The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch

Hard at Work

16 chapter one Hard at Work Dawn.Cocks crow,birds sing,and bells ring.Time to stretch stiff limbs,scratch at insect bites, awaken drowsy bedfellows, and leave the warmth of the bed for the cool morning air. On with the coarse, woolen clothing.A hunk of bread washed down by beer makes a peasant’s breakfast. Outside the ground is wet with dew. Time to fetch water from the well, time to sweep out the dust, time to take the sheep to pasture, time to get to work. The rhythms of work in premodernity were primarily set by the rhythms of nature and agriculture.The seasonal cycle dictated what was done when for the vast majority of people. In the winter when the sun rose late and nature slowed down,laborers had more hours for rest and leisure (though there were still winter crops and farm animals to care for and firewood to cut and gather). In the summer and early autumn, days were long and long hours of work were needed to help bring in the harvest. Only when the sun hung hot and heavy in the midday sky would harvest workers seek a cool refuge to rest and eat. Whatever the season, Sundays were days of enforced rest. Legends told of people who had transgressed this divine law and found their hands permanently fastened to whatever tool they had been using on the Lord’s Day.In many churches images showed a doleful Christ surrounded and attacked by pitchforks,axes,and hammers, graphically instructing churchgoers that to work on Sundays was to hurt Christ himself (Rigaux 2005). Farm work was acknowledged to be very hard work, for both humans and beasts. It took strong arms to guide the plow as it cut through stony ground, and the oxen who did the heavy pulling would be pricked with the sharp point of a goad to drive them ever onwards.A furlong,about two hundred meters,was the length of a field that oxen could plow before needing a rest. Even after a field was plowed, clumps of earth might still need to be broken up by hand (Gies and Gies 1990: 137). The material world was recalcitrant. It resisted the touch of the human hand; it could not simply be stroked or cajoled into productivity. In the medieval fantasy land of Cockaigne tame deer and rabbits allowed themselves to be caught by hand and ripe fruit dropped into people’s mouths.In the real world,attaining food involved force: digging and cutting and killing.While knights fought with enemies and priests fought with Satan, laborers were understood to “fight” with the land.The earth had to be broken with a plow, root vegetables had to be torn from the ground, grain had to be cut down with scythes and flogged with flails. The tenth-century Colloquy byAelfric described the harshness of agricultural labor from the plowman’s point of view:“I work so very hard.At daybreak I drive the oxen to the field and yoke them to the plough;even in the bitter winter I dare Classen_Text.indd 16 3/15/12 2:48 PM A Place by the Fire 17 not stay at home for fear of my lord. . . . I must plough a whole field or more every day. . . .The boy who drives the oxen with a goad for me is hoarse from the cold and from shouting” (Aelfric 1961: 20). Recently unearthed bodies of medieval laborers show the permanent physical effects of“the excruciating labors of plowing, lugging forty-pound seed bags, and harvesting with the scythe” in their skeletal deformations (W. Jordan 1996: 14). In the metaphor of society as a body,peasants were the lowly feet,carrying the rest of the body by their efforts.The hard and rough work of the peasantry was understood by the higher orders of society—the nobility and the clerics—to be in keeping with the supposedly hard and rough nature of the laborer, a notion expressed in the stereotype of the “coarse peasant.”The laborer’s physical intimacy with the land identified him with it: like the land he was said to be difficult to cultivate and always ready to lapse into his former uncouth ways (Freedman 1999: 15, 60, 218–19). Yet farm work was, at least verbally, honored as honest and productive toil, worthy of heavenly, if not earthly, reward. Manual labor could be traced back to the prototypical labors of Adam and Eve...