The Ties That Bound

by Barbara A Hanawalt

  Other youths went into service in a manor, religious house, or private house, performing a variety of tasks such as getting water, fetching boats, doing errands, and learning to cook. William, son of Herbert atte Still, aged ten, was standing in the prior of Newnham's kitchen cutting up vegetables with a knife. The knife dropped, cutting a tendon of his foot. His mother, who was nearby and probably also a servant, carried him to their house, but he died of the bleeding."

  Young women learned brewing and a variety of other tasks at home from their mothers or in service. A housemaid's lament indicates the work:

  I must serve the old women, I must learn to spin, to reke, to card, to knit, to wash buckes, and by hande, to brew, bake, make mault, reap, bind sheaves, weed in the garden, milke, serve hoggs, make cleane their houses, within doores make beddes, sweep filthy houses, rubbe dirty ragges, beat out old Coverlettes, draw up old holes: Then to the kitchen, turne the spit, although it was but seldome, for we did not at meat often; then scour pottes, wash dishes, fetch in wood, make a fire, scalde milk Pannes, wash the Charne and butter dishes, ring out a Cheese clote, set everything in good order.

  The servant girls' work was also dangerous. Amice, daughter of Robert Belamy, and Sibyl Bonchevler were carrying a tub full of grout between them in Lady Juliana de Beauchamp's brewhouse. As they were trying to dump the grout into a vat full of boiling water, Amice fell in and was scalded. And Emma, a washerwoman, fell into a large vat of boiling water.18

  We must turn now to the question of the prevalence of servants in medieval peasant households and the likelihood of a teenager spending a few years in service. While we may rule out our Italian observer (see p. 157) as an objective source for peasantry, studies of early-modern sources have indicated that young peasants ten to twelve years of age were sent to other people's houses to work until they were in their twenties, when they would marry. Alan Macfarlane has leaped to the conclusion that, because there were servants in medieval rural England, it could not be called a true peasant society. According to his definition, peasants only use family labor, not hired labor.19

  A few definitions are in order before we begin the discussion. Serviens had various meanings during the fourteenth century and included both domestic servants and agricultural laborers.20 No doubt the confusion arose because often the hired help worked at a variety of tasks, both domestic and agrarian, and some were hired for piecework and others were year-round employees. For our purposes let us define laborers as those who supplemented their small landholdings with wages from agrarian work or milling or who rendered labor in connection with their holding a particular cottage and a bit of acreage. Servants, on the other hand, would be those who were hired year-round and did a variety of tasks as the season and need arose. They may or may not have resided with the family for whom they worked. That some sort of distinction existed in the minds of fourteenth-century administrators is apparent, for laborers are listed separately from servants in the poll tax lists.

  Although servants could be found in households of both lords and peasants, it is difficult to find much specific information about them. Wages and work occasionally appear in the manorial court and account rolls and the title servant appears in records. For instance, Alice, daughter of William of the Grene, appeared in Wakefield court against William Gothe. She complained that when she had "gone out of the country on service" five years ago, she had given him the keeping of a cow and he would not return it.21 The poll taxes of the late fourteenth century are the only systematic listing, and they are deficient because many servants, particularly female servants, were hidden from the tax collectors. Poll taxes and manorial records do not indicate whether servants lived with their employers and what their lives were like. The coroners' inquests, therefore, provide some of the best insights into the servants' lives.

  None of the sources permit us to establish with any accuracy the percentage of people in society who were laborers or servants, or what their ages were. We cannot show, as has been done for the early modern period, that 60 percent of the youth from fifteen to twenty four were servants.22 As we mentioned in an earlier chapter, communities varied in their composition, and that variation meant that the number of laborers and servants also varied. Taking the poll tax of 1379, the craftsman town of Skipton had seventeen servants who were unmarried, thirtyone married laborers, twenty-four married tradesmen or craftsmen, and only two cultivators. The primarily agricultural community of Kettlewell had eleven servants, three craftsmen, one cattle buyer, and thirty-four agricultural laborers. Servants, therefore, comprised about a quarter of the village population in these two lists. In Kempsford, where the poll tax was taken twice because of evasions, the first tax listed thirty servants out of a population of 118, but the second tax collection produced thirty-nine more servants who had been concealed. Servants, therefore, actually accounted for 44 percent of the residents. The 1381 poll tax for the Hundred of Thingowe in Suffolk showed that servants comprised about 40 percent of the population, laborers 39 percent, craftsmen and tradesmen 14 percent, cultivators 7 percent, and gentry 1 percent. Again, the percentages of population in the different categories varied greatly from one village to another. One may conclude, therefore, that servants played an important part in the work force, even if we cannot be sure of the percentage.23

  While sources for the early modern period can answer decisively that the servants were young, unmarried, and lived with their employers, the medieval records are not conclusive. The handmaidens who were accused in manorial courts of taking nuts or dry wood in the lord's woods were probably young, for they are listed along with the village youth. In the few cases where both age and occupation are given in the coroners' inquests, however, servants might be any age. Some people have used the high proportion of single people among the servants in the poll taxes as an indication that the servants were young and unmarried. Such information is suggestive rather than conclusive. To be sure, most of those listed as cultivators were married (94 percent in Thingoe Hundred), as were most of the craftsmen (77 percent) and laborers (84 percent), whereas only 54 percent of the servants were. In market towns such as Mildenhall or Stowe, however, none of the servants were married. For some youthful servants, the period of service was probably a temporary one, but the evidence is hardly overwhelming.

  Likewise, it is difficult to find conclusive evidence on whether or not the servants lived with their masters in the same household. Hilton has devoted considerable attention to this problem, even comparing a rent list with a poll tax that listed people by household, but he still felt that the evidence was inconclusive. At Buckland, in the Avon Valley, he found thirty households of cultivators. Half of these had adult sons and daughters resident and five had live-in servants.24 Poll taxes add to the confusion about the residence of servants, for it is not uncommon to find sons or daughters listed as servants in their father's house. Thus John, son and servant of John Wysman, or Isabel, daughter and servant of John Shortnekke, are listed. In accidental-death cases teenagers, like children had a large percentage of their accidents at their father's home but a rather lower percentage at the homes of others, figures that suggest that they were not living with a master.

  Detailed coroners' inquests provide some information on live-in servants. In cases of night burglaries all the residents of a house may be named. For instance, at bedtime on November 15, 1369, felons and thieves came to the house of Edmund le Mastref of Clifton, broke in and entered it, tied up Edmund, his wife, Maude, and the housemaid Sarah. They went on to Agnes Colburne's house and wounded her servant, John le Toutere, and a neighbor woman, Beatrice le Sarreman. Margery Tailor was a servant in the house of Johanna del See and had her room in the solar.25

  The evidence for live-in servants is hardly overwhelming. Hilton has estimated that in the Cotswolds perhaps one in eight families had servants, but this does not mean that more did not rely on hired help. Peasants had a variety of options for procuring workers if familial labor was insufficient and, consequently,
did not necessarily need servants. Laborers gladly worked for piecework. Arnold of Tyringham was desperate for work and stood at the market cross in Bedford to indicate that he could be hired.26 Some prosperous cultivators, as we have seen, had credit arrangements that provided them labor from their debtors. Reciprocity arrangements with neighbors could also help, particularly among the middling peasants. Whether the hired help lived in or not was probably a negotiable option in a labor contract. Robert, son of Thomas, for example, complained that Adam Trub owed him money for work because he had lived with him to his damage of 3d. This was obviously a labor contract in which part of the pay was in housing.27 During harvest it was customary to provide sleeping arrangements for the harvest crew, but these were for temporary laborers who may have been migrating with the harvest.

  On balance the evidence is against the practice of either having live-in servants or arranging for the majority of young people to undego a period of servitude. While not unknown, neither was a firmly established tradition for medieval English peasants. What we now know of economic and social conditions suggests the hypothesis that servitude and agricultural help might have undergone a substantial change during the late Middle Ages. In the first part of the fourteenth century the surplus of labor would have made the position of servant a very attractive one for it guaranteed meals, wages, and perhaps a roof over one's head. Noninheriting sons and daughters would have found such an arrangement attractive and so might a son who was waiting to inherit the family property. Following the Black Death, however, laborers changed their attitudes about receiving pay in food and housing and instead demanded monetary payment and tried to avoid working on year-long contracts. With low population continuing through the fifteenth century, laborers continued to prefer freedom from binding contracts and payment only in money. Furthermore, housing through the period was cheap to construct and readily available. A laborer with wages could have his own cottage; and the inheriting son of a cultivator would have his own land even before his father's death or retirement because of the ready availability of land. Fathers of the yeoman and cultivator groups probably preferred to keep their children at home until they were adults, so that they could have the benefit of their labor rather than hiring expensive laborers. Good wages and cheap housing may also explain why about half of the servants in the Suffolk poll tax were married.

  In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, the labor supply again outstripped demand and once again the postponement of marriage and the live-in arrangements for servants became a very attractive option for young people. Housing had also changed by this time and the more substantial stone and brick houses had separate rooms for the master and the help, so that the master could have live-in servants without depriving himself of privacy. Wattle-and-daub huts were still built, but may have been less attractive to young people entering service than a room in a substantial, modern house.

  While most aspects of a servant's life are difficult to document, the relationship between the master and servant do surface in both literary and official records. One aspect of the relationship that concerned both sides of the contract was its permanency. A fifteenth-century poem warns "squier, yeman, and page" that "service is not heritage" and that "lordes love chaungeth oft." But a carol advised lords to treat their old servants with generosity "and elles must thou drink as thou dost brewe."28 Both good and bad relationships between employer and employed are described, and servants varied in their competence. One imagines that Emma Coleville was distressed with her carter, Reginald Carter, when he lit a fire in her stable to keep warm at dawn in December 1342. The conflagration killed not only Reginald but eight cart horses, eight oxen, and destroyed carts.29 Some masters inflicted extreme punishment for lapses in work. Warren Polehanger, a miller, accused his servant Walter of stealing a bushel of flour. He hit Walter with an ax and killed him.3o

  Murders of servants by masters were fairly rare, as were the opposite, and one is struck by the great loyalty of servants to their master's property and person, even when such loyalty meant risking their own lives. Sir Nicholas Peyvere's servant boy Gerleys came to the rescue of his master and the rector of Pertenhall, who were being threatened by a man with a sword. The assailant then attacked the servant, who shot him in self-defense. On the master's side, there was often familial concern expressed for servants who disappeared. Bertran Polet left his master's courtyard at vespers in November to guard his master's wood. When he did not return "the household were troubled and searched for him for a whole week" until they found him.31

  Unless the laborer who worked for the household was a casual one who did piecework, his or her relationship to the family would have been a close one whether or not he or she lived in the household. While the servant was not equal to the children of the family and would not inherit family land, bequests often indicate great affection. John Thrale of Lutton was a wealthy man who apparently had no children. He left the bulk of his lands to his wife and brother, but also left eight acres and a close to his servant, John Colyn, to use when he became twenty-eight, with the provision that he keep the obit. John's father's will is also recorded and it indicates that he was not a wealthy man and had done well to settle one son with a prosperous and well-disposed neighbor. In another example, Elizabeth Lamkyn received 26s. 8d. to pursue a trade from a grateful master. The more typical bequests included items of clothing, sheep, a small sum of money, or malt, Such gifts were the usual sort of token bequest reserved for godchildren, grandchildren, nieces and nephews and may have indicated a similar place in a master's or mistress's affections.32

  Sometimes a servant was able to marry into the family. Thomas, who was a servant of Lettice, sued for half a bovate of land that his uncle sold out of court to Thomas's loss. The jurors found that Thomas had the just claim to it. The next time he appeared in court, he was Lettice's son-in-law.33

  Children and servants were an indispensable part of the household economy, lending a hand at both men's and women's work in the close and field. Unless orphaned, children spent most of their leisure and working hours in the home or around the village until they were ten or twelve. Then they herded, gathered, and fished. Teenagers lived at home for the most part, helping their parents with their tasks. Some worked for other villagers or on manors as servants, particularly if the family had more labor than it needed, but they would not necessarily move in with their master. Some young people may also have chosen to work as servants for a period of time in order to earn sufficient money to marry. These would be younger sons and daughters or children from poorer families, who could not expect an attractive marriage settlement from their parents. The number of youth becoming servants is not known, but it appears that it was not yet a well-established routine for them to spend part of their life cycle in service in another person's house before they married. Socialization and training for work occurred within the domestic economy for those pursuing traditional careers. From the earliest years children began to imitate their parents at work. Girls quickly identified with their mother's tasks while boys worked at both household chores and some field labor. By the time boys and girls were seven, they began to make routine contributions to the home economy, such as fetching water and herding. Young people did not take on the full work load and responsibilities of adults until their late teenage years, when they possessed sufficient strength and skills. Their accidental-death pattern indicates that they were between children and adults in their behavior, a subject that will be explored further in the next section.

  So much of recent historiography has centered on children. For almost every period of history and in every culture the young of our species have been studied for their play, developmental stages, and parental attitudes toward them. Philippe Aries, in Centuries of Childhood, denied that people in the Middle Ages had a concept of childhood and argued that the sentimentalized view of childhood as a special phase of life did not exist until the modern period. Because medieval peasants kept no diaries and wrote no lette
rs, it appeared that their childhoods would elude historical research and Aries's view could stand; but the coroners' inquests open up the world of medieval peasant children. The cases tell about provisions for child care, the clothing and feeding of children, games and pastimes, and the exploration of their environment both alone and with adults and other children. A remarkable aspect of these vignettes of childhood is that medieval peasant children's behavior patterns fall into modern observations of child development; both their motor skills and their relationship to their environment develop within the stages that are familiar to us. This similarity of child development in the Middle Ages and in modern observations suggest, I argue, a strong biological basis for child development as opposed to decisive cultural influences. Although, as we shall see, medieval childrearing practices could be considerably different from modern ones, parents in both periods provided for their children's basic biological and psychological needs and thus the early years of maturation were similar.1

  Leaving aside all Freudian ideas of birth trauma, for which there is no medieval information, we can, however, observe children in the early hours of their lives. The birth process itself belongs more properly to the woman's life experience, for it was a female ritual exclusively, and will be considered in a subsequent chapter. Once born, the child was prepared for baptism. The midwife washed the baby in warm water or perhaps used oil, salt, or rose petals to clean the baby and straighten its limbs. She also tied the umbilical cord. When the coroner asked witnesses about a dead baby girl, a half-day old, who had been found in the Thames, they told him that they did not know whose child it was but they knew that it had not been baptized because the umbilical cord was not tied.2