What Do Medieval Tiles and Billhooks Have to Do With Each Other?

These are reproduction medieval floor tiles. This one has got my own personal coat of arms on it and this one has got a more traditional medieval design. It's made of red clay and white clay and they're all made by hand. They would have been used on the floors of high-status medieval buildings, so cathedrals, posh churches, manor houses, and the way they're laid is quite a cacophony of different colours and organisations. These are made by hand. What do they have in common with this tool? This is, surprisingly enough for many of you, not a medieval weapon. This is in fact a modern day hedging tool called a bill hook or a slashing hook. It has probably as many designs as it does names in different parts of the country. I use this one for maintaining hedges on my farm. What do bill hooks and medieval tiles have to do with each other? It's coming towards the end of summer, beginning of autumn and the leaves are starting to change on the trees. We are harvesting the apples and the pears and all sorts of fruits now and the weather is beginning to change a bit, but most importantly the light is beginning to fail. It used to be light here in England until 10 o'clock at night so I could go riding until very very late. Now it's starting to get dark at about seven and every day will probably get darker earlier by a couple of minutes or more and that restricts what you could do with the daylight hours because you just have fewer daylight hours. So to get back to the question I asked you to begin with, what is the connection between medieval tiles and a bill hook? Well that's to do with seasonal working and there were jobs to make tiles during the summer where you could work with clay and it wasn't too cold, but as the weather got colder and as the temperature dropped to close to freezing it became next to impossible in a rural environment to actually be a tiler. So how did you make your money? Well there was another set of jobs and that was maintaining the landscape and hedges, local hedges around farms and cutting back trees and all sorts of stuff was strangely enough the exact opposite of the tile making season. So we know from medieval records that some itinerant tile makers were tile makers during the summer and then when the work sites closed down, when that cathedral was shut down for the winter, they became itinerant hedges and environment clearers with their bill hooks. So you might be a tiler in the summer and you might be a man who hacked and slashed at trees in the winter. I find it fascinating to think that there would have been traveling bands of specialists who were good at hedging and were also good at making tiles. It doesn't seem to fit together but at the same time it does because one could be done in the summer and one could be done in the winter. Some of you might recognize the bill as more of a medieval weapon than a medieval tool which of course is completely correct. The English were famous for fighting with bill blocks especially during the War of the Roses and those bills were little more than modified hedging tools. So the bills you can buy today which are the same kind of tool that would have been used in the medieval period with a few minor modifications maybe welding a spike onto the very end would be used on the battlefield and those skills in hacking back hedges and clearing the landscape with a bill day in day out would be employed on the battlefield in a very similar way because that tool was now a and to push against enemy soldiers. Very very similar in many ways and just as lethal. In the medieval period artificial lighting was available of course you had a fire you might have candles if you were high status or rush lights if you were poor but none of the lights actually were that good for doing any kind of close-up work and also the weather would have meant it was cold or freezing sometimes so different types of jobs simply couldn't be done outside anymore. So with the turning of the seasons was the turning of jobs and one job might change into another from summer to winter. We know that building sites tended to close down from about the end of September because lime doesn't work when it's freezing cold. We know that tilers stopped doing their job because clay doesn't really set properly when it's freezing cold. So there are jobs you can do when the weather is good and when the temperature is right and when you have enough light but as the winter draws on it becomes cold and it becomes difficult to do certain jobs which of course means there are opportunities there are other jobs that you can do in the winter and vegetation dies back in England and you can see what you're doing when you want to clear landscapes. So there is a season for each kind of job and that's certainly something in the West that we've forgotten a little bit. Seasons are just things in the calendar but in the medieval period they made a fundamental difference to what you could do how long you could do it for and where you did it.