Historians working on village studies have used pledging as an indication of the strength of intervillage ties and the lines that these ties took. A person who was fined, directed to appear at a future session of court, or entering into some form of contract would have to find people who would answer for him if he failed to meet his obligations. These pledges were fined if their pledgee defaulted. Sometimes a person could have such a bad reputation that he could not find a pledge. One man who neglected his tenement on Chalgrave manor to the damage of 100s. could find no one who was willing to stand surety for him, so his land was confiscated. Studies of pledging have introduced conflicting interb
pretations of its importance for village cohesiveness. All are in agreement that, with the possible exception of husbands standing as pledges for their wives in brewing fines, kin were not called on as pledges. In Redgrave in Suffolk, as we have noted, those groups that relied most heavily on their neighbors were the middle and upper-middle wealth groups who called on each other for pledging and other favors. In Broughton and Holywell-cum-Needingworth there was also evidence of cooperation, but the upper group of villagers played a more active role in pledging for lower-level villagers. Such intergroup pledging could be either a sign of village cohesion or an indication of the dominance of the upper status group over the lower one.7 As such, it is not an unalloyed example of village emotional ties and loyalites.
Other clues to cooperation among villagers appear in manorial courts. The court could encourage concords and "love days" between community members who were in dispute, so that community harmony could be restored. Community members who were close to each other exchanged pieces of land, worked together in the fields, and lent goods and animals to each other. Again, in the Huntingdonshire villages the main village families tended to predominate in the use of this recipro- city.s
Villagers cared enough for each other to risk their lives helping a friend. The coroners' inquests have numerous cases of men who died helping a neighbor free wagons stuck in the mud, put out house fires, catch animals, or secure a boat. Thomas Teddy of Chesterton lost his life helping his neighbor Henry de Becahe put out a house fire. Other people lost their lives standing up for neighbors in quarrels or pursuing a fleeing felon (the hue and cry) in defense of the community peace.9
Shared leisure activities accompanied the shared work in the village community. Games, sporting events, drinking, and religious ceremonies brought neighbors into emotional contact. Bull baiting, wrestling matches, and archery contests drew people together, as did the various games of football.10 The tavern was a social center for both men and women, as we have seen, and people seemed to spend evenings at the local as well as stopping in during the day. Such drinking was not discouraged in Catholic England and, as we have also seen, church ales helped to provide for the upkeep of the parish church." One testator saw the community drink as an opportunity to have prayers said for his soul. He left three acres of meadow and one acre of arable to hold "one drynkynge evermore to be kept the twysday in the rogacon weke at Pekworth Crosse to the Intent to be prayd for ever more and to be parte taker of prayers and suffragis there sayd."12 His bequest would have provided a generous quantity of beer.
The calendar was also filled with a variety of festivals, both Christian and pagan remnants, that brought the community together. In Croscombe in Somerset, in addition to the youth gilds that we have mentioned, the Archers, who impersonated Robin Hood and Little John, held an archery contest, and the Webbers, Tuckers (fullers), and Hogglers (field laborers and miners) all had performances. The village also performed plays, had a Play-King, and held mock courts in summer and autumn.13
Viewed across the centuries, the traditional festivities of peasant communities have an innocent appeal and they were a major contribution to entertainment and socializing among neighbors. They were among many institutions that encouraged community identity and cohesion. The judicial system, based on community arrest and vigilance over bylaw violations, required the participation of all members; the annual beating of the bounds and football matches with neighboring villages contributed to a sense of identity; and the very inevitability of daily contact ensured that good neighborliness would be cultivated. While one would call such neighborly ties emotional, they are not the same as those that we have seen within the family.
Wills show other types of affection and loyalty to communities. Of the 389 people leaving wills in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Bedfordshire, 65 left bequests to repair roads and 32 to repair bridges. Many of the testators, of course, also left gifts for the parish church.
All of these examples of community bonds are exactly what we would expect to find in a world of neighbors, but they are not familial bonds and not a substitute for them. We must turn from the more general ties in the community and look at attitudes toward particular friends.
Friends played a more important part in wills than did extended family, with 419 receiving bequests. Some of the male testators who had children still at home relied on friends to act as executors along with their wives and rewarded them in their wills. Money payments went to a quarter of the friends receiving bequests, animals to 22 percent, personal effects to 19 percent, household goods to 17 percent, and grain to 8 percent. Surprisingly, testators felt so strongly about some of their friends that 7 percent of friends receiving bequests were given land or a house. Others offered their friends the first option or a discount on buying the home tenement. In general, the value of bequests was greater than the ceremonial gifts to godchildren, grandchildren, and other kin. In other words, the wills tend to confirm the conclusion that neighbors and friends, rather than extended kin, played a significant role in daily life.
The wills of widows and older men are particularly informative about the importance of friendships, for they are voluntary arrangements by people who have had a long life of accumulated debts of gratitude. In Northhill in Bedfordshire, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the wills of Christina Gylmyn, Simon Peyndell, William Tychmeers and his second wife, Catherine, John Taylor, Thomas Kenygall, John Gray, and Robert Harrison all overlapped in their bequests, indicating that they as well as other people they named were linked through mutual friendships. The Basse, Gere, and Hafurne families showed similar overlaps that included intermarriages and the passing on of land among their families. 14
Social-religious gilds are good candidates for surrogate family, because in their very conception they adopted metaphors of family. Members called each other brother and sister and consciously performed some functions expected from family. They also agreed to submit themselves to the discipline of the head of the gild as they would to a father.
Gilds were multifaceted organizations with religious, political, economic, and social functions, but it is primarily their quasi-familial activities that shall occupy us here. In rural communities all adults who could afford to pay the entrance fee and annual dues belonged to the gild, and sometimes the fees were reduced for the deserving poor. In the village of Bardwell, for instance, there were thirty married couples, thirty single men either widowers or bachelors, and twenty-four single women six of whom were described as widows.'s Their chief officer was an alderman who was selected from the wealthier members of the gild to serve an annual term.
Of those aspects of gild activity that could be seen as familial, the most apparent was the funeral procession and subsequent prayers for the soul of the departed member. In some respects gild members were surrogate family for the hereafter. Of the nearly five-hundred gilds responding to the writ of 1389 requiring gilds to register their rules, 74 percent told the royal government that funerals for members were of primary importance. The ceremonial expenses of religious observances, both for the public and individual good, were expensive. The funeral masses alone-dirige, placebo, and requiem-could cost as much as eight marks by the fifteenth century. Such expenses were better borne by a group than an individual. Corpus Christi of Lincoln offered its members four soul candles on the
hearse, masses, soul alms from the membership, and the gild banner to be carried before the hearse with the brothers and sisters walking behind it. The gild also paid for bells to be tolled at the funeral.16 This collective family could put on a more elaborate funeral than most of the individual families would be able to do.
Gilds brought psychological comfort as well as financial relief to members. One could not be sure that family would continue to pray for the dead person even though the will might make bequests conditional on keeping the obit, but gild members could be counted on to pray for former dues-paying members. After all, the members' souls would need the same services in the course of time.
In addition to providing a type of "salvation insurance," gilds offered their members companionate functions. The feast in honor of the gild's patron saint was not simply a religious event, it was a convivial occasion for brothers and sisters to eat well and, perhaps, drink too much. In small fraternities of neighbors the entertainment would fall to each couple in succession to provide the gild meal in their homes. Or the meal would be a simple one of bread, cheese, and ale-in one case, thirty gallons of ale.'7 The fifteenth-century accounts from the Bardwell gild cited earlier in the book give a good picture of how elaborate these village feasts could be. Common worship in the gild chapel, processions on the saint's day, and visiting sick brothers and sisters were all part of gild companionship.
Some gilds, such as that of Bardwell, were wealthy enough to construct a gild hall that could seat as many as 150 members at a communal feast. But smaller gilds relied on a tavern or church-house for their banquets.18
Gilds also imposed regulations directed towards socializing their members. Since a quantity of ale was served at the feast and the participants could become boisterous, rules required a solemn prayer at the beginning of the feast. Members who slept noisily or failed to pass the cup when it was set in front of them were fined. A dress code enjoined banqueters from coming in tabard or cloak, or bare-legged or barefoot. And they were to leave their caps and hoods off when they sat at table. 19
Gilds went beyond the dinner table, instructing their members in general ethical and moral behavior. Thus one gild would exclude a member if "he lie too long in bed, is lazy, looses his goods through his foolishness." Other gilds had rules against brawling, gaming, gambling, talking beyond reason, or other inappropriate behavior. They expelled adulterers, lewd young men, and nonvirgins among their single sisters.20 In short, they imposed rather puritanical values on their members.
Like any good family, members were required not to fight with each other and to maintain cordial relations with each other at all times. If disagreements arose, they were to go to the head of the gild for arbitration. The intent of all regulations was to achieve internal harmony, and some gilds explicitly drew an analogy to family. Gild members "must stand by a brother or sister charged with any offense such as homicide and in markets, with counsel and help, as if they were all children of the same father and mother."21
The gilds might also provide their members with economic aid and support in time of need. The gild account books show how the credit operations worked for members and how the gild, as a whole, profited from the investments. Loans might be in money but were more commonly in kind. In a Cambridge gild, for instance, dues were payable in quarters of malt. The gild placed a value of 4s. to 6s. on a quarter and lent it to members for brewing. The member borrowing malt returned its value plus Is. 2d. to Is. 4d. at the end of the year. The gild made over 25 percent on its investment and the member could make and sell beer without a large capital outlay for malt.22
Most rural gilds lent livestock. Gilds either purchased herds from the treasury or received them as bequests. Some gilds, such as Eyam in Derbyshire, lent out oxen for plowing. Agricultural historians have pointed out that only the wealthiest peasants could afford to own a full plow team and that others would have to borrow them. Gild ownership of herds permitted villagers to share the expense of purchasing and feeding the oxen.
Many gilds kept breeding stock including sheep, horses, cows, bulls, and so on. The animals were rented for the year and the leasee returned the animal with rent and the value of the offspring, if any.23 In the fifteenth century, when labor was scarce and more and more land was being turned into pasture, the use of breeding stock would be of great value to gild members and help them to take advantage of the new economic opportunities. It is even possible that the gilds consciously purchased better animals in order to improve the stock of members.
A second economic benefit for members, which we noted earlier, was disaster insurance. Potential disasters were specified: poverty, sickness, old age, blindness, loss of limb, loss of cattle, fall of a house, making a pilgrimage, false imprisonment, aid in temporary pecuniary difficulties, and losses by fire, flood, robbery, or shipwreck. One gild even provided a midwife for the gild sisters.24 In the 1389 gild returns, 19 percent of the gilds declared that they provided a weekly allowance and clothing in the event of misfortune. The average weekly allowance was only 7d. With a loaf of bread costing Id., this was not a generous aid. Apparently, gilds did not consider poor relief as one of their main functions.
To avoid abuses, the gilds placed limitations on eligibility. At Ludlow, for instance, a member could only get relief in misfortune three times during his or her lifetime. The word misfortune was the key to eligibility, for a member could claim aid only if he were "overtaken by folly not of his doing." One gild would provide for widows "as long as they conduct themselves well and honestly."25
The fifteenth-century account book of St. George's Gild in Norwich gives some indication of the recipients of these benefits. This was a large gild and apparently expected to support several people a year because the members had to subscribe }d. a week for relief. The charity rolls included a brother who had once been wealthy and had even served on the city government. The more usual recipients were poorer members who also held such gild offices as beadsman, bellman, beadle, and so on.26 In the returns of 1389 the urban gilds showed more concern about insuring members against destitution than rural ones: 46 percent of the urban gilds had provisions for poor members compared to 19 percent of the rural. The rural populace apparently expected to make personal arrangements, rather than use their gilds, in the event of old age or misfortune.
Of all the extrafamilial bonds that we have investigated- coparenthood, pledging, personal friendships, and gild membershipthe latter comes the closest to being surrogate family. And yet gilds did not provide the same emotional functions that family did. In the final analysis they were voluntary associations, not family.
Another approach to assessing the strength of bonds between neighbors as familial substitutes is to look at what community did not do. If we begin with the very basic and biological, community did not reproduce the species. Most children were born in wedlock. The community was not the primary trainer of children; rather, parents took the major responsibility without seeming to have much recourse to godparents. And the selection of marriage partners was not a community decision, even when the community urged marriage. When a child was scalded, it was not the community that called upon a saint to revive little Agnes, but Agnes's mother.
The basic unit of production was not the community but the individual household. All members of the household contributed work on the family land, and when they reached the age of majority all children expected some share in its accumulated wealth. The community did not decide what portions would go to which children in the family unless a father died without making his wishes known.
When a person lay on his or her deathbed and drew up a final will and testament, the priorities of emotional concerns were first for the salvation of his or her own soul; second, the division of family property among family members; and third (if the second had been done inter vivos), to remember friends and more distant relatives and godchildren. Only after having seen to these obligations did the testator leave goods to gilds, hospitals, and for roads and bridges.
Perhaps the nostalgia for the past that has entered into our modern view is not for the loss of extended family and distant kin, but rather the closeness to neighbors and community cohesion. The close-knit community of the Middle Ages began to break down by the beginning of the fifteenth century. Gilds may have been formed to meet the perceived decline in community ties rather than as a substitute for family ties. Thus gilds were more properly surrogate community rather than surrogate family. The Poor Laws of the sixteenth century may be seen as an attempt to reinstitute the old community services with the force of law. Such laws tried to enforce community, not family spirit.
The Ties That Bound Page 33