The Ties That Bound

by Barbara A Hanawalt

  It is difficult to determine if rural society had many foundlings. Abandoned children were a romantic theme in the Breton Lays. For one reason or another, the child of a noble was considered inconvenient to have around, and it would be bundled off with some symbol of its noble birth that would serve to identify it for its dramatic reappearance. In "Sir Degare" the child was left with a hermit who baptized the little boy and took it to his sister to raise. In "Le Freine" the child is deposited at the door of a nunnery.22 But such standard foils of the storyteller are not good clues to the presence of foundlings in society at large.

  Although the Order of the Holy Spirit, founded in France in 1160, was intended to take care of foundlings and orphans, the orders in England appear not to have played a large role as surrogate parents. English nunneries took in girls, usually of gentle birth, to educate them and teach them other virtues, but they did not take in poor children.23

  A few hospitals and eleemosynary institutions specialized in the care of abandoned children. St. Katharine's in London took in waifs and strays of society, and other asylums were dedicated to them as well. Because, as one such institution indicated, "certain orphans are placed in danger through the negligence of their friends, and deserted, ... [they] are brought into the hospital of St. Sepulcre, guarded and educated there." Hospitals that took in poor women during childbirth cared for their children if they died and also took in foundlings. Ages were often mixed in these institutions, with young and old treated alike. Another type of hospice for the young was for those who attended grammar school in a town. They could have a bed and board while they pursued their studies. They miht sing in the choir of the sponsoring religious establishment as well. 4 Such hostels, however, were not for poor and abandoned boys. Even those few institutions that were available to care for abandoned infants and children could accommodate very few; hospitals often had only twelve beds.

  Evidence of community care for destitute infants and children is difficult to find. A few cases in the coroners' rolls indicate that the children were taken in by other village families. Possibly the rector took some role in the placing of orphans, because very young children sometimes died of accidents at the rectory. For instance, Simon, son of Hugh of Clyne, was one week and four days old and was lying alone in the rectory of Trumpington when a sow came in and bit his throat.25 Villagers were generally concerned about the homeless, children as well as adults, and offered charity. Roger, son of Agnes of Maulden, a poor boy of eight, sat in the road opposite the house of Reynold le Wyt and cried because he did not have a house. When Reynold came out and tried to comfort the boy, thieves attacked and killed him.26

  Adoption, which modern readers would regard as the obvious solution for caring for orphaned children, was not used in medieval England. Goody has identified three reasons for adoption: to provide homes for orphans, bastards, and foundlings; to ive childless couples social progeny; and to provide heirs for property. Aside from the last consideration, English peasantry did not feel the need to make formal arrangements. Parentless children appear to have been taken in by family and community without a formal adoption procedure. Since surnames were not stable in the early period and not a point of family pride, medieval peasants had no feeling, as people do today, of having a child to carry on the family name. Childless couples do appear among those leaving wills, but they compensated for their lack of immediate family by forming closer bonds with siblings and their children, godchildren, and friends. For the purposes of passing on property, however, a type of adoption was formally practiced. When, as we have seen, a peasant retired, he or she often made a contract with another person that essentially made that person his or her heir in return for support in old age. The advantage of this "adoption" was that it gave the person taking up the land the same family inheritance rights that the former tenant had. The "adoption" could also be done without a retirement contract. Isabel, daughter of William le Blac, gave Is. to the lord that she might be the heir of Walter the cowherd.28

  Although the upper classes practiced fostering and apprentices were characteristic of urban life, there is little evidence of systematic fostering among the peasantry. One might argue that the brief period of acting as servant in another person's house was fostering, but it was not done routinely and, when done, appears to have been pursued out of economic necessity and not for the purposes of training a youth.

  We have discussed in a previous chapter the retirement contracts that old and sick people made for surrogate family to minister to their last needs, and we have in this chapter discussed the parent substitutes who provided for children. But we have addressed only obliquely the institutions for the poor and sick and the general attitude toward charity in rural society.

  Historians have estimated that there were some five hundred to seven hundred hospitals in late medieval England, but only a few specialized in caring for the aged, poor women in childbirth, maimed soldiers, and the "deserving poor." The shelter that most of these establishments provided was temporary and there were not enough of them to serve adequately society's needs. Most were rather small establishments holding a dozen people; others would only take people for one night. The situation was so bad by 1509 that Henry VII described the problem thus:

  ... there be fewe or non such commune Hospitalls within our Reame, and that for lack of them, infinite nombre of pouer nedie people miserably dailly die, no man putting hande of helpe or remedie.29

  He hoped to build hospitals "to lodge nightly 100 poor folks," but did not carry out the project.

  One reason why the hospitals became increasingly inadequate arose from abuses of their founding charters. Patrons sometimes insisted that their retired servants be lodged at the hospitals rather than the deserving poor. The case of the hospital at Bury St. Edmunds illustrates the problem well. Initially, the hospital was founded to provide food and clothing to the indigent and give the sick and aged a place in the monastic hospital. The establishment had only seven beds in the thirteenth century but grew into a complex of buildings. By the fourteenth century the abbot decided who would reside there and began charging people as much as twenty-six marks for the privilege of spending their old age in the hospital. Eventually, the space reserved for aged women was used for aged monks and clergy and ultimately most of the hospital's clientele was clergy or paying guests.30

  Life in one of the almshouses or hospitals was not to everyone's liking. The inmates had to follow a modified monastic rule. Their treatment could be so bad that they sometimes rebelled against their keepers.31

  The population expected that clergy and monastic establishments would provide charity, but this charity could take the form of food and clothing and not necessarily shelter. Parishioners expected their parish priest to dispense about a third of his income in alms and might have felt that he should organize charity in the village.32 Monasteries regularly gave out food. The abbeys might provide other services as well. Four unknown paupers asked the abbot of Sawtry's servant to ferry them across the river out of charity, but the boat sank because of the current and the servant lost his life, although the paupers made it safely to shore. 33

  Local people also called on lay lords for aid, and these routinely gave distributions of alms and food. The trencher on which a wealthy person ate his meal was made of an inferior bread. At the end of the meal these were collected and distributed to the poor, complete with the juices and gravy that had seeped into them. The lord and his officials also forgave fines of those who were too poor to pay them in manorial court.

  While medieval peasants themselves tended to be charitable, especially to people they knew, more general aid was sporadic at best. One widow's will is a particularly good illustration of the very local focus of pious bequests. She wanted all of her wood to be distributed to poor neighbors. She also desired that every poor person in Goldington be given 12d., and named in her will these ten poor men and women. 34

  The coroners' inquests present the beggar's story in sad detail. For instance, on
an evening in June 1273 Joan Fine of Milton Bryant came to Houghton Regis and sought hospitality from door to door, carrying her son, aged two, in her arms. She was allowed to spend the night in Richard Red's barn. Her son wandered out and drowned. Since she was unknown in the village, she could not find pledges and was delivered to the bailiff. Emma of Hatch had been begging from door to door on a cold day in January when, unable to find lodging for the night, she died of cold in a field. Beatrice Bone begged from door to door in October and finally fell down and died on Amice Mordant's threshold. People of all ages begged for food from their neighbors, sometimes even when they had a house and family in the village. Alice Coke, a poor woman, lay ill in a small house she shared with her sister Agnes. At twilight her sister went out to beg milk for her. While she was gone a fire, broke out and Alice died. Both Alice and Beatrice were found dead by kin.35 Begging was a hard life that often ended tragically.

  Giving charity, however, could be risky, particularly if one did not know the people. One couple took in a man and his wife for the night, but they turned out to be two men who killed them and took their goods. 36

  The various formal institutions of charity and the informal one of begging left much to be desired in both material and emotional comfort for the proverty-stricken, orphaned, old, and sick. They were poor substitutes for having wealth adequate to procure decent care.

  We have discussed surrogates for dependent children and adults, but we have yet to investigate the emotional bonds people formed in the absence of familial ones. Priests' wills provide some of the best insights into the friendships and ties that consoled single people. A priest dying in Bedfordshire in 1516 put aside a large part of his estate for prayers for both himself and his parents. He left the bulk of his estate to his sister and brother-in-law and gave each nephew and niece a silver spoon. He remitted the debt of a tenant and gave his wife some beads. His books went to fellow clergymen. The man who had been his keeper in his old age was given 6s. 8d. He gave 3s. 4d. to a promising young man, whose mentor he had been, if he eventually became a priest. His will is typical of the networks of affection that the unmarried built into their lives.

  We also catch an occasional glimpse in coroners' inquests of a local priest involved in friendly interactions with their parishioners. One priest, on a visit to a family, took the ten-year-old boy of the house for a ride on his fancy horse. When he tried to set the boy down, the boy fell.38

  Pet animals may also have consoled medieval peasants, as they did the upper classes, and provided them with surrogates for children. Chaucer has provided us with a classical example, the Prioress in the Canterbury Tales, of a childless woman's affection for her little dogs:

  Noble women were often painted with lapdogs, and there was even a satirical song about women who fed delicacies to their dogs while the servants went short of food. To the nobleman as well, dogs were constant companions. 40

  Only a few hints about affections for pets emerge from our records. In a court case in 1294 "William Yngeleys complains against John Saly and Christina his sister because they detain a certain cat to William's damage, which damage he would not willingly have borne for 6d." 41 Whether he lost the services of a good mouser or the companionship of a prized pet is unclear. Dogs, while generally forbidden in manorial custumals, were common to the villagers. We read in manorial court rolls of men and boys illegally hunting with dogs and of dogs mauling and biting people. But that dogs had an importance beyond hunting is shown in a manorial court case previously cited in which the man who abused a maintenance contract for Moll de Mora not only stole goods from her and did not keep up her house, but also killed her dog. Another indication is archaeological. In the dig at Upton the full skeleton of a dog was found with a knife in its body, the victim, archaeologists 42 believe, of the final abandonment of the homestead.

  Childless couples probably took in orphans or nieces and nephews when a brother or sister had too many children to provide for, but, if so, it was not done through formal adoption. Most orphaned children would be cared for by a relative or someone in the community. The person who usually offered shelter was a man who hoped to marry a son or daughter to the orphan and gain access to the orphan's land, or someone who hoped to profit from a wardship. For those children, adults, and old people without land or relatives, charity from clergy and the community would have to suffice, because hospitals and almshouses could take only a few. With greater mobility and new economic opportunities, the old community ties loosened and the welfare functions it had performed began to deteriorate along with the bonds that had held neighbors together.

  Emotional surrogates for family must be our final consideration. In Shorter's "Bad Old Days" the ship of family had gaping holes in it that permitted the community to stream in; Aries saw emotional ties to the community as more important than those to family for the medieval peasant; and Stone has portrayed the community as a continual irritant that prevented affective ties from developing within the traditional pleb family. In the final analysis, then, did the community so intrude on family life that the emotional bonds that we associate with the nuclear family could not develop or were the close, sentimental ties with the community rather than the family? The matter is not a trivial one. If, in committing homicide, one is more likely to kill a person with whom one has close bonds, then the murder pattern among the peasants of medieval England would suggest that they were more emotionally involved with their neighbors than with their families. Intrafamilial homicide was very low compared to the number of neighbors who were victims. Furthermore, medievalists have always emphasized the importance of community for medieval people and speak of the "Christian community," "the monastic community," "the community of the realm," and "the village community." In so doing they have taken their cue from medieval records themselves.

  To investigate the problem, we want to know both the extent to which community intruded into family and those relationships in the community that provided services and emotional support that we normally associate with family. We will want to discover if godparents formed closer bonds than family, if the shared emotions among neighbors were stronger than those among family members, and if parish gilds were more important to people than their family. We want to know what change, if any, population depletion and mobility made in the sense of community, for, as we have seen, family remained stable. A fundamental question in considering the emotional attachments of medieval peasants is whether or not an individual is capable of more than one type of emotional bonding. Aries and Shorter have implied that the individual either relates to the family or the community, not to both.

  We will begin with the problem of the community's intrusion into family life. Stone has described the preindustrial peasant community in terms of a generalized spy network that peered into people's windows and charged them with the immoralities and infringements of rules that they saw therein. This omnipresence of neighbors prohibited the development of intimate emotional lives within the family.' The testimony of witnesses in LeRoy Ladurie's account of life in Montaillou also leads a reader to suspect that one could not have a secret with such aggressively curious neighbors.

  When one reads court records, it is very easy to see all life as bickering, slander, and gossip, without looking at the other personal interactions that occurred. What may appear at first to be prying may also be interpreted as an effort to protect and preserve family rather than interfere with it.

  Most of the material relating to family in manorial courts was concerned with either adjudicating family disputes or keeping family intact. Only a tenth of all manorial court cases dealt with family, and most of these involved property and debts. A very small pro?ortion of the intrafamilial cases involved violence or even adultery. Marital problems were not a routine part of court business. In general, the neighbors appear to have intervened only when the community was disturbed or there was an accompanying infraction of bylaws. While the lord and neighbors might require a bachelor or widow to marry or pay a
fine, they did not tell the person whom to marry. Their chief concern was that the house and land be maximally productive. Furthermore, it was not prurient interests that led to the legerwite. The lord used the fine on young women who were deflowered to raise money, and the neighbors might impose it to keep lines of descent beyond dispute.3 Inheritance problems came into court only when the peasant proprietor died intestate or when there was a dispute over the settlement. In all the cases related to family the court's object was to protect and encourage family, not harass the institution.

  The neighbors, through the manorial court, could also be the best protection that an individual from a truncated family could have. In wardship arrangements and retirement contracts it was the community who could intervene if the terms of the contract were not met. The community, then, became the general guardian of such people. The community, however, did not want to know about problems through idle talk and punished those of its members who gossiped "to the grave nuisance of the countryside." Thus Matilda Bowees, Agnes Mulleward, Isabell Ingelfon, Samina Kyinde, and Agnes Andrewe were distrained for being communes garulators and William Barbor was fined for gossiping with neighbors.4

  If neighbors did not inhibit the development of emotional bonds within the family, they might have formed more significant ties with each other than those between one family member and another. The extrafamilial bonds of godparents with the parents of the godchild (coparents), for instance, might replace familial ones. While the significance of the godparent/godchild relationship appears to have been minimal, some historians have argued that the relationship of the coparents was of great importance. In studies of godparenting in Mediterranean countries, and even in LeRoy Ladurie's study of Montaillou, coparents formed a network of mutually beneficial ties. The assumption is that the men and women officiating at the baptism were linked together in a type of kinship tie that promoted cooperation in ventures other than the spiritual welfare of their mutual charge. The relationship was reinforced by ecclesiastical prohibitions against marriages contracted between people who had entered into copaternity.5 If such a network of mutual cooperation ever existed in England, it remains obscure and the very lack of reference suggests that it was relatively unimportant. Testators do not leave bequests to people identified as coparents. Folklore, which reserves a role for godparents in aiding a godchild, has no similar tradition for coparents. The only hint that the relationship may have produced significant ties is linguistic. The common use of gosse (compater) and gossep (comater) left us the word gossip as a form of address and a derogatory label.