Family and Community: Durability and Relevance

Despite the undoubted importance of family and community in the lives of rural dwellers, neither family nor community dominated all relationships in the countryside. That household size, even amongst the wealthiest tenantry, seems, typically, not to have been large may reflect, in part, a disinclination to reside in extended domestic units. As we have seen, peasant patriarchs and matriarchs provided land for their offspring so that they could establish households of their own, a counter-tendency to the move towards complexity. Further, even where a variety of factors combined to provide the conditions conducive to the establishment of complex households, the peasantry generally appear to have eschewed the opportunity. Although it is accepted that unmarried siblings, retired parents and other dependants might well remain in close proximity to the family home, especially in a period of rising population, land-hunger and strong lordship, as existed, for instance, c.1300, there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that they occupied separate buildings, although often on the same messuage or plot of land. On the Cambridgeshire manors of Crowland Abbey, for instance, dependants were given small plots of land adjacent to the principal holding while, at Halesowen, in the early fourteenth century, the main house ‘was surrounded by cottages occupied by single as well as married relations of the tenant’.14

Such distance could be extended through more extreme activity. Whilst there was little opportunity for divorce under church law, the institutions of the family could be challenged in other ways, through adulterous relationships, for example. Finally, whilst the church promoted marriage, the parties to a marriage did not require consent of anyone but themselves. Marriage and household formation were, in essence, potentially creations of individual will.

Investigation of contracts between individuals in the medieval village suggests that economic ties and associations of trade were as likely to determine alliances as were ties of blood. Villagers and country-dwellers also sought out other associations, such as religious guilds, which were not always centred upon the family or community. In their observable activities, villagers did not necessarily ally instinctively with family or community. Research upon the peasant land market does not reveal that family members and kin were always treated with particular preference. In fact, in years of dearth, an increase in transfers between kin has been taken as indication of competition between family members. By the same token, acquisitive and competitive behaviour by members of the village community, activity again especially evident in studies of the peasant land market, suggests that individuals were prepared to promote their own interests at the expense of their neighbours. The same may also be said of villagers who appear to have perceived their best interests to lie not within their own communities but elsewhere. The reeve who sided with his lord or the peasant who bought produce beyond the village and sold at profit to his fellows were hardly unknown in the medieval countryside. Death-bed transfers of land, the diversion of wealth from the family to the chantry priest to pay for masses for the dead, and other arbitrary distributions of property also indicate a preoccupation with the individual rather than the family. Perhaps most importantly, a significant proportion of peasants, anticipating greater opportunity in the wider economy, looked to move beyond their families and communities in search of employment.

In certain measure, as we saw at the outset of this chapter, any evident increase in acquisitiveness, the chance flickerings of individualism and the development of selfidentity have been employed as crude measures of historical process, the rise of the individual and the decline of the wider group used as indices of economic and social change. It would, however, be clearly inappropriate to suggest that family and community had, in some way, lost ground to the individual by the close of the period. The variety of experience and the changing social, economic, political and religious tenor of the countryside ensured that, whilst the close ties of family and community could weaken, they could also increase in strength. If, however, we were to single out a development of the period that, perhaps more than any, marked a change in the role of family and community, it would be the apparent increase in outmigration from peasant families. Changes in the level of peasant mobility sit at the heart of historical explanations of fundamental demographic, social and economic shifts. Such changes are consistent with a reorientation of the nature and role of the peasant family and the village community but not with their reduction. Essentially, as has been argued throughout this chapter, family and community in the middle ages performed a multiplicity of functions and were constrained and propelled by a variety of forces, political, economic, social, religious, as well, of course, as natural. It is in the interaction with those forces rather than in the isolation from them that the history of the peasant family and the village community lies.