Why Nobody Loved Their House
We like to imagine medieval peasants living out their days in the same cosy cottage their grandfather built, patched and loved for a hundred years. The archaeology says otherwise, and it’s a genuinely startling correction to make.
Most peasant houses were built to last about one generation — roughly twenty years — before they were simply abandoned and a new one put up. Not on the same spot, either, and not even facing the same direction: excavated village sites show houses rotated by ninety degrees, moved to a different corner of the plot, sometimes flipped entirely, generation after generation. The old structure, rather than being lovingly preserved, usually just became a shed for the animals or the plough.
Part of this was pure practicality. Timber-framed, wattle-and-daub houses with thatched roofs and no foundations simply didn’t last. Once damp got into the mud walls they began to dissolve, and a family inheriting a decayed house often had two years, by manorial custom, to knock it down and start again. But there’s a more interesting explanation lurking underneath the practical one: sons inheriting the tenancy don’t seem to have minded starting fresh. There’s no sign in the records of grief over losing the house one grew up in, no clause in wills protecting the ancestral walls.
What people were fiercely attached to was the land itself — the strips in the open field, the croft, the family name attached to a particular holding for generations. Home, in other words, wasn’t a building. It was wherever the hearth happened to be pitched that decade. A useful thing to remember next time a story leans on a character’s misty-eyed devotion to the house their father built: the house probably wasn’t there anymore, and nobody much cared.
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