Customs & Lifestyle

a.) Personal Hygiene
There are not many pieces of evidence to suggest examples of personal hygiene. However, we are able to guess the situation of personal hygiene based on our general knowledge and after reading Merchant of Venice. There is unlikely to have a high level of personal hygiene, considering that most countries were not modern at that time and like countries in Asia, it could have been dirty then due to the fact that we do not have enough knowledge about how the kingdom runs the country. Yet again, there are no pieces of evidence to suggest that it was dirty; it could have been quite clean. During that time, there were many diseases and people were learning how to cope against them, thus, they could have maintained a high level of personal hygiene.

b.) Diet
During that time, many people were peasants and since there was not much trade, many people depended on themselves for food. As peasants, most of them were farmers are depended on bread for their food; they grew rye and barley as ingredients to make bread. Besides bread, their only other sources of food come from pottage (a soup made from oats), meat (pigs), mutton (sheep and lamb) and other animals living in the woods near the village. They usually drank water taken from the river and milk; however, a more common drink would be ale, made from barley.

c.) Recreation
Once more, there is insufficient evidence to tell us what they did for recreation. One would have thought that Christmas could be a day of recreation for them. However, it isn’t, it causes grieve instead. Based on our knowledge, recreation could have been derived easily, by living in happiness, some hobbies could include hunting in the woods, or going out to sea.

d.) Accommodation
The peasants usually lived in towns, however, these towns were located at places where people could meet up easily, such as near rivers. These towns were very small compared to the towns we have now in England, such as Brimingham and London. Houses were usually built using wood, since buildings were very expensive and only the rich could afford mansions.

e.) Dress
The dress code could have been really simple in England; however, we do not have any evidence to support this claim. Based on our general knowledge, it is likely that they were dressed casually, just normal shirts and shorts made out of cloth. The rich definitely had better clothing, probably made out of silk and fibre and maybe with the use of ornaments made out of gold on it.

Resources:
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/england_medieval.htm