Even in relatively peaceful times, medieval existence was for the majority a harsh and uncertain one – Lawrence Stone describing rural life as “at the mercy of disease and the weather...with money to burn today from the sale of a bumper crop, plunged into debt tomorrow because of harvest failure”. Nevertheless, the rural community was clearly prepared to play hard, as well as work hard (even if much of the surviving evidence for this comes in the form of official censure, ecclesiastical or secular). The festival calendar provided some fifty holy days for seasonal and communal coming-together and merry-making. Complaints against the rise in levels of drunkenness and crime on holidays, of flirting in church or on pilgrimage, of grievous bodily harm from the “abominable enough...foot-ball-game” all testify (however indirectly) to a vital, if unofficial medieval existence. Langland might castigate, but also provided a vivid picture of, those who “drink all day in diverse taverns, and gossip and joke there”, of the field-workers who "sat down to drink their ale and sing songs – thinking to plough his field with a 'Hey-nonny-nonny'". The wandering scholar, or goliard, who posed the mock questions of whether it was better to eat meat or fish, to court Agnes or Rose, belonged to a similar fraternity.