This is the Summer month, with trees at their fullest and the flowers most fair. On the land, where most of medieval England’s population’s concerns were centered, the summer work began to intensify, with sheep-shearing at the beginning of the month, followed by one of the quarter days of the year when rents came due, after which there was an increase in the work days that lords received by right from their landholders.

Because sheep’s wool was the basis for much of England’s wealth at every level of society, shearing time was a vital time for the economy. The sheep were not simply dipped but thoroughly washed and foul wool removed before shearing. Afterward, the husbandman or lord was expected to give a dinner for those who had helped with his flock, and the sheared fleeces were prepared and sacked in readiness for when the wool merchants and their agents would tour the country purchasing it for the foreign trade. Households would keep enough wool for its own clothing needs, with the carding, spinning, dyeing, weaving, and sewing needed for clothing a year-round concern for housewives. 

Ideally, the shearing would be done before St. John the Baptist day, June 24. This was one of the four quarter days of each year, when the rents came due and contracts might be renewed. It was also the last holiday before the long stretch of haying and harvest work began. On its eve, bonfires and the gathering of green boughs to decorate homes and churches was traditional, with dancing around the bonfires and often a town watch parading all night with torches and merriment. In London a Watch of 2,000 men would parade the streets on Midsummer’s Eve and again five days later on the eve of St. Peter and Paul. 

The hunting season for hare ended now (since Michaelmas in last September), and although the roebuck continued in season there was usually a ‘time of grace’ from Midsummer to Holyrood Day (September 14). 

For farmers, field work became the over-riding concern. Depending on the year’s weather and local climate some haying might be started in late May but usually sufficient dry weather could not be counted on until June, and even then

Wet weather could be a disaster to a hay crop, and disaster to the hay crop meant fewer animals could be kept through the coming winter so that the next spring there would be fewer animals for breeding, milk, cheese, and wool – a disaster for everyone. The haying was spread out through June and July. It had to be timed not only to the weather but to when the meadows were ready to be cut and dried, and even then only some of the meadows could be cut at one time to better the chances of getting enough good hay to last the whole year.

Meanwhile, weeding of crops and all the dairy work went on. Because of the increase in the number of work days that a worker owed his lord after Midsummer, there was even less time for someone to do his own work just when he needed it most. The constant tug-of-war between the workers, wanting to work their own land, and the lord’s clerks, trying to keep track of who owed what work when and seeing to it that the work got done, was probably a major factor in those work-days gradually being commuted to money payments, freeing the workers to their own work and simplifying the lord’s business since he could then simply hire workers without all the bureaucratic interfacing that complicated everyone’s life. 

This was also the time for repairing mills (necessary to grind grain to make bread that was a staple of everyone’s life) and setting up pens for animals on new-mowed land, placing weirs in streams to catch fish, and doing last minute planting. 

For those less tied to the land, the expectation of good weather made this a likely time for travel, for merchanting or pilgrimages, and such aristocratic games as tournaments. Between the cool of Spring and the heat of Summer, warm June could be the most pleasant time of the year – for those with the leisure to enjoy it.