The Ties That Bound

by Barbara A Hanawalt

  Theoretical arguments for infanticide suggest that when food is scarce in other cultures, babies are killed or exposed. Such an argument would be applicable to medieval England only during the subsistence crisis in the first quarter of the fourteenth century, and, indeed, one of the contemporary chroniclers mentions that mothers killed their babes and ate their flesh.44 One never knows in chronicles of this sort whether the author knew of such instances or was simply using a standard literary device to describe how horrible the Great Famine was.

  Many scholars have argued that infanticide was common but did not show up in records because mothers or midwives successfully concealed the deaths by calling them stillbirths or accidents. An analysis of the accidental deaths of infants under one year old, however, does not indicate a pattern of willful destruction. None of the seventy-eight babies were described as dying from drowning or exposure, and the majority of them died in fires in their cradle or in their house, thus indicating that they were being cared for. A mother would not risk burning down a house by starting a cradle fire to kill an infant. Furthermore, one would expect that a higher proportion of female infants would be killed compared to male infants if the parents were practicing infanticide, but the sex ratios are quite close.45 Medieval English sources do not even contain the usual peasant complaints over the liabilities of excess female children.

  A number of questions remain about attitudes toward children that would favor infanticide. Parents might have neglected children who were mentally and physically handicapped and these would then have a high infant mortality. But one occasionally finds the village idiot who has even inherited land. When Henry Swerd inherited two and a half acres, the lord had to take the land from him because of his idiocy. Illegitimacy appears not to have been heavily stigmatized, indicating either that it was rare or that all children were valued. Sixteenth-century records suggest that only about 3 percent of the births were illegiti- mate.46

  In the absence of baptismal records, it is very difficult to determine if peasants were performing some sort of birth control, including infanticide. The drop in the number of people per household in the late thirteenth century has been taken as a sign of some artificial control over reproduction."' Scattered cases in the coroners' inquests, when, for instance, all of the children of one family died at once, tell us something about spacing of children. Robert Penlyn of Hemingby and his wife, Alice, went to market on a Saturday in December 1355, leaving at home their three children, John, aged four, Agnes, two, and Edmund, one.48 Even with such information it is difficult to tell if the two-year gap between John and Agnes was the product of family planning or if the conception in between, assuming there was one, was terminated naturally

  We have discussed much in this chapter about the structure and size of medieval peasant families. Medieval materials for appraising these two problems are weak and projections back from other English sources or across from continental ones are always suspect. One would normally console the reader at the end of a chapter with such tentative conclusions by suggesting that additional work will illuminate the matter more, but, because of the record deficiencies in this case, I believe that further research will be fruitless. What may be said with some degree of certainty is that medieval families were for the most part simple, conjugal families. Even areas that practiced partible inheritance did not necessarily establish joint households. Parents and children exhibited a strong preference for separate residences once the children were grown, and fathers tried to establish their sons and daughters with land and marriages during their lifetime. The wealthier peasants were, of course, more successful in fulfilling this ideal. Stem families were not common and, as we shall see, parents were very resourceful at forming retirement contracts that did not leave them dependent on the goodwill of sons. Most people married, so that households generally did not contain a number of unmarried siblings.

  The household size was small, possibly dipping very low (2.5) for poorer peasants in the land hunger of the early fourteenth century and never averaging more than 5. Even in the century following the Black Death, when land and wages were abundant, household size remained small and population stagnated at a very low level in spite of the new economic opportunities. Age of marriage was not excessively low but was probably not as high as the modern western European marriage pattern. In any case, the age of marriage did not determine family size. Although artificial control over conception and births may have kept family size small, high infant mortality probably played a more significant role. The usual peasant family that gathered around the hearth contained a father and mother and two or three children of varying ages. A grandmother might be sitting at the hearth as well, but not if she or her children could make separate provisions for her.

  "The first fundamental characteristic of the farm economy of the peasant is that it is a family economy."' Thus did the Russian economist A. V. Chayanov, whose work itself has become fundamental for studying peasant economy, begin his study. His discussion of peasant economy and that of the anthropologist Eric Wolfe have helped to shape the model that I present here for medieval English peasant families. In adapting these models to medieval English peasant society, I have tried to make them more flexible and more dynamic in order to reflect the range of options that a peasant family had open to it depending on the general economic conditions prevailing at a given time, the social and economic status of the family, and the point in its life cycle. Throughout the book we have looked at the importance of availability of land and labor for determining inheritance and family size. In addition, we noted a tendency for the peasant communities to split into three status groups of primary, secondary, and tertiary villagers depending on both wealth and social clout in the village. These factors had an enormous importance in determining what options the peasants were able to exercise in economic planning. Some of the strategies were open to all peasants, while other families had to have a sufficient level of wealth even to enter the economic game. The model presented is not a mathematical one, for much of the peasant economy had to be one of makeshift in which families followed the main chance in availing themselves of opportunities or entered into short-term reciprocity arrangements with neighbors. Such one-time ventures and mutual assistance are difficult to quantify and are best illustrated through particular cases.

  The peasants' assets of land, livestock, and family labor would have to provide for the basic demands made on peasant resources. Wolf has outlined minimum expenses that the peasant family unit must meet. Foremost in their concerns was to provide a caloric minimum to feed the family. But rations could often be short, because they also had to pay rent to the landlord. Most of the lord's officials were inflexible about rent and only forgave them and waived fines when a family was destitute. Ceremonial expenses for religious services and village festivals also came out of the profits from family land and labor. And, finally, the family had to keep an eye to the future in providing for the children as they became adults and securing a portion of the family assets for them so that they could establish their own families.

  Our concern in this section must be with the strategies and options available to peasant families in trying to meet the demands on their production. The matter is a complex one, for several factors must be taken into consideration. The period we are studying represents major economic shifts that changed the peasants' options considerably. In the years before the Black Death population was high and land scarce. Wage labor brought little profit because of the surplus of laborers. Peasant family strategies in these lean years would be very different from those in the period of low population in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when land was readily available and wages rose, in spite of official efforts to keep them at preplague levels. But in the period of low population persistent mortality threatened the existence of families and carried off children whose labor was needed for the prosperity of the household economy. Coupled with the major shifts in opportunities were the persistent problems of cultivators-ba
d weather, disease of animals, fires, debts, and loss of family members. A further complication in understanding the functioning of the household economy is that the family's initial resources largely determined the options it could pursue. A primary villager with ample land, plow teams, and able sons and daughters would have advantages and options at his disposal that would never be available to the cottager. A family in the middle years of the life cycle was more likely to farm efficiently than old couples or young ones with toddlers at home.

  Our problem is twofold. One aspect concerns the strategies peasants used to maximize profits in their household economy, and the second relates to the division of labor within the household. The latter issue is treated in subsequent chapters in this section; the former lends itself well to a model that permits us to consider various economic options available to the peasants.

  A model for peasant family economy is a useful tool in three ways. First, it helps to make coherent the limited sources available. Unlike the sources used for the analysis of more modern peasant economies, the medieval English records are not systematic enough to suggest their own models of household economy.3 The manorial court cases, our major source, were recorded because some dispute arose over an economic decision within the family or in its relationships to the lord or a neighbor. The references are scattered and much is not explicitly mentioned. Other sources such as wills, manorial accounts, poll tax lists, and the coroners' inquests help to supplement manorial court roll evidence. Second, since the various options available to peasant families depended on their economic and social status in the community, a general model permits us to compare how these different groups coped and which options they could choose given their resources. Third, a model of peasant family economy aids in comparing the impact of economic change on the family's options and strategies. Using a model, it is possible to compare the household economic strategies during the overcrowded conditions of preplague England with the more open economic circumstances prevailing after successive visitations of plague.

  The model has four basic parts: demands on the family economy, assets of the family to meet the demands, supplemental economic activities, and strategies to improve the family's economic standing.

  Demands on the Family Economy

  In part simple need and in part legal and social customs determined the outlays required of the family economy. First and foremost, the family economy had to provide a livelihood, or, in Wolf's terms, a caloric minimum, for its members. The family lands, even if they were only a few acres, would have produced most of the food. For the poor in the community wage labor, begging, and gleaning supplemented a meager diet. In addition to food, families had to allot a portion of their proceeds to replacing seed corn, farm animals, equipment, clothing, and household goods. Finally, the unit would try to find the resources to endow children with their share of the profits when they became adults. Supplying the basic livelihood for the family from landholdings was a major part of the peasants' efforts, and those with more land and labor at their disposal would do considerably better than those with only two or three acres.

  Modern historians have tended to place undue emphasis on the pursuit of the caloric minimum and have called the medieval peasant economy a subsistence one. As we shall see, the appellation is inaccurate both because peasants actively engaged in a local and regional market economy and because their resources had to cover other expenses than those necessary for survival.

  Wolf has emphasized that the requirement of rent and services by a lord or the state is the fundamental feature of peasant economy that distinguished it from a primitive economy-and, he might have added, from a farm economy.' The demands of these two social institutions were also a fundamental part of Hilton's definition of peasantry with which we began the book. The state, particularly during the fourteenth century, developed taxation systems based sometimes on assessment of movable property and sometimes on poll taxes in order to tax peasants and others in the population. In addition, they made a number of levies of animals and goods to support various war efforts. The burdens of such taxation could be heavy, and anger over them contributed to the Peasant Revolt of 1381.

  The lords' collection of rents, services, fines, and other levies on the peasant economy was of long-established right and has been given the name manorialism by modern historians to aid in understanding what some historians would call a complicated contractual arrangement between lord and peasant and what others would call the lord's oppression of his tenants. Briefly, the lord owned the land that the peasants relied on for their house site and for their strips in the open fields. He also controlled the meadow and the woods. Even though, as we have seen, the peasants became attached to their landholdings and regarded them as "family land," both they and the lord agreed that, in the final analysis, title belonged with the lord. In order to have the right to use the land, the villeins owed the lord a money rent. They and their plow animals gave labor service on demesne land or paid monetary sums as a substitute; they also presented gifts in kind, such as poultry, eggs, and ale; they paid fines for taking up holdings, merchet for marriage of their women, and a number of other routine fines and fees. In addition, they paid fines for a variety of economic activities, such as brewing and cutting wood, and for failure to meet the terms of their lease to the lord. When the head of household died, the lord took his best beast as heriot, again underscoring his ownership of all the peasant had. Even such private matters as the deflowering of a peasant girl (legerwite) elicited a fine from the lord. All fines, land transfers, trespasses, infringements of the lord's rights, and failure to perform the required work were recorded in the manorial court, and the lord's bailiff duly collected money accruing from these sources. If peasants wanted to take their private cases to their lord's court, they paid a fee for the privilege. The profits from manorial court alone provided the lords with considerable revenue. Even free peasants were not exempt from rents and some services. The cost of maintaining the noble class was a great and inescapable drain on peasant family resources and was ameliorated only slightly by the feasts that the lord owed his villeins for boon work and his generosity (often stingy) in forgiving fines of those too poor to pay.

  Ceremonial expenses were the final demand on the household economy, and in medieval England these were substantial. The Church collected annual tithes from each household and a mortuary beast on the death of the householder. Furthermore, in the absence of state welfare systems, the villagers expected to give charity to the local poor and might even contribute to a local hospital or almshouse for the good of their souls.5 They also participated in community and religious ceremonies-celebrations of saints' days with feasts, processions, candles, banners, and ale, repair of the parish church, village games, and so on. Finally, family ceremonies incurred occasional major expenses. Baptisms required gifts to the godparents. Marriages were a statement of a new village alliance and a new family and were marked with as much feasting as was affordable. Funerals became increasingly important in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, requiring that the corpse be escorted to the grave with candles and processions and that the soul be aided through purgatory with alms and masses. A wake comforted the survivors.

  Failure to participate in ceremonies would lead fellow villagers to punish the culprit with loss of status, ridicule, and perhaps even physical violence. The punishment for not contributing the plow penny, for instance, was having the ground in front of the offender's house plowed up. On one occasion the bride's family failed to bring the usual gifts and the ensuing brawl left one of the wedding party dead.6 For the primary and secondary villagers, displays at baptisms, marriages, and funerals were essential for maintaining village status, but the cottagers might have to dispense with them.

  Ceremonial outlays were so highly valued that families could go into debt or even ruin themselves with heavy investment. One man, dying while he still had a young family, explained in his will that his father's commitment of money for prayer for his soul so e
ncumbered the estate that it could not maintain his family. The expenses for prayers were 20s. annually for ten years. He importuned his brother, Richard Bune of London, to be "good and specyall friends to my wyf and to my chyldrern in the way of Charyte and to be favorable for all and syche detts as I do oowe unto him." He hoped that his children would eventually inherit the family land.

  The problem that the peasant family economy continually confronted was balancing the external demands of rent and ceremony against its need to provide a livelihood for members. Peasants had only two ways to introduce any elasticity into the system: either increase production or decrease consumption. In years of dearth the second was the only strategy possible. Curtailing consumption, if limited to reducing goods bought from the market, could help the peasant family through a temporary setback, but deprivations that forced them to eat seed corn and plow animals could be devastating.' Opportunities for increasing production, as we shall see, included acquiring more land or a manorial office, working for wages, or pursuing supplemental economic activities.