Why Christina?
By Michael Wood
History is so often told from the top, from the point of view of the kings and queens, the nobles and the literate classes. The challenge we set ourselves was to take someone from the bottom of English society, a serf or a villein (a semi-free bonded peasant) and see if we could tease out a biography from the sources of 700 years ago. And to make it even more challenging and interesting, we chose someone from the forgotten half of medieval society: a woman.
I first came across Christina many years ago. I wrote about her village -Codicote- in my book called ‘Domesday’ in 1986. The documents for the place, like all the manors that belonged to St Albans Abbey, are so rich in detail that at times you really feel you can get a sense of ordinary English people’s lives that far back in time.
As so often happens as a writer or film maker, you hold onto certain stories thinking that one day you might come back to them and do something more detailed: In this case I had in mind a biography of a medieval English woman peasant, someone like Christina: the kind of person you never read about in the history books. So when Janice Hadlow at BBC 4 came in with a late invitation to do a show for her Medieval Mind series, I jumped at the chance even though the time was very tight.
We made the show in about six weeks shooting and editing – our last day’s filming was April 23rd at the British Library in the morning (with the village court book) and in the afternoon in Victoria Park with Professor Miri Rubin: our final editing was the next day, and we locked the picture and sent the show off for auto conforming the same evening!! (It reminded me of the days when I used to do current affairs: though in this case it was historical current affairs!!)
Despite the rush we had a lot of fun. For our film crew, Producer Rebecca Dobbs and I, teamed up again with old friends cameraman Peter Harvey and director David Wallace –with whom we shot series such as ‘In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great’ and ‘Conquistadors’ (Peter and I first shot together in Iraq in 1989-David and I go still further back to the Congo in the BAFTA winning River Journeys (1984). The editor was Gerry Branigan who did such a great job on our recent Story of India.
We shot some sequences at the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum in Sussex where real medieval buildings have been saved and re-erected in a wonderfully atmospheric landscape, where their experts on medieval diet, farming and cooking gave us fascinating glimpses of what it was like to be at the bottom of the pile in the 14th century. The British Library gave us very generous access to the Codicote manuscripts which tell Christina’s tale.
In the National Archive in Kew they allowed us into the storage basements (175 km of shelving!) where the tax records of the medieval English state are stored, and let us unroll the thirty foot long parchment tax roll for Hertfordshire in 1307, which records Christina’s father.
Sue Flood at the Hertford Record Office even let us take documents onto location, to St Albans Abbey, and to the 14th century barn at Kinsbourne Farm, where a medieval farm diary gave us an incredibly vivid insight into what conditions were like during the Great Famine of 1314-22 when ten or fifteen per cent of the people died, including Christina’s husband and her brother John.
In Codicote itself, the Local History Society - which is very active - was a fantastic resource and help to us. Over the years, they've produced a number of interesting and informative booklets about the village and its people, and the landscape with its trees and hedgerows; its fields and wildlife.
Obviously to a point you make this kind of film on a hunch - that the story will turn out to be interesting: But this turned out much more than that. Through it all, the life of a poor woman in the medieval past came through much more vividly than even I had hoped. And there were surprises, even in the last few days of shooting and editing! 
On the Thursday before we finished I went back to the manuscript room of the British Library to check a section of the village accounts that I hadn’t examined closely. I needed a bit more detail on what Christina did between her late twenties and late thirties.
To my delight (and embarrassment!) I found that Christina had been, married not once but twice: First husband was just before the Famine: William Baron (the father of her kids I would guess) who was an outsider to the village and maybe younger than his wife who by then was in her late twenties. William seems to have died in the Famine and the epidemics that came with it.
Her second husband was with her by 1322, before the end of the Famine, and he died in 1345, though I could find no evidence that they were still living together. Maybe with her house, garden and shop Christina was quite a catch-she certainly made sure that her small inheritance went down through her children and not to either of her husbands’ families!
Christina’s life was spent in hard work, in the fields, in her stall in the market, in her house brewing ale, in her garden planting and growing food; and probably also travelling locally to buy and sell. She died in 1348 the year the Black Death hit Britain-probably of old age (she was sixty-ish). Her kids John and Alice survived the Black Death.
So I guess you would say she had done well. There were still Coks in the village in the early 19th century, and in a sense I think that she and her like are the ancestors of all of us ordinary British people.
‘With so many people there was a huge pressure on land in the early fourteenth century’ Miri Rubin told me on our last afternoon of shooting:
‘And an older woman who had a bit of land and property might well be able to choose her partner. And after all, for an older woman, to have a young vigorous man about the place, who is helpful and good at a few things: well, you know, that’s quite useful even today!’
‘And what about love’ I aske ‘Did she have a chance of love then?’
‘Look’ said Miri “Even in the 14th century there’s a life out there. And love could blossom. There are court cases where jilted wives and husbands talk about giving each other love gifts, rings, flowers. So William might well have given Christina a love token.’
She smiled with a twinkle:
‘But then so might some other guy!’