The Ties That Bound

by Barbara A Hanawalt

  Various household sizes have been suggested for the pre- and postplague periods. In Halesowen before the Black Death the average was 5.8, a higher figure than the 4.7 and 4.9 for Redgrave and Rickinghall, respectively, in Suffolk in the late thirteenth century. The average household size in Kibworth Harcourt was 5 before the plague and it dropped to 3.96 during the course of the fifteenth century. By the sixteenth century England again had a mean household size of 4.8. The improved economic conditions following the plague may not have increased household size, but they did ease the differences between the rich, middling, and poor families in numbers of children."

  Most of these estimates are based on family reconstitutions derived from manorial court rolls. These rolls were never intended as census documents and demographic calculations based on them must be reconstructed from court appearances. The rolls are biased against females, children under twelve, and against poorer elements who made fewer court appearances. Even extreme care in using them will never make them a reliable demographic source. Wills are another source for family size, but they too are very inadequate, for not all living children are mentioned because they may have received a previous settlement. But some trends may be derived from them, such as that the testators had few children during the fifteenth century, with the picture improving in its closing decades."

  Although none of the sources leaves one satisfied, it appears that the average number of persons per household was about five before the plague, with the rich having more and the poor less. In the late fourteenth and first part of the fifteenth century the average family size may have dipped below four, while the late fifteenth century saw a return to larger household size.

  If we are to talk about small households including only a conjugal couple and one to three children, then questions arise about fertility and mortality. One wants to know why population was not reproducing close to the biological maximum, as the early historical demographer Frederick Le Play predicted.i8 Various suggestions and hypotheses have been put forward to explain the small family size, including birth control, infanticide, high infant mortality, late marriages, infertility due to poor diet, high female mortality, and economic limitations on nuptiality. If one assesses the limited data available to answer these questions, once again it is apparent that firm answers will not be forthcoming. Without parish registers, censuses, and even a routine notation of age in medieval records, one can only suggest possible parameters.

  The age of marriage and percentage of the population marrying is obviously important in determining fertility, for early marriages and most people marrying should foster maximum reproductive capabilities. In his classic article on the European marriage pattern, Hajnal identified the medieval English population as non-European both because people married earlier than the northwestern Europeans did in later centuries and because a larger percentage married. Basing his argument on studies of the 1377 poll tax and of the British peerage, he concluded that the medieval English population resembled that of Bulgaria or Romania. These studies have proved to be unreliable.19 A more rigorous, recent study of the poll tax evidence suggests that the percentage of males marrying was low and those who married did so late in life. This pattern was also confirmed in a reexamination of the thirteenth-century Lincolnshire serf lists. If this study is correct, then the marriage pattern of medieval England would fall within Hajnal's classification for the northwestern European pattern. The stagnation of population in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, therefore, could have arisen not only from the pervasive mortality but also from the relatively late age of marriage of the population.20

  The conclusions a researcher draws from poll tax lists, however, may depend on the ones she or he analyzes. Suffolk poll taxes show a high percentage of the population marrying and suggest a young age of marriage.21 Of the knightly class, 86 percent were reported as married, as were 94 percent of the peasant farmers, 77 percent of the artificers, 84 percent of the laborers, and 54 percent of the servants. The Suffolk poll tax returns demonstrate that servants were establishing their own households while still young and in service. They appear to be taking advantage of the higher wages to set up independent households. The Suffolk returns also show that in the upper-status groups marriage was very common, and those not married were either widows, widowers, or teenagers living at home.

  The family reconstitution study of Halesowen showed a variable age of marriage depending on economic circumstances. In the early fourteenth century, when land was hard to come by and wages were depressed, couples married in their early twenties. With the new economic opportunities opening up following the Black Death, the marriage age for women and men dipped into the late teens.22 Both the Suffolk poll tax returns and the Halesowen materials suggest that Hajnal's depiction of the medieval English population as non-European is correct.

  One reason for the relatively early age of marriage and the high percentage of the population marrying was that medieval peasant youth appear not to have been bound by the custom of "no land, no marriage." Both historians and demographers have held this up as an inalterable principle of peasant marriages. These scholars have presumed that a peasant son waited for his father to die or retire before he secured a tenement and married, and that younger siblings without prospects remained at home, unmarried. The effects of this long wait, historians argue, is that men marry older and spend part of their youth on fantasies of parricide.23

  Evidence from fifteenth-century wills and fourteenth-century manorial court records dispel the myth that sons waited for their fathers to retire before marrying. We saw in Chapter 4 that fathers with grown sons had already given them other tenements or pieces of land or may have given them the home tenement and themselves retired to a cottage. Even the land shortages of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries did not deter marriages. In Halesowen even a small holder could establish two sons on pieces of land and in separate cottages during his lifetime. The sons then married and supported small families on their land. Larger holders likewise set up their more numerous children during their lifetime. In the preplague years about 38 percent of the sons who formed households did so before their fathers died or retired. The land shortages may have delayed marriages for the poorer and middling groups, but not for the well-to-do. With the diminished population and ready availability of land, 54 percent of all sons established households while their fathers were alive.24

  Land need not have come from the fathers, for enterprising youth, both male and female, purchased small plots of land in order to marry, and some inherited land from childless relatives. In manorial court rolls, as we have pointed out, numerous small pieces of land changed hands. These were often purchased by an individual anticipating marriage or by the parents of a child. Young couples were willing to risk establishing a household with as little as a cottage and an acre or two of land. They would have a meager life, poor survival rates for their children, and have to find wage labor and perhaps charity to supplement their income, but they were not deterred from marriage.25

  Other resourceful young people took up retirement contracts, as will be discussed in the chapter on aging, so that they could guarantee that they would eventually have land when their elderly charges died.26 In the early fourteenth century, when land was so much in demand, young men married widows for their land even if it meant that they would have to compete with children from the first marriage for the land after her death27 On the Ramsey Abbey estates, 141 out of the 426 brides paying marriage fines had earned enough money to pay their own fines and select their own partners.28 Even vagabonds, with only stolen goods to their name, married.29

  Another reason that the lack of an inheritance or land did not deter marriage was that it was so simple to marry. A verbal agreement to marry was all that was necessary for a canonically valid marriage.

  We have been suggesting that medieval peasant youth married young, but none of our sources so far have given ages. The absence of concrete evidence places greater value on
the more subtle indicators of cultural attitudes toward the age at which marriage and sexual relations were considered appropriate. We must, therefore, look at unorthodox sources to determine what the society thought was the normal age of first marriage. All evidence points to the mid-teenage years as being too young for adult responsibilities, including marriage. The poll tax itself did not tax youth of fourteen because they were not fully adult. In the prosecution of rape cases, jurors singled out as especially reprehensible those men whose victims were teenagers and were much more likely to convict such offenders. One father lost his life trying to save his teenage daughter from a rapist. She had gone to the woods to gather sticks when the rapist approached her carrying a bow and arrow. She called for help from her father, who came to her rescue but was shot.30 The rape and attempted-rape cases indicate a feeling on the part of society that girls in their teenage years should be sheltered from sexual encounter and that violent sexual attacks on them were repugnant. Another legal indication that adult marriages were preferred was the continued custom of keeping the age of majority for inheritance at twenty-one and higher. Such a high inheritance age was a signal, if not always an impediment, to youth to delay marriage. While these bits of evidence from legal records are far from conclusive, they do indicate that early and middle teenage marriages, and perhaps even sexual contacts, were not the norm.

  Moralists such as Robert Mannyng counted marriage of children an outrageous sin. His objections had practical overtones; he observed that if people marry too young, they will come to dislike each other as they grow older and the marriage partners will tend to wander. But the canon law, applicable to all Europe and not England alone, permitted a very young age for marriage contracts. Children under seven could not enter into marriage contracts, and those over that age could repudiate the agreement at the age of puberty. For boys puberty was canonically established at age fourteen and for girls it was twelve. Few cases appeared in ecclesiastical courts arguing for dissolution of marriage or contract on the grounds of the parties being too young. The situation may seldom have arisen because children so young contracted few marriages or their repudiation was accepted without a court case.31 Although Chaucer had the Wife of Bath married first at the canonically permitted age of twelve, we may not take that as a normal age of first marriage; such an early age of marriage could have been a literary devise to shock the public and enhance the sexuality of his character.

  In ballads special and tragic circumstances surround the taking of a young bride. The classic story is that of Earl Brand. A young maid, who is described as just fifteen, came to his bedside and they conspired to elope. But as they went away together an old man on the moor recognized her and went to the castle to tell her father. The father set out with her brothers, but Earl Brand killed them all. However, he did not get to enjoy his too-young bride, beca,dse he too had received a mortal wound.32

  Popular lyrics also warned about marrying women too young or too old, for either can turn shrewish:

  The speaker goes on to complain that when he asks for cheese, she calls him "boy" and tells him he is not worth half a pea.33

  Individual cases from scattered sources occasionally provide a glimpse into the age of first marriage. For instance, on a Sunday evening in 1367 a twenty-year-old man put a ladder against a beam in his house to get a cord, but the beam broke and he fell. His wife was the first finder. But we have no idea how long they were married before his accident. Margery Kempe, daughter of the mayor of Lynn, said in her autobiography that she was twenty when she married.34 Such pathetic shreds of evidence underscore the difficulty of establishing any firm conclusions about age of marriage.

  Cultural evidence suggests that marriage of teenagers was not normal and that a young Romeo and Juliet marrying in England would have created scandal. Furthermore, the great age disparities between husband and wife found in Italy were not the norm in England. In evaluating the evidence of age at first marriage and percentage marrying, it would appear that Hajnal was correct in suggesting that in medieval England the age of marriage was lower than in the modern period and a greater proportion of the population married. But his thesis requires some modification to take into account the fact that age of marriage could vary with economic and social conditions and that it was never common to marry in the early or middle teens. Hajnal is probably also correct in concluding that most people married. After all, men and women had so few economic options outside of establishing a family unit. Some men might have entered the clergy, but few of them were peasants; and some men and women may have entered service and remained single. Marriage, however, seemed to be a robust institution in the society and one can easily believe that the estimate that only 8 percent of the women remained unmarried in the mid-sixteenth century is not far off the mark for the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.35 Although land scarcity and lack of access to the home tenement may not have been as effective a brake on marriage as a rational demographer or economist might assume, marriages among the poor and landless were not very fertile. Under such circumstances a high proportion of the population marrying relatively young need not have produced offspring at a biological maximum. Delayed marriage and a large portion of the population remaining celibate is not the only possible explanation for low fertility.

  The most apparent explanation for small family size has been high infant and child mortality, estimated at 30 to 50 percent of the children born in the preindustrial period. In the preplague years poor mothers could very well have had such insufficient diets that their fertility was reduced, miscarriages increased, or their weak infants were susceptible to disease.

  Following the Black Death, however, almost all mothers should have had adequate diets since both land and wages were profitable. Nonetheless, mean family size decreased during this period. Contemporary chronicle and literary sources suggest that some visitations of the plague attacked children and young people more than the old. And some of the current research into plague has suggested these age groups as special targets as well. As Sylvia Thrupp noted, the fifteenth century, if it was a golden age for anything, was a golden age for bacteria. Not only plague, but other types of diseases became endemic in Europe at this time. The age groups most vulnerable were young adults, those who would produce the next generation.36

  Some scholars have argued for a conscious limitation of family size in medieval England, including the practice of birth control. Medical treatises suggested a variety of herbs, and some, applied to the vagina, may have acted effectively as a block to sperm. A plausible argument based on ecclesiastical sources has been made for a knowledge of coitus interruptus. The pastoral guides, of course, forbade their parishioners to engage in such an act, ranking incest with a daughter as a lesser sin than performing unnatural sex with one's wife. Many of the writers of these manuals had acted as confessors and probably knew quite a bit about the abuse they were cautioning against. The West, unlike many other cultures, was fortunate in having a folklore and intellectual traditions dating back to Aristotle that encouraged laity to think of contraception in terms of blocking the sperm.37

  Abortion was also a concern of ecclesiastical and medical writers. Medical texts list a variety of herbal suppositories and potions that a woman might take to induce abortion. Bracton, in The Laws and Customs of England, and later the author of Fleta were the first English legal writers to connect abortion with manslaughter, and the methods they named included potions and hitting or pressing a pregnant woman so as to kill the fetus. Only one such case appeared in the coroners' inquests.

  On 12 Dec. 1503 Joan Wynspere of Basford, "singilwoman," being pregnant, at Basford drank divers poisoned and dangerous draughts to destroy the child in her womb, of which she immediately died. Thus she feloniously slew and poisoned herself as a suicide and also the child in her womb... .

  Moralists warned that it was a great sin to take anything "with meat or drink" against pregnancy, but in folklore herbs were used to "scathe the babe away."38

 
Psycho-historians have delighted in making medieval peasants great practitioners of infanticide. A precis to one psycho-history article claimed that "the latrines of Europe were screaming with the cries of murdered infants" and that there was a "widespread infanticide component ... present in the medieval personality."39 As we have seen, it is by no means clear how much latrines were used in peasant society, and archaeological evidence could neither confirm nor deny the assertion in any case, because the bones of a newborn baby would disintegrate very rapidly.

  In pre-Christian Europe a child could be exposed if it had not been named, but Christianity forbade exposure and infanticide. Even after Scandinavia became Christian it continued to be permissible for the poor who could not feed the infant or for the father of a deformed child to expose it. The procedure was to put a piece of pork fat in its mouth, wrap it up, and put it out. The decision was always the father's and the execution was usually left to servants.40

  If infanticide was widely practiced, one would expect to find a positive rationalization for it in European folklore. Instead, one finds in folk traditions that dead infants returned to haunt their mothers. In "The Cruel Mother," a woman who has murdered her illegitimate twins in the wilderness is haunted by them when she gives birth to a legitimate child. And in another popular balled, "The Maid and the Palmer," a woman washing by the well is told by an old palmer who begs a cup of water that she is no maiden but had nine children, three buried at her bed's head, three under her lead brewing vat, and three out on the green.41

  Finding concrete evidence that infanticide was widespread in medieval England has proven impossible. Of the more than four thousand cases of homicide that I have read in the coroners' and jail delivery rolls, I have only found three cases of infanticide. Indeed, the law did not clearly state (until the sixteenth century) that a mother was culpable of murder when she killed her infant. Jurors were thus unsure about whether indictments could be brought or not and, if they were, what was to be done with the woman who proved to be guilty of killing her newborn child. The Church took an interest in the newborn child and prescribed penances for mothers who killed them. But a study of the church court records revealed that here, too, cases of infanticide were rare.42 Finally, evidence of skeletal remains in medieval graveyards shows a disproportionately high number of adult males to females .41 Some people have been tempted to take this as evidence of female infanticide, but it is possible that female bones rather than those of males were unearthed and scattered as graveyards were cleared for new occupants.