Christina: A Medieval Life
Christina: A Medieval Life
BBC FOUR, 2008
1 x 60 mins
Producer: Rebecca Dobbs
Director: David Wallace
Part of BBC Four's Medieval Season
"Another example of BBC4 at its considerable best" - The Telegraph
Available to buy for £12.99. Please email info@mayavisionint.com to order.
‘Miserable, horrific, ferocious! Only the dregs of people survive to bear witness!’ scrawled a Hertfordshire priest, a medieval vicar of Dibley, on the wall of his church after his village had been decimated by the Black Death. But we English are nothing if not resilient: on a pillar nearby some wag scratched in Latin ‘The Archdeacon is an ass…. and that Barbara is a real young vixen!’
The 14th century is the most conflicted in British history, shot through with famine plague and war. It’s a time of climate change, with floods and rains and failed harvests, of virulent cattle pests like BSE, and above all the Black Death -during which more than half the population of Britain may have died.
Yet hard as life was for the ordinary people, this is also the time when our modern mentalities were shaped- and not by the rulers, but by the common people: with the beginning of the end of serfdom, the growth of individual freedom and the start of a capitalist market economy.
In this fascinating piece of detective work Michael Wood (‘a lapsed medieval historian turned TV presenter’ he wants to point out!!) delves into medieval court books, to follow the fortunes of one village, Codicote in Hertfordshire, from Boom to Bust, and into the horrors of the Great Famine, and the Black Death.
It’s a tale full of surprises: a world where even lowly peasant boys can go to school (for a fee of six chickens!) where women peasants can use writing- and might even hire a lawyer; and where -unlike in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, most peasants have a reasonable diet, good jokes and plenty of holidays.
In the pages of the landlord’s books, Michael unravels a story of 14th century Neighbours- the family of poor peasant Christina Cok, her father Hugh, her estranged husband William , and her kids John and Alice.
We meet her neighbours too: Michael Gorman who dies ruined in the famine; Sybil and Isabella the Reeve’s daughters (who are both fined for sex outside marriage! ) ; 15 year old Mabil Hulle who runs off to London ; ‘Sir’ John the vicar who dies of plague; and poor Simon Truebody who is gruesomely executed for his part in the Peasants Revolt. 
This is an everyday story of medieval countryfolk through which we see the bigger picture of the shaping of the character and destiny of the ordinary British people. A history told not (as so often) from the top but from the bottom- and especially through the eyes of the forgotten half of the workforce, the women.
‘In the fourteenth century’ says Michael, ‘though their lives might at first seem quite alien, you only have to scratch below the surface to find uncanny connections with us. After all, Christina and her fellow peasants are the ancestors of most of us!
With them you see our beginnings as a nation of shopkeepers; the roots of the British love affair with beer - and football!! And, maybe more important, the triumph of that sturdy, fatalistic and cussed streak of individualism that has made us Brits the people that we have been ever since’.