A county-by-county breakdown shows large variations in kin as first finders. When one reads the coroners' rolls for Bedfordshire, it appears that a strong emphasis was placed on the family being the first finder; and occasionally the person who actually found the victim notified the next of kin so that the latter appears officially as first finder. In Bedfordshire 60 percent of the cases in which the first finder was identified he or she was related to the victim. But in Cambridgeshire only 25 percent were kin; and in Norfolk 30 percent, in Wiltshire 28 percent, and in Lincolnshire only 15 percent were kin. The lower percentages do not necessarily reflect a lack of emotional concern in these counties, but rather a difference in local legal attitudes. Since most of the first finders who were kin were females, counties that reserved legal roles largely for men, such as Wiltshire and Lincolnshire, have a lower percentage of kin as "official" first finders.
The first finder, therefore, is not a reliable indicator of concern about kin except that, once again, only the immediate family were the first finders, not extended family.
Wills, likewise, underscore the close attachment of an individual to immediate family rather than to more distant kin. Members of the nuclear family were given the bulk of the estates, and only the aged were likely to make token gifts to kin.21 Of the 376 testators in Bedfordshire only 12 percent remembered grandchildren in their wills and they often referred to them as an undifferentiated group-e.g., "to each grandchild I leave 4d." The gifts were the token, ceremonial types that were reserved for those outside the immediate family circle. Animals (usually a sheep) were the most common (48 percent) bequests, followed by money (20 percent), and grain (11 percent ). Other provisions included a bit of land or a house other than the home tenement, trade or an education, clothing, valuables, and a dowry for a granddaughter (3 percent). Some of the wills stated that the grandchild had been provided for already and some indicated that if the son inheriting the home tenement died, the grandchild should succeed him. Godchildren, as we shall see, were even less likely to be remembered, and when they are, they are given animals, money and grain.
A scattering of other kin are mentioned. The largest of this group are nieces, nephews, and unspecified kin with the same surname. This group received the usual animals, money, grain, and miscellaneous household goods, clothing, silver spoons, and so on. Only two were given the home tenement and two were given the right to buy it. Brothers were the next most frequently mentioned (21 percent), followed by sisters (11 percent), sons-in-law (10 percent), mothers, fathers, and daughters-inlaw. All receive the usual ceremonial token gifts, although a few are provided with a house or land other than the home tenement. For the most part, as we mentioned in the last chapter, if a testator did not have a wife or a son or daughter, he directed that the estate be sold for masses for his soul.
Another insight into concern for kin, or lack thereof, comes from the provision for prayers for the testator's soul and others he cared to remember. In this largely spiritual matter one might expect that bonds of affection rather than economic ties would predominate. The provision for prayers would, of course, only go to people who had predeceased the testator, and this must be borne in mind in interpreting the data. Almost half of the testators left special bequests of goods and money for masses for only their own souls, while 30 percent generously included all Christian souls. Of those who did include kin in the masses, a father (10 percent) was the most common, followed by a wife (9 percent). Husbands were mentioned in 3 percent of all wills, but a high proportion of the widows leaving wills mentioned their husband. Most of the men still had a wife alive, so that the failure to include a wife is not surprising. Only two men mentioned two wives. Mothers were not specifically mentioned but included as parents (4 percent). Brothers were rarely mentioned (1 percent), and sisters never were. Priests were most likely to reserve prayers for parents or brothers in their wills. The enlightening omissions are children who predeceased the testator (only one example) and kin other than the immediate family.
The nuclear family, seen in the light of inheritance customs and practices and kinship relations, was a compact unit, not a porous one. Inheritance customs kept the nuclear family tightly bound until the children set up their own households. The role of relatives outside the nuclear family varied with family preferences, individual bonds of affection, and the value of family assets. Kin outside the nuclear family could either play no part or a large part in family life and economic strategy. No strong cultural norms dictated that extended kin be asked to sit at the hearth or be serviceable in case of need. Even with the introduction of surnames and Church prohibitions on consanguineous marriages, knowledge of family relationshps beyond grandfathers and aunts and uncles remained shaky. Thus, contrary to the assertions of Shorter and Stone, the nuclear family was not permeable to the entrance of other kin to its hearth unless it so chose. Friends and neighbors were important for an individual and a family unit to succeed, particularly among the large group of middling peasants, but they too did not enter into the family.
The Black Death and the major economic and demographic changes of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had little effect on peasants' assumptions about the rights and obligations of nuclear family members; they remained as firmly binding as ever. The greater opportunities meant simply that second sons were likely to be able to do much more with their inheritances than had previously been possible, assuming they survived disease. Because of the high mortality, members of the extended kin network appeared more frequently in court records, chiefly to claim vacant family lands. Neither the dearth of the early fourteenth century nor the prosperity of the later period seems to have altered peasants' indifference toward extended kin.
Two of the most elusive aspects of the medieval family are its size and structure, and yet both have received considerable study. The record sources are all deficient in one way or another. The two large surveys, the Domesday Book of 1086 and the poll taxes of the late fourteenth century, do not list all household members, so that the demographer must derive a multiplier from other sources in order to arrive at the number of people in the household. Other sources, however, also have their defects. Manorial court rolls do not refer to women and children with any consistency. The surveys and serf lists that survive are for short time periods and small areas. Wills are not numerous until the fifteenth century and do not necessarily indicate all of a testator's children. Coroners' inquests provide fleeting glimpses of the whole family around the hearth, but are not systematic sources for household size or structure. Thus to those vital questions of age of marriage, fertility, family limitation, and relationship of people in a household, the answers will necessarily remain somewhat tentative.
Although sources are sparse, speculation has been rife on all of these matters. Scholars of the early modern and modern family have found it necessary to fill medieval households with a number of kin in order to argue that the modern family is very different from the medieval one. Historians and social scientists have equated the nuclear, or conjugal, families with modern economic and social life, and have equated extended families, by contrast, with preindustrial and peasant societies.' Two sociologists, for instance, have argued that in societies with a high degree of social stratification the extended family will predominate.2 Certainly, medieval Europe qualified as a society with a high degree of social stratification, but we have already shown that in matters of inheritance the nuclear, or conjugal, family predominated and that in the recognition of kinship bonds only close relationships were noted. However, we must still investigate who lived under one roof and who controlled entrance to and exit from the hearth.
Because of source material deficiencies and because scholars have been so active in creating hypothetical structures for the medieval family, it is useful to start with some basic definitions of subjects investigated in this chapter. Two demographic historians, Hammel and Laslett, have provided some basic categories for analyzing domestic units that can serve as a guide. Their basi
c definition is that the domestic group "consists and consisted of those who share the same physical space for the purposes of eating, sleeping, and taking rest and leisure, growing up, childrearing and procreation." The domestic group is coresidential and functions as a household unit. In establishing this basic definition, they draw a distinction between the household and the houseful. The household is a functioning domestic unit in which the members contribute to the general well-being of the group and share in the reciprocal obligations to its members. This close relationship of the members is opposed to the houseful, which may include visitors, guests, lodgers, boarders, and even aged parents and other kin who do not directly contribute to the domestic unit.
The domestic group could be very varied in its content, but the variations fall into six basic types. Solitaries included the widowed and widows as well as single people. Groups with no familial relationship include coresident persons who were either siblings or not related. Simple families or households are based on the conjugal couple and include married couples alone, married couples with children (nuclear family), and widows or widowers with children. The extended family or household could be extended either vertically or laterally or even a combination of the two. The most usual would be parents and a married son with children. The multiple family or household included secondary units and could thus encompass two brothers and their families living under one roof. Finally, there is a catchall group of incompletely classifiable households.3
Most of the debate over the structure of medieval families has been whether they were simple or more complex either extended or multiple. Our discussion of inheritance would lead us to expect to find multiple families in areas such as Kent or East Anglia, where partible inheritance was practiced. If two brothers inherited the land, it could be economically advantageous for them to work it jointly. But even though they might work the land jointly, they did not necessarily live in the same house. Thus thirteenth-century serf lists in an area that practiced partible inheritance showed that nuclear or simple households predomi- nated.4
The traditional assumption about households in peasant society has been that they contain extended families, with the married son and his children living in the same house with his retired parents. Thus one has a three-generational household or stem family.5
One argument that historians have used for extended peasant households is a type of architectural determinism. Housing space was limited because a peasant house was a substantial capital investment that prohibited expansion of housing, thus forcing married sons to continue living with parents. As we have seen in the chapters on the material environment, a one-bay house was fairly inexpensive and could easily be erected to house a retired peasant or a single adult brother or sister. Archaeological evidence suggests that father and son built a new house on the croft as a "dower" cottage or retirement home.' Thus alternative solutions to housing the older generation were both common and preferred. Furthermore, we have seen that the houses were neither large nor, until the fifteenth century, very substantial. Houses lasted about one generation, so that the son would have to rebuild. While there was attachment to the family land, it did not extend to an identity with the physical structure of the home. Home was, literally, where the hearth was. The late medieval English peasant houses were not the substantial, large stone houses found in parts of France and Italy.
The two main documents that enumerate household occupants, the Domesday Book and the late-fourteenth-century poll taxes, indicate that simple families were the rule. Manorial records of various sorts that have been used in the numerous village reconstitution studies also show households containing only the immediate family. All these records have flaws in accurate reporting, but they suggest that if stem families did occur, they were rare or short-lived. In the coroners' inquests the families who are described around the hearth or in the house are almost always simple families. But one occasionally finds an ambiguous case such as the burning of the house of John, son of Henry of Baumburgh. In the house was John's four-week-old son and his older son's sixteenweek-old daughter.' Was the latter child simply left there or did John and his older son live under the same roof?
One might argue that the stem family was of short duration in the family cycle but nonetheless important.8 A reply to this argument and an attempt to overcome the source deficiencies has been a demographic simulation model. It shows that demographic variables provided only very loose constraints on household structure and that in the English case, at least after 1500, the existence of stem families would have been rare. If demographic variables were not decisive, then one would not expect to find stem families earlier, except possibly during the period of land hunger and famine in the early fourteenth century.' Another source of evidence is the demographic studies from the continent, where records are more complete. In fifteenth-century Tuscany over half the families were simple ones. In northern France simple families predominated, but starting in 1350 stem and joint families appeared to be more common in Languedoc and southern France.10 All evidence, such as it is, points to simple families predominating as the most common household type.
Evidence on solitaries is also difficult to find. Thirteenth-century serf lists show that 9 percent of the households were widows living alone.11 The coroners' inquests also mention the occasional widow living alone or coresident with a sibling. Peasants were also familiar with local clergy as a solitary living alone or with some servants.
Widows heading households, however, were rather common. Of the 252 serf households in the study mentioned above, widows headed 5 percent. A survey of a dozen hamlets on Ombersley manor showed that one tenant out of seven was a widow, and the records of ten estates in the west midlands from 1350 to 1450 show that of the holdings remaining within families, 60 percent went to female heiresses and all but 5 percent of these were widows. In 1260 in Holderness about one-sixth of the villein holdings were in the hands of women, but about one-third of the cottars were women. These women were sometimes described as widows and sometimes as daughters of tenants. Among the Bedfordshire laymen leaving wills in the late fifteenth century, 72 percent had wives living at the time they wrote their wills (usually shortly before death).12
The presence of extra kin and nonkin in the households is a matter of separate interest. Orphans, as we shall see in a later chapter, were absorbed into family, as has been shown for later centuries. Servants, however, seemed not to have been as prominent a part of peasant households as they were later. Families relied on servants if they could afford them, and the poll tax lists their presence, but it is not clear that they always lived with the master or that peasants routinely put their children out in a semi-fostering arrangement as was common later in England.13 Wealthy peasant families became temporarily larger during harvest season when they sheltered extra workers and sometimes their families, but these fall into the category of houseful rather than household.
The brief summary presented here indicates how little concrete information can be amassed on medieval English peasant household structure. Such evidence as exists points to a predominance of simple, conjugal families rather than either multiple or extended families. Housing was cheap throughout the period, so that the option of a separate roof over one's head was feasible and seemed to be preferred. No evidence may be found in literary or legal sources suggesting that the extended or multiple families were an integral part of the culture. In balance, the scant information available lends itself more readily to an argument for the predominance of simple families over stem families among the English peasantry during the late Middle Ages. Those who would argue for extended and multiple families must produce evidence rather than assertions and hypothetical preferences for the behavior of medieval English peasants.
Peasant household sizes have been the subject of as much disagreement as have their structure. Again scholars have produced hypothetical arguments. It is conventional wisdom, for instance, that peasants will reproduce at near biological maximums and hence have very l
arge families with births every year or two during the woman's reproductive life. Other scholars, however, have observed that household size tends to be small in all societies and that one finds larger domestic groups only in pastoral societies and among rich peasants whose plentiful resources make it possible to support larger households. 14
Historians who have studied preindustrial peasant society have also observed that economic opportunities were closely related to household size. Wealthier households had more children than poorer, and wealthier regions had larger families than did poorer ones. In rural Pistoia peasants living on the hillside terrain were kept poor by the avarice of landlords who charged too much rent and did not encourage capital investment in either the land or technology. The gouging landlords prior to the Black Death so depressed the standards of living of these people that married couples failed to replace themselves. Peasants on better land, however, had substantially larger families." In Halesowen land in the preplague period was so scarce that sons inheriting small holdings or cottages were unable to increase either their income or their holdings. Consequently, they had small families while the wealthier peasants with more land had larger families.
The Ties That Bound Page 12