Furniture was rude and scanty.  In 1150 the farm implements and household furniture on the Manor of ‘Waleton’ was valued and consisted of 4 carts, 3 baskets, a basket used in winnowing corn, a pair of millstones, 10 tubs, 4 barrels, 2 boilers of lead with stoves, 2 wooden bowls, 3 three-legged tables, 20 dishes or platters, 2 tablecloths worth 6d., 6 metal bowls, half a load of the 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] Diseased animals were constantly eaten, vegetables were few, and in the winter there was no fresh meat for any one, except game and rabbits