The Ties That Bound

by Barbara A Hanawalt

  With further population loss of about a third to a half in the first wave of plague, and the continued low population levels, a new era of opportunity opened for peasants of all status groups. Cottars and others who chose to sell their labor found that they could command a high price. The laboring population became more mobile, leaving old tenements and seeking better opportunities elsewhere. Those who chose to remain in the villages could rent land from vacant tenements and add to their holdings. The landlords tried to force the villeins back to the manor, but their efforts failed, and by the first decades of the fifteenth century the demesne lands that had previously been cultivated to produce grain crops for the lord's profit were leased. Peasants who could afford further rents took up these lands, as did other entrepreneurs. The labor shortage also led to a shift from cultivation to grazing of sheep and cattle, a less labor-intensive agrarian land use. With the increased mobility of the rural population and the breakup of some of the old tenements because of the active land market, the manorial system was challenged. Peasants were willing to pay rents for their land, but they omitted to pay the other dues and services that would have indicated their servile status. Lords' officials made futile efforts to track down offenders and get them to pay. Serfdom simply withered away during the course of the fifteenth century. In sum, it would appear that the fifteenth century was a golden age of opportunity for the peasantry.

  One must be careful not to present too rosy a picture of life in the fifteenth century, however, for the plague revisited about every generation and there were a number of other diseases that were new and deadly. Furthermore, a new social structure was developing in the countryside that eventually eroded some of the good features of the old communities. The social stratification within the rural population became much greater than it was in the early fourteenth century.5 The problems that this situation created are discussed in the fifth section, on surrogate family.

  In defining peasant families and discussing their fortunes during this brief review of economic and social conditions in the countryside, it is apparent that peasants had a range of economic options open to them. The flexibility of the peasant household economy permitted it to adapt to the radically different conditions of the two centuries under study. One of the major goals of this study has been to create a flexible model of peasant household economy that takes into consideration the sex roles in the household, age of members, social status, and economic options.

  The model I propose is based on that suggested by the Russian economist A. V. Chayanov and on Eric Wolf's anthropological discussion in Peasants, but I have adapted these to the medieval English system and have added more dynamism to the model to accommodate sex, age, and socioeconomic status as factors influencing the range of peasant options. The dilemma for the peasant family was to balance the demands of their economy against their assets. The essential outlays were for their daily living, rent, ceremonial and religious expenses, and ultimately a division of property among adult children. Their assets included land, livestock and other moveable goods, and family labor. How well a family could maximize their assets depended on how large these were, the number and health of family members, the sorts of reciprocity they could call upon from neighbors, and simple good luck and cunning.

  The model is a verbal rather than a mathematical one, for the functioning of the peasant economy is not sufficiently precise to sustain a mathematical model. Nonquantitative exchanges and social relations always must play a fairly large part in peasant family planning. While the third section of the book deals most specifically with the household economy, the idea that the peasants work with a range of flexible options within the constraints of their economy appears throughout the book. In the first section, on the material environment, the model explains the options for sustenance and housing. The common use of a variety of options in inheritance planning, considered in the second section of the book, indicates that the peasants were not bound by custom or law but worked out disposal of their goods to their own perceived advantage. The model also helps to explain the role of surrogate family, particularly the role of social-religious gilds, for the gilds were a way of providing extrafamilial fellowship and of defraying some ceremonial expenses that would otherwise come out of the family budget.

  In its bare outline, to be fleshed out with the examples in subsequent chapters, the economic model emphasizes scheming peasants. They were scheming and deserved that reputation in the Middle Ages. They had to be. But there was also time for play, for enjoyment of a few luxuries, for drinks with neighbors in taverns, and for dinner parties with friends at home. Babies were fussed over and bounced on the knees of proud parents. Youths flirted and married couples loved as well as argued. The affective relations between family members dominate the fourth section of the book.

  With relish have the early modern and modern historians painted the medieval peasants as boorish, unsentimental, unsociable, gossipy creatures without enough sense to keep the doors to their lineage and family closed. To Edward Shorter, the traditional family of "The Bad Old Days" was like a ship moored in a harbor and tied down by cables representing kin and community ties. This ship never goes anywhere, but since it has gaping holes in its sides, outsiders are forever going in and out of its open structure. A parking garage might have been a more apt analogy, for it is a recognizable, if skeletal, structure that never travels itself, but its occupants (cars) keep going in and out and provide its only dynamic. Lawrence Stone has also described the peasants ("rural proletariat," in his words) as open-lineage families. But here the metaphor is more subtle, for these families have a "porosity" about them that permits others to slip in and observe and destroy the precious privacy that a modern, affective family needs. Open-lineage families are more like sieves in which irritants come in and family goes out, to be irritants to other families. With less colorful imagery Philippe Aries has argued that for the medieval peasant family, community rather than family played a large role in the emotional life of individuals. In all of these works, traditional families are perceived as extended rather than as simple conjugal families, and the households teem with grannies and bachelor aunts and uncles, all of whom interfere with the family.6

  On the other hand, we have Alan Macfarlane's equally inaccurate perception that the medieval family members behaved just like modernday Englishmen. To argue that medieval rural families were not true peasants because they lived in conjugal units, participated in local and regional markets, devised strategies for passing on land outside customary inheritance patterns, and otherwise behaved like individuals in a capitalist society is to overlook the many ways that they were peasants by Hilton's definition. Land was family land, as was the wealth produced by the household. The individual was not the basic unit of the economy, but rather the family was. Only the very poorest in the society could function as individuals, and people did not envy these wanderers but regarded them with great suspicion. While one must appreciate Macfarlane's desire to redress the balance in regards to the medieval English rural population and sympathize with his wish to point out that the English peasant was different from those on the continent,7 this goal may be accomplished without historical distortion.

  My objections to the early modern historians' descriptions of the medieval family are twofold. First, they are inadequately researched statements and often factually incorrect. The specific points of disagreement are discussed more fully later in the book, but one may say from the outset that medieval English peasant families were not exactly like our own, but they were also not extended, full of holes, porous, or solely centered on the community. The inheritance practices virtually precluded an outsider from entering into family land without some "adoption" into it. Furthermore, the family economy as outlined above was designed to benefit family members, not community. Neighbors might help out, but it was a reciprocal arrangement in which a good turn would be done in repayment. The sort of spying on neighbors that one finds in early modern court records is rare in medieval re
cords.

  My second objection is the emotive quality of these condemnations of medieval peasant families; it is completely unnecessary for the sake of the authors' arguments and leads to suspicions of a theory of progress or the ethnocentrism of modernism. The anthropologist Jack Goody has pointed out the ethnocentric biases that enter these works because historians of the modern family have tried to do history backwards, projecting the modern institution onto an imagined past. Granted, the three authors mentioned do not go as far as Macfarlane, who argues that if only we can understand the experiences of ordinary Englishmen in the Middle Ages we will be able to help the underdeveloped nations to move toward industrialism as England did.' I feel no need to shoulder the "white man's burden" and use history to bring the Third World into the dubious glories of the modern age. Nor do I have either a nostalgic or an antinostalgic view of our past. The Middle Ages were neither a lamented world we have lost nor "The Bad Old Days." I believe it is safe to assume that the majority of my readers will share my view and have neither a longing nor a loathing for medieval peasant life. Rather, I assume that the readers want to know how the medieval peasant families lived and what continuities and discontinuities may be found between their familial behavior and our own.

  Having stated my objections to the "straw families" that historians of the modern and early modern family have erected, I must add that I am not attacking the premise that medieval peasant families and modern families have major differences. Medieval literature does not contain the same intensity of sentimentalization of family that modern literature does. Even without letters from medieval peasants, one can imagine that if they wrote to each other it would not be romantic or sexual, but more like Margaret Paston's letters to her husband. Affection certainly existed among family members-that shows up clearly in wills-but not sentimentalization. Domesticity was not an ideal, and if the medieval peasant had described the establishment of a new household, it would probably be in the terms my grandmother used: "going to housekeeping." Paterfamilias did not hold the sway over his family that he did in nineteenth-century England. In short, there are major differences between the medieval English peasant family and the modern family.

  Similarities also exist, however, and I will argue that much of human and familial behavior is dictated by biological needs that cannot be culturally denied or even culturally distorted. Children must be fed, cleaned, talked to, and played with simply for their survival. This may be done with or without sentimentalizing the concept of childhood, which has little influence in the first years of child development. Furthermore, cultural change is gradual, particularly in such a profoundly basic institution as the family. One can have revolutions in government, but families are resistant to sudden change. Some of our perceptions about family are folk theories dating from the Middle Ages, and so continuities and similarities will appear. The people in this book are not unrecognizable to us.

  Studies of the medieval family have progressed so far that we are able to see profound differences in family organization, household economy, and intrafamilial relations depending on the country, the demographic structure of the society, and the wealth and social class of the family. The fine studies of Mediterranean society, particularly Italy, present a picture of more complex households, more emphasis on the role of the paterfamilias, and different ages of marriage.' In parts of France and in Germany partible inheritance was an honored custom, where it was ignored in England. Among the aristocracy, marriage, childrearing, relations between spouses, and, needless to say, the economic base were radically different from that of the peasantry. The same may be said of urban households." Thus these fine studies have been used for comparisons rather than to draw analogies or fill in information where English rural data are missing.

  When Homans and Bennett did their studies of medieval peasants and their families, they both relied heavily on their travels in early twentieth-century Europe to evoke a picture of peasant households and the daily life of the peasant. Such images from one's past are inspiring and influential in forming perceptions, as are modern oral histories of fading English country life. Although both scholars wished for more contemporary evidence, they felt that more intimate views of family life would elude medievalists. Medieval English records, however, are voluminous and full of information as yet untapped. The new methodologies and questions that social historians have now probed have opened up many of these records to fresh inquiry. For this study, the coroners' inquests have provided the intimate view, the vignette, of peasants at their daily routine. Because of the richness of these accounts, I have been able to reconstruct life in peasant households without relying on either modern or comparative sources. - - -- - --- - - - - -- - -

  Medieval coroners, like modern ones, investigated all sudden or unnatural deaths, whether they were homicides, suicides, or misadventures (accidents). By royal order, each county elected four coroners from among its knights so that this official could arrive at the scene of a suspicious death within a day or two of the discovery of the body. When villagers saw someone die or found a body that showed evidence of unnatural death, they notified one of the coroners. The coroner ordered the hundred bailiff to summon a jury of the vill and several neighboring vills for an inquest into the cause of death. The coroner then viewed the body, turning it over to observe all wounds or other signs that would indicate the cause of death. He inquired of the neighbors and witnesses the cause of death and what they knew about the circumstance of it, the activities of the victim before the death occurred, and the person or persons who first discovered the body.

  The richness of detail in the records depended on the coroner and his clerk. Some recorded numerous details, translating into Latin the jurors' very words concerning the activities of the victim and those around him or her, the physical environment, the extent of the wounds, the value of the death instrument, the length of time the person lingered before he or she died, whether or not extreme unction was administered, the date and time of day of death, who was the first finder, and sometimes even the reactions of the first finder. Some coroners even recorded the age of adult victims, and all recorded the ages of children through age twelve. Although the wealth of detail will be amply apparent as the cases are cited in the text, it is helpful to see at least one example in full to have an appreciation for these inquests:

  It happened in the vill of Eaton in a hamlet called Staplehoe in the brewhouse of Lady Juliana de Beauchamp about the hour of none on Thursday next after Michaelmas in the fifty-fourth year that Amice Belamy, Robert Belamy's daughter and [Sibyl] Bonchevaler were carrying between them a tub full of grout, intending to empty the grout into a boiling leaden vessel; and Amice Belamy's feet slipped, and she fell into the said vessel, and the tub fell upon her. Sibyl Bonchevaler at once sprang to her and lifted her from the vessel and shouted [for help]; the servants of the household came and found her almost scalded to death. Amice had the rites of the church, and died on the following Friday about hour of prime. Sibyl, who was with her, found pledges: Gervase of Shelton and Robert Monk of Stablehoe.

  Inquest was made before Ralph of Goldington, the coroner, by four neighboring townships, Eaton, Wyboston, Chawston, and Colmworth; they say on their oath that they know nothing except as is aforesaid. The vessel is appraised at twelve pence, the tub at two pence, the cowl-staff at a halfpenny; and they are delivered to the township of Eaton.12

  Sometimes the inquests were accompanied by editorial comments on the part of the coroner's clerk or the jurors themselves. One clerk added to his description of a young man's fall from a wagonload of grain that it resulted from his vanity, and jurors said that a young woman who put a dead illegitimate child at the father's doorstep had acted shamefully.

  In an earlier work on crime in fourteenth-century England, I used the inquests into the homicide cases to study the patterns of homicide and suicide. While reading through the records I realized the value of accidental-death cases for studying ordinary life. The current study is based on 3
118 accidental-death inquests drawn from the counties of Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire, and Wiltshire. The cases cover the whole of the fourteenth century, with a scattering from the late thirteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The only county with anything approaching continuous records is Northamptonshire. The others are sporadic, with Bedfordshire having only early ones and the others spread through the middle to late fourteenth-century. The records were all very detailed and all legible cases were used. The data are too scattered to indicate trends, but they are useful for such matters as seasonality, day of week, time of day, cause of death, and sex, age, and activity of victims. The rolls provide a rather wide geographical spread. East Anglia is perhaps overrepresented, but these coroners were the best record keepers. Parts of Lincolnshire are excellent for understanding coastal life, and other parts of the county illustrate the more northern patterns. The Midlands and the west country are well represented, but the southeast does not have good records. More technical information on the accidental-death inquests may be found in the Appendix.

  I am frequently asked why the king was interested in accidental deaths as well as homicides. In Anglo-Saxon times the neighbors had assessed the value of the item that killed the person and sold it for prayers for the soul of the victim who had died without extreme unction. The value of the item was called the deodand, or gift to God. Norman kings found this practice lucrative and, instead of arranging for prayers for the person who died of misadventure, collected the deodand for their treasury. The coroner was responsible for the collection.