The Ties That Bound
Page 11
Middle and modern English adopted from the Normans the French root words for kinship terms such as uncle and aunt, but no more complicated term than cousin was used for more distant kin. Although the special term for a relationship to father's brother was dropped, the kinship terminology perpetuated Anglo-Saxon practices. Thus we continued to form clumsy compounds such as grandmother or fourth cousin once removed. The lack of words for extended kin indicates that they were not a part of daily parlance because they were not needed.
Anglo-Saxon social custom, like the modern English one, was not patrilineal and did not emphasize obligations to extended kin. Modern historians have argued that inherited surnames are an indication of a patrilineal system, but they are mistaken. Instead, both then and now, society was organized into ego-centered, bilateral kinship. Only a slight preference, arising perhaps out of the warlike nature of Anglo-Saxon society, made the "spear side" more important than the "spindle side." Residence tended to be virilocal, unless a man married a woman inheriting a house and land. But even inheritance customs in AngloSaxon England showed the same ad hoc quality that we found in late medieval England.' Surnames, as we shall see, were not even necesarily patronymics.
Although the Church introduced the elaborate canonical prohibitions on marriage by degree of kinship, peasants did not adopt a more elaborate system for kin recognition. Marriage was prohibited between men and women related to the fourth degree of kinship, so that people who had descended from the same great-great-grandfather were considered consanguineous. Affinity was also a ban to marriage, so that a man could not marry the sister of a former wife and vice versa. Even sexual relations outside marriage established affinity; if one had sexual relations with a fiancee's kinswoman, the marriage could not take place. The spiritual kinship from the baptismal ceremony meant that, for instance, a man could not marry a woman who had stood as godmother to a child by his first wife. The Church must have presumed that people would know their family trees and would avoid marriage to those with either consanguineous or affinal ties. But did they?
Cases in ecclesiastical courts indicated that the populace had considerable anxiety about kinship connections in marriages and, as a consequence, people did avoid at least the obvious kin marriages. Furthermore, few divorce cases among the general population were based on consanguinity. One would assume, given the many degrees of kinship involved, that divorce would be relatively simple because of the potential for consanguinity. But cases appearing in the ecclesiastical courts demonstrate that people did not know their kinship ties and could not find witnesses or prove to the court's satisfaction that they were related to their spouse. Apparently, parishioners did not have a good sense of their more distant kinship ties.4
In spite of Church strictures on intermarriage with kin, marriages within the forbidden degrees occurred. To form a rough estimate on intermarriage, one scholar looked at the marriages in various ecclesiastical act books and found that roughly 50 percent of the couples were from the same parish, and therefore potentially related. Since no routine parish register was kept, the extent of intermarriage among kin cannot be established, but a statistical model based on an individual and starting at the Norman Conquest (1066) shows considerable overlap:
Around the discovery of America, our individual has more than 60,000 distinct ancestors. Some 95 percent of the slots in the family tree at this level are still filled by different people. But back as far as the time of Wycliffe and the Peasants' Revolt, at the twentieth generation the number of distinct ancestors has grown beyond 600,000 and nearly a third of the slots in the tree are filled by duplicate people. Just before the Black Death nearly 30 percent of the 3,650,000 inhabitants of England turned up as ancestors. [By the time of King John] 80 percent of the population are ancestors of our single individual.'
On an island such as England the more distant kinship relations had to be forgotten or nearly all marriages would have been within the prohibited degrees.
Two other legal situations encouraged peasants to call upon their family history. In the thirteenth century men and women went to the king's court to try to prove that they were free peasants as opposed to villeins. They supported their testimony with their genealogies showing freeborn relatives while the lord countered with his reconstruction of their family trees indicating telltale unfree ancestors. These genealogies went no farther back than to a grandfather, but they did extend laterally to include aunts, uncles, and cousins. All cases showed a mix of free and unfree relatives. In very few of the cases did the inquest jury, drawn from the community, support the peasant's claim. The evidence leads one to conclude that not only family, but community members and the lord's officials as well, knew the relationship and the status of all individuals involved.6
Knowledge of one's family tree could also be important in claiming land that had become vacant because of death or desertion of direct heirs. Following the Black Death, collateral branches came from other villages to claim inheritances in Halesowen, and their claims were recognized. Again, the ties were mostly limited to nieces and nephews of both the male and female lines.'
Lineage did not have the great importance to peasants that it did to nobility. One use of the word house that did not appear in the peasants' vocabulary was its association with an aristocratic lineage system, as in "the House of Lancaster." If peasants had family traditions that traced descent from some notable ancestor, such as John the Bullthrower, they have escaped record readers to date.
English peasants were ahead of those on the continent in one aspect of family identity, and that was the early establishment of relatively stable family surnames.' By the late thirteenth century, and certainly by the time of the Black Death, surnames had reached considerable stability. The need for surnames arose partly because English government was beginning to reach out to individuals in the countryside, particularly in such matters as justice and taxation, which required stable names, but also because peasants were using written records and found that surnames were useful to themselves as well. Thus land transactions could be traced and debts collected from the next generation.
English peasants did not necessarily use patronymics. A child might be identified by either the father's or the mother's surname, so that matronymics were not uncommon. The mother's name was not reserved for illegitimate children but, rather, was used when the mother was the inheritor of the family land. Thus one finds in manorial court cases, such as that of Henry Chyld, who married Joan, the daughter and heir of Walter Chyld, that the husband has taken the wife's name. In another case the couple changed their name to the wife's father's surname when they inherited the land.9
The surnames themselves suggest that the community bestowed them. Occupational surnames such as Smith and Carter described the family's work; geographical names such as de (of) Broughton or atte Townsend described the village or place of residence; and physical descriptions such as Long or White depicted a person's physical characteristics. Sometimes the names were not entirely complimentary, but they stuck as surnames because the community recognized them. Occasinally a name suggests an ancestral root in a Danish settler such as Wigeston's Herricks, who perhaps descended from an Erik. Surnames became commonplace only gradually, and the old system of identifica tion with a father's or mother's first name continued, either as the only identification or along with a surname as in William, son of Maud Squint. At least initially it is hard to imagine a positive identity with surnames given in such a way, unless it indicated flattering personal characteristics. Pride in a family name appears not to have been a preoccupation of medieval peasants, for they had no formal adoption procedure for a child to take an adoptive parent's surname.
Another way to look at the importance of kinship for an individual or family is to investigate the rights and obligations that a peasant might expect from kin. We have already seen that the right to inheritance was tightly held to the blood relations centered at the family hearth. But did peasants rely for various services and emotional bo
nds on a limited family network of parents, children, and siblings? on an extended family including uncles and cousins? or, as Aries suggested, on community contacts?
The myth of extended kinship in the Middle Ages does not die easily; and even when social scientists considered the uses of kinship, they adopted a sentimentalized argument for extended kinship being better, theoretically at least, for a peasant society. Extended families, they argue, are more efficient for agriculture in that they provide for a cooperative work force, greater security for members and less disruption from death and divorce, and ample entertainment and fellowship.10 While it might make more short-run economic sense to invest in the wage labor of fellow villagers to help with farm work, the long-term investment in extended kin is worth more because they can be relied upon for aid in adversity."
Medieval peasants did not behave in a manner modern social scientists think of as optimal for their circumstances. They did not routinely live in extended families and seem not to have relied extensively on kin. From the Anglo-Saxon period and into the Middle Ages, the only right that extended kin could ask of an individual was part of the inheritance, should that individual's direct line fail. Their duties to him/ her were also few. They might be asked to stand surety and care for him/ her in the event of illness, but as we shall see, immediate family and nonkin might be preferable for such roles. In Anglo-Saxon law they received compensation in the event that he/she was killed, but only a remnant of this right remained in the late Middle Ages. The wife or mother could prosecute the murderer of a dead brother, father, husband, or son.12 Record sources do not mention exchanging work with kin or obligations to aid in hard times. Instead, reliance on the labor of nuclear family, supplemented with hired servants, and some reciprocity with neighbors dominate the records.
One vexing question that eludes researchers in medieval records is the extent to which members of village communities were related to each other. If inbreeding was common in villages, we might expect that the networks of mutual aid and pledging (surety) we see in manorial courts are, in fact, the workings of extended kinship. Even if families did not live together, they could have cooperated to further their mutual interests. Studies of networks are just beginning to be done, and those that are published indicate that an individual family was likely to have at least one other kin in the community. In early modern Terling, 50 to 60 percent of the households had kin in the village, but the link was usually with only one other household containing closely related kinparents or siblings; more extended family was rare. Thus kinship networks tended to be loose and played only a small role in the village's social structure.13
What sort of mutual reciprocity, if any, did peasants expect from their kin? To answer that question we must turn to manorial court rolls. Here, again, we meet with some frustration in analyzing kinship obligations, for only the close relationships of the nuclear family are specifically mentioned and kin ties through the female line are difficult to detect. A study of Redgrave, Suffolk, shows that of the 13,592 interactions in the manor court from 1259 to 1293 only 10.7 percent were between members of the same familes, and this figure included such uncooperative actions as assault and tresspasses. The most common form of interaction (96 percent) was when families were jointly amerced (fined). Since family members are cited as defaulting on debt, they apparently borrowed from each other. In Writtle (Essex), however, only 2 percent of debt litigations were between family members. While family members did pledge for each other, they were more likely to select someone who was not in their family. Pledging, or standing surety that the other person will meet their obligations, is the area where one would expect the most family cooperation, for the arrangement required a high degree of trust since the pledger was fined or held responsible if the pledgee reneged. That studies of pledging have not found family ties predominating argues for friends being more import- ant.14 One reason for selecting nonkin as a pledge, however, was that recruiting a higher-status villager for the role was more prestigious.
The extent to which an individual relied on neighbors or kin depended on their community status. Both upper- and lower-status individuals in Redgrave had few interactions. The lower economic group had small nuclear families in which the children, by necessity, left home early to seek work as servants and laborers. Because they had little property to distribute, as we saw in the last chapter, they made few claims on family. At the upper end of village wealth, money and power could, in a sense, substitute for kin and neighbors. It was the middling group who relied on kith and kin. Sons and daughters might marry during the father's lifetime and even live on the same messuage, thus encouraging mutual help, but for this group as well neighbors were more important than kin in pledging and cooperating in agriculture.15 The relationship of an individual and his family to neighbors will be considered more fully in the section on surrogate family.
While it is difficult to move beyond bonds within the nuclear family in manorial court rolls, the picture they present may not be totally unrealistic. It is possible, however, to trace the fortunes of some individuals and their extended kin through sources ranging from reconstructed manorial court "biographies" to wills and chronicles. Amassing example upon example cannot, to be sure, provide a final guide to the debts of kinship and the depth of family feeling, but they do indicate how kin could be exploited if conditions were right and the parties amenable.
In the late fourteenth century three cousins, John, Richard, and Thomas Cellarer, made such an impression on the abbey of Meaux with their joint strategy to get their villein status transferred out of abbey and onto royal demesne, that their case was recorded in the abbey chronicle thirty years later. The Cellarers, as their name implied, had risen to prominence because their grandfather Adam had been an abbey official. After Richard had tried to raise an unsuccessful revolt in 1356, John and Thomas along with two other kinsmen made a clever legal maneuver. They claimed that, in violation of the Statute of Labourers of 1351, the abbot had taken by force a plowman whom they had hired. The abbot intended to discuss the case with the royal auditors at Westminster, but since the charges had been brought, the auditors distrained the abbot's horses and he had to rent some to return to Meaux. The plea was quashed when the cousins, examined singly, admitted they were villeins of the abbot. They could not, therefore, bring charges against him. Richard then appealed to the king on behalf of the family, saying they were really his villeins and not those of the abbot, but the king delayed the case because of a fresh campaign in France. Yet another infraction of manorial rules landed John and some family members in the abbey's prison, but John crawled out at night through a shaft in the latrine system. He and William, another cousin, then tried to get their freedom declared. Throughout these legal maneuvers members always acted in the interest of the whole family and often worked together, assuming legal costs and punishments jointly."B
In one of the reconstructed biographies from court roll evidence, the importance of marriage in changing a person's kinship encounters is well illustrated. When Henry Kroyl, Jr., married Agnes, daughter of Robert Penifader, their union brought together the kin of the two prominent village families for the first time. While for all parties most associations continued to be with nonkin, Henry's relationship with his brother, as opposed to his father, became more important and his affinal relationships with his wife's kin were a new feature of his life. Henry's brothers-in-law, however, tended to use their new association with the Kroyl family more extensively, perhaps reflecting the greater political prominence of the Kroyl family. The women in the Penifader family also reflect their marital status in their networks. Agnes relied on her husband's network, but her unmarried sister, Christine, continued to rely largely on her natal family. The relations between the two families remained amicable during this generation, but conflicts arose over inheritances among their children and between aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews."
Wills and manorial court land transactions sometimes show the role that kin played in an ov
erall strategy for setting up family units. For instance, John Andrew died in 1303 without heirs. His brother Roger took his land and endowed his son Andrew with it. His other son, John, took an acre of land with his uncle's widow. Eventually John and Andrew took over Uncle John's messuage together. Andrew apparently died without issue and the land went to John, son of John, the son of Roger, or the grandnephew of the original holder. Uncles and aunts on both the father's and the mother's side could be a source of inheritance. Since they received part of the family inheritance, they might return it to the children of siblings if they died childless, and in a stable population 20 percent of married adults were likely to be childless. 18
Even if we must assume that the connections with extended family are obscured because of name changes at marriage or failure to mention the ties of blood, our few examples cannot prove extensive networks of kin.19 If the reliance on kin related by blood is difficult to trace through the records, the importance of fictive kin and stepparents is even more difficult. We will leave these two relationships for a separate chapter on surrogate parents.
The most difficult aspect of kinship to illuminate with medieval records is the affection felt and displayed toward relatives. Here one can only appeal to the sources for inferences about feelings. What, for instance, does it tell us when we read in a coroner's inquest that the wife of Hugh the Cobbler of Blundham expected her husband to come back from Sandy on December 11 but he did not? She searched for him the next day "because she was troubled by his delay and every day until December 29," when she found him drowned in the river.20 Was it the kin's duty to search for a family member who was delayed on the road or was this an act of individual concern and affection?
Of the 1704 cases in which the first finder in an accidental-death case is mentioned, only 26 percent were found by a family member. The mother was the first finder in 36 percent and the father in 31 percent. The wife was the first finder in 9 percent of the cases and the husband in 2 percent. Siblings account for 8 percent of the first finders. The rest were an insignificant scattering of other relatives and kin whose relationship is not known but whose surname was the same as the victim's. The preponderance of parents in the first-finder category disappears when one controls for children as victims, and the number of first finders who are related to adult victims drops to 15 percent. When the first finder is a relative, most likely she will be a woman, either a mother, wife, or sister. This is not a coincidence but rather underscores both the nurturing role of peasant women and the greater likelihood of adult men, as opposed to women, to die from accidental death.