The Ties That Bound

by Barbara A Hanawalt

  For the poorer peasants and wanderers the clothing was often inadequate, and it is instructive that the authors of "The Man in the Moon" and the "Song of the Husbandman" chose to comment on the inadequate clothing of the peasants they depicted. Almost 1 percent of the cases (excluding homicide) in the coroners' rolls are deaths by exposure. Most of these occurred in the winter, and most of the people were poor and elderly.

  Having bathed and dressed themselves for, let us say, the gild feast, did they have any idea what they looked like? They would have relied on each other for comments and probably aid with arranging hair and hoods, but they were unlikely to have mirrors, athough they might have had a chance to look into one in the market town. Wells, however, gave very good reflections. An inquest over the body of a boy, four and a half years old, explained that he looked into a well and saw his face reflected there. When he tried to get at the reflection, he fell into the well.79 One can easily imagine that adults routinely checked their appearance in such reflections, but without tragic consequences to reward their curiosity.

  The period following the Black Death and the new opportunities that the decreased population afforded the peasants encouraged greater interest in material comforts.80 Gower was not an uninformed observer in his complaints that the peasants no longer kept their station. The new opportunities meant more investment in housing, food, and clothing. It also ultimately created greater divisions in the peasant community, for some of the peasants did very well and became yeomen while some of the less successful peasants slipped in their standard of living. The fifteenth century may be seen as one of greater consumerism, but not all benefited equally.

  The material environment was not a benign one, but rather one that required aggressive pursuit of a living. Success depended partly on a person's inheritance, on the other competitors, on the family economic strategies, and on luck The wheel of fortune was a common motif for church wall paintings. In the pursuit of a living both cooperation and competition were inevitable. The community ideal encouraged sharing of labor and wealth. Alms maintained the village poor, and the man without plow animals could have his land plowed by a wealthier neighbor in return for other labor. The worst of the deadly sins for the peasantry was avarice, and yet throughout the Middle Ages peasants were labeled as "grasping."

  While neighborliness was essential, the tensions of securing a living could easily lead to serious fights and criminal acts. Almost 30 percent of cases coming into jail delivery courts were felonies between people living in the same village." Village bylaws attempted to regulate the inevitable tension, and court rolls show that they were enforced. But the most trivial arguments over the material environment indicate how easily tempers flared. Toward vespers in July, Alice Timpon of Harrowen came into the highway opposite Isabel Bernard's house and claimed as hers a basket that was lying in the street. William Bernard came out of the house and in the ensuing quarrel over the basket he hit and finally strangled her.82 Competition with neighbors for food and goods reinforced the family as a unit of economic activity and as allies in an aggressive world.

  After reading through three chapters of mud, ditches, and cramped quarters, it should come as a relief to readers to know that in this section we shall be demolishing the myth that in the Middle Ages families lived in complex households. The sooty households were generally shared only by a conjugal couple and their children. The brown bread, peas porridge, and small ale of the everyday meal were ordinarily divided among the immediate family. Households with several brothers and their wives fighting for room and debilitated older generations insisting on their place by the hearth were rare. The myth of the extended family may seem an appealing one in a large nineteenth-century farmhouse, but not in a peasant's wattle-and-daub house.

  In discussing the peasants' material environment I did not consider how many people actually lived in the houses. The time has come to address the problem. Likewise, in discussing the attachment of peasants to fields and hearth, I did not discuss how the land and dwelling would be passed on from one generation to the next. In this section, therefore, we must look at the demography of the peasantry, household structures, inheritance patterns, and the importance of kinship. Such matters are essential for understanding the peasant family economy, the relative rigidity of customary rules of inheritance, and the affective relationships within the family that could offset custom. Leaving aside until a subsequent chapter the problems of household size and demography, I will turn first to inheritance patterns, for in part they helped to determine household size.

  Medieval peasant parents were caught in a dilemma as they arranged the devolution of family land and the accrued wealth of family enterprise from their generation to the next. English custom was in agreement with that of other European peasant societies, that wealth produced from family labor on their holding belonged to all members, and those children reaching adulthood could claim either a part of these benefits as their own or continued maintenance on the family land. English peasants also shared with those on the continent the idea that the generation controlling family land was more a steward than owner, and, preferably, the land passed on as a unit.' Ideally, daughters were given a dowry of chattels and money, sons were provided with pieces of land or skills of a trade, and one son inherited the family tenement. While rules governing the lines of descent of the tenement were part of the customary law of every manor and prominent in common law, I will argue in this chapter that peasants put aside such rules and explored a range of options for inheritance that permitted them to resolve their dilemma and make arrangements compatible with their own needs.

  The tradition has been, since the great jurist Bracton first looked at the welter of peasant inheritance customs and practices in the thirteenth century, to try to impose some rational ordering, to pin peasants down to a system of inheritance. When Homans applied a new theoretical framework to the data, an anthropologically based classificatory system for inheritance, he too tried to force peasant inheritance into neat categories. But the researcher must let the records speak for themselves and not be overanxious to impose legalistic or social-science structures on a system of make do. Peasants appealed to customary rules of inheritance only when a father died without making arrangements or when the family squabbled about the inheritance. In these cases the jurors cited the rules and decided the case. But in practice peasants exercised a range of options depending on their age and that of their children, their confidence in various children, and alternative arrangements for older offspring.

  Peasants' instruments for breaking with custom were either a settlement during the parents' lifetime or a will. The Church encouraged all laymen to make wills for the good of their souls, but it was also to the lord's advantage through most of the period under investigation to encourage the smooth succession of the land from father to next of kin. Legally, the ownership of all villein land was in the lord's hands and he could in theory take it back at any time. But in practice the family claimed the right to keep the land from generation to generation, to cultivate it, and to pay such rents as the lord demanded. The lord, however, did not need to hold peasants to strict inheritance rules in order to preserve his rights in the land, but only to have the devolution of his land recorded with its present holder in the manorial court rolls.2

  The formal inheritance rules that Homans and others have reconstructed are readily observable in manorial court rolls and custumals, and a review of them will serve as a contrast with the cases of peasants bending the rules to suit their own circumstances. Free peasants, of course, could follow the common law of primogeniture, but rules for inheritance among villeins fell to custom and thus varied from region to region and manor to manor. Consistent throughout all the various customs was the demand that the inheritor be of the family's blood, the only exception being the widow, and her claim, as we shall see, was a different one.

  Two basic inheritance types emerged from early studies, which made the whole matter appear more regular than it was in p
ractice. Impartible inheritance, that favoring one son and keeping the land intact, could be either through primogeniture or Borough English (usually ultimogeniture) and was common in champion country. Partible inheritance (gavelkind in Kent) called for the division of land among all surviving sons and was found in woodland.3 The results of the different inheritance customs appeared obvious to these early investigators. Borough English and primogeniture kept the land intact and sent noninheriting sons scurrying for other land or labor, whilst impartible inheritance either led to joint exploitation of the land or breaking it up into smaller units.4

  Borough English would appear in the abstract to be preferable from the peasant parent's viewpoint. Older children could be provided with their portion of the family wealth in dowry, an apprenticeship or education, or a parcel of land. When the parents were ready to retire, the young son would be grown and ready to take on the family tenement and care of his parents. The peasants, however, had other thoughts on the matter, and by the fourteenth century primogeniture replaced ultimogeniture. The change at Bookham in East Surrey in 1339 was well documented. Two of the leading villeins, Gilbert Luwyne and Thomas atte Hache, came with the whole homage and asked the lord's seneschal if the abbot might change the rule from the youngest son inheriting to the oldest because, although it had been the custom of their ancestors, it was "to the grave damage and detriment of the whole homage and tenants." The abbot agreed to the change and within a year the other villages also asked to switch to primogeniture and were allowed to do so at a cost of 40s.5 Perhaps peasants wanted to bring their customs in line with that of the nobility, who practiced primogeniture.

  Unigeniture, whether the eldest or youngest, had the obvious advantage of keeping the family tenement intact and, from the lord's viewpoint, guaranteed that it would continue as a unit of cultivation. If the family economic unit had accumulated other goods and wealth, noninheriting children would have some share of it. For daughters, dowries of animals, cash, household goods, and occasionally a bit of land would be their portion. Sons might receive some similar items or, if the fathers were wealthy, they would buy up other tenements or bits of land to establish their sons. The son inheriting the family land ended up with a higher status that his siblings, who might sink to the cottager group in the village.' In modern European peasant society such distinctions in social status estranged the inheriting brother from his other siblings.' But apparently less animosity arose from unigeniture, for fewer sibling murders occurred in impartible compared to partible inheritance areas.8

  When the family unit had not been productive or had few resources, noninheriting children were considerably disadvantaged. In the French village of Sologne, where parents had few possessions to pass on, the children had few ties to their parents and tended to make their own way in the world. Old parents were turned out into the streets to beg.9 Such was the case for cottars and wage laborers in rural England, as we shall see in the chapters on marriage and old age.

  Manorial court records and wills give ample evidence about the provisions for noninheriting siblings in areas practicing unigeniture. A father might set up the eldest son or sons and instruct them to provide their younger brothers with land or money when they reach the age of majority. The dowry of unmarried sisters might also be specified.10 But if the family had little wealth to go around, the siblings had the right to maintenance on the family tenement for life. The Syward family went to court to settle how much the noninheriting sisters could expect. The court judged that the two sisters should have lodging and a ring of corn (one-half a ring of wheat and one-half of peas)."

  Partible inheritance, one would assume, would impose on the siblings the demand that either they cultivate the land together or that the patrimony be broken up into smaller fields. In East Anglia the field sizes did tend to be smaller than in open-field husbandry, but Homans may have overemphasized the amount and importance of fragmen- tation.'2 Partible inheritance seems to be characteristic of areas in which opportunities for supplemental economic activities were abundant. Thus in the fenlands and wooded areas where hunting and fishing provided additional sources of food less land was needed to support a family. Fenlands in East Anglia and woodlands in Kent could afford partible inheritance. But partible inheritenace in pratice did not necessarily imply fragmentation. In thirteenth-century Lincolnshire usually only two sons lived to inherit and, with the exception of one village, the landholdings tended to be large.13 In Kent an active land market helped to counteract the effects of gavelkind inheritance." Elsewhere siblings sold their interest in the land to one brother or the legal ownership would be in all siblings' names but only one worked the land. Thus family land tended to remain intact or be regrouped into units. The tendency to splinter was particularly noticeable in the land hunger of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries; but other than that period of crisis, land units tended to coalesce. 15 Joint cultivation of the land seems to have been fairly rare.

  Succession of sons could be delayed because the widow, at least for her lifetime, had a claim on the land. In common law the widow was allowed a third of the property for life through a dower, but customary law was far more generous. On a number of manors in the West Midlands the widow could have the whole tenement or less for life, with the most common arrangement being half of it. The widow's right was as the continuator of her husband's tenure, and consequently she did not pay an entry fine.16 Other studies indicate a range of dower settlements. In one community widows were given interest in the land only until the age of majority of the heirs, and this could be as low as fourteen. In Orwell the widow was left with the land until the son or heir was twentyone, and then she could claim houseroom. But the widow could be a bar to her son's succession to his patrimony, particularly if she remarried and started a new family. 17

  A more complete discussion of widows appears in a later chapter, but a few examples will clarify how the widow's right worked in practice. On Chalgrave manor (Bedfordshire) Richard, son of Thomas Ballard, claimed that he was the eldest son and that he should inherit his father's lands. The jury said that he had an elder brother who was now dead, but that he had heirs. If this older brother had held the land, his heirs would have a prior claim. Since he did not, Richard's claim was the rightful one, except that his mother was alive: "the use of the manor is that no customary tenant can enter such land after the death of his father while his mother is alive, unless the mother shall agree and that his mother will hold the land all of her life if she shall wish."" In one will a man gave his wife her choice of living arrangements, declaring that if she was not satisfied, she could have her third of the estate according to the law.'9

  Succession to land in the absence of a widow or surviving sons also involved customary rules. In the case of surviving daughters the land was usually divided equally among them unless some extenuating circumstances, such as an older daughter already having received her share of the family inheritance at marriage, obviated the rules.20 In a case a Chertsey Abbey the younger daughter was declared impotent and her claim was overlooked in favor of the older daughter.21

  Inheritance rights became more complicated when half brothers and half sisters had claims. Although the manor courts always resorted to customary rules in disputed cases, these arrangements had an ad hoc appearance, indicating that efficient cultivation of the land may have been the most important criterion. Cecily and her husband sued her half brother for ten acres in Holme, arguing that her brother had inherited it from her father and that when he died it should have gone to her rather than her half brother by her father's second marriage. The court upheld her claim probably because she had a husband who could farm the land.22 At Chertsey Abbey practicalities argued against the daughter of the first wife. Peter Bernard died, leaving a messuage and a half virgate to his son by his second wife. When this boy, William, died while still a minor, his half sister by Peter's first marriage claimed it. Instead, the court argued that she was not William's sister but the daughter of a first wi
fe. "None of half-blood can inherit of right." The land eventually went to the man who married Peter's widow.23

  Bastardy posed complications because it could be a bar to direct succession of the land. Thus when John de Tothale of Chobham claimed some meadow that had belonged to Ralph de Forde and his wife, Alice, on the grounds that he was their son but born before they were married, the court disallowed it. The jurors claimed that John was "by the laws of England, a bastard, to whom no villein-land can descend, so that he has no right to the aforesaid land, either by way of purchase or inheritance." Such harshness, however, was not as uniform throughout the realm as the jurors claimed. In Wakefield a child conceived between trothplight and marriage was legitimate:

  Robert son of Richard de Risseworth of Wakefield and John his brother come and crave the land of Thomas son of Nigel de Wakefued as his heirs. John says Robert ought not to be heir because he was born before the marriage was solemnized at the church porch, but after the plighting of troth privately between them. Robert, the elder brother, says it is the custom on the lord's land in these parts for the elder brother, born after trothplight, to be heir, and he therefore prays to be admitted as heir.