is called whole grain and to do that it's quite difficult.

So obviously white bread was much easier.

Was reserved for the rich as was meat as well.

Last part of the lesson, writing activity.

Historians, we read and we write.

So we've done some reading and now we are going to do some writing and this is what we are going to be doing is bringing together all the knowledge that we've got in this lesson into a nice paragraph.

Cause practising writing is a really big part of being a good historian.

The question we are going to be answering is what can we learn about life in a mediaeval village from Luttrell Psalter? And this is the particular part of the luttrell Psalter that we are going to be looking at.

We've already looked at the farming pictures and the pictures of the monkey and the waggon now we are going to be looking at this two things here.

What I'd like you to do is to pause the video and I'd like you to look very closely and I'd like you to see f you can work out what is happening.

Pay attention to how people are dressed, also look what kind of meat is being eaten and really importantly, can you spot the white bread.

Pause here and have a go in answering these questions and then write some of this down as well because we will be using this details that we can see to then write a nice paragraph.

So have a go and then restart the video when you are ready.

These are the things that I spotted.

We have an angry chef preparing meat we see a roast chicken how it looks like and what looks like it might be a rabbit and we have the servants, they are wearing simple clothes and they are carrying the food to their masters.

And then on the right hand side we have a rich family and this is actually the Luttrell family sitting at a dinner table with loads of food by them and the lords probably Sir Geoffrey himself sat in the middle.

We have the servant kneeling, which tells us a lot about how he the lord was seen.

Interestingly you might be able to spot two religious people on the left hand side of the table, which we will look at in more detail later on and there we have the white bread loaf in the blue circle.

Make sure you've written this details down because we are going to be using this to write an answer in a short moment.

Write these down I you books just as a list that's fine and then we will move to the last bit of the lesson.

This is the question, what can we learn about life in a mediaeval village from the Luttrell Psalter.

First sentence, we can make this sentences or we might want to be more specific.

From the Luttrell Psalter we can learn a lot about life in the mediaeval village.

I would actually say, we can be a little bit more specific than that.

So what can we learn, we can learn that there were important people and less important people.

We can say that, one of the things that we've just wrote down, and then put four sentence starters that will guide you in how you might want to write this paragraph.

When we are using a source like this, we have to say, it's a very simple way of writing it.

In the picture we can see what? We can see religious people at the table, we can see that they are eating meat, we can see that there is an angry chef, we can see that there are servants kneeling, we can see that they are dressed in a specific way and then I have to explain what is the show.

Great, we can see a chicken but so what? What about a chicken? What's special about a chicken? and then we need to do this two or three times.

I'd like you to have a go at this now.

Again do not worry if you find this difficult it is absolutely fine to find this difficult because if it wasn't difficult, you wouldn't need to be doing this lesson.

This is all about practising and practising and practising and what makes a good historian, is knowing how to look at these images, these bits of writing and then using them to explain what you are seeing and why this matters.

So pause now, have a go no longer than five or ten minutes and then we will continue while we go to the last part of the lesson.

If you want to, this is not compulsory but I'd love to see the work you are producing.

You can share your work with Oak National and me if you'd like to please ask your parent or carer to share your work on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter tagging @Oak National and #LearnwithOak.

Again, not compulsory but I would love to see what you are producing.

So please do if you can.

That brings us to the end of lesson two of our six lesson inquiry looking at the mediaeval world through the life of Margery Kempe.

I hope you find it interesting.

I just really love.

I love Margery, big fan of Margery and I hope you do to.

What I would like you to do now is simply do the short quiz after this lesson.

Five questions just to make sure that this bits of information are lodged in your brains so that we can use them next time and then when you've done that, have a great day.

Try doing it without your phone for a change.

See how that goes.

See you next time.