SOURCE: “In Due Season: Farm Work in the Medieval Calendar Tradition,” in Agriculture in the Middle Ages: Technology, Practice, and Representation, edited by Del Sweeney, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995, pp. 309-36.

[In the following essay, Henisch studies the visual depiction of agricultural labor in the calendars of the Middle Ages.]

When a medieval artist was told to illustrate a calendar, he knew exactly what he was expected to provide. It made no difference whether he was working in wood or in stone, tracing the design for a stained-glass window, or brushing gold onto a sheet of vellum. He reached into his store of patterns and pulled out, not twelve scenes, or emblems, one for each month of the year, but twenty-four. One illustration showed a characteristic occupation for the month, and the other displayed the month's dominant zodiac sign. The artist then proceeded to group his pictures in any number of configurations, of which the simplest and most straightforward was the pair of compartments, as can be seen on a page for June, in a psalter made in northern France toward the end of the twelfth century, which shows a man mowing in one frame, and a crab, the zodiac sign, in the other.¹

The presence of the occupation scene is readily understood. The sequence of twelve activities, almost always drawn from the countryside and the farm, represents the annual, endlessly repeated, cycle of necessary, basic tasks that put food on the table: pruning and ploughing, sowing and reaping; the fattening up of livestock, and the slaughter.

The presence of the zodiac sign needs a little more explanation. The zodiac is the narrow pathway across the sky in which the sun, the moon, and the principal planets seem to move throughout the year.² It is divided into twelve equal sections, or signs, each named after a constellation whose position once, long ago, lay within it. The sun passes through one of these sections each month, as it makes its progress from one year's end to the next. Because the sun was all-important to society, its movements were studied with the greatest attention, and it was only natural and fitting that the twelve divisions of the calendar should be marked with the zodiac signs, as reminders of the sun's journey through the sky, as well as with the scenes of man's essential duties, as he bustled about his work down below.

One more pair of scenes, from a later, fifteenth-century French manuscript, offers a crude and cheerful representation of July, with a man cutting grain in one compartment, and Leo the lion flourishing his tail among the stars, next door …³ Over the centuries, the tradition of calendar illustration became comfortably established. And just for that reason the artist could play with it, presenting the same familiar scenes in a variety of conventions, from the use of isolated figures set against a plain or patterned background⁴ to groups of people moving in a fully developed landscape.⁵

The calendar tradition had very long roots, tapping into the classical past. In the medieval period, in western Europe, we begin to find traces of it from the ninth century onward; by the twelfth century it had become firmly established, and was to grow especially strong and popular in France, England, and Flanders. As the Middle Ages drew to a close in the early sixteenth century, the convention still showed great vitality, with many splendidly rich examples in the Books of Hours made in Flanders for an international market.⁶

The name often given to the tradition is “The Labors of the Months,” but in fact by the end of the medieval period it had become a cycle of occupations rather than labors, because so many pleasures of the seasons had been tucked into the scheme, from snowball fights in January⁷ to dancing and dicing in December. …⁸ But, however frivolous the details of any particular calendar might become, always at the core there was the round of activity on the land intended to pile provisions high in the larders of society.

The cycle might be shown anywhere, up on a roof boss, or down on a misericord, half-hidden in the shadows beneath a choir-stall. It could decorate the pages of a Book of Hours, for the private pleasure of a private owner, or be carved as a public statement for all to see, around the great west doorway of a church.⁹ No matter where it appeared, whether in solemn majesty or as a light-hearted frivolity, it was the embodiment of a deeply felt, long-held belief that life on earth was an unending round of work, shaped and driven by the year's unending round of seasons.

It was an accepted truth that man's fall from grace had led to the punishment of incessant toil and struggle in the world beyond the gates of Paradise. The terrible words of God to Adam in the third chapter of Genesis summed up the situation: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it was thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3: 19). Nature herself had been corrupted by human sin, and the corruption showed in her contrariness and lack of cooperation with human efforts: unpredictable weather, difficult soils, rampaging weeds, ravening wildlife. Adam had been God's first gardener in Paradise, but his undemanding round of duties in that blessed enclosure was but a poor preparation for the realities he had to face when, thrust out into the hostile world, he was handed a spade as a parting present from a reproachful angel.¹⁰ It was a very rude awakening.

Although the curse of unending toil had been laid on the whole of society, not everyone was expected to toil in the same way. Although all people had to face a verdict after death on the life they had led on earth, all were not rewarded for their efforts in quite the same way while still living in the world. According to a very simplified, shorthand scheme, which remained popular as a teaching tool for centuries despite its obvious limitations, society was served by three groups: those who looked after its spiritual needs, those who defended it against injustice, and those whose job it was to feed it: the church, the governing class of kings, lords, and knights, and the laborers. It was a coarse but convenient grid, laid over the teeming complexities of real life, to create a bold, easily memorized platitude.¹¹

Of these three groups, all were necessary, but some were more equal than others. Just as history is always written by the victors, so rules are drawn up by those already in position to derive most benefit from them. The relations between two, the church and the secular government, showed an endless jockeying for real power in the world throughout the period. The third group, of laborers, was regarded, by and large, as a necessary evil. It was worked very hard, punished harshly for ordinary misdemeanors and ruthlessly for any stirrings of revolt. It was also held in some contempt. Then, as now, there was no strong desire felt by those with some comfort and authority in their own way of life to change places with anyone in obviously less agreeable conditions. Voluntary poverty, accepted as a spiritual education, was one thing. Ordinary, grinding poverty imposed by circumstance offered no such rewards and often had a dishearteningly bad effect on the character of its victim. Preachers pointed out, frequently, that as much pride, and greed, and anger, lurked in a peasant's heart as in that of the most arrogant baron.¹²

The poor, in short, were not very attractive. Not in clothes, in appearance, in habits, in situation. That remarkable man, Henry Grosmont, Duke of Lancaster, who was not only one of Edward III's great magnates and military commanders but also a devout layman who was able to write his own manual of devotion, confessed there, quite frankly, that he did not like the smell of the poor. He was sorry for it, he prayed for forgiveness, but there it was: He found it most disagreeable.¹³ The same kind of attitude is to be found in another aristocratic author, Joinville, the biographer of Saint Louis, king of France. He loved and honored his master as a saint, but was appalled when Louis insisted on following Christ's example to the letter and actually knelt to wash the feet of some poor men on Maundy Thursday. Joinville's rigid disapproval is recorded in his own book¹⁴ and remembered in an early fourteenth-century illustration of the scene.¹⁵

The lot of the poor was sometimes described with compassion, and the figure of the honest workman was sometimes held up for imitation, but even in such cases the emphasis was on the harshness of the peasant's life, the courage and obedience with which he shouldered his heavy burden. Remarkably little was ever said in praise of the good sides of that life. It is very rare to come upon this kind of remark, set down in a schoolboy's exercise book in the late fifteenth century: “It is a great pleasure to be in the contrey this hervest season … to se the Repers howe they stryffe who shal go before othere.”¹⁶

To turn from the written record to the calendar pictures is to step into a very different world. In comments about the peasant and life on the land, the three notes most often struck, whether in sermons, in manuals for priests, or in the secular literature of the age, are contempt, criticism, and compassion. Not one of these is sounded in the labors of the months tradition. In the calendar cycle, man seems to have exchanged one paradise for another. Admittedly, he is always busily at work throughout the year, but in circumstances never to be matched this side of heaven.

The emotional tone of the cycle is noticeably calm. This is one of the few places in medieval art where serenity, not suffering, is the order of the day. The pictorial presentation of the passing seasons is pierced with no sense of sin, no sense of paradise lost. The harmonies are disturbed by no fear of death, no forebodings of disaster. There is no hint of effervescent high spirits, but everywhere we look there is an air of quiet purposefulness and confidence …¹⁷ The figures know what they are doing; no one is getting in anyone else's way, no quarrels flare up. No one is in despair about ever finishing the job in time. The work may be back-breaking, but it is never heart-breaking.

One reason for this happy state of affairs is that the weather is always accommodating, always appropriate. No untimely drought shrivels the new growth of springtime; no sudden hailstorm flattens the harvest. Nature provides the right weather, at the right time; man takes the right action to reap best advantage from ideal conditions.¹⁸ Peace of mind is further guaranteed by the fact that not only the weather but also the equipment is in perfect shape. The necessary tools for any job are always in working order. We never see a broken ploughshare or a rusty billhook, and there is never any sign of an accident, even when an enormous scythe slices through the air, alarmingly close to a set of vulnerable toes.¹⁹

In the world set forth in medieval literature, it is not hard to find distinctly unflattering descriptions of the peasant's physical appearance:

His hosen overhongen his hokschynes. on everiche a side,
Al beslombred in fen. as he the plow folwede …
This whit waselede in the fen. almost to the ancle.(20)
[His stockings hung down round his legs,
All splattered with mud, as he followed the plough.
He was mired in mud, almost up to his ankles.]

Alternatively, it is not hard to find the peasants presented as objects of pity, as in an early fourteenth-century English poem on the daily miseries they had to face, miseries summed up in a somber last line: “Might as well die straightaway, as struggle on like this” (“ase god in swynden anon as so forte swynke.”)²¹ In the calendar world, the impression of peasants and their life is quite different. The figures going about their work may not be strikingly handsome, but they are sturdy, trim, capable. They have had enough to eat. They are dressed not in rags and tatters but in appropriate clothes, warm in winter,²² loose and easy in summer.²³ They are shown at just the right age: young enough to have energy and strength, old enough to have experience. …

Ideas of death and mortality are kept firmly at bay. It is true that there is one branch of the calendar tradition in which the seasons are linked with the ages of man, and death comes with winter, but as it is not relevant to the theme of agriculture there is no need to consider it here. Apart from this special case, death plays remarkably little part in the cycle. The human figures show no sign whatever of advancing age or dwindling energy, and the only death that occurs in the entire year is in November or December, when animals are slaughtered for the meat supply. Almost always, in the calendar tradition, the animal chosen is the pig. Even here the idea of death is controlled and colored by the theme of the tradition as a whole: the promise of life's ever-returning, ever-renewing cycle. Death is accepted with composure. Pigs are killed to fill the larder in December, but as we look at the scene we hear no squeals of agony, see no blood stains, smell no sweat.²⁴ We know, and the pigs know, that, in the calendar cycle at least, they are absolutely safe and indestructible. Come next November, they will be resurrected, to root for acorns once again.²⁵ On this point there is a yawning gap between the treatment of time's passage in art and in literature. In medieval poetry, the haunting question is always: “Who wot nowe that ys here / Where he schall be anoder yere?”²⁶ In calendar art that question is never raised, because it is quite unnecessary. Everyone knows what will happen next year: exactly the same round of seasons and the same round of activities as in the present one.

Calendar scenes are small. They are ornaments, whether decorating a page, a lead font, or a stone porch. This limitation in size takes the figures one step further from reality. There is a doll's house air to many examples and, even in the severe medium of stone, the little figures often look more like pixies than like people.²⁷ One of art's mysterious powers is the ability to draw pleasure from pain. Just as Samuel Beckett's prose gives a mesmerizing beauty to disintegration and decay, so the artists in the Labors tradition transformed the mud and misery of demanding work into satisfying harmonies. The medieval mastery of line and pattern creates from everyday movements, in everyday jobs, the choreographed rhythms of a dance, as in a carving of a man sowing seed.²⁸

Wood and stone offer the spectator the satisfactions of contour and texture, of actions and gestures caught by the artist and modeled by light and shadow. In manuscript examples, bewitching harmonies of color soften the rigors of work and add a bloom of beauty to the most humdrum activities …²⁹ Refinement of line and the precious pigments chosen for the scene give an early fifteenth century illustration of manure being poured around a vine-stock, in early March, an elegance strangely at variance with its subject matter …³⁰

In the same way, a typical calendar scene of harvesting is all bright gold against a bright blue sky.³¹ Its smooth perfection of surface, and its serenity of tone offer not a hint of the discomfort of an actual day spent cutting the grain. Gertrude Jekyll, the great English garden designer, touched on the truth of the matter when she once spoke about her memories of holidays on a farm when she was a little girl, and remarked: “Anyone who has never done a day's work in the harvest-field would scarcely believe what dirty work it is. Honest sweat and dry dust combine into a mixture not unlike mud.”³²

The idea of life as a round of unremitting toil is softened in some calendar scenes by yet another element: the element of enjoyment. Tiny details, caught by the artist, add a sweetness or a zest to the yearly round. A cart-horse is offered a tidbit after hauling a heavy load.³³ A peasant in an enormous vat presses grapes, while he helps himself to a cluster.³⁴ Workers look forward to a picnic lunch in the harvest field …³⁵ It is significant that the touch of relaxation or pleasure here and there never interferes with the work at hand, never breaks the rhythm of purposeful activity. It is not an interruption and never antisocial. It is never a protest against the rules of the game, a sullen gesture made against the system. The relaxation comes at appropriate times. One of the traditional images of Sloth, in manuals on the sins drawn up for preachers, is the laborer sitting idle by his plough.³⁶ In the calendar tradition this sin is avoided, because workers relax only when a particular job has been finished, or in ways which do not affect the task in hand, like munching grapes while still treading the vat. Just as no one in a calendar scene is ever shown stealing from the crop, sneaking home with a few ears of grain, so no one steals time. Work moves to the rhythm of the seasons. Pleasure moves in counterpoint and fills the natural pauses in the measure; it never disrupts the dance.

Beneath the smooth, deceptively simple surface of the cycle lurk many surprises. The biggest surprise of all, in a medieval work of art, is that there are no obvious religious overtones. Occasionally, a religious scene is chosen as the occupation of a month as, for example, the distribution of ashes on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, in a few calendar pages for March.³⁷ At the core of every cycle, however, lies the agricultural story of the year, and there no religious touches of any kind are to be found. There is never a hint of divine intervention, or a turning for help or consolation to the Virgin Mary or to some local saint. There is no scene that shows the offering of harvest tithes to the church, no blessing of the fields at Rogation-tide by the parish priest. Work goes on quite outside the framework of belief, doctrine, or discipline.

There is another missing ingredient. Nowhere to be found is any sense of social context. Figures are hard at work, but they are not shown in any recognizable community. They are busy and, apparently, independent. Very rarely is there to be seen any figure of authority directing operations, or any hint of coercion. The occasional exception, as in an early fourteenth-century English scene of an overseer in the harvest field, only goes to prove the rule.³⁸ Every activity seems to be free, planned and carried out by the peasants themselves. Usually, masters and peasants, when shown together in the same picture, seem to inhabit entirely separate worlds, as in an August scene where lords and ladies ride out hawking in the foreground while, in the far distance, the harvest is gathered in.³⁹ It is only in some very late examples, produced at the end of the fifteenth or beginning of the sixteenth century, that it is possible to find orders being given and received. In a few gardening scenes for early spring it is made quite clear that the garden belongs to an owner, and the gardeners work under watchful, proprietorial eyes …⁴⁰

While there is scarcely a trace of an order given or obeyed in the calendar tradition, there is no suggestion at all of resentment, let alone actual rebellion, against the system itself. Peasants had ample grounds for grievance throughout the medieval period, and every now and again violent protest flared up, to be met in due course with even more violent retribution. When Froissart described the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 in England, he put into the mouth of John Ball, a leader of the rebellion, a speech that is a mosaic of traditional complaints against the high and mighty: “They have the wines, and spices, and the good bread; we have the rye, the husks and the straw, and we drink water. They have shelter and ease in their fine manors, and we have hardship and toil, the wind and the rain in the fields. And from us must come, from our labor, the things which keep them in luxury.”⁴¹

Rulers were uneasily aware that their thrones rested on tinder-boxes, and the thought of peasant turmoil often troubled their dreams. In the mid-twelfth century, Henry I of England had a nightmare so upsetting that it was not only recorded but illustrated in a contemporary chronicle. Henry dreamt that maddened peasants pressed around his bed, menacing him with their pitchforks and their scythes.⁴² Of such explosive anger and pent-up fury, or indeed of any breakdown in the social system, not a hint scratches the smooth surface of the calendar tradition.

The principles of selection that shaped that tradition remain shrouded in mystery. Of all the myriad, varied jobs to be done on the land, only a handful ever found their way into the calendar cycle. Considering that the tradition flourished most vigorously in northern Europe, in France, Flanders, and England, it is a little surprising that one of the most frequently represented tasks for early spring is the pruning of vines,⁴³ and the almost invariable one for early autumn is some aspect of the grape harvest.⁴⁴ Does this preoccupation with the vine stem from the tradition's root in the classical, Mediterranean world? Or is it due to a quite different fact of life? Wine played a central role in the service of the Mass observed in every Christian country, no matter how far it lay to the north. As a result, there was a need to produce some kind of wine for the Church, however thin or however acid, in every region of the Christian world. Whatever the reason may be, the calendar's emphasis is always on the grape and the vine. Beer-making and cider production are never shown.

Why is the core of the calendar year the growing of grain: breaking ground, sowing seed, harvesting the ears, winnowing the grain from the chaff?⁴⁵ Is this because bread is a staple of life in the West? If so, it is surprising that no place is found for that other symbolic staple, salt, nor for the process of salt-making. To descend from the level of symbol to that of mundane reality, why is there never any hint of interest in the backbone of the medieval diet: dried peas, dried beans, and cabbage?

Considering how important sheep farming was in the economy of Europe throughout the medieval period, it is puzzling that it appears only now and then as an occupation in the calendar cycle, and never becomes a regular feature. … Is the reason that the sheep was prized as a source of wool, the raw material of the cloth trade,⁴⁶ and so sheep farming does not fit with perfect propriety into a cycle concerned above all else with the production of food? Or were there reservations about the pastoral life itself? The shepherd with his sheep was an isolated figure, and his hours and conditions of work set him a little apart from ordinary village life. In certain important ways the shepherd's life was more primitive than life on the farm. Certainly it did not depend to the same degree on organization and cooperation, on people moving together as a team, and so it was perhaps less satisfactory than farm life as an image of society productively at work. Gerald of Wales, in the late twelfth century, thought the Irish were inferior to the English and French for several reasons, of which one was that they showed no interest in arable farming. He remarked: “They have not progressed at all from the primitive habits of pastoral living. Man usually progresses from the woods to the fields, and from the fields to settlements and communities of citizens, but this people despises work on the land.”⁴⁷ Several of Gerald's contemporaries made the same point about other people living on the fringes of the known, civilized world.⁴⁸

There is one other problem, with no easy answer. Why do women appear, more and more frequently, in the calendars of the later medieval period, the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries …?⁴⁹ It would be rash to assume any sudden surge of support for women's rights to be behind the new fashion! Women had always, by long-established custom, labored side by side with men in village farm work. Is their absence from most calendar cycles due to the fact that so many scenes are presented within small medallions, or confining frames, inside which there was simply no room for more than one figure? Or does their entrance on the scene have more to do with changed economic conditions caused by the many plagues that swept through Europe at frequent intervals after the mid-fourteenth century? Was women's contribution needed—and felt—more keenly in this period of labor shortages created by the high rate of illness and death? Or was that contribution acknowledged at last, quite simply, on aesthetic grounds, with the discovery that to include the figure of a woman was to add a new interest, a new charm of line and detail, to a very old scene?⁵⁰

The characteristic arrangement and appearance of the calendar cycle hide more than they reveal, and foster a somewhat distorted view of reality. They help to sustain the illusion that everything in medieval society was on a very small scale: one field, one plough; two men, two scythes. There is scarcely a hint in the tradition, from one century to the next, of commerce or of trade, either of the great international markets that punctuated the year and drew merchants from all over Europe, or of the local ones held any week, in any town.

When an elderly husband in late fourteenth century Paris gave his young wife advice on how to plan a special dinner party, he directed her, as a matter of course, to buy her supplies at the many specialized shopping districts in the city. Beef was to be found at one group of butchers, pork at another. Delicate wafers were to be ordered from one expert, garlands and table decorations from another. And when the husband suggested a recipe for a sweet confection made from carrots, he took care to add this helpful note: “Carrots are red roots, which are sold in handfuls in the market, for a silver penny a handful.”⁵¹

The controlled confusion of such commerce finds no foothold in the tradition, and it is rare indeed to find a scene in which any farm produce is actually being exchanged for money. …⁵² Trade requires surplus, but in the calendar the emphasis is all on sturdy self-sufficiency. Only in the very last stages of the medieval tradition, for example in some of the Flemish calendars made in the early sixteenth century, do we begin to catch a glimpse of large-scale operations. After the diminutive, doll's house scale of most calendar activities, it comes as a shock to see a gigantic crane, for hoisting barrels, looming in the background of an autumn scene that shows the tasting of the season's new wine⁵³ and realize that its presence points to an economic system considerably more sophisticated than would have been suspected from the clues provided by the tradition as a whole.

Everything about that tradition, from its tone to its contents, from what it puts in to what it leaves out, should warn the viewer against the temptation to regard the calendar cycle as the equivalent of a careful, even-handed documentary film about work on the medieval farm. Peasant life has been distanced and refined by art, and society's burden made bearable by being shouldered within the sustaining dream of a world not fatally flawed but, instead, in perfect working order.

Within the confines of this old tradition the peasants, in real life so despised or disregarded, became the representatives, the image of all humanity. Ideas about human dignity shaped their appearance and bearing. The harmony between their work and the seasons was a potent and satisfying image of the well-regulated society, in which forethought in planning and skill in execution drew the appropriate reward from a responsive, and equally well-regulated, nature. The cycle's harmonies express something of the spirit to be found in other images of the properly functioning society. Its figures move not through the polluted air of the real world but within the pellucid atmosphere of an ideal model of that world. They are related not so closely to real peasants as to those honest laborers who, in an image elaborated by John of Salisbury in the mid-twelfth century, were described as the feet of a “Body Politic,” in which every member was an essential part of an organic whole.⁵⁴

In the 1370s, a translation of Aristotle's Politics was made for King Charles V of France. Aristotle describes four possible kinds of democracy, of which he picks the agricultural model as the best, with the disarmingly frank explanation that this is because farmers are “always busily occupied, and thus have no time for attending the assembly” and making a nuisance of themselves with their opinions.⁵⁵ The manuscript illustration of this section, labeled “Good Democracy,” follows the same careful rules about the relation of work and pleasure that can be found in the calendars.⁵⁶ While some peasants are harrowing in the foreground, the men—and horses—that have done the first ploughing of the field are enjoying a well-earned picnic, one that does nothing to disrupt the rhythm of the job in hand.

The high seriousness that underlay the old calendar tradition was also, in time, sweetened and softened by a far more frivolous, but most engaging dream, the dream of a very different kind of good life. In this, the wearisome vexations and disappointments of wealth and privilege were contrasted with the pleasures of poverty. Viewed from the vantage point of high position and, perhaps, in the digestive pause after a satisfactory dinner, the simple, strenuous life in the open air, the fiber-packed diet of black bread and pure water, the untroubled dreams of the contented peasant, could seem positively enviable, and such attractions found praise in a number of elegant poems composed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.⁵⁷ None of the authors, nor any of their readers, had the slightest intention of actually exchanging a comfortable life for the rigorous realities of the farm, but it became fashionable to play with the idea. It is to be suspected that the charm and grace of many calendar pictures owe something to this fancy, and were intended to please the eyes of just such patrons.

One of the most beautiful of all the calendar cycles, and certainly the one best known today, is that in the manuscript known as the “Très Riches Heures,” made for the Duke de Berry, a man not noted for his love of farm life or, indeed, of peasants. In another manuscript that he commissioned, he is shown being welcomed by Saint Peter into Paradise.⁵⁸ If this happy event ever did take place, outside the Duke's fond dreams and the pages of his own manuscripts, there must be a strong presumption that he was received into heaven on the strength of his generosity as a patron of the arts, not for his generosity as a lord and master. In that role, he showed a harsh indifference toward his peasants, and a rapacious interest in the profits he could wring from their exertions. His record as a master called forth not paeans of praise from grateful subjects but resentment and rebellion throughout his vast domains.⁵⁹ For him, at least, the calendar pictures he enjoyed as he turned the pages of his Book of Hours must have woven a beautiful veil of illusion, to mask the ugly reality of the world outside his castle walls.

Notes

1. Psalter, northern France, end of the twelfth century, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS. Lat. 238, f. 3v, June, Mowing.

2. Woodcut from Textus de sphaera, by Johannes de Sacrobosco (Paris, 1538), New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Dick Fund, 1934), Armillary Sphere.

3. Book of Hours, illuminated in France for the English market by the Fastolf Master, ca. 1440-50, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Auct. D. inf. 2.11, f. 7r, July, Reaping.

4. Martyrologe d'Usuard, Saint-Germain-des-Près, northern France, ca. 1270, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Ms. Lat. 12834, f. 64v, July, Threshing.

5. Book of Hours, Flanders, illustrated by Simon Bening, ca. 1530, Munich, Staatsbibliothek, Cod. Lat. 23638, September, Ploughing, harrowing, sowing.

6. For calendars of the early period see James C. Webster, The Labors of the Months in Antique and Mediaeval Art to the End of the Twelfth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1938). For later examples see Wilhelm Hansen, Kalenderminiaturen der Stundenbücher: Mittelalterliches Leben im Jahreslauf (Munich, George D. W. Callway, 1984).

7. Book of Hours, Flanders, illustrated by Simon Bening, ca. 1530, Munich, Staatsbibliothek, Cod. Lat. 23638, January, Snowballing.

8. Book of Hours, Flanders, illustrated by Simon Bening, ca. 1530, Munich, Staatsbibliothek, Cod. Lat. 23638, December, Dancing and dicing.

9. West doorway, Cathedral of St. Lazarus, Autun, Burgundy, ca. 1135, carved by Gislebertus.

10. Winchester Psalter, English, ca. 1150, London, British Library, Cotton MS. Nero C IV, f. 2, Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise.

11. For a full discussion of the scheme see Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

12. For examples of sermon criticism of peasant behavior see G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, 2nd rev. ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961), pp. 365-69.

13. Henry of Grosmont, Duke of Lancaster (1310-61), Le Livre de Seyntz Medicines (1354), ed. E. J. Arnould, Anglo-Norman Text Society 2 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1940): 13-14, 25.

14. Jean de Joinville (ca. 1224-after 1309), The Life of St. Louis (1309), in Chronicles of the Crusades, trans. M. R. B. Shaw (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1963), p. 169.

15. The Hours of Jeanne d'Évreux, Paris, Jean Pucelle, ca. 1325-28, New York, The Cloisters, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, f. 148v, Saint Louis washing the feet of the poor.

16. William Nelson, ed., A Fifteenth Century School Book (Oxford: Clarendon, 1948), p. 5.

17. The Da Costa Hours, Bruges, illustrated by Simon Bening and others, ca. 1515, New York, The Pierpont Morgan Library, MS. M. 399, September, Ploughing and Sowing.

18. Book of Hours, Flanders, illustrated by Simon Bening, ca. 1530, Munich, Staatsbibliothek, Cod. Lat. 23638, August, Harvesting.

19. The Rohan Hours, France, 1420s, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS. Lat. 9471, f. 8v, June, Mowing.

20. W. W. Skeat, ed., Pierce the Ploughmans Crede (ca. 1394), Early English Text Society, orig. ser. 30 (London, 1873), ll. 426-27, 430.

21. “Song of the Husbandman” (1300), in Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries, ed. R. H. Robbins (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), no. 2, pp. 7-9, l. 72.

22. The Da Costa Hours, Bruges, illustrated by Simon Bening and others, ca. 1515, New York, The Pierpont Morgan Library, MS. M. 399, February, Pruning.

23. Book of Hours, illuminated in France for the English market by the Fastolf Master, ca. 1440-50, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Auct. D. inf. 2.11, June, Mowing.

24. Stained-glass roundel, English, fourteenth century, Bilton Church, near Rugby, November, Pig-killing.

25. The Playfair Hours, made in France (Rouen) for the English market, late fifteenth century, London, Victoria and Albert Museum, MS. L. 475-1918, November, Hunting for acorns.

26. Fifteenth century carol, in A Selection of English Carols, ed. Richard Greene (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), no. 27, p. 85, ll. 1-2.

27. West doorway, Cathedral of St. Lazarus, Autun, Burgundy, ca. 1135, carved by Gislebertus, Detail, March, Pruning vines.

28. Misericord, Church of St-Martin, Champeaux, France, sixteenth century, the Sower.

29. The Belles Heures of Jean, Duke de Berry, French, ca. 1408, New York, The Cloisters, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, f. 8, July, Reaping.

30. The Belles Heures of Jean, Duke de Berry, French, ca. 1408, New York, The Cloisters, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, f. 4, March, Pouring manure around the vines.

31. The Playfair Hours, made in France (Rouen) for the English market, late fifteenth century, London, Victoria and Albert Museum, MS. L. 475-1918, July, Reaping.

32. Betty Massingham, Miss Jekyll (London: Country Life, 1966), p. 24.

33. Book of Hours, Flanders, illustrated by Simon Bening, ca. 1530, Munich, Staatsbibliothek, codex latinus 23638, July (b), Feeding horse.

34. Martyrologe d'Usuard, Saint-Germain-des-Près, northern France, ca. 1270, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS. Lat. 12834, f. 69v, September, Grape-treading.

35. Book of Hours, Flanders, early sixteenth century, London, British Library, MS. Add. 24098, f. 25b, August, Harvest picnic.

36. Somme le Roi, Flanders, 1415, Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, MS. 11041, f. 88v, Sloth.

37. Book of Hours, Paris, ca. 1450-60, Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS. lat. 1362, f. 3r, March, Distribution of ashes on Ash Wednesday.

38. Queen Mary's Psalter, England, early fourteenth century, London, British Library, MS. Royal 2 B VII, f. 78v, August, Overseer and harvesters.

39. The Très Riches Heures of Jean, Duke de Berry, France, the Limbourg Brothers, ca. 1413-15, Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS. 65 (1284), f. 8v, August, Hawking.

40. Book of Hours, Flanders, illustrated by Simon Bening, ca. 1530, Munich, Staatsbibliothek, Cod. Lat. 23638, March, Gardening.

41. Jean Froissart (ca. 1337-ca. 1410), Chronicles (ca. 1369-ca. 1400), trans. and ed. Geoffrey Brereton (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1968), Book II, p. 212.

42. Chronicle of John of Worcester, England, ca. 1130-40, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Corpus Christi Coll. 157, f. 382, Henry I's nightmare.

43. Bedford Hours, France, ca. 1423, London, British Library, MS. Add. 18850, f. 3, March, Pruning.

44. Book of Hours, made in France (Rouen) for the English market, late fifteenth century, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Auct. D. inf. 2.11, f. 9r, September, Treading of grapes.

45. The Playfair Hours, made in France (Rouen) for the English market, late fifteenth century, London, Victoria and Albert Museum, MS. L. 475-1918, August, Threshing and winnowing.

46. Book of Hours, Flanders, illustrated by Simon Bening, ca. 1530, Munich, Staatsbibliothek, Cod. Lat. 23638, June (a), Sheep-shearing.

47. Gerald of Wales (ca. 1145-1223), The History and Topography of Ireland (ca. 1188), trans. John J. O'Meara (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1982), Part III, ch. 93, pp. 101-2.

48. Robert Bartlett, Gerald of Wales (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), pp. 160-62.

49. The Playfair Hours, made in France (Rouen) for the English market, late fifteenth century, London, Victoria and Albert Museum, MS. L. 475-1918, October, Sowing.

50. The Très Riches Heures of Jean, Duke de Berry, the Limbourg Brothers, ca. 1413-15, Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS. 65 (1284), f. 6v, June, Haymaking.

51. The Goodman of Paris (ca. 1393), trans. and ed. Eileen Power (London: Routledge, 1928), sec. 2, art. IV: “How to Order Dinners and Suppers,” pp. 221-47, 296.

52. Book of Hours, Flanders (probably Bruges), ca. 1500, Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS. 1058-1975, f. IIV, November, Pig market.

53. Book of Hours, Flanders, illustrated by Simon Bening, ca. 1530, Munich, Staatsbibliothek, Codex Latinus 23638, October (a), Tasting wine and loading barrels.

54. John of Salisbury (ca. 1115-80), The Statesman's Book (Policraticus) (1159), trans. John Dickinson (New York: Knopf, 1928), VI, xx, p. 243.

55. Aristotle, The Politics, trans. and ed. Ernest Barker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), VI.4.2, p. 263.

56. Aristotle, The Politics, translated into French by Nicole Oresme, Paris, ca. 1372, Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, MS. 11201-2, f. 241, Farming in a good democracy.

57. For example, Philippe de Vitry, Franc Gontier, Pierre d'Ailly, Le Tyran, and François Villon, Les Contredis Franc Gontier, all in The Penguin Book of French Verse: To the Fifteenth Century, ed. Brian Woledge (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1961), pp. 216, 218, 327.

58. The Grandes Heures of Jean, Duke de Berry, ca. 1409, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS. Lat. 919, f. 96, Saint Peter welcomes the Duke de Berry at the gate of Paradise.

59. Millard Meiss, French Painting in the Time of Jean de Berry: The Late Fourteenth Century and the Patronage of the Duke, 2nd ed. (London: Phaidon, 1969), text vol., p. 32.