St Martin's Day
St Martin's Day is the 11th of November and marks the end of the farming cycle for the peasants. On this day the stubble that remains from the grain field is burned. For the most part the peasants grew wheat, rye, and barley plus a small garden. By the mid 1700's they were also growing potatoes, a crop recently introduced to Poland. The wheat produced on the land was often given to the landlord as payment for the use of his land for farming and the courser rye and barley milled into flour for bread for the peasants.
St Martin's Day is also the date that the peasants assessed their food stored up for the coming winter.
If there was more livestock than winter fodder stored, this was the time for slaughtering the excess livestock. So this may be the only time of the year that the peasants might have meat to eat. As noted in Peter Remus' contract, his payments to the Polish nobility were made on St Martin's day in salt. Thus, the Polish nobility who received the salt from Peter would have salt to preserve meat into the winter period - but the peasants might have to eat the meat immediately.
If it was a truly terrible year, the family might have to consider infanticide or worse. The story of Hansel and Gretel is actually a cleaned up version of an old story of the terrible choice facing parents if it was a truly bad crop year. They could all starve or the young (or old) taken to the forest and be put in God's hands.
The peasant's remaining family huddled in a one room house for the duration of the winter. The peasant's remaining animals usually shared the one room and provided warmth during the cold winter.
It was a very hard life of brutal choices. The peasants faced hard work and a very short life (averaging life expectancy was 17 years in the 13th century but increasing to 35 years by the 18th century).
November 5, 2002