by Michael Pye
Mistress Rachel in Trier picked up the knife and beat herself, knowing what had to be done but ‘with an embittered heart’. She killed three of her children and had to pull a fourth, her son Aaron, out by his feet from under a box where he was hiding and she sat lamenting over their bodies until the Christians came to demand ‘the money you have in your sleeves’ and then to kill her. We know the details of both her pain and her courage, but of her husband we know only that he ‘yelled and cried upon seeing the death of his four beautiful sons … he went and fell on the sword that was in his hand … he rolled with the dead’.26
In the Flemish town of Douai in the thirteenth century, when the aldermen had to speak to a whole craft or a whole profession, they addressed ‘boulengiers ne boulengiere’ or ‘drappiers ne drappiere’ or ‘taneres ne taneresse’. They always included both women and men who were bakers, drapers, tanners. In Bruges they went one step further: they addressed the bosses of the town as ‘mester’ and ‘mestrigghe’.27
Out in the country women worked the land, helped plough and kill pigs, made ale and cheese, spun wool and wove cloth; but they did not inherit as their brothers might, and making a living had everything to do with having the use of property. If they were paid wages they earned much less than a man. A thirteenth-century bailiff in England, in a book that was copied again and again, says it is worth having a dairymaid to look after the small animals even if you don’t have a dairy: ‘it is always good to have a woman there, at a much less cost than a man’.28
The pull of towns, where a woman could earn more, change her job or her employer, maybe start a business of her own, was the prospect of having a household of her own in time.
Women worked in the cloth trades, of course, since Flanders was famous for cloth; but that was only the start. They were moneychangers, not just informally pushing some useful cash across to friends and neighbours but acting as bank managers. They were shipbuilders, too. They went out to run and clean houses, they formed their own hierarchy in the markets: from the ones who had their own businesses to the ones who had their own market stalls to the women who sold from a cloth spread on the ground and were relentlessly moved on.29 In Bruges, they dominated the market for everything edible but meat; drink was another matter, but even so there was a Kateline van Denille who had a wine shop. They could be sureties for the debts of people who were not their relatives, and if they were married they did not have to follow their husbands’ trades; a separating couple in Ghent in 1355 was reckoned able to live apart without being a burden on the town because they had been ‘practising different trades and paying their own expenses’.30 When married women were doing business, suing or being sued, the clerks keeping the records quite often did not find the marriage worth mentioning.
Women did not go travelling as merchants so they often had the city, the hostel, the shop, the warehouse or the money business to themselves while their husbands went away; they were the constant, stable heart of business. They represented the family, and in Flemish law that meant the present reality of the married couple much more than the children who would eventually inherit. Women shared. They had authority over children just like any father. A mother and her children, even if they were all born out of wedlock, formed a family with the mother at its head; there was a Flemish custom that a mother has no bastards, no need to make special provision for children who happened to be ‘illegitimate’. So while families took the name of the father, should there be one available, the mother could perfectly well be head of the household: in the house, in the business, in the world.
That was the world around the beguinages: where women took responsibility for their families and for their own survival, where almost no trade or business was forbidden to them, where they could operate more or less freely and independently without their gender being an issue. The beguines learned. When they brought children into the beguinages, even ones born out of wedlock, they did what any mother would do. When they went out to work, they did what other women did: worked for wages. They could, like other women, protect themselves at law, by demanding back money they had loaned or claiming property that somebody else also claimed. The richer beguines brought their capital into the courts, built their own houses there and owned them; exactly as a woman could do out in the city. As for a woman’s authority, and the power of the mistress of a beguinage, there were also women who controlled castles or abbeys and held public audiences, not to mention financial receivers who explained their accounts at public audit; citizens knew very well that women could have power. Only the countess was meant to have a male to speak for her, but then the countess belonged to a fading feudal system which never did have deep roots in Flanders.
The beguines begin to seem less exceptional.
William Aungier was eight when he lost his father, then his mother, then his stepfather to the plague. His new guardian, his uncle, sold the right to be his guardian to a local man who happened to have a niece called Johanna, aged ten. The pair went through a ceremony of marriage and were duly put into bed to spend the night. They then went their separate ways until they were old enough to consent to a real marriage, but just before William was fourteen and legally marriageable, Johanna turned out to be pregnant by one of her surprisingly various lovers. William was packed off to his notional wife in 1357, but he refused to consummate the marriage, not even after spending a night solus cum sola, nudus cum nuda, which means alone and naked in the same bed. He told friends: ‘It displeases me that I knew her once for she does not care for any affection that is felt.’ He wanted his marriage annulled because, he said, he wanted to base his marriage on ‘an affection that is upheld’. He wanted love and constancy.31
He had learned well. After the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, English priests worked from pastoral manuals that taught them what to teach believers, including the doctrine that marriage is a matter of consent.32 The woman chooses, the man chooses, and the choice must be mutual: both partners almost equal for a moment, whether the motive is love or business. This teaching was meant to go all through Christendom, but when it came to the North Sea it was particularly powerful because it fitted perfectly with custom, and so with the law. In the law school at Bologna the scholars learned that what made a marriage real was the consummation, but in Paris and the North a marriage was already real when woman and man consented to it, although the next and essential stage was the consummation. When you see a picture of a wedding in an Anglo-French manuscript, there will be a priest because marriage is a matter of the spirit. In Italy, there will be a notary, because of the contract.33
The differences go much deeper, so deep they may well help explain what happened to the whole economic machine around the North Sea over centuries, and why it did not happen in quite the same way in the South. They explain, among many other things, windmills and pensions.
A woman marrying in the South brought a dowry with her, money or goods or land. Families negotiated the amount, which had everything to do with what the woman might contribute to the marriage: how young she was, how strong, how likely to bear children. The older the woman, the more expensive the dowry, so there was every reason to marry girls off as soon as possible. Even when the marriage involved rather little money or goods or land, the dowry mattered; it was the one time in her life when a woman could expect money from her parents. If she wanted money to get her life started, she had to marry to get it; but once she was married, the dowry was all she could control herself. If she and her husband built a fortune out of a business or their land, that was his fortune, not theirs.
The custom in the North was different. Women had the right to inherit, so they expected money from their parents, but only when their parents died. They could come into land, sell it off or give it away, all in their own names; it was theirs. They had no financial reason to marry early, and their parents had no reason to fret over when they married. Dowries were never as common as in the South and in a prosperous city like Ghent, in the late Middle Ages, they are hard
ly even mentioned.
When a woman did decide to marry, all that she had was put into a kind of marital fund: one pot of money for both wife and husband. The husband controlled the money for as long as he was alive, but the wife could inherit it, and she could do business with her share. She might have a deal, like one woman in Nivelles in 1471, that she took everything if her husband walked out, at least until he returned ‘to talk and to remain in peace and love as suits the loyalty of married people’.34 Her husband didn’t always have to know what she was doing with their money; in York, Thomas Harman first knew his wife had bought a batch of candlewick so huge it took two servants to carry it when he was handed writs for debt and breach of commercial promise.35
Inheritance mattered because sickness and war so often cut lives short and left survivors. Second or even third marriages were common, and they were sometimes practical alliances made startlingly soon after a husband’s death, marrying a rival, marrying the apprentice; look at marriage contracts for the town of Douai in the fifteenth century and a third of the brides were widows.36 They brought with them the riches they had helped to build. In Douai the custom was that they kept half the assets of the marriage, and they seem to have been able to sidestep their husband’s debts. A woman’s economic life could be long in the North, where a husband’s death was not the end of things and a woman could do well without being married.
The fact that marriage was tangled up with money did not make it less affectionate. True, in Douai the legal documents that allowed childless couples to leave each other their worldly goods only mention ‘love and conjugal affection’ from the 1550s; but those are legal documents, which do not need sentiment.37 A better test is what happens after death, and whether couples choose to stay together. Most people until the thirteenth century ended up anonymous in mass and unmarked graves; but in 1374 one man wrote a will in Douai to ask that he be buried alongside his wife in the nave of a church. Graves were marked with marble slabs with carvings of the couple who lay there, sometimes their children as well, on one occasion a man lying between two wives. After plague came in 1400, one third of wills in Douai said exactly where the grave should be, and who should be near: spouse, father, mother. Again there is a frontier across Europe: in Italian towns, men wanted to be buried with their ancestors, with as much of a male line as they could find and if necessary some invented coats of arms. Around the North Sea, it was the marriage and the children that mattered.38
Out of that doctrine of ‘marital affection’, William Aungier’s hope, came unexpected consequences. The custom of the North was reinforced: property was shared in a marriage, not separate, and women could expect their share. Women could do business, and it was worth their while. Women could take their time choosing a husband, wait at least until they were eighteen or twenty and more likely into their mid-twenties; they took responsibility for the marriage and they had a degree of equality within it. At the very least, they had a negotiating position. Women and men needed the time to get together the resources to start an independent life because being an adult in Flanders meant having a household of your own; just marrying, or reaching a certain age, was not enough. You were a minor if you ate your parents’ bread, en pain de père et mère, and adult when you could keep yourself, hors de son pain. Real life took its time to begin.39
So there were years in their lives when young people could go into service as maids, or become apprentices, or work as journeymen hiring on by the day. Most of all, they could move. By the late thirteenth century, there are references to journeymen, to young and unmarried workers on short contracts who had special skills and travelled to find the demand for them. They had their own networks, often family connections, in building and shipping and mining; and quite soon they had more formal arrangements, the first masons’ lodges in England and the franchises that Edward III of England offered John Kempe from Flanders in 1331 to come and show the English how to weave, full and dye cloth and so defy the guilds, who thought they already knew. The same privilege was on offer to ‘all the clothworkers of strange lands of whatsoever country they be’.40 German-speaking workers were tramping from Riga in the east to Bergen in the north, and the bakers went south to Rome because Romans, it turned out, loved German bread. Much later, some of these serious tramps would write down their own stories: like Emmanuel Gross in the seventeenth century, a shoemaker from Baden who went walking as a journeyman from Lithuania to France, from Sweden to England.41
These men were knowledge marching. They didn’t like the idea of being used by officials, or made to hide from officialdom, so they shifted about in small groups in Flanders, and in Germany they kept crossing the boundaries between the various princedoms to stop any one authority coming down hard on them. By the fourteenth century they could get work by showing certificates of service, or proof of their indentures; they had hostels where they could stay, and special fraternal handshakes; and often they organized things so that if there was no work they could at least be given a bed for the night and enough money to travel on. Shoemakers in Troyes, just south of Paris, reported in 1420 that ‘many compagnons and workmen … of a variety of tongues and nations, came and went from town to town to learn, discover, observe and see what others did’. Learning and tramping were so close that London became a kind of training centre for the whole of England.42
A man whose life was tied to land and early marriage and a single place and his father’s authority could never have gone away, let alone stayed away so long; but these men were free to travel to make a living. They carried with them facts and techniques. Their predecessors took the windmill out of England into Flanders, or just possibly, if you reckon the date 1114 carved on a beam in a windmill just south of Dunkirk really does show when it was first built, out of Flanders into England. Either way, the idea of the windmill crossed the sea with alacrity. The first one recorded in England goes back to 1155 when ‘Hugo de Plaiz gave to the monks of Lewes the windmill in his manor Ilford, for the health of the soul of his father.’ By 1200 there were at least twenty-three mills working from Sussex to Northumberland, with a sizeable number in East Anglia, just over the sea from Flanders. By then there were at least four windmills in Northern Europe, at the mouth of the Somme, just inland at Ypres, and at Silly and Wormhoudt: close enough to the coast to suggest the idea came by water.
We can’t tell who first shipped the idea, but we do know why it was needed. In the lowlands, peat for burning was running short, and waterpower was not strong enough in the flatlands to be useful energy. Besides, the owners of the rights to use riverbanks wanted high fees from anyone who used the flow of the river water to power a mill. Windpower was not entirely reliable, and it required careful engineering to gear the vertical sails to the horizontal shaft that worked the grinding stones, but it was wonderfully available; and only in the Netherlands did a man have to pay a ‘wind brief’, a tax to the lord or king who thought he owned the weather. Elsewhere, a windmill let a man step outside the feudal order for a while. Dean Herbert built a mill for himself at Bury St Edmunds in 1191, which infuriated the abbot, who owned two local mills and the feudal rights to grind corn. The moment he heard, the abbot ordered carpenters to take the mill down ‘and place the timber under safe custody’; he tongue-lashed Dean Herbert, told him: ‘I thank you as I should thank you if you had cut off both my feet.’ The dean said he wanted the mill only for himself, but the abbot could not tell the local farmers where to grind their corn, so the dean was competition. He was alarmed enough at the abbot’s fury to tear down his mill even before the abbot’s servants could arrive, so they found nothing to demolish; but he also had the technical knowledge to build the mill himself, and he must have learned from travellers.43
A century or so later, the first windmills for draining polder land started turning at Alkmaar, just north of Amsterdam; within twenty years the magistrates at Saint-Omer, close to Calais, needed to drain their marshes and they sent a delegation to Holland for the plan of a mill ‘pour vider les
eaux’, to drain off the waters. The mill was running by 1438, but it was never effective, and it was abandoned twelve years later, but a process had begun: bringing in plans and workers with the expertise to build new technologies. Since mills were a source of power, that power could be applied in a hundred ways. Over the next centuries, it drained fens in the Polish part of Prussia, in Schleswig-Holstein in the late sixteenth century, in Friesland and around Norfolk in England. It made oil mills work across Northern Europe from Ireland to Sweden and Germany, crushing the seeds of rape; it milled paper in England and the Netherlands; it ran hulling mills in Germany and saw mills as far away as Portugal and Russia.44 It created new land out of marsh and sea, it kept industries running, and all because the idea had journeymen to bring it where it could be most useful.
The pattern of marriage had one other side-effect: the very beginning of financial markets, of pension plans and annuities and trying to save your life by investing. When people marry late and set up their own households, they move away from their families and their obligations to them. They may leave town altogether, or even the country. They may decide not to marry at all. Even if a couple had children and grandchildren, they could still not be absolutely sure of their support in old age. Just as a couple had to save to set up their household in the first place, so they had to save to protect themselves when work and business no longer seemed possible; instead of protecting the future by keeping everything in the family, which was often the pattern in the South, they put their money out to work with strangers. So in Flanders, Brabant and Holland the main source of money to run the affairs of cities and towns was people worried about old age, who bought renten from the councils: annuities that paid out a heavy rate of interest on the amount invested for as long as the investor was alive. Sometimes, as in the cheese town of Edam and in East Anglia, these annuities were what parents got back when they handed over land and assets to their children, who then organized their pensions. Already by the end of the thirteenth century roughly four out of ten people in East Anglia, both women and men, had pensions to draw on.45