The Ties That Bound

by Barbara A Hanawalt

  Concern about aging is not new. Both literary remains and court records speak of problems that are all too familiar to us: the physical decline of the body, the lack of dignity and respect that advanced age brings, and the anxiety of guaranteeing continued care when one cannot provide for oneself and when the society in which one lives does not venerate the aged. The harsh reality of the problem is succinctly summed up in the medieval story of the divided horse blanket. The son has inherited the family house and land and is raising his own family, but his old father lives on as another mouth to feed. It is winter and the old man, shivering with cold, asks his son for a blanket. The son directs his son to get the horse blanket and give it to his grandfather. The grandson returns with half the blanket, and when asked why he cut the blanket in two, he replies, "I will keep the other half until I am a man, and then use it to cover you."

  Care of the aged produces a far greater variety of societal adaptations and solutions than do other stages of life. While childrearing must take into consideration such biological imperatives as feeding, clothing, and teaching children the rudiments of survival, and marriage is, in most preindustrial societies, an institution of economic and biological perpetuation, aging brings about such culturally extreme responses as veneration and parricide. Anthropologist Jack Goody, in "Aging in Non Industrial Societies," has surveyed, cross-culturally, the basic problems that the aged face in securing their material survival and respect in their social milieu. Concerns with shelter, clothing, and food dominate the list of needs, but participation in household decisions, assurances of political and religious inclusion, and the guarantee of a "decent" burial are important psychologically as well. Above all, the older generations must have cultural institutions that will ensure that provisions for their old age will be maintained even when they become impotent.2

  If the war between the sexes was cause for comment, so too was the clash between young and old. Moralists not only repeated homilies about the callousness of children toward aged parents, but also warned fathers not to use their children as executors, for, as Robert Mannyng observed, children would not carry out the provisions of a will because they would stand to lose the most from bequests not directed to them. He shrewdly comments that you should make neither your heir nor your doctor an executor.3 A persistent tension existed between the possessors of land, goods, and power and their heirs. Once the old person retired and passed on these accoutrements of adult life, he or she could be left at the mercy of the younger generation. From the younger generation's viewpoint, the aged pose problems. They no longer worked equivalent to the amount they consumed; they stood in the way of the young adult's advancement; their appearance offended the aesthetics of their juniors. A young man might have to wait until his father died or retired before he could marry and set up his own household. If old men married younger women, then they were taking potential wives of young men in the community. A young man might marry an older widow to get her rights in dower and thereby deprive a village girl of a desirable marriage partner. The young, therefore, had ample reason for not regarding old people as benign, and their prudent elders sought legal safeguards for retirement rather than relying on cultural precepts about honoring father and mother and respecting the aged.

  But how serious was the problem of coping with old people in latemedieval England? To answer that question we must know how large the problem was and the ways in which the aged functioned in society. The age at which people were specified as old in the Statute of Labourers was sixty. Beyond that age the statute's provisions did not apply. Ecclesiastical sources indicated that anyone aged fifty or more could be called senex (old),4 but peasants would not necessarily have been aware of the ecclesiastical divisions of life stages and even the scribes in manorial and royal courts did not use the word senex to describe the elderly. Indeed, neither the statute nor the ecclesiastical descriptions could have had practical application, for people had only a vague idea of their ages since they never recorded births and were seldom called upon to give their age. When an adult's age was given in the coroners' inquests, it was always rounded off with the statement et amplis (and more). The description of a person as aged was based on his or her physical appearance and general health, not simply on calendar years.

  We may never know the percentage of old people in the medieval English population, but we must not be misled into thinking that because life expectancy was about thirty-three years of age there were few old people. High infant mortality rather than adult deaths was the chief contributor to the low life expectancy. Analysis of bones from medieval English burials indicates that 10 percent of the people were over fifty.5 Late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century parish re1isters show that roughly 8 to 16 percent of the population was over sixty. And in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Tuscany 6 to 15 percent of the rural population was over sixty.

  Although 10 percent or more of its population was over fifty and conflicts between the needs of the old and the aspirations of the young could produce tension, parricide in medieval England was extremely rare.8 Instead, either the old people themselves, their families, or the community made arrangements for the aging. These accommodations varied considerably in the material comfort and satisfaction they provided, but there was a range of options open to the aged.

  Retirement contracts are one of the most apparent of these arrangements because they appear frequently in manorial court rolls. In essence, these contacts provided that the retiring peasant would relinquish the use of his buildings and lands in exchange for food, shelter, and clothing from the person, whether a kinsman or not, who took up the contract. While wills mostly describe arrangements men made for their aging wives,9 manorial records are a rich source on the lot of both sexes.

  The historian Elaine Clark has studied 200 maintenance cases largely from fourteenth-century East Anglia and has provided an insightful discussion on retirement.10 Her conclusions may be extended back to the late thirteenth century and to other regions of England as well. Maintenance contracts could be made in three ways. First, the lord and the community could impose a contract on a tenant who became too old and impotent to work the land and pay the rent. In such cases the community leaders met in manorial court and made arrangements for someone else to take the land in exchange for providing for the person. By so acting, the community made way for a younger person to establish him or herself while still guaranteeing care for an aged neighbor. The lord encouraged such arrangements so that he could get rents from the land. Thus, for example, in Chertsey Abbey court John Atte Wyle's mother was described as "of great age and non compos mentis and it seems useful to the court that John shall be admitted." 11 The court could settle the senile or impotent person's affairs with a neighbor, if there was no kin or if the kin were not interested in taking over the tenement.12

  In most cases the retiring tenant made his or her own arrangement through a contract. A father might make such an agreement with a son when he relinquished the family land to him or with a daughter at the time of marriage. Richard Loverd of Northamptonshire put his cottage with appurtenances into the lord's hands, and Emma, his heir, did the same. Her prospective husband paid the lord 5s. to enter the tenement, agreeing at that time that he would marry Emma and provide her father with food and clothing.13 In another case, a kinsman of Ralph Bea- monds took over the tenement because Ralph was impotent. The kinsman promised Ralph that he would have a cottage and a curtilage along with, yearly, a garment valued at 2s. 6d., a pair of linen hose, a pair of shoes worth 6d., a pair of woolen hose worth 6d., four bushels of fine white wheat, and four bushels of barley. As in court-dictated settlements, the agreement could be reached with someone not related to the pensioner. When Hugh took over Simon's tenement, he agreed to recondition the property and "to look sufficiently after Simon's wife Alice, his son and all his children and Simon was to have food and drink when Hugh acts as host to his wife." 14

  And third, the dying tenant or peasant proprietor could make provision for his wife a
nd family by recording his provisions or will in the manor court. These were often deathbed scenes with the bailiff coming to record the final arrangement or, as in one case, the whole manorial court came. On his deathbed John Whytyng surrendered his messuage and land to Simon Wellyng with the provision that Simon provide John's widow with food, drink, and sixteen bushels of barley. He also had to maintain for her use one cow, six hens, and one goose and cultivate and seed an acre of arable in every season of the year. He was to provide 3s. for clothing annually as well as a pair of shoes each Easter. She was to be allowed to continue to live in her late husband's house, although she was only guaranteed entry, a place by the fire, and a bed.15

  In the cases that we have looked at so far, the retirees have all been sufficiently well off that they exchanged only their land and buildings in return for specific arrangements for their comfort. But what of cottars who might find it hard to get good terms because they had so little with which to bargain? With two to three acres being considered necessary for the support of one person, these people found it difficult to attract a caretaker. Cottars often made further concessions in order to ensure care, such as promising the caretaker not only the use of the land but also making him or her the chief beneficiary of the will. In practice this meant that all of their household equipment, clothing, and other movables would go to the person who agreed to provide for them in their old age.16

  The retirement contracts show great care in planning and indicate that the individuals making them tried to cover all possible contingencies. Rather than leaving to chance the food, clothing, and shelter that they would receive, the pensioners spelled it out in detail. Modifications in the house plan might be specified so that a solar, hall, or chamber be added for the retiree. Sometimes separate houses were built. In 1281 Thomas Brid agreed to build for his mother a house thirty feet lon 17 and fourteen feet wide and having three doors and two windows. In addition, some asked for the regular laundering of clothing, horses for riding, gardens, fuel, tools of their trade, and other such benefits. Psychological needs were also stipulated in the contracts. Provisions were made for regular visits from friends when the pensioners were on their sickbeds and for funeral processions and prayers for their soul when they died.18

  To protect the agreement and ensure that the terms of the contract would be met, the pensioner always transferred the land conditionally. If the terms were not met, the land reverted to the pensioners. Custom as well as the binding nature of the contract protected them, for the community or the lord could insist on the reversion to the pensioner if the contract was broken. Furthermore, when the contracts were recorded in the manorial court, the son or other contractee swore he would uphold its obligations. He had to produce kin and friends who were to act as surety or guarantors that he would abide by his oath or they would be personally responsible.

  The reversion clause served another purpose as well. The contractee might die before the pensioner. In the century and more following the Black Death, this eventuality was a real risk because mortality from disease was so high. The contract could specify that heirs of the original caretaker would have to take up the tenement along with the continued support of the pensioner. Sometimes the original caretaker decided to sell his or her rights in the land and the contract changed hands. The person taking up the land had to agree to the old terms and continue to provide for the pensioner in order to hold the land.'9

  Clark's study permits some generalizations about the preferences and concerns that retiring peasants shared. Whether married or widowed, they wished to continue living on their own property. In the manorial cases the norm was for coresidence with their contractee; only one in twelve had the luxury of a private residence. Second, even after the population decline of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries made land readily available, 50 percent of the retirees had small holdings of less than 5 acres. While few pensioners mention the issue of how long they expected to live, those who did anticipated that they would live another six to nine years. All sought the most binding legal protections in making their contracts so that their comfort would be ensured. Perhaps the most interesting of Clark's findings is that only one-third of the pensioners negotiated contracts with their own chil- dren.20

  These conclusions are provocative and deserving of further analysis. Should there have been a census taken in the fourteenth century it would have shown that households with old people present would not necessarily be stem families, but, rather, the old person could be a pensioner unrelated to the current head of the house. Manorial records, however, may tend to overrepresent this type of nonkin arrangement. One may assume that some parents and children had amicable agreements that did not have to be guaranteed in manorial court. More wellto-do peasants, as we shall see, chose to make their arrangements by will or established their children in separate holdings before their death. The manorial cases, therefore, may represent people with fewer resources or without close kin. An alternative hypothesis is that the contracts with nonkin were second retirements, that is, peasants who had already distributed their land to their children but had retained a cottage and a few acres. They were thus making arrangements for final illness. In any case, these households probably did not constitute a large percentage of the population, if we may infer from later studies where population information is available.21

  The position of aging single people was not necessarily worse than that of married people with family, provided they had some land that they could negotiate into a maintenance contract. In Clark's figures only 36 percent of the pensioners were married while 43 percent were women alone and 21 percent were men alone.2~ The predominance of single people suggests that retirement contracts were normally negotiated when the person or persons felt that they could no longer cope with providing for their own living, particularly after the loss of a spouse.

  It is curious that a cottage and a few acres encumbered with the care of an old and sick person was in demand at all, since land was readily available following the Black Death. One can easily imagine that such an arrangement would be much sought after in the land hunger of the early fourteenth century, but it would appear to be undesirable if one could get land free of an aged tenant. Unfortunately, manorial records do not permit a comparison between the number of contracts recorded before the plague of 1349 and those afterward. One might conclude, looking at Clark's study, that the incidence increased following the depopulation, but her data were not collected in such a way as to permit a comparison. Missing records from the early part of the century could easily explain the disparity. Nevertheless, the continued popularity of the retirement contract from the contractee's viewpoint needs further investigation.

  An unpleasant explanation is that entrepreneurs bought up these retirement contracts simply to get the land and might even have hastened the death of the pensioner through neglect. A breakdown of those taking land with pensioners on it suggests a different motive: 44 percent were couples, 5 percent were single women, and 51 percent were single men.23 While entrepreneurs cannot be ruled out completely, it appears that some of these may have been young people whose families had not yet provided for them, or could not, and who were planning to set up households on their own. Even in the land glut of the early fifteenth century, people put a premium on land that had traditionally belonged to a family. The people taking up the contracts were, therefore, being "adopted" by the retiring peasant and could enter the land with the same claims to it that the old person had.24 The cottage and few acres became "family land" rather than rented lands and gave the contractee a secure tenure on it.

  Simply knowing the provisions of the maintenance contracts, however, does not indicate the standard of living and treatment of the aged. Did all of the legal ploys at least safeguard the promised material standards? Complaints of contract violations indicate that the unscrupulousness suggested in the story of the divided horse blanket did occur. A Wakefield manor court case underscores the problems entrepreneurial caretakers created. Th
e community charged in 1286 that William Wodemous drove out Molle de Mora and her son from her house, killed her dog, and carried off ten ells of linen. He also took a cloak of hers and did not meet his obligations to repair her house. When the community had to intervene in these cases, they meted out suitable punishment to the offender. When John Catelyne evicted Elena Martyn from her house and tore it down, the jurors of Wistow ordered him to rebuild the house and find a suitable residence for her until it was done. When a son failed to honor the terms of his contract with his aged mother, the jurors fined him and gave the land back to her, banning him from holding it during her lifetime.25

  A complication related to contracts was that they could be sold by one contractee to another. Such a transfer of a contract must have been a great disruption to the elderly. For instance, a cottar died in 1415 and made provision that his wife should have the cottage and acre conditional to her caring for his enfeebled sister for her life. After six months the widow left, making arrangements with a local man that he take up the obligations and live in the house. After a year he too moved out, selling the contract to another villager.26 Once a person was unable to cope with the courts, the village community would have to be the watchdog on broken contracts, and in all likelihood neighbors would only intervene in cases of flagrant neglect and maltreatment.

  Wills present a somewhat different picture of retirement than do the contracts arranged in manorial courts. People at the upper end of the village social scale were more likely to make wills, and thus they represent the arrangements of people who are more likely to be well off. Furthermore, unlike retirement contracts, wills usually entrusted the care of the old person to close kin rather than to strangers.

  When wives were aged, husbands might make provisions in wills similar to those made in manorial courts, spelling out in detail the care for the old woman. In such cases a son was the most frequent person assigned to carry out the terms of the will. Again, the careful peasants tried to anticipate failures to honor the arrangements. One man expressed his suspicion of his son and stated explicitly that his wife should have one-half of the crops for the first year and three acres of grain the following years along with an old horse to carry her grain sacks to the mill. Other times the husband made contingency plans. The mother and son should live together, but if they were not able to get along, the mother would be given a separate house or be guaranteed a room in the house. Another man worried that his son might sell the property and instructed that whoever holds the property left to his son John shall provide a chamber in the house for the testator's wife to dwell in, and also meat and drink such as he "ettythe and drynkes" for life.27