What Did Medieval People Actually Do All Winter?

The Disturbing Ways Medieval People Survived Winter No heating. No glass in the windows. No supermarket. And the warmest thing in the house was a cow. For a medieval peasant, winter wasn't a season. It was an attack from three directions at once: the cold, the hunger, and the dark. In this video we look at how ordinary villagers in 14th-century England actually made it to spring: houses with walls made of dung, families sleeping next to their animals, the "blood month" of November, the deadly hungry gap at the end of winter, rushlights, curfews, and the twelve-day party in the darkest part of the year. All research and sources are linked below. RESEARCH & SOURCES: ▸ The Little Ice Age — "The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300–1850" by Brian Fagan (2000, Basic Books). ▸ Longhouses and Wharram Percy — "Wharram Percy: Deserted Medieval Village" by Maurice Beresford and John Hurst (1990, Batsford / English Heritage). ▸ Smoky houses and sinus infections — "A Bioarcheological Study of Maxillary Sinusitis" by Charlotte A. Roberts (2007, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Vol. 133). ▸ The February painting — "Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry" by the Limbourg brothers (c. 1412–1416, Musée Condé, Chantilly). ▸ Blotmonath, "blood month" — "The Reckoning of Time" (De temporum ratione) by Bede (725). Translated by Faith Wallis (1999, Liverpool University Press). ▸ Peasant diet, salt and winter food — "Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England c.1200–1520" by Christopher Dyer (1989, Cambridge University Press). ▸ The Great Famine of 1315–1317 — "The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century" by William Chester Jordan (1996, Princeton University Press). ▸ Village life and coroners' records — "The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England" by Barbara A. Hanawalt (1986, Oxford University Press). ▸ Rushlights — "The Natural History of Selborne" by Gilbert White (1789). ▸ Night and two-part sleep — "At Day's Close: Night in Times Past" by A. Roger Ekirch (2005, W. W. Norton). ▸ Everyday medieval life — "The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England" by Ian Mortimer (2008, The Bodley Head). ———————————————————— PEOPLE & PLACES MENTIONED IN THIS VIDEO: ▸ Wharram Percy, Yorkshire — A village abandoned around 1500 and dug up by archaeologists for forty years. Its houses, bones and rubbish tell us more about everyday medieval life than almost any written record. ▸ Dartmoor longhouses — A few medieval-style longhouses still stand on Dartmoor in Devon, where people lived at one end and animals at the other, under the same roof. ▸ Bede — A monk from Jarrow in northern England who, around the year 725, wrote down the old English names of the months, including Blotmonath, "blood month", for November. ▸ The Limbourg brothers — Three Dutch painters who made a prayer book for a French duke, with one of the most famous pictures of medieval winter ever painted. ▸ Gilbert White — An 18th-century country vicar and naturalist who measured everything around him, including how long one rushlight could keep the dark away. ▸ The Lord of Misrule — A person chosen at Christmas to turn the normal order upside down: peasants played kings, and lords played servants, until Twelfth Night. ———————————————————— 🎨 Animation by The Hooded Peasant ———————————————————— #medievalhistory #middleages #medievalwinter #medievalpeasants #history #medieval #littleiceage #dailylife #explainer #animation #education #englishhistory #historyexplained