P. J. P. Goldberg
It was a commonplace for educated people of the medieval era to think in terms of the ages of man, but the bewildering multiplicity of schemes for dividing the life-span into three, four, five, six, seven or some other number of divisions tells its own story. These are abstract conventions that cannot be read as simple mirrors of social practice. Thus, for example, within the tripartite scheme, the first stage may extend well into the third decade. The stages of childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood are here compressed into a single phase, but there is little reason to believe that people in the middle ages were unable to recognise these as distinctive and with their own needs. The terminology of the ages of man schema is likewise problematic. Latin terms such as pueritia, adolescentia and iuventus suggest obvious English equivalents, but these are in fact meaningless outside the philosophical framework to which they belong. It would be unwise, however, to dismiss these systems as of no practical relevance. They may not readily translate into evidence for social practice, but they may still have influenced the way people of the time thought about themselves and each other. The effect of the schemes tends to be that maturity was achieved only slowly, but that old age was reached at an earlier age than we would expect from the perspective of our own culture of longevity. The clue here is that the three score years and ten of the life course was regularly seen as characterised by a progression towards and then a falling away from a peak of physical and intellectual development achieved at the half-way stage. Indeed, this ‘perfect age’ corresponded with the thirty-three years that Christ achieved by the time of his crucifixion. It follows that people in the middle ages may not have thought themselves fully adult until well into their twenties, but may have considered themselves old at the point we in our own culture admit to middle age.
The ‘ages of man’ tends to be just that. It relates to the lives of men and hardly addresses the rather different circumstances of women. Phillips
Offers an alternative model for the ‘ages of woman’ that sees her perfect age as located not in the fourth, but in the second decade.481 Here the model is not Christ, but Mary, who became a mother at fourteen, and the numerous virgin martyrs whose mortal lives ended in their mid to later teens. Again, it would be foolhardy to imagine that women were considered adult some years before men or old before their brothers had even entered the phase of‘youth’. What it does suggest, however, is that there was a particular cultural interest in the young unmarried woman in a way that was perhaps less true of men. Medieval societies socialised men and women differently. If we are to follow the life courses of men and women in medieval England, we must offer an account that is sensitive to gender difference. Though birth, reproduction and death are natural processes, the process of socialisation, the making of marriage, or provision for old age and death are culturally constructed and hence have their own histories. We need, therefore, also to be aware of change over time and differences in the experiences of different status groups.
This is a demanding agenda. Unfortunately the medievalist is not helped by the paucity of the evidence. This is an era before censuses and the collection of vital statistics; only in 1538 did Thomas Cromwell institute the recording of baptisms, marriages and burials, and most extant parish registers are from at least a generation later. The position regarding the more obvious personal sources - letters, diaries and autobiographical accounts - is not much more satisfactory. The last two hardly exist in our period, the first only for comparatively select groups and only really from the fifteenth century. The medievalist must look instead for otherwise less promising texts and adopt an essentially creative approach to sources that only indirectly relate to mapping the history of the human lifecycle. It follows also that more attention is given to some aspects of the lifecycle than others simply because some are better documented: much has been written on the making of marriage, but all too little on married life itself. Childhood, and particularly earlier childhood, is especially sparsely documented. The upper echelons of society, as always, are better recorded than those at the bottom of the social hierarchy.
The bringing of new life into the world was, and still is, an anxious time, but for people in the middle ages it had added cultural significance because the child represented a new and vulnerable soul. Depictions of childbirth invariably represent the mother assisted by numbers of other women, and documentary evidence reinforces the view that what some scholars have dubbed the ‘ceremony’ of childbirth was exclusively women’s territory. (Indeed it is tempting to conclude that the frequency of manuscript depictions of childbirth represents a form of voyeurism on the part of male artists and book owners.) The women helpers called to the mother in labour were probably largely friends, neighbours and kin rather than professionals, but equally it is likely that some of these women, through attending numbers of births, would have gained experience of the management of delivery. It follows that the woman who took the principal role in assisting the mother need not have been a professional midwife, in the way we might understand the term today, but rather an older and more experienced neighbour. Only larger towns could have generated enough births to support professional midwives - two midwives are, for example, listed in the poll tax returns for Reading in 1381 - though numbers of women may have acted on a semi-professional basis.482
Delivery, ideally, took place in a specially prepared room kept warm and dark. We know this best from post-medieval evidence, but it is also suggested from the chance description of births found in church court litigation. In one case from the later fourteenth century a gentlewoman, Ellen de Rouclif, gave birth in a basement room, which was implicitly not the family’s regular bedchamber.483 This attempt to mimic the womb may, however, have signified the social rank of the mother. Most mothers would have lived in houses comprising only one or two rooms and there would have been little scope to set space aside for the mother’s confinement and delivery. Similarly we must be sceptical as to the degree to which mothers were formally segregated for the month after their delivery prior to their ritual reincorporation into the community by means of purification or ‘churching’, which involved the mother being sprinkled with holy water at the church door. That most mothers were churched, and so cleansed of the impurities of sexual intercourse and childbirth, is suggested by the large numbers of women recorded as paying fees for the ritual in surviving fifteenth-century parish accounts.484 That we also have evidence that the day of the mother’s churching might be accompanied by family celebration, as was the case with Ellen de Rouclif, suggests, however, that the laity understood childbirth in more positive terms.
Much has been written of medieval scientific knowledge concerning obstetrics, but little is known of ordinary practice. The men who wrote the academic texts on the subject were not the women who delivered the children. Even those texts in the vernacular and supposedly addressed to women, such as The Knowing of Womankind in Childing, do not address the management of normal deliveries.485 This strengthens our earlier suggestion that such knowledge was gained from experience, not from texts. Depictions of childbirth invariably show the mother lying in bed whilst other women wash the infant or fetch the mother nourishing food or ‘caudle’. Sometimes a chair that looks remarkably like a delivery stool is placed next to the bed and it seems likely that such stools were indeed used for the actual delivery. The mother may have been aided in less tangible ways by the use of written prayers and charms or, not uncommonly, a girdle (fabric belt) borrowed from (and hence empowered by) an image of the Virgin in the parish church. The mother would also have invoked spiritual help during labour, notably from St Margaret, who, because she had escaped from the belly of a dragon, was regarded as the patroness of women in childbed.
Parents were anxious to see their newly born infants baptised quickly, often within forty-eight hours of delivery, lest the child, stained by original sin, be denied hope of salvation by dying unbaptised. In an emergency the baptism could be performed by the midwife and naming could follow subsequently. This shared concern with the sacrament of baptism suggests that parents were interested in and concerned for their children even as tiny babies, but that these sentiments co-existed with a pragmatic recognition of infants’ vulnerability. Statistical evidence for perinatal and maternal mortality does not really exist, but the likelihood is that it was less acute than is popularly imagined. Archaeological evidence does provide harrowing examples of the skeletal remains of adult women with their babies still lodged at the pelvic opening. But because the bones of small infants do not generally survive, archaeology cannot give us an overall sense of infant mortality. Anecdotal evidence from the Rouclif case noted previously relates to the births of seventeen children. Of these, eight were still alive when aged about twelve years, four had died in the intervening years, one lived to at least eighteen months (and may still have been alive at the time of the case), and of the remaining four nothing further is known. Of the four that had died, one is known to have lived a few months, another only a matter of days.
Early childhood may have been a hazardous time, but those scholars who have argued that parents chose not to invest emotionally in their offspring lest they die are hard pressed to find contemporary evidence to support this thesis. Babies were swaddled, normally nourished with their mothers’ milk, sung lullabies, rocked in their cradles, and carried about where necessary. Primary childcare appears to have been very much within women’s province. It may be that older female siblings and, in slightly better-off households, female servants assisted mothers to care for the very young, but wet nurses, who suckled the infant in place of the mother, seem not to have been employed below the ranks of the aristocracy (and perhaps more prosperous urban families). Maternal breastfeeding was probably extended well into the child’s second year and so the infant was given some protection from various diseases through the mother. The practice of prolonged maternal breastfeeding would also have helped reduce the mother’s fertility and so helped space births.
We have little evidence for infanticide or the abandonment of children. It may be unsurprising that an essentially secret crime should go undetected and unreported, but it is worth remarking that, unlike in the cities of northern Italy, there was no institutional provision for abandoned children, and the 1377 poll tax returns do not raise suspicions concerning the overall gender balance of the population. Had there been a marked cultural prejudice against girls and in favour of boys, we might expect to see the sort of skewed sex ratios found for early fifteenth-century Tuscan communities. The probability is that both infanticide and abandonment were comparatively rare occurrences, though a fourteenth-century pastoral manual, the Memoriale presbiterorum, advises confessors to ask of ‘sexually experienced women’ whether they have ever abandoned a child in a church or churchyard as a foundling.486 One telling factor here is that there was perhaps not the same cultural stigma attached to mothers who gave birth outside wedlock as appears to have been true of southern Europe, where family honour demanded that daughters remained at home and guarded their virginity until they were married.
Hanawalt has made a pioneering attempt to throw light on early childhood using coroners’ rolls: that is, evidence relating to homicides and accidental deaths.487 This is clearly an oblique and problematic source. She has argued that these records show that male toddlers were much more likely to wander outside the house (and so fall into ditches and the like) than their sisters. This could reflect interesting gender differences whereby little girls were discouraged from leaving the house, but may only reflect the greater likelihood of the coroner being called to investigate the death of a male child than a female. Hanawalt has also argued that slightly older children were likely to imitate the tasks of their same-gender parent. Phillips has likewise noticed that mothers were more likely to find the bodies of daughters who had gone missing, whereas both parents were equally likely to find sons.488 The implication is that parents were aware of, and children were taught, distinctive gender identities from quite an early age. These may also have been reflected in dress and in the games children played. We know that toys, such as spinning tops or lead-moulded knights, were made on a commercial basis, and hence that play was a recognised need of young children, but we know little of which children played with which toys.
Older children were probably allowed much freedom to play among themselves whether in the house, the fields or the street. Children may also have played near to where their parents were working. In the urban artisanal household the family and work groups were essentially the same, and fathers here may have played nearly as active a role in supervising children as mothers. Children probably assisted their parents initially as an extension of play. In the peasant economy, certain tasks were regularly assigned to children, notably tending livestock in the fields, scaring birds away from newly sown crops, gathering firewood, collecting nuts and berries. Mothers presumably taught their daughters to use the distaff from a young age; boys would have learnt how to use a bow and arrow.
The rudiments of the faith and the identity of some of the more important saints would have been taught to young children: mothers - as much as parochial clergy - probably played a key role here. In aristocratic, mercantile and substantial artisanal, and even some well-to-do peasant households mothers may also have instructed children in the basics of reading, though this was probably rare before the later fourteenth century. Older boys, particularly in an urban context, might go on to grammar school for instruction in Latin, and a small number of peasant boys would have been singled out to be trained as clergy. The most ubiquitous way in which youngsters learnt skills outside the home was, as we shall see, through the institution of ‘lifecycle’ service, whereby teenagers and young adults lived as part of the household and labour force of family acquaintances, distant kin and even strangers. Service and servants tended to be more a feature of urban than rural society and this is reflective of the generally more conservative nature of peasant society.
The peasant economy was characterised by a rather more marked gender division of labour than appears true of urban society. Though both sexes were involved of necessity in the grain and hay harvests, which even in the labour-abundant years of the earlier fourteenth century put real pressures on the rural labour force, some tasks were gender-specific. Ploughing and mowing, for example, were men’s work, but weeding and dairying were women’s work. Hanawalt has argued from her analysis of the spatial location of accidental deaths that men’s work was outdoors, while women stayed within or close by the house. Our preceding observation shows that this interpretation does not hold water, but suggests another more subtle distinction. Weeding and dairying could be learnt from a comparatively early age since only some of the processes depended on the possession of a certain height and physical development. As such they could be learnt informally by girls tagging along beside their mothers. Ploughing and mowing using a scythe could only be attempted from a more advanced age since both were potentially dangerous and would require careful supervision. It follows that boys would have been taught these as teenagers and not as children and that the more conscious process of teaching would have imbued these activities with a certain kudos that we somewhat lazily label ‘skill’. Girls, on the other hand, tended not to be initiated into new tasks on achieving their teens with the consequent result that women’s work was seen to be inherently unskilled (or even ‘natural’ to women), and that women were seen always to occupy a category akin to children. The one qualification to this general pattern is that in pastoral areas some older girls would have learnt how to make butter and cheese or how to shear sheep. It is in this pastoral sector, also, that we find significant rural evidence for the employment of young women as live-in servants.489
The point at which children left home varied considerably, though it is unlikely that they normally left before they achieved their canonical majority (twelve for girls, fourteen for boys). Emmota Cokfeld’s famula, noted in a matrimonial case of 1394 running an errand for her mistress, was twelve at the time.10 Many children, however, particularly in the countryside, remained within the natal home into adulthood and may only have left, if at all, to marry. The principal factor pulling children away from the natal home prior to marriage was the demand for servants and this was always greater in towns, characterised by a multiplicity of crafts and services not found in peasant society, particularly in the century after the Black Death. The point remains, however, that from their early teens children were considered of sufficient age to leave home and to work for others. It follows that whether they remained with their natal families or otherwise, children of this age were considered old enough to be an integral part of the household labour force. Though not yet thought adult, they were no longer children.
Youngsters of both sexes can be found as servants and the later fourteenth-century poll taxes suggest that in towns the gender balance was fairly even. Many urban servants would be migrants from the surrounding countryside, but even rural servants, who tended to be predominantly males, moved about and did not necessarily work in their natal communities. Usually servants contracted for a year at a time, though half-year contracts are also found; parents probably contracted on behalf of younger servants, but older servants were free to negotiate terms for themselves. Certain days in the year were established as customary hiring dates, notably Martinmas (ii November) north of the Trent and Michaelmas (29 September) in the midlands and south, but other feast days, such as Pentecost (late spring or early summer) or the feast of St John the Baptist (29 August) are also commonly found. Alice Dalton, for example, remembered taking positions as a servant in York and neighbouring Poppleton variously at Martinmas and Pentecost when aged between fifteen and eighteen in the earlier years of the fifteenth century.11 The exceptions to this pattern were apprentices who might contract at any time, but who normally served for a period of seven years. Most were male, but a few females were apprenticed to silkworkers, embroiderers and the like. Both servants and apprentices were primarily remunerated in terms of bed, board and clothing. Only some older servants are likely to have received anything approaching a wage paid at the
BIA, CP. E.215. 11 BIA, CP. F.201.
Conclusion of their term. At the end of the fourteenth century, for example, John, the servant of the Oxford brewer Thomas Chantour, was given a tunic with hood, a ‘roket’ [coat] and an apron, plus ios, clearly an insufficient wage had he been expected to feed and house himself.490
Service provided an opportunity for youngsters to gain a variety of skills and be socialised in manners that could not readily be provided in the natal home or even in the natal community. The aristocracy seems commonly to have sent their children into service in households of the same or higher status as part of their upbringing. Anne, Elizabeth and Margery Paston, for example, members of a Norfolk gentry family, all spent time in the households of other aristocratic families. London mercantile families may have hoped to launch their children’s careers in like fashion. Geoffrey Chaucer, for example, the son of a London vintner, began his career as a page in the household of the countess of Ulster.491 Such service also provided a form of security for young people at around the age when they might lose one or both their parents, and there are examples of the children of deceased London citizens being placed as apprentices in order to provide them with quasi-parental nurture.
As youngsters gained skills, experience and strength, the temptation was to move on so as to learn more. Each time they did so they negotiated their terms of service afresh, always seeking some improvement in recognition of their growing experience. Moving on also meant servants were able to increase their contacts and, for older servants especially, the opportunities to enter into courtship and find a spouse. But although servants enjoyed a degree of independence and had a clear sense of the limits of their responsibilities to their employers and equally of their employers’ obligations towards them, they remained dependants and as such quasi-adolescents.
Coming of age seems to have varied according to gender and to social rank. It should also be seen as a process, since children acquired different degrees of autonomy and different responsibilities at different ages. Children could be held criminally responsible once ‘capable of trickery’ - perhaps at about ten years - and in peasant society boys were entered into the tithing (a sort of self-policing organisation) at twelve. Young women, like weeds, were thought by nature to mature more quickly than their brothers. This is reflected in the earlier age of consent (canonical majority) assigned to girls compared to boys, itself related to classical theories regarding sexual maturity. In fact girls probably achieved sexual maturity (menarche) at about fourteen or fifteen rather than at twelve years. Interestingly this coincides with feudal and customary understandings of age of majority for women, since peasant girls and the daughters of the aristocracy alike were considered to come of age for purposes of inheritance at or about fifteen. Aristocratic men, in contrast, generally came of age at twenty-one, but for other levels of society custom was less clearly fixed. Bracton, written immediately prior to our period, relates legal majority to the capacity of young people to carry out the responsibilities appropriate to their level of society. Thus the son of a burgess achieves ‘full age when he knows how properly to count money, measure cloths and perform other similar paternal business’. This is reflected in borough customs: at Shrewsbury a boy came of age at fifteen if he could measure cloth and tell a good penny from a bad. A woman of like status, according to Bracton, came of age when she knew how to order her house and do the things that belonged to its management. He adds that a girl will not have sufficient ‘discretion and understanding’ to manage these things before her fourteenth or fifteenth year.492 In peasant society the position for males varied from manor to manor according to custom. On the manor of Halesowen (Worcs.), for example, it was twenty-one, but at Thornbury (Gloucs.) it was only fourteen. The urban male apprentice, on the other hand, would not normally complete his apprenticeship before twenty-one and there is plenty of evidence for young people of both sexes still in service, and hence in positions of dependency, well into their twenties. These observations have implications for the ages at which young people married.
Marriage had different meanings for men and women. For males marriage represented social adulthood: in a culture in which couples set up a new home together, the man became a householder with authority over all others who came to reside within that household. For women marriage probably meant more in terms of reproduction and childrearing. Margery Kempe’s fourteen children, who are so conspicuously absent from her Book, were probably not atypical. Many mothers would have borne fewer, and of course the older children may have begun to leave home by the time the younger ones arrived. Nevertheless, most women would have passed much of their adulthood in repeated pregnancies and often with youngsters to nurse. Marriage also meant different things at different levels of society. The majority of men probably looked for a partner who could augment the labour needs of the household, just as women may have looked for a man who promised a degree of economic stability. For the aristocracy, however, work was not an issue. Rather the concern here was to make marriages that enhanced the respective families’ social position and which guaranteed the smooth transmission of property from one generation to the next. It will immediately be seen that here we pass from the concerns of the parties marrying to those of their families, and this is reflected in what we know about courtship and the making of marriage.
From the later twelfth century the Church taught that it was the consent of the man and the woman alone that made a marriage: an argument necessitated by the belief that the marriage of Joseph and the Virgin was unconsummated. This was formally incorporated into the provisions of the fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which also recognised marriage as a sacrament of the Church. The primacy of consent appears to have been respected without significant challenge, but in emphasising consent the Church did not expect young people to make their own decisions without due deference to their families. In fact autonomy was one pole of a spectrum that at the other end encompassed a high degree of parental persuasion. Most marriages fell somewhere within this spectrum. If parents or others exerted excessive pressure, the marriage could be challenged because it violated the principles of consent, as happened in 1362 when Alice Belamy of Raskelf (Yorks., N. R.) claimed her great uncle had threatened to pick her up by the ears and throw her down a well.15 Few young people, however, would have entered into matrimony in the face of hostility from parents, family or their own peer group.
Other than for the aristocracy, our knowledge of the processes by which marriages were made is largely limited to the evidence of litigation within the church courts and hence to a tiny minority of disputed contracts. They can nevertheless provide us with clues to the nature of the stages that went to make a marriage - for example, courtship, proposal, publicity and solemnisation at the church door. Thus the relative frequency of cases alleging forced marriage emanating from the more prosperous levels of peasant society and from the gentry may be indicative of a higher degree of parental involvement and influence in the making of
15
BIA, CP. E.85.
Marriages (especially of daughters). Reading the evidence in this way, it would seem that parental influence in the making of marriages was strongest at all times among the more well-to-do peasantry and weakest among townsfolk in the century following the Black Death. Here the high demand for servants was sufficient to give young people an unusual degree of freedom to engage in courtship and ultimately select marriage partners without constant parental supervision. For example, when Richard Carter and Joan atte Enges, servants in neighbouring York households, exchanged vows in about 1370, their employers, but not members of their families, were present. This was much less likely to have been the case before the plague and again by the second half of the fifteenth century. Thus when in 1470 Elizabeth Isaak of London agreed to marry John Bolde, she did so on condition that her brother consent, her father being dead, and Bolde on another occasion asked her mother for her good will.493
The likelihood is that well-to-do peasants shared the concerns of their social superiors and looked to make marriages for their children that enhanced the family’s standing and contacts within the community. They may also have adopted a conservative attitude towards their daughters’ ‘honour’, regularly understood in sexual terms, and so been more chary of allowing their daughters to engage in courtship. The proliferation of maidens’ guilds, and even young men’s guilds, during the later fifteenth century in rural parishes may represent one attempt to socialise the children of the more well-to-do in this conservative morality. We may also illustrate these values tangentially by reference to cases where a young woman’s brothers forced a wavering male suitor to contract marriage, and also by the case of Isabella Alan living in the Yorkshire Wolds in the mid fifteenth century who was allegedly paid 20 marks compensation by the man who had seduced her.494 This concern with honour accords with a number of other observations, notably the relative paucity of females found in service in the countryside (but the high proportion of adolescent and young adult women living at home) even at the time of the poll taxes. The daughters of the well-to-do are likewise much less likely to be presented within the manor court for fornication (and hence liable for the leyrwite fine) than their poorer sisters. Peasant women also probably married at an earlier age than their urban counterparts. Razi suggests that on the large West Midlands manor of Halesowen in the century or more from the 1270s, villein women who paid the marriage fine (merchet) appear to have done so when aged about eighteen.495 Razi’s evidence relates primarily to more well-to-do families, but that is our interest here. Women who live at home, who are protected from associating freely with the opposite sex and who marry when they are still in their teens (albeit late teens) are not going to be making their own marriage decisions. For these women, consent meant going along with their parents’ plans.
This pattern of parental initiative was at least as true of the aristocracy. At this level of society it was customary for the bride’s father to pay a dowry to the groom - at other levels of society some kind of matching of gifts on the part of both families to help set up the young couple in their new home appears more normal. Fathers consequently had an immediate financial stake in their daughters’ marriages. Aristocratic society likewise laid considerable weight on the ‘honour’ of their womenfolk and, although they might go into service in other aristocratic households, daughters were socialised from an early age to shun all intimate contact with the opposite sex and guard their virginity from the continuous snares and allurements of the male. This is the world of The Book of the Knight of the Tower, a later fourteenth-century French conduct book addressed to aristocratic girls which is known to have been popular in England and was printed by Caxton. Conversely, aristocratic males, especially younger sons, were allowed some freedom to seek out prospective marriage partners, though no marriage was possible without the good will of the woman’s family. There is much evidence from the various fifteenth-century gentry and mercantile letter collections of brothers exchanging information on possible spouses. Thus Richard Cely wrote in 1481 to the younger George Cely of John Dalton’s sister that ‘she is as goodly a young woman, as fair, as well-bodied and as serious as any I have seen these seven years, and a good height’.496 Oldest sons, to whom the family title and property would descend, probably enjoyed much less autonomy.
The balance between the influence of parents and kin and the autonomy allowed to young people themselves in the making of marriages is reflected in the ages at which couples married. Unfortunately clear statistical evidence for age at marriage is either lacking or problematic. It is easy to produce anecdotal examples of aristocratic child marriages - the need to spell out provision for brides marrying as children
In marriage contracts accentuates this picture - but the likelihood is that such marriages were the exception in our period. Hollingsworth’s evidence for the marriage of the daughters of dukes in the period 1330-1479 suggests that though some third had already married by their sixteenth birthday, another third only married at some point in their early twenties (and even then not all had married). Sons of dukes married at varying ages from about fifteen, although only half had married by twenty-five years. Fleming found that a sample of males who subsequently served as members of parliament married at a mean age of just under twenty-two years.20 Here it is tempting to suggest some correlation between legal majority, the inheritance of property and matrimony.
Outside the ranks of the aristocracy, child marriage was rarer still, though we do find the odd case from the church courts relating to the upper ranks of peasant society. In a marriage case from the first decades of the fourteenth century, Alice Crane of Cropwell Butler (Notts.) was only fourteen when she contracted William Crane, but he was himself allegedly even younger.21 Razi’s analysis of the Halesowen court rolls suggests peasant men normally married at about twenty to brides of a similar or slightly younger age, but his data are probably only reliable for better-off peasant families and, in relation to the marriage of males, the heir. Younger peasant sons may have married a little later. The same may be generally true of poorer peasant families. Poos’s analysis of the Essex poll tax returns for 1381 would support this: he found that a significantly higher proportion of husbandmen (the more substantial peasants) were married than was true of labourers (poor peasants).22 This is also apparent from the rather better 1379 Howdenshire (Yorks., E. R.) returns. This would translate into later marriage for the families of labourers and even a significant proportion of labourers opting out of marriage, having neither the means to support children nor the land that would benefit from the labour of those children. It should be noted that in Howdenshire these single labourers were as likely to be women as men.
For urban society we effectively have no evidence before the later fourteenth century, but an analysis of age and marital status from the deposition evidence cited earlier would suggest males marrying at some point in their mid twenties women only a couple of years younger, a
T. H. Hollingsworth, ‘A demographic study of the British ducal families’, Population Studies, ii (1957), 13—14; P. Fleming, Family and Household in Medieval England (Basingstoke, 2001), p. 22. BIA, CP. E.23; R. H. Helmholz, Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1974),
Pp. 20i-4.
Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, pp. 63, 136; Poos, A Rural Society, pp. 155—7.
Pattern that falls clearly within what demographic historians call a northwest European pattern, but which differs somewhat from the earlier pattern of marriage associated with (at least better-off) peasants. The Essex and Howdenshire poll tax evidence again reinforces this view. Age at marriage, particularly for women, may have fallen slightly, though still within the parameters of a north-western model, by the later fifteenth century since we have more evidence of familial involvement in marriages by this date. The implication is that a north-west European marriage regime emerged during the course of the English later middle ages and that it may have developed most precociously in towns and cities. Interestingly we begin to find some London authors at the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth century actively advocating love as a motivation for marriage. Thus Hoccleve wrote of his wife in an autobiographical passage in his Regiment of Princes that ‘I chose her as my mate for love alone’. He goes on to suggest - a comment on the frequency of separation - that those who marry for love stick together.497 This same precocious development may also be true of the developing economy of East Anglia. Smith has, for example, hypothesised that the Spalding serf lists (genealogical listings of the priory’s servile tenants) are compatible with such a marriage regime as early as the 1260s.498
Whereas the making of marriages is comparatively well documented, the nature of married life is much less so. Again we have more evidence for mercantile and gentry families from the fifteenth-century letter collections. Marriage meant the beginning of a sexual, and hence reproductive, relationship, though couples may often have begun this relationship prior to any actual solemnisation. Only at the end of our period does it appear that the upper echelons of peasant and urban society started to disapprove of sex before solemnisation and this itself may indicate that, for this level of society at least, the ceremony at the church door had come to be identified as symbolic of marriage rather than merely the final, and to some extent optional, stage in a longer process. Medieval men and women had some knowledge of contraceptive techniques. Biller, for example, has argued for the possibility of a widespread awareness of coitus interruptus (withdrawal), and the author of the Memoriale presbiterorum writes of the use of potions and herbs to impede conception or induce abortion.499 Nevertheless, it is likely that age at marriage and the practice of extended maternal breastfeeding were the most significant influences on how many children couples had. The clergy had much to say on the inappropriateness of sex at certain times - such as on Sundays, feast days or during Lent - in any position other than the missionary, and on the sinfulness of contraceptive practices. Some of this teaching may have been disseminated through preaching and the hearing of confession, but we cannot know how far the laity responded. What is apparent is that certain groups in lay society by the end of our period were beginning to articulate an increasingly conservative sexual morality and to demand the same of the clergy. This is reflected in accusations levelled by churchwardens at parochial visitations against neighbours who failed to keep their marriage vows and priests who were incontinent. Not all couples were faithful, and some married men used the services of prostitutes or fathered illegitimate children. The York merchant, John Goddysbruk, for example, asked in his will of 1407 that 20s be given ‘to Emmot with whom I had a daughter... and that it be sent to her secretly’.500 A minority of couples - perhaps one in ten - would, however, have been unable to conceive and so remained childless. Since, culturally and theologically, becoming a mother and rearing children was so important to a woman’s identity, such childlessness must often have been a cause of distress, hinted at in the sad case of the couple who were reported at the parish visitation for idolatry because they slept with an empty cradle by their bed ‘as if there were an infant in it’.501 Pregnancy and repeated childbirth would, nevertheless, have been the lot of most wives and the support of numbers of children the responsibility of most couples.
Clerical commentators and sermonisers regularly reiterated the authority of husbands over wives and the need for wives to be dutiful. The biblical understanding of husband and wife as one body, but with the husband at the head, is mirrored in legal notions. A husband was normally responsible for his wife’s debts, and a wife was exempt from responsibility for criminal actions if acting on her husband’s commandment. Conversely, the murder of a husband by his wife was considered ‘petty treason’. Husbands were expected to exercise authority over their wives as over their children and servants and could lawfully chastise a disobedient wife. In a society that freely used violence as a means of resolving disputes, a certain level of‘domestic’ violence should be no surprise, but neighbours expected certain limits and would not necessarily tolerate abusive husbands. Limited redress for abused wives was also provided by the church courts, which in extreme cases might sanction the separation of the couple subject to the payment of maintenance on the part of the husband. The normal experience, however, rarely impinges on the record. Most wives probably deferred to their husbands in public, but may have been less submissive privately. We have, moreover, plenty of evidence, from urban society especially, of women acting independently of their husbands, particularly in respect of economic activity.
The partnership between husband and wife was central to the household as an economic unit. In peasant society work activities, as we have already observed, tended to be more gender-specific, but husbands and wives would work together as a team cutting and binding during harvest. At other times husbands would plough, sow, ditch and hedge, whilst wives minded poultry, prepared flax, brewed ale or took goods to market. Poorer peasant couples were probably dependent on both parties selling their labour, though women may also have brought in additional income through spinning, keeping poultry or petty retailing. In urban society, wives were an integral part of the artisanal workshop. When in 1390-1, for example, the York founders’ guild moved to limit masters to a single apprentice at a time, special exemption was allowed to Giles de Benoyne ‘because he has no wife’.28 But in addition to assisting in the workshop and to serving customers from behind the counter, wives also contributed through a variety of other activities such as spinning, brewing, making candles (as in the case of butchers’ wives) or even on occasion running their own business (as must have been true of the London silkwomen, who were often married). Again, we know less about labouring couples, whose lives probably mirrored those of their rural counterparts.
The mutual dependence of most husbands and wives, the shared burden of responsibility for young children, the fact that husbandmen (peasants with sufficient land to support themselves) and artisans would have spent much of their days in their wives’ company, must have required couples to get on. Aristocratic and labouring couples may have spent less time together, but gentry correspondence suggests at least a high degree of mutual respect between husbands and wives, occasionally hints of real affection. The problem is that few conventional sources allow
28
Ibid.,
P. 203.
Much scope for the expression of feeling. We need to be careful not to see these silences as evidence of a lack of affective bond between spouses; nor should our own rather different cultural prejudices lead us to conclude that later medieval marriages were essentially loveless because the majority were not initiated solely by the young people making them.
Medieval marriages could not be terminated by divorce, a concept not recognised within canon law. Marriages could be annulled - declared never to have been valid - because bigamous, made without consent or between persons too closely related to one another; but this was rare. It does not follow, however, that couples always co-habited and remained faithful to one another. There are various scattered hints that couples sometimes separated by mutual consent - by the end of our period such couples were sometimes reported by the churchwardens at parish visitations - and it is apparent from disputed marriage cases that couples might even enter new relationships though strictly already married. The author of the Memoriale presbiterorum comments admonishingly that ‘many women despise their husbands and withdraw from them, dwelling apart’.502 How often such arrangements occurred is not known, but it was probably more common at the lower echelons of society than elsewhere.
Most marriages, however, were terminated not by human agency but by the death of a spouse. Remarriage seems to have been acceptable for both men and women, and a few prosperous individuals married more than twice. An analysis of York wills over the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries suggests that widowers were much more likely to remarry than widows: between one in three and one in two widowers remarried as against only one in six or seven widows. How representative these trends are is hard to tell, though widow remarriage was probably more common before the plague. In the land-hungry years of the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, peasant widows holding land were especially sought after in marriage. In some instances lords obliged widows to remarry in order to secure the considerable merchet (marriage) fine that landless males were prepared to offer. At other times, widows may have preferred not to remarry unless they had young children to support. A few wealthier widows, notably from the ranks of the gentry, took vows of chastity. In some instances, Cullum has argued, this was to protect them against familial pressures to remarry.503
Too often scholars have explored widow remarriage from a male perspective: widows will remarry if still young and attractive or have property to their name. In fact we need also to consider the woman’s perspective. Whereas men would regularly seek to find a new partner to care for them in their declining years, women were more capable of looking after themselves and many were in an economic position to do so. In urban society, at least before the late fifteenth century, widows of artisans seem regularly to have taken over workshops and to have continued to trade with the assistance of apprentices or other servants. Thus in 1458 Emmot Pannal, a York saddler’s widow, left all the tools of her workshop to her servant Richard Thorpp.31 In rural (and aristocratic) society jointure, whereby title to a holding was in the name of husband and wife, increasingly displaced customary arrangements for dower. The consequence was that widows enjoyed control over the entire holding, where previously they had merely a life interest in a third or half the holding.
Peasant couples and widows alike were able to use their possession of land as a means of purchasing security in old age. In the decades before the Black Death manor court rolls often record maintenance agreements whereby older peasants effectively passed their holdings to a younger generation in return for accommodation and regular provision of food. Such arrangements were made both with kin and non-kin, even at the cost of disinheriting the tenant’s own children. The more well-to-do might purchase corrodies, a sort of annuity or retirement plan, from a religious house. For a lump payment in advance of need, support in old age was purchased at levels that varied from simple provision of food to sheltered accommodation. From the later fourteenth century we also see a proliferation, especially, but not exclusively, in towns, of small hospitals or almshouses (sometimes also known as maisonsdieu or God’s houses). Their particular concern was with the ‘respectable’ poor: those too old, feeble or handicapped to support themselves.
For the poor in general, funerary and anniversary doles, casual almsgiving and the outdoor relief provided by some hospitals, religious houses and guilds provided a safety net. In rural society peasant holdings were sometimes given to support the poor and needy and so supplement (perhaps significantly) the alms supposed to be provided out of the parochial living. The lack of this provision could become a particular bone of contention where churches had been appropriated and the parish revenue thus diverted to a religious house. At all times, however, both in
31
Goldberg, Women in England, p. 197.
Town and country, the lot of the very poor was probably very hard, in spite of the tendency in the post-plague world for moralists to equate begging with wilful idleness.
Before the registration of baptisms and burials it is often hard to gauge average expectation of life. We have comparatively good evidence for the greater aristocracy and for numbers of monks, evidence that is thus skewed towards the better off, adults and males. The same is true of Razi’s data in respect of manorial tenants. Some attempts have been made to use cemetery evidence but these are often hampered by the problem of linking skeletal remains (aged not in years, but relative maturity) from a cemetery used over several centuries to a specific period. Lastly there is the evidence of the ages of witnesses or deponents attesting to proofs of age (where witnesses testified that a feudal heir was of age to inherit) or giving testimony within the church courts. Here we can find numerous old men (even the odd alleged centenarian), but no clear sense of how representative this evidence is of the general population structure.
For the manor of Halesowen between 1270 and 1400, Razi found that male tenants who survived to adulthood might on average live to fifty or thereabouts. This compares quite favourably with Russell’s evidence for tenants-in-chief, an exclusively aristocratic population, though here the mean life expectation dips to nearer forty for the cohorts born either side of the Black Death, whereas Razi’s sample actually shows a slight improvement in the half-century following the plague. It also compares with evidence for the monks, themselves often of peasant stock, of Christchurch (Canterbury) and Westminster around the middle of the fifteenth century.504 The monks’ expectation of life declined, however, later in the century (and at Westminster continued to decline until the end of the century). The congruence of these different pieces of evidence is encouraging, but only the monastic evidence is good enough to show up clearly real shifts over time.
What the monastic evidence also shows is that by the fifteenth century tuberculosis had become a major killer alongside the plague introduced by the first pandemic of 1348-9 and thereafter endemic. Conventionally this last disease has been understood by historians to be bubonic plague, although this view is periodically challenged.505 The evidence we have for disease before the advent of plague is even sketchier. Skeletal evidence tells of the prevalence of such chronic conditions as arthritis or deformities caused by failure properly to set fractures, but rarely of life-threatening diseases. Leprosy, which can show up, was endemic at the beginning of the period, as witnessed by the ubiquity of leper hospitals founded during the central middle ages, but seems to have been in decline before the plague. The hungry years of the late thirteenth century and more particularly the first two decades of the fourteenth century probably saw a high incidence of malnutrition-related disease, including typhus, which no doubt translated into diminished life expectancy for poorer members of society. Child mortality was probably particularly high in those periods and again in the post-plague era. The major respiratory diseases, including pneumonia, were probably significant killers at all times, especially for the elderly. The absence of evidence relating to the morbidity of women is frustrating. There is slight evidence, however, that they were less vulnerable to plague, and that the hazards of childbearing, though real, have probably been overstated.
People in the middle ages were encouraged to think of death as an ever-present possibility. The clergy repeatedly reminded their flocks of the transitory nature of earthly existence. By the end of the middle ages some were even learning how to conduct themselves in their final hour through books on the ‘art of dying’ (ars moriendi). Images of the three living and the three dead warned of the vanity of worldly wealth and the inevitability of death. The late medieval fashion among the wealthy devout for tombs with representations of the decaying cadaver, like that commissioned by John Baret in St Mary’s church, Bury St Edmunds, pushed home the same message. They also solicited the help of the living. The doctrine of purgatory, the belief (discussed by Eamon Duffy above) that souls stained by sin could still ultimately be saved once purged of that sin, created a new need for people to be remembered - and be prayed for - long after their deaths. Those with sufficient wealth could purchase the remembrance of strangers by their elaborate sepulchral monuments or the endowment of perpetual chantries. Alternative forms of commemoration included the gifting of vestments or furnishings within the parish church marked with the donor’s arms or labelled with texts asking for the prayers of the living. The less prosperous could hope to be remembered by their parish guild, a form of collectivity that became especially popular after the plague. The very poor, however, were reliant on the memory of family and friends.
Such a brief analysis of so broad a theme can do scant justice to the diversity of experience over a comparatively long and highly eventful period. Whereas medieval theories of the ages of man obscure gender differences, modern scholars have tended to emphasise gender and marital status at the expense of thinking about social status, age or dynamic change. Thus some writers talk of the ways in which wives and daughters were subordinated within a patriarchal society, but widows, freed from the bonds of matrimony, were ‘liberated’. We should be sensitive to the hierarchical nature of medieval society, of which gender hierarchy was but one dimension. Children and adolescents were supposed to be respectful to their elders, obedient to their parents or employers, and firmly (but not harshly) disciplined if they were not. During their teens, however, young people of both sexes took on more obligations and responsibilities as part of their socialisation into what was necessary to run a household. This process culminated in matrimony, associated in English culture with setting up a new household. Legally wives remained quasi-dependants, but in fact a more egalitarian relationship may have been common, especially in urban society; peasant society seems to have been much more conservative in respect of gender ideology. Another striking feature of English culture, at least below the level of the aristocracy, is provided by the comparatively weak ties between parents and children beyond the period of socialisation. Indeed, children were socialised to be able to support themselves and make their own way in the world. Children do not seem to have felt a strong obligation to provide for their parents in old age. Rather their parents made, so far as they were able, their own arrangements, even to the extent, on occasion, of disinheriting their children.
World History
