Whilst the family was, to a greater or lesser extent, a reality for all country-dwellers, the extent to which it impinged upon their lives varied considerably by time and by place. The same was true of ‘community’. Furthermore, whilst some basic elements and anticipated consequences of family life were undoubtedly common to all - provision of comfort, warmth, sustenance - there was also, undoubtedly, a series of expectations and roles which certain individuals assigned to their families as a matter of course and others did not or could not. The same is true, once more, of community.
To the individual family member, the family meant support, succour, education and opportunity. From birth, the child was, of course, dependent upon the family, although, in a relatively short time, the family would grow increasingly dependent upon the child. In its earliest years, a child’s care was in the hands of parents, siblings or servants. As carers and educators, more distant relatives, as we have seen in the earlier discussion of family forms, are unlikely to have been much in evidence. The bulk of a child’s education was learned from his or her family and, for the majority, what he or she learned under the aegis of family members offered a fundamental basis for life’s necessary ‘skills’. Religion, a sense of law, rudimentary politics, all were likely to be encountered, at least initially, within the family. The family brought its own expectations to its members: individual members of the family were expected to labour for its benefit. For heirs, as we have already seen, the family could offer opportunity in terms of family property and land; in such cases, their futures were determined by birth. Where the family held resources sufficient to be distributed usefully amongst its members, provision could also be made for non-inheriting offspring. Pre-nuptial gifts of land and payments of dowry were means by which the family helped establish its individual members in adult life. Elderly and dependent members of families looked to their immediate relatives for support and care in their old age. Elderly parents frequently entered into agreements with their offspring that they would provide food and shelter in their final years while non-inheriting siblings were sometimes housed within the messuage of the family home. For more distant kin, family ties also provided opportunities and points of access into communities. In postplague Halesowen, for example, cousins and distant relatives appear to have been afforded an easier entry into the community, where they were more quickly accepted into the responsible positions of local administration and into landholding than were complete strangers.
The resources of the family could be employed for the benefit of those other than its members. Families exchanged their facilities and their labour. Small loans of goods and services are well evidenced in local records. Furthermore, families within and beyond communities regarded their neighbours as opportunities for aggrandizement and social elevation. The institutions and defining events of family life, notably marriage but also birth and death, provided opportunities for families to ally and to swell their resources. Marital agreements and arrangements were entered into by wealthier peasants in this period while deaths of household heads offered niches for noninheriting sons. Birth, or more precisely baptism, provided a further opportunity to cement ties between families, particularly through the institution of godparenthood. But, while neighbouring families could offer support and opportunity, they could also present a challenge. There is some indication in manorial records that feuds between peasant families persisted over a number of generations. On the Suffolk manor of Hinderclay in the late thirteenth century, two villagers, Robert the son of Adam and Nicholas Wodeward, fought out a bitter rivalry through the secular and ecclesiastical courts as well as extra-curially, through the agency of gangs of supporters. Nicholas’s dispute with Robert, which involved debts owed by Robert and an adulterous relationship between Robert and Nicholas’s wife, Alice, was inherited by Nicholas’s son.10 Such disputes also, of course, served to reinforce a sense of familial identity.
The family was a basis of community. The family served the wider needs of the community as a unit of control and of policing. Heads of families were responsible for the behaviour of their members and stood surety for their good behaviour and compliance. The family also served as a guarantor in other ways, especially economic. As a collective repository of resources, knowledge of the family background of an individual underscored deals and agreements in village society and permitted everyday arrangements to be conducted with a degree of confidence. Given the security which the concept of family could bring to the community, the rural community was eager to protect the family as an asset. The community set about its defence of the family in a number of ways. First, it attacked and shamed those who deviated from traditional values. Those who committed crimes that ran counter to the ethos of family - fornicators, adulterers, the incestuous - were censured by the community. Tenants of the earl Warenne at Stanley (Yorks.) complained, in the early fourteenth century, that ‘Richard del Ker has lived an incestuous life amongst them and has allowed the harlot... to return again’. Although Richard protested that ‘the harlot lived in the house with him to bring up his children, but he had no relations with her’, an inquest found otherwise and he was fined and held under further penalty for his good behaviour.11 Second, the community helped secure the rights of individual family members. The vital elements of succession and familial continuity, rules of inheritance, rights to land, family trees and descents, all of these were stored in the collective memory of the community and were unearthed in the defence of family as and when the situation required. In 1357, for instance, Thomas de Hodyng could testify to the age of John de Liston at Braintree (Essex) because his own son had been born at the same time.12 Finally, the community reinforced these bonds through its participation in the significant moments of the family. Baptisms, marriages and funerals were typically public events.
As with the community, so local lords saw the peasant family as a foundation of their world. The family was a unit of account and a unit of labour. Though often only individual household heads were identified in seigniorial records, the levies of lordship were frequently made of the peasant family in its entirety. Where, in particular, the lord claimed rent in the form of labour, members of the family in addition to the head of the family could be called upon to provide this. Again, as the community, the lord also saw the peasant family’s vital events as an opportunity to reinforce his or her relationship with the family and to take full advantage. Thus lords expected, as a matter of custom, to be invited to the wedding feasts of their tenants. Marriage and death could bring financial reward to the lord, as, especially, unfree tenants paid fines for licence to marry (merchet) and to enter into inheritances (heriot). Further, where the individual veered from the path of family, the lord penalized him or her: fines for fornication (leyrwite) and for bearing children out of wedlock (child-wyte) reinforced the lord’s commitment to the peasant family and his proprietorial regard for it.
If the care and attention which the wider community and lordship displayed towards the peasant family was, in no small part, a product of self-interest, it also reflected a good deal of learned behaviour. The church also promoted the concept of ‘family’ and placed events closely linked to family, especially the sacrament of marriage, at the core of the Christian liturgy. As with lay lords, the church benefited financially from family life: payments for baptisms, marriages and burials, masses for the dead, and so on, were all made, as a matter of necessity, by relatives keen to provide as best they might for their loved ones. Although, as we shall discuss a little later, the church challenged the authority of the family in significant ways, its message of duty and acquiescence within the family also promoted pious reflection and imitation. Those few late medieval representations still to be found in parish churches, mostly the brasses and memento mori of the wealthier parishioners in cloth - or wool-producing regions, show the individual surrounded by the members of his family. In the late fifteenth-century funeral brass of Thomas Spring II and his family at Lavenham, for instance, family and marriage are revealed as holy states at a time when a newly emergent ‘yeomanry’ aped the nobility in their dynastic ambitions.
Beyond family, community, lordship and the church lurked two more entities which also conceived of the family as the fundamental unit of society and cared, in varying degrees and for various reasons, for its preservation: the state and the outside world. Although tending to concentrate its attentions upon the individual, the state was also aware of the potential of the family as a basis for taxation. The family was employed less and less as a foundation of law and order and relatively little allowance was made for familial sensibilities in judgements and penalties. There was little or no room for the concepts of feud and blood-money in post-Conquest law, for instance. However, taxation of moveable goods from the twelfth century was based upon individual households and novel attempts at taxation, such as the poll taxes of the later fourteenth century, also appear to have distinguished between households. Finally, strangers saw family and household as a source of charity and of employment. Whilst medieval theologians preached that charity began at home, there was an expectation that the family would be a source of charity for the wayfarer and the destitute. Further, the family offered employment. Servants-in-husbandry found regular work within the households of wealthier villagers and, as we have seen, in certain parts of the country and under particular economic conditions, service of this kind was a singularly important aspect of employment opportunities.
The function of the family was further fulfilled by the community. But community could also offer an alternative to family. Members of communities provided mutual support and the usual benefits of neighbourliness. In more organized form, neighbourliness merged into charity. Feasts and ales, the parish-box and other forms of collection were all manifestations of collective charity. In a period before state-organized charitable provision, the family and the local community stood alongside the church as the significant donors of charity. The community also used its collective resources to entertain and to educate. Plays and other entertainments were funded by the community while it was also substantially responsible for the fabric of the parish church. In their religious convictions, also, members of communities reaffirmed their faith through their collective observance. In some rural parishes, membership of religious guilds, associated with local saints, corresponded to membership of the community while the regularity of church attendance and the public celebration of the liturgical round also confirmed bonds of membership.
The community was capable of organizing itself in ways that minimized risk and worked to the mutual advantage of its members. Especially in areas of open-field agriculture, where compromise and cooperation were vital, agricultural activity was regulated according to the agreed dictates of the community. By-laws, such as the early fifteenth-century document at Wimeswold (Leics.), which contained nineteen clauses for regulating the harvest and access to pasture, controlled access to and from the open-fields, the timing of sowing and of harvesting, the hours of labour, the employment of strangers, and a number of similar activities. Observance of these regulations permitted such an agricultural system to operate and sacrificed the ultimate benefit of the individual to the general security of the wider community. In similar ways, the individual was subsumed within the community in matters of law and order. Freedom of action and privacy were partially traded for security and mutual protection. Members of the community were responsible for the behaviour of each other and it was incumbent upon them to report malefactions. Pre-Conquest institutions that persisted into the late middle ages, such as the tithing group and the ‘hue and cry’, were also dependent, in their operation, upon the villagers’ sense of responsibility. Less formal ‘institutions’ of the village, such as idle gossip and defamation, also served to reinforce norms of behaviour and to constrain individual excess. Further, security and order were achieved through the willingness of villages to accept formal responsibilities and offices. Villagers held official roles within the community as, for example, jurors, constables, chief-pledges, affeerors and ale-tasters. As well as offices closely associated with the regulation of order, there were offices linked to manorial administration, such as the reeve and hayward, and to the organization of the parish. Officeholding was an inevitable condition for the more senior male members of medieval village communities and a further indication that membership brought with it responsibilities.
Membership of communities also brought with it a degree of familiarity and notoriety, or, as contemporaries described it in the particular context of pleas of defamation, ‘public fame’. To be known within a community, however, was to be capable of being vouched for. The community’s memory of past deeds and associations offered an important resource which could be tapped to the advantage of the individual villager seeking to make good a claim. In attempting to prove some or other right, an individual could call upon members of his or her community to support the claim or, rather, to testify to the worth of the claimant. Finally, the community was capable of collective action in opposition to some common threat or enemy. Villagers combined to oppose their lord on many occasions in the middle ages. They shared their resources to employ lawyers in order to contest the claims of lords but also joined together in concerted resistance, such as rent strikes and a policy of silence and non-cooperation. In the early fourteenth century, in a deliberate show of defiance, the tenants of the bishop of Exeter at Paignton (Devon) refused to gather grain in sheaves since, as they argued, their custom was to gather the sheaves unbound.13 The community was capable of similar concerted behaviour against or in support of the state, as events at the outset of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 or the skirmishes at Peatling Magna in the Barons’ War a century earlier testify. Ultimately, of course, villagers risked all in such actions.
If lordship could be a focus for community, so could community occupy the close attention of lordship. Lords made demands of the ‘whole community of the vill’ and recognized that the community retained a wealth of information relating to its past. Just as the community employed its collective memory for its own benefit, so the lord also made use of this memory to ease the transfer of lands between his tenants, for instance, or to settle long-standing disputes. Further to this, the good order valued by members of the community was also valued by the lord who sought the calm functioning of the community. Consequently, the lord also expected the community to provide, from its number, administrators and senior villagers capable of facilitating the organization of the community and of the lord’s enterprises. The lord also employed the village community as a surrogate for the individual or the family. In particular, where some undisclosed or unattributed misdemeanour was carried out to the injury of the lord, the lord was able to impose a fine upon the whole community. Similarly, the lord, especially where he or she had appropriated and attempted to exploit ancient regalian rights, taxed the community as a unit but turned the actual collection of the sum over to the community.
The church also made use of the community in a number of ways. Its members, as parishioners, were, as we have seen, collectively responsible for the maintenance of the parish church. The church’s efforts at pastoral care and education of the laity, especially from the time of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, made deliberate use of the community. The concept of charity was dependent upon some sense of mutual cooperation and neighbourliness. The community met that responsibility in a number of ways, notably through the funding of charitable doles and the making of provision for the poor, as we have already seen. Less obviously, perhaps, the community also served the church as a moral guardian, its collective sense of that morality constraining the actions of the individual through fear of censure. Where fear of detection and shame did not prove sufficient deterrents, neighbours and other members of the community, through their gossip, brought cases of immorality to the notice of the church, which then proceeded against the parties in the ecclesiastical courts.
Finally, for the state, the village community was a unit of law and administration. In medieval England, government and law were essentially one and the same. In its most basic form, government meant the local community. The shire court, the regional focus for government orders and the administrative developments, was dependent upon the local community for its personnel; the itinerant justice of the eyre also demanded the presence of local jurors. At the level of the community itself, the crown expected that the more substantial villagers would oversee the collection of taxes and ensure that its justice was upheld. Finally, the community was also a unit of taxation and of military levy.
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