Live locally, live sustainably, live medieval

If you want to live a sustainable life today, you need to think local. For that, you can channel the experience of the Middle Ages, as Dr Ian Mortimer suggests

An illustrated drawing shows 3 peasants, dressed in yellow, green and orange, exchanging goods including corn and chicken. A pink pig is in the foreground

Published: July 23, 2025 at 10:30 AM

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When I have a spare moment, I dabble in making hazel hurdle fence panels. It’s gloriously therapeutic. You get yourself a fat bundle of six-foot-long straight hazel rods, ram a few of them vertically into the ground at regular intervals and then cajole the rest of your rods through them on the horizontal, weaving them in and out of the uprights. The trick is to bend the rods robustly so that you can feel the fibres creaking and twisting through your palms, but you can’t be so hard on the wood that it cracks and snaps. It’s bad if that happens.

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A fence made of light brown hazel rods, weaved together. In the background, there is a wall covered in ivy and a wooden structure with fairy lights on it

“My shabby efforts at making hazel hurdle panels,” explains Dr David Musgrove. “Note the amateur broken ends of the rods.”

I am a rank amateur at this, and the results of my labours are woefully rustic, but I like the process of getting there. If you’re doing it properly, you’re supposed to split the hazel rods in half, but I’ve yet to conquer that art. To see it done masterfully, there are loads of informative videos of competent, serious chaps in forests teasing the wood into beautiful hurdle panels.

People have been making hazel hurdle panels for millennia. In the Somerset Levels, archaeologists have excavated them in situ where they were laid down in the Neolithic period as trackways to help people get across the boggy ground. They survive, amazingly, because peat grew up over them and protected them.

The trickiest bit of making a hazel hurdle is procuring the rods. You have to coppice trees (ie cut them down to the base) in order to encourage the hazel to shoot up in straight stems. If you’re managing a woodland, you would crop the coppiced hazel on a regular rotation every five to seven years. It’s a very sustainable building material because the wood grows back fast and parallel, and we know that in the Middle Ages, they were definitely managing their local woodlands to supply this.

The medieval mindset

It’s just one of many examples of sustainable living that our medieval forebears were engaged in, according to the historian and author Dr Ian Mortimer. “They managed their resources in a way that they knew they could get continuing crops off – if you pollard or coppice a tree, it’ll grow back stronger. They knew about all that sort of thing.”

For Mortimer, there’s a lesson there for us – we should look back to the Middle Ages for inspiration for living sustainably today. Now I know what you’re thinking: those medieval folks weren’t living sustainably because they wanted to, but simply because they had to.

It’s certainly true, according to Mortimer, that life in 11th-century England was precarious for many. He notes there was a regular cycle of famine at the time, so much so that some parents were willing to sell their children into slavery, “because that was a child’s best chance of survival”.

There wasn’t much surplus around, and for most people, there wasn’t ready access to markets to transfer the surplus anyway, so most communities were pretty much self-sufficient and heavily dependent on their own productivity and ingenuity.

Four pictures show a group of people surrounding a large table, chopping up pieces of meat and hanging them on hooks

A scene from the butchers at a market, painted between 1414 and 1418 by an anonymous artist (Image by Getty)

By the time we get to the 13th century, however, things are different. England was much more of a market economy and a lot of goods were moving around. Surpluses could be transferred from places with plentiful supplies to areas in need. The precariousness of a subsistence economy was thus overcome. Nevertheless, communities continued to source most of their food and raw materials from their locality. The less distance it had to travel, the less vulnerable the society.

WATCH | Dr Ian Mortimer on the medieval mindset of maximising sustainability

“Local production combined with a market economy is a very positive way of maximising sustainability. Whether the Middle Ages had a concept of environmental protection or not, people living then certainly knew how to marshal their local resources and wider networks. And that included working together, collectively and collaboratively.”

To avoid the spectre of food shortages, medieval farmers had to manage their risks across the community, share good and bad land equitably among one another, and accept communal rules about what was gathered when, where and by whom.

Whether the Middle Ages had a concept of environmental protection or not, people living then certainly knew how to marshal their local resources and wider networks

“Look through the manorial customs of medieval manors, and they’ll be saying when the peasants can go take their pigs into the woods to get the beech mast from the ground, and when they’re allowed to pick up the fallen sticks for their firewood, how much timber they're allowed to take for their houses,” observes Mortimer. “When you think about an open field system, which is what we had across most of central England, you can see how they divide all the strips of land into areas where no one’s going to have all their land blighted by a frost pocket because it’s all divided up and scattered, so there’s an average sort of production level across all the fields.”

Two peasants – one dressed in a red top and blue hat, the other in a blue top with red hat – are bent over in the woods, gathering sticks and twigs. In the background, there are fields, thatched cottages and a man riding a white horse

Two peasants gather sticks and twigs, turning them into bundles. This traditional wintertime activity is shown here in a Book of Hours c1550 (Image by Getty)

Community values

What Mortimer is describing there is a way of living communally where resources were shared in a way that was seen as equitable. It had to be managed and rules observed of course, and that’s where the customs of the manor, and the writ of the lord’s local representative, the reeve, came into play. This wasn’t some utopian land of harmony – some people didn’t conform, sometimes there were disputes and disagreements, and sometimes the lords of the manors pressed hard with their demands on the peasants. But there was a strong element of co-operation among these communities to allow for this way of living. Living sustainably was only sustainable if they worked together.

Some people didn’t conform, sometimes there were disputes and disagreements, and sometimes the lords of the manors pressed hard with their demands on the peasants

People in the Middle Ages would not have understood the concept of sustainable living – to them, it was just living. So you might take the view that this interpretation is simply historians today mirroring 21st-century concerns and projecting them onto the past. Of course, that’s true to an extent – history is always a reflection of the present. However, academics have been writing about this aspect of medieval life for quite a while.

A shepherd dressed in light brown and red stands by his flock of sheep. He stands on a yellow path, next to a cream building. In the background, there are more buildings, lots of green trees and a big blue building

A shepherd leading his flock, as depicted in a 15th-century miniature. There was a strong ethos of cooperation between medieval peasants (Image by Getty)

There is an interesting paper written back in 1990 by Jules Pretty, who is now emeritus professor of environment and society at the University of Essex, and a noted voice in sustainable living. His paper, published in the Agricultural History Review, and called “Sustainable Agriculture in the Middle Ages: The English Manor”, makes the argument that the medieval peasantry valued highly the goals of stability, sustainability and equitability. Like Mortimer, Pretty stresses the importance of neighbourly cooperation:

“Villagers traded ale, cereals, hay, livestock and wood, and hired out livestock, ploughs, harrows and carts. Secondly, they provided support and mutual help for each other, particularly through crop and plough-team sharing arrangements. Peasants lent grain, livestock, tools and household utensils to needy neighbours, though these arrangements were more common between small and middle landowners. Thirdly, communal decisions were taken against individuals who had attempted to over-consume or underinvest in the communal resources – in particular those who had encroached onto the common wastes, had over-used the commons, over-gleaned the fields, or had neglected their obligations to maintain roads, ditches, hedges and gate.”

Waste not, want not

Of course, they were also very mindful of not wasting what they did produce. All parts of the animals they kept were eaten, and they consumed the old animals rather than the young so that they could be sure of getting all the resources (milk, wool, that sort of thing) from them in life. They made sure that they returned what they could to the land they worked as well. The use of animal, and human, excrement for manure was a major concern. And when it came to building materials, they were very happy to reuse stone and timbers from old structures wherever they could – you only have to look at the Roman bricks in the great Norman tower of St Albans Cathedral to see that.

A photograph of St Albans Cathedral. To the left, a tree partially obscures the building. To the right, a large building with many arched windows and a large tower.

The Norman tower of St Albans Cathedral includes reused Roman bricks, just one example of a sustainable building practice in the Middle Ages (Image by Dreamstime)

In his forthcoming book, Mortimer’s A-Z of English History (Old Street, publication scheduled for 21 October 2025), Mortimer succinctly explains this, and he’s let me quote a few paragraphs here: “Today, few of us keep vats of urine stored around the house. But up until the 19th century it is collected and put to use in fulling wool and scouring cloth, as well as being employed in various dyeing processes. It is in demand because it’s a natural and cheap source of ammonia, which is an alkali. People also use spots of it when removing stains from clothing. It becomes more efficacious when it is old, so people really do store vats of it for long periods of time. Thus, when you imagine the smells in an ordinary medieval home, along with the smoke and the traces of rotting offal in the rushes, add the smell of stale piss.

A document showing drawings of 12 bottles of urine. The top 5 are filled with urine from red to green colour, the second row of four have orange and yellow, and the last row of three contain very dark red to black urine

A series of flagons containing urine, which, until the 19th century, used to be stored by people at home for various tasks (Image by Getty)

“The point here is not to laugh at how gross life was in the past. It is rather that people in the pre-industrial age look at things that we think of as undesirable in different ways. In the 1960s the sociologist Mary Douglas famously observed that there is objectively no such thing as ‘dirt’ but rather what we call ‘dirt’ is simply ‘matter out of place’. A good example is manure: in the garden, it is definitely in the right place; in the middle of your living room carpet, it is dirt. This is why medieval people keep hold of things that neither you nor I would want lingering around the house. In a world created by God, everything has its ‘right place’.

“Usefulness is the key. Or sustainability, as we might call it today. Medieval people keep old ashes from the hearth to make potash, which is used for scouring pots and pans with handfuls of straw. They also use potash for making lye (in which you wash your hair, even though it is strongly alkaline). It is also a key ingredient of liquid soap (in which you clean your clothes). Likewise, medieval people will eat all manner of offal that we would throw away. Apples are kept carefully for a full year; if they turn rotten, they are pressed to make cider. Nothing is wasted. Bones are boiled for their marrow. Fat is stored in dripping pans. Skins from all sorts of animals, including goats, dogs and cats, are made into gloves. Fallen boughs and sticks are put aside for firewood. The heat that remains in an oven after the bread has been baked is used to make small cakes. ‘Waste not, want not’ is the motto by which everyone lives unless they are rich enough to be a ‘waster’, and even the wasters let their castoffs and rubbish be used by other people. Almost nothing is thrown away except broken pottery and the cloth used to wipe your ‘nether end’.”

A man dressed in grey, wearing a red hat with gold veil, picks acorns from trees to feed the pigs in front of him

A peasant gathering acorns for pigs, shown in a Book of Hours. ‘Waste not, want not’ was a motto for medieval life (Image by Getty)

The three Rs

In our interview, I didn’t chat to Mortimer about the repair culture in the Middle Ages very much, but we did run a fascinating interview on the HistoryExtra podcast a little while ago with the German medievalist Professor Annette Kehnel, author of The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability. Kehnel explained how the repair business was a thriving one in European medieval cities, with people making their livelihoods by repairing clothes, shoes and household goods. You can listen to that here.

So, if you think of the three Rs of sustainability – reduce, reuse, recycle – the people of the Middle Ages were absolutely living the second and third values in that list, but not so much the first. Reducing consumption wasn’t really in the gift of most people, with the limited resources available to them, though Mortimer does note that the strictures of the church in terms of not eating meat does play into that:

“ You could take the view that the restriction on eating meat across Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays in the Catholic church was not just a spiritual thing, but also about eking out protein because you don’t need to eat meat every single day. Eating fish as opposed to meat then naturally balances things out.”

To conclude then, Mortimer’s message, drawing on his knowledge of the Middle Ages, is that, if we want to live sustainably today, “Necessities all need to be local and all need to be transported within the locality, in a way that’s reliable and energy-efficient and low cost.”

There are problems with that. It’s much more difficult to buy locally if you happen to live in a modern conurbation, and as is regularly reported, it’s often much more expensive to buy locally produced foods than it is to get imported products in a supermarket. But there are urban co-operative movements springing up across the UK that are trying to address those problems.

It’s been argued, and counter-argued, that the decline of neighbourliness occurred in the post-medieval period as the ethical code of the old village community unwound in the face of more individualistic behaviour in the 16th and 17th centuries. That debate has been going on among social historians of early modern England for decades, and it carries on still. I’m not going to get into that here, but perhaps the message is that locality, community and sustainability fit together. That certainly was the case in the Middle Ages, and maybe that’s something we should think about today. If we want to live sustainably, we need to think about how we live as local communities and cooperate harmoniously.

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Authors

Dr David Musgrove, FSAContent director

David Musgrove is the content director at HistoryExtra

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