e invaluable
salt, 2 axes, a table with trestles (the usual form of table), and 5
beehives made of rushes.[137] These articles were handed down from one
generation to another, and in a lease made 150 years afterwards of the
same manor most of them reappear. The greater part of the furniture,
until the fifteenth century, was most likely made by migratory
workmen, who travelled from village to village; for except the rudest
pieces it was beyond the village carpenter, and shops there were none.

It is not to be expected that when the master lived in this manner the
lot of the labourer was a very good one. His home was miserably poor,
generally of 'wattle and dab', sometimes wholly of mud and clay; many
with only one room for all purposes. A bill is still in existence for
a house, if it can be called one, built in 1306 for two labourers by
Queen's College, Oxford, which cost 20s. in all, and was a mere hovel
without floor, ceiling, or chimney.[138] Their wretched houses appear
to have been built on the bare earth, and unfloored. Perhaps as time
went on a rude upper storey was added, the floor of which was made of
rough poles or hurdles and was reached by a ladder. The furniture was
miserably poor; a few pots and pans, cups and dishes, and some tools
would exhaust the list.[139] The goods and chattels of a landless
labourer in 1431 consisted of a dish, an adze, a brass pot, 2 plates,
2 augers, an axe, a three-legged stool, and a barrel.[140] Englishmen
of all classes were hopelessly dirty in their habits; even till the
sixteenth century they were noted above other countries for the
profuseness of their diet and their unclean ways. Erasmus spoke of the
floor of his house as inconceivably filthy. To save fuel, the
labourer's family in the cold season all lay huddled in a heap on the
floor, 'pleasantly and hot', as Barclay the poet tells us; and if he
ever had a bed it was a bundle of fern or straw thrown down, with his
cloak as a coverlet, though thus he was just as well off as his social
superiors, for with them the loose cloak of the day was a common
covering for the night. He was constantly exposed to disease, for
sanitary precautions were ignored; at the entrance of his hovel was a
huge heap of decaying refuse, poisoning air and water. Even in the
sixteenth century a foreigner noticed that 'the peasants dwell in
small huts and pile up their refuse out of doors in heaps so high that
you cannot see their houses'.[141] Diseas