BARBARA A. HANAWALT
For the men of my family: my father, Nelson; my brother, Ronald; and my husband, Ronald Nelson
In his great study English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century, George Homans lamented that "in the absence of a great contemporary novel about the husbandmen, we cannot follow them into the intimate life of their homes." In his section on village families he limited his discussion to those aspects of family life that appear so prominently in manorial court rolls, bloodlines and inheritance of family land. Writing in 1941, he could not have predicted the amazing dynamism that has transformed research in social history. Medieval historians have used those same court rolls to open up the networks of intrafamilial and intravil- lage interactions; they have opened the doors of village homes. Archaeologists working on medieval village sites have laid bare the floor plans of these homes. Finally, the emotional interactions of the husbandman's family may be investigated, not through a contemporary novel, but through wills and, most importantly, through the cases of accidental death that appear on the coroners' rolls. Each inquest into a misadventure reads, not like a novel or even a short story, but like a very succinct verbal snapshot of life. The intimate detail of the scenes comes through in rich texture as neighbors and witnesses reconstructed what had happened.
The present study will enter the doors of the peasant's house. The first section considers the material environment of the family, starting on the ground with the archaeological work but constructing the rest of the house, furnishing it, and filling its larders and clothes chests. The second section assesses the recent scholarship on blood and land that Homans pioneered. The third investigates the heart of the peasant household, the family economy, presenting a model for the functioning of the economic unit and investigating the contributions of husband, wife, children, and servants. In the fourth part the affective bonds of family members and life stages receive detailed consideration. Finally, surrogates for family form a fifth section dealing with godparents, neighbors, social-religious gilds, and religious institutions.
This book cannot be definitive, but it is designed to pull together information about medieval peasant families that appear in a variety of secondary works and add a substantial body of new material from the accidental-death inquests from the coroners' rolls. I have attempted to present as complete a synthesis of work on the late medieval English peasant family as is currently possible. Gaps are inevitable and not all readers will agree with the thesis. Controversy, however, will be useful to the field. For too long we medievalists have discussed family as a reply to the medieval straw family that historians Philippe Aries, Lawrence Stone, Edward Shorter, and Alan Macfarlane constructed for us. Their descriptions of medieval peasant families are designed to show how different the modern family is from the medieval one. Medievalists have declared the straw family wrong on a number of specific points, but we have lacked a comprehensive discussion of our own to which to refer.
Some historians will object that regional variations are so great that a synthesis is impossible. I am not denying the importance of regional variations; they are vitally important in a country that was settled by Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Frisians, Jutes, Danes, Norwegians, and Normans. Furthermore, the geography is not homogeneous but varies with marshes, woods, hills, plains, heath, and soils that are sand, clay, and gravel. Ecological factors are bound to influence settlement patterns and cultivation practices. But to remain rooted in one village or one region handicaps comparative discussions and obscures the broader picture of common customs and practices among medieval peasant families. Many aspects of family life cut across these boundaries, for they are more rooted in biology than in inheritance practices or variations in cultivation.
In writing a synthetic study of the family, I have relied heavily on excellent regional and local studies, on the publications of county record societies, and on the work of antiquarians and historians of earlier generations. These debts are recognized in specific footnote references. In the field of English social history, however, there are exemplary historians who have substantially changed the way we have conducted research on the peasantry. To G. R. Coulton I owe the debt of his own work on the manor and also the number of imaginative students whom he trained in the field. Eileen Power, with her gift of bringing medieval people alive through fine writing, has been a model for many, including myself. She has shown us all that good scholarship need not be obscure and pedantic. J. Ambrose Raftis, in his pioneering work on village reconstitution from manorial records, permanently removed any temptation to look at peasantry as an amorphous class without internal wealth and status divisions. R. H. Hilton's many studies on the English peasantry, particularly his Ford Lectures, have brought a valued level of sophistication to the field. My debts to my mentor, Sylvia Thrupp, become increasingly obvious to both of us and bring a mutual pleasure and amusement that over the years she was actually teaching me and I learned.
Without borrowing from anthropology, a study of peasant families would be incomplete. I am particularly grateful to Eric Wolf for the training I received from him as a graduate student at the University of Michigan. More than he is aware, he had a strong influence on the direction and thesis of this book.
In taking a new direction in research, I have had to learn new areas of scholarship and new methodologies. In the summer of 1974 I took a seminar with David Herlihy on the medieval family and demographic history at the Southeastern Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. His initial influence on the project has carried through the whole of it. I also attended an institute on quantification and demographic history at the Newberry Library in the summer of 1978. The lectures and readings in connection with these courses initiated my reading in the modern history of the family and confirmed my desire to present a coherent picture of the medieval family.
In the course of researching a broad topic such as this one, blocks of time free from teaching and access to archives and computers are necessary. The American Philosophical Society generously provided me with the initial funds to survey the coroners' inquests, and Indiana University granted me a Summer Faculty Fellowship to return to the Public Records Office in London for further research. The university also provided funds to purchase microfilm, hire research assistants, and have access to their computing facilities. The staff of the Public Record Office were the courteous helpers that I have always found them to be. My two research assistants, Madonna Hettinger and Benjamin McRee, have gone on to become fine medieval historians in their own right. The Newberry Library, through a National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Research Fellowship, permitted me to use their excellent collection of printed primary sources that has formed a large part of this study. At the same time the Newberry was a congenial and intellectually stimulating environment in which to work. The members of their Fellows Seminar all contributed to my thinking on this project. Finally, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton provided a perfect environment for writing the first draft of this book. Again, the National Endowment for the Humanities, matching a sabbatical from Indiana University, made the year possible. With the year at the institute still fresh in my mind, I would like to list everyone on the staff and among the fellows who made life so pleasant and intellectually alive, but this is not the place to reproduce their telephone directory. Two of my colleagues, Norman J. G. Pounds and George Alter, were kind enough to read portions of the manuscript and share with me their expertise in archaeology and demography, respectively. My warm thanks to all who have directly or indirectly helped on this project.
Introduction 3
1. The Material Environment 17
1. Field and Village Plans 19
2. Toft and Croft 31
3. Standa
rds of Living 45
II. Blood Ties and Family Wealth 65
4. Inheritance 67
5. Kinship Bonds 79
6. Household Size and Structure 90
III. Household Economy 105
7. The Family as an Economic Unit 107
8. The Husbandman's Year and Economic Ventures 124
9. Women's Contribution to the Home Economy 141
10. Children and Servants at Home and in the Fields 156
IV. Stages of Life 169
11. Childhood 171
12. Growing Up and Getting Married 188
13. The Partnership Marriage 205
14. Widowhood 220
15. Old Age and Death 227
V. Surrogate Family 243
16. Surrogate Parents and Children 245
17. Neighbors and Brotherhoods 257
Epilogue 268
Appendix: Coroners' Rolls 269
Notes 275
Bibliography 320
Index 335
The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were traumatic ones for the English peasantry. Each generation faced new threats to life and livelihood. In the first quarter of the fourteenth century famine brought starvation to poor peasants and belt tightening to rich. Disease was ever present following the first wave of the Black Death in 1348 through the late fifteenth century. In addition to natural disasters, royal tax collectors and recruiters came to collect money, carry off goods, and impress peasant lads into service. Even if some of the peasants thrived despite adverse conditions or because reduced population presented new economic opportunities, the possibility of death was very close, taking life before the rewards of hard work could be enjoyed or killing heirs who would have profited from the fruits of their parents' labors. Radical changes threatened the institutions of English society, eventually resulting in the demise of serfdom in the fifteenth century. But what happened to that basic institution of peasant society, the family?
In this book I explore that question and propose a thesis: that the peasant family remained much the same throughout these two centuries of cataclysmic changes and, moreover, that the family was able to maintain its basic structure because it was a remarkably flexible institution, permitting the pursuit of a variety of options while retaining the integrity of the unit. The family was the basic economic unit for working the land, producing and socializing the younger generation, and finally passing on wealth from one generation to another. Even a sweep of plague through a community did not destroy these familial capacities. People remarried if they lost a spouse, and relatives came to claim a family holding left vacant. Constant regroupings of families occurred to compensate for losses. Using a range of economic strategies, the peasant family continued to function effectively and often expanded its wealth and options as new economic opportunities opened up in the fifteenth century.
Economic necessity alone, however, did not hold families together or keep people continually regrouping into conjugal units. Traditional role structures for men, women, and children made people more comfortable within a family structure. Folklore and long custom ascribed various functions to youths, to married couples, and to children. Thus village fertility festivals were the province of single youths, but married men held village offices and married women officiated at births. Cultural roles for family members reinforced those that biology had imposed on humans. Children must be nurtured, the sexual drives are strongest in youth, and the need for food and shelter forces mature men and women into economic activities to provide for themselves and their offspring.
While family remained a stable institution during the fifteenth century, the community changed, as did the relation of family to it. In the fourteenth century the peasant community was a fairly close-knit social and political group. Their mutual reliance and emphasis on selfregulation did not mean that the community members always got along with one another, but rather that they used institutions such as village bylaws, manorial courts, and even royal courts to regulate disputes, punish offenders, and enforce contracts and debts. By the fifteenth century the traumas of the previous century began to erode these institutions of village regulation, and neighbor became estranged from neighbor.
My assertion that family was the basic unit of peasant society, and that peasant communities, not family structures, changed, requires elaboration. A few rudimentary definitions and some background description of late medieval social and economic conditions are in order.
As other historians of medieval families have noted, contemporary language was deficient in describing the institution on which we have lavished so much study.' Familia was a Latin word used in the Middle Ages, as it had been earlier, to describe the households of lords or ecclesiastical establishments and included the master, his immediate kin, servants, and other household residents. In the fourteenth century it would not have applied to a peasant with his wife and children. Nor was the aristocratic concept of "house" as a lineage used among peasantry. Instead, from Anglo-Saxon times the more specific terms for the roles in the family were used. The husband was the holder of a house, the wife (his woman) and his children completed his immediate circle at the hearth. In late medieval records intrafamilial relations continued to be specified as in "Matilda wife of William" or "John son of Richard." Manorial court records speak of "William and his wife Matilda surrendering land to the lord and taking it back for themselves and the heirs of their body." Such references to family served the peasants' linguistic needs as effectively as the more abstract category of "family" does for us today.
The household units we will encounter in this book tended to be nuclear or conjugal families. Peasants showed a strong preference for having only a conjugal family in a household. As we shall see in the first section on the material environment, one reason that this preference was so feasible in practice was that the peasants' wattle and daub housing was cheap to construct. Old people could often have a dower cottage rather than living in the family residence, and even the propertyless and children inheriting only minimal wealth could at least have a hovel of their own.
Another term demanding definition is that of peasant, partly because Alan Macfarlane's The Origins of English Individualism has so muddied the waters by defining peasants in terms of an economic and familial organization resembling that of twentieth-century Polish rural dwellers.2 As he conclusively proved, medieval English peasants did not resemble these-not a surprising fact and already well known. But if they were not twentieth-century Polish peasants, were they peasants nonetheless? A more general definition will take us farther, and R. H. Hilton, a medieval historian, has provided one of the most thoughtful. Peasants are rural dwellers who possess (if they do not own) the means of agricultural production. The basic unit for working their holding is the family, but the families are integrated into larger units (villages or hamlets) that have some degree of collective and community interests and regulations. Not all peasants are continually involved in agricultural pursuits, and they may supplement these with wage labor, participating in the market, or providing their skilled services, such as carpentry, tailoring, or brewing, to other peasants. Crucial to the definition of peasantry is that they support, through their agricultural production, not only themselves but superimposed classes and institutions, such as landlords, churches, and towns, that dominate them politically and skim off surplus profits. In medieval England the lords raked off their share of peasant wealth through the institution of manorialism, churches through the tithe, and the state by introducing taxation. Although there has been some learned grumbling that we should not use the term peasant at all, I concur with Hilton, who argues that it is not the word that matters but the social stratum that the term designates.'
The peasantry cannot be considered a "lumpen" class, however, but can be broken down into three basic status groups within the class. As George Orwell observed at the conclusion of 1984, societies always group into high, low, and middle. While it had been commonplace to observe that some peasants had thirty
acres compared to another group who had fifteen and still another group who may have had only one or two, it was the historian J. Ambrose Raftis and his students who discovered and explored in depth what the implications of the different status groups were. Through painstaking village and family reconstitutions they, and now several other scholars, have investigated the variations in wealth, the domination of village power, the reliance on fellow villagers, marriage alliances, and a range of behavior that relates directly to the social status of the village family. It is now apparent that these status distinctions were much more significant than the differences between free and unfree (villein) peasants. Modern scholars have found that marriages between villein and free peasants and an active land market tended to obscure these old legal distinctions until the demise of serfdom in the fifteenth century made them irrelevant.'
The wealthy peasants, who have sometimes been called primary villagers and even oligarchs, were wealthy in land and chattels, dominated village offices, ate well, and produced relatively large families. The secondary villagers were a numerous group who also had roots in the village, but they had less land and fewer chattels. In good times they could prosper, but to make ends meet they relied on a network of other villagers to aid them. They were respected in the village, but only occasionally held the coveted offices of village governance. Below this group were the cottars, or tertiary villagers. They had only a cottage and a few acres, and consequently they had to rely heavily on wage labor or some supplementary activity, such as thatching, in order to get by. Their standard of living was low, and few of their children survived.
The demographic catastrophies of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries brought changes to these established village ranks. In the first quarter of the fourteenth century, overpopulation created a land shortage and wages were very low. Primary villagers, with their greater landholdings, were able to pursue such strategies as educating a son or marrying one to a widow with land, but a family had to have wealth to negotiate such moves. Secondary villagers might well find themselves struggling for survival during the famine years and were certainly not in a position to hope to settle all children well if they had more than one or two. For the cottars, hunger and high infant mortality precluded more than hoping for work, stealing, and begging. But it is an ill wind indeed that blows no one good, and the diminished population that survived the famines found higher wages and more available land.
The Ties That Bound Page 1