The plague and other diseases took their toll of the community in more than numbers of dead. Although family units tended to regroup fairly quickly, with more distant kin taking the place of family who died, they did not have the same socialization into the community that the former tenants had, the mutual cooperation and community cohesion that had been built on generations of interactions and trust. Of the old power structure at Overton in Huntingdonshire, for instance, only two of the main village families remained after the 1348 plague. New families in the village tended to be more opportunistic and the older families could not keep the dominance they once had.27 Attractive wages lured away people with less desirable lands, and new people, not even related by distant family ties, came into communities. The fifteenth century saw the development of greater differences in the wealth of community members. The primary villagers acquired more land and also a new title, that of yeoman, while the poorer villagers increasingly lost wealth and status relative to the yeomen.28
Although no one would argue that community suddenly ceased to play a large role in peasants' lives, the signs of breakdown were unmistakable. Pledging, the most apparent example of community cooperation in the court rolls, began to decline in the fifteenth century. Trespasses tended to increase, particularly the trespass of animals into a neighbor's crops, and violence among the higher-status peasants rose. Another sign of the waning of community was the decline in importance of community policing and of manorial courts. The justices of the peace increasingly replaced the sheriff's tourn and gradually took over the slander, assault, debt, and trespass cases from the manorial courts. The rising peasant proprietors, the yeomen, participated in the change and identified increasingly with the gentry rather than with the lower peasantry who worked for them. The demise of serfdom meant that, even to the lords, manor courts ceased to be as important as they once had been. 30
While families showed resilience and regrouped into nuclear units fairly readily, the community proved less robust. If there was a major change from the medieval to the early modern period it took place less in the structure and function of family than in community.
If the medieval peasants whose actions are recounted in these pages appear to behave in ways that are entirely comprehensible to us, and if their family life does not seem unfamiliar, perhaps we should not be surprised. We have more continuity with the lives of our ancestors than we normally assume. Historians are so dedicated to showing change over time and revolutionary breaks with the past that they often overlook historical behavior that does not change radically. Historians are also prone to making implicit value judgments about the past, looking back at earlier times with nostalgia for lost innocence or, alternatively, seeing in the past the horrors of a benighted time from which we modern people have fortunately escaped. Neither approach does justice to the lives of our peasant ancestors. We are not entirely like them, but they are not alien to us even though we are separated from them by five hundred years.
When considering an institution as basic as the family, the very biological necessities of perpetuating our species ensures that many aspects of medieval life must be similar to our own. The elemental care of children in their first years and the awkwardness of adolescence cannot be substantially modified simply through different cultural norms. The family is a particularly interesting social phenomenon to study, because it is an intersection of both the biological and the cultural. While suckling a baby is biological, other aspects of family life, such as treatment of the aged, is cultural.
The family has proved to be a remarkably flexible institution. People have adapted it to a number of severe economic swings, but it remains recognizable. The family has gone from the economy of hunting and gathering, through one of peasant cultivation, and is still a viable institution in the modern world.
The office of coroner was created in 1194 in the counties of England as an aid to the royal administration, particularly the general eyres. Each county was to elect four knights to act as coroners, but in practice the number varied from two to four. The coroners' duties covered a range of adminstrative activities, but their chief function was to investigate all deaths that were unnatural, violent, sudden, or surrounded by suspicious circumstances. In practice this meant that they investigated all cases of homicide, suicide, and accidental death or misadventure.
When a body was found, the first finder (either the actual person who found the body or someone in the community who assumed this legal role) summoned the neighbors, who sent off for one of the coroners. The coroner was to come as quickly as possible, summon a jury from the vicinity, and view the corpse. He turned it over, noted wounds, and tried to determine the probable cause of death. The body was then buried and the inquest was held. The jurors had collected information among the community to determine the activities of the person before he or she died, the people present, the instrument that caused the death, the time of day, and so on. The instrument that caused an accidental death was assessed and the crown claimed the value of the object, the deodand. In the case of homicide, an indictment would be made and directions sent out to arrest the suspect. The coroner or his clerk kept a record of the inquest to present to the royal justices when they came to the county. When the justices demanded the records, a fair copy was made by the clerk for deposit with the justices.
While the eyres worked smoothly in the thirteenth century, the coroners' rolls were fairly routinely collected, but in the fourteenth century the collection of the rolls was more sporadic, so that few counties have continuous series of coroners' rolls. Furthermore, the quality of the rolls submitted varied considerably, with some being very complete reports while others gave only the bare essentials. In the fifteenth century very few coroners' rolls were collected and preserved.'
The rolls used in this study are from those counties in which the coroners kept fairly detailed records, even if only for a brief period. The most detailed of all the records are those of the late thirteenth century (1265-1276, 1300-1317) from Bedfordshire, 94 cases 2 Cambridgeshire (Just. 2/17, 18, 21, 24), 418 cases, covers the years 1374 to 1376. Lincolnshire (Just. 2/64-93), 1115 cases, deals with the years 1349 to 1393. Norfolk (Just. 2/102-105), 261 cases, covers 1362 to 1379. Northamptonshire (Just. 2/107-127), 674 cases, has the most complete series, covering most of the fourteenth century (1301-1419). Wiltshire (Just. 2/193-204), 275 cases, includes rolls from the years 1341 to 1384. While the six counties are spread throughout England, the southeast and northwest are not represented.
In the current study I used only the misadventure cases, with a scattering of homicide cases for illustration of particular points. The misadventure cases presented a more accurate and detailed picture of people's daily life. Furthermore, the seasonality and victims of misadventures and homicides differed widely, so all the homicides are left out of calculations. Because of the sporadic nature of the collection of rolls, I made no attempt to look at trends in different types of accidents. My chief interest in the accidental-death cases was the incidental details of daily life. I have been more interested in the qualitative detail of the record than in accumulating quantitative information. Since the cases are not uniform, some contain more descriptive material than others. For this-reason, not all of the material was even quantifiable. Some quantitative results, presented here in the form of tables, contribute to a greater understanding of patterns of daily routines for men, women, and children.
The material on children is particularly rich because the coroners recorded the age of children through the age of twelve. Until a child reached the age of twelve it was not legally responsible for criminal acts and did not join a tithing group. Fortunately, coroners recorded the ages of most children, even those who died of misadventure. The very act of recording these ages suggests that society noted the death of children in particular. The ages of adults were only occasionally given, with some coroner or his clerk taking an interest in providing such information. Norfolk and Cambridge coroners seem to have been most interested
in ages.
The information contained in the rolls is of enormous diversity and, although the cases were coded into machine-readable form, the variety has been too great to reproduce here. Any number of objects could cause death, people engaged in a wide range of activities when they died, some died immediately and others lingered for months, and the places of death were numerous. The rich quality of these documents enhanced their value as a guide to everyday life, but that very richness is difficult to duplicate in a table. The grouping of information into categories means that some of the vividness of the record is lost. For this reason the tables have been put into the appendix for those who wish to have further information. So that the reader may form some idea of the detail in the records, I have included one table with the aggregate data on activities of the victim at the time of death.
Table 1. Adult Males and Females: Place of Accident
Table 2. Adult Males and Females: Activity
Table 3. Adult Males: Activity by Age-
Table 8. Activities at Time of Victim's Death: Aggregate Numbers
Introduction
1. Michael Mitterauer and Reinhard Sieder, The European Family: Patriarchy to Partnership from the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. Karla Oosterveen and Manfred Horzinger (Chicago, 1982), Chap. 1. Recent historiography on the preindustrial European peasant family abounds with discussions of patrilineage, patriarchy, kinship, and family types. Since the purpose of the current study is not a historiographical essay but rather an attempt to discuss what we know about the medieval family, I will not attempt to provide a complete discussion of the various views, many of which are not relevant to this study. For recent evaluations of the literature, see: Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 1-5, and Louise Tilly and Miriam Cohen, "Does the Family Have a History? A Review of Theory and Practice in Family History," Social Science History 6 (1982), pp. 131-180.
2. Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism (New York, 1979), pp. 7-33.
3. R. H. Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages: The Ford Lectures for 1973 and Related Studies (Oxford, 1975), Chap. 1, particularly p. 13. For a more abbreviated definition, see Eric R. Wolf, Peasants (Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1966), pp. 1-4, and Teodor Shanin, ed., Peasants and Peasant Societies (Harmondsworth, 1971), pp. 11-19.
4. J. Ambrose Raftis, "Social Structure in Five East Midlands Villages: A Study of Possibilities in the Use of Court Roll Data," Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 18 (1965), pp. 83-100, and "The Concentration of Responsibility in Five Villages," Mediaeval Studies 28 (1966), pp. 92-118, were the two pioneering studies of the methodology. Edwin DeWindt, Land and People in Holywell-cum-Needingworth (Toronto, 1972), took the method farther. Edward Britton, The Community of the Vill: A Study in the History of the Family and Village Life in Fourteenth-Century England (Toronto, 1977), pp. 166-169, includes a discussion of the legal, as opposed to social, distinctions between villein and serf. Zvi Razi, Life, Marriage and Death in a Medieval Parish: Economy, Society and Demography in Halesowen, 1270-1400 (Cambridge, 1980), used the same methodology but was more interested in demography than in social status indicators and social interactions.
5. The summary of demographic, economic, and social conditions in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries has been brief and only meant to be a reminder of the major events and an aid to nonspecialists. Several excellent books provide more information. Hilton, English Peasantry, discusses the impact of these events on the manorial system and the peasantry. J. Z. Titow, English Rural Society, 1200-1350 (New York, 1969), discusses the earlier period, the contributions of M. M. Postan, and the controversies surrounding Postan's Malthusian interpretation of late-thirteenth- and early-fourteenth-century demography. John Hatcher, Plague, Population and the English Economy, 1348-1530 (London, 1977), assesses the effects of depopulation on the countryside. J. L. Bolton, The Medieval English Economy, 1150-1500 (London, 1980), provides a convenient overview. For the effects of the depopulation on particular communities, see J. Ambrose Raftis, "Changes in an English Village after the Black Death," Mediaeval Studies 29 (1967), pp. 158-177, and DeWindt, Holywell-cum-Needingworth.
6. Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (New York, 1975), pp. 3-4, for analogy of family to ship; pp. 22-53 for more complete discussion. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York, 1977), pp. 4-7, 87-93. Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York, 1962), p. 368.
7. Macfarlane, Origins of English Individualism, pp. 87-197.
8. Ibid., p. 16.
9. David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber,.Les Toscans et leurfamilles: une etude des catastoforentin de 1427 (Paris, 1978). Diane Owen Hughes, "Urban Growth and Family Structure in Medieval Genoa," Past and Present 66 (1975), pp. 3-28. Randolph Trumbach, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 1978), pp. 13-16 and in his introduction, tried to develop a model that distinguished between the lineage system of the aristocracy and the kindred system of the peasantry or lower classes. He based his generalizations largely on Diane Hughes's study of family in Genoa. When one comes to examine it closely, however, the distinctions begin to crumble and one is left once again with the dilemma that a Mediterranean city may not provide the best model for agrarian England.
10. Georges Duby, Medieval Marriage: Two Models from Twelfth-Century France, trans. Elborg Forster (Baltimore, 1978). Jacques Heers, Le Clan familial du Moyen Age: Etude sur les structures politiques et sociales des milieux urbains (Paris, 1974). Sylvia Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London (Chicago, 1948). These are but a few examples of a more extensive literature.
11. Ronald Blythe, Akenfeld: Portrait of an English Village (New York, 1969), is a fine example of the use of oral history for reconstructing the milieu of village life. George C. Homans, English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1941), p. 109. H. S. Bennett, Life on the English Manor (Cambridge, 1937), pp. 237-238.
12. Select Cases from the Coroners' Rolls, A.D. 126Y-1413, ed. Charles Gross, Selden Society 9 (London, 1896), pp. 14-15. This volume contains sample cases with both the Latin original and an English translation and is a fine introduction to the coroners' rolls.
Chapter 1. Field and Village Plans
1. Trevor Rowley, "Medieval Field Systems," in The English Medieval Landscape, ed. Leonard Cantor (Philadelphia, 1982), pp. 25-55. This essay contains a good summary of current knowledge about fields and their origins.
2. Howard L. Gray, English Field Systems, Harvard Historical Studies 22 (Cambridge, Mass., 1915). Charles Orwin and Christabel Orwin, The Open Fields (Oxford, 1938).
3. W. G. Hoskins, Leicestershire: An Illustrated Essay on the History of the Landscape (London, 1957), p. 4. Historians of local and village history owe a debt of gratitude to Hoskins and his students for introducing landscape evidence.
4. Brian K. Roberts, Rural Settlement in Britain (Folkston, Kent, 1977), pp. 87-88.
5. Ibid., p. 86.
6. Hoskins, Leicestershire, p. 17.
7. J. Ambrose Raftis, "Town and Country Migration," in Studies of Peasant Mobility in a Region of Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Century, ed. Edward Britton and J. Ambrose Raftis (in manuscript).
8. Warren O. Ault, Open-Field Farming in Medieval England (London, 1972), p. 65.
9. W. G. Hoskins, Local History in England (London, 1959), pp. 46-47.
10. J. Ambrose Raftis, Tenure and Mobility: Studies in the Social History of the Mediaeval English Village (Toronto, 1964), pp. 18-20. J. Z. Titow, "Some Differences between Manors and Their Effects on the Condition of the Peasant in the Thirteenth Century," Agricultural History Review 10 (1962), p. 3. He found that in Taunton, Wargrave, and Witney 56 to 74 percent of the peasants held fifteen acres and 5 to 12 percent held thirty or more acres.
11. Just. 2/113 m. 29.
12. Au
lt, Open-Field Farming, pp. 51-53.
13. Raftis, Tenure and Mobility, p. 97.
14. Barbara A. Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict in English Communities, 1300-1348 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), pp. 54, 99.
15. Bedfordshire Coroners' Rolls, trans. R. F. Hunnisett, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society 41 (1961), p. 99.
16. M. W. Barley, "Farmhouses and Cottages, 1550-1725," Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 7 (1954-1955), pp. 291-306. W. G. Hoskins, "The Rebuilding of Rural England, 1570-1640," Past and Present 4 (1953), pp. 44-59.
17. Roberts, Rural Settlement, pp. 122-128.
18. Peter Bigmore, "Villages and Towns," in The English Medieval Landscape, ed. Leonard Cantor (Philadelphia, 1982), p. 164.
19. J. G. Hurst, "A Review of Archaeological Research to 1968," in Deserted Medieval Villages, ed. Maurice Beresford and J. G. Hurst (London, 1971), pp. 125-127. Bigmore, "Villages and Towns," pp. 164-166, suggests that the Wharram Percy pattern is more typical of the north than the Midlands. In both Durham and Yorkshire, perhaps in response to destruction from raids, villages were replanned in a more regular fashion. But certainly this argument would have to apply more to the fourteenth than the thirteenth century.
20. Colin Platt, Medieval England: A Social History and Archaeology from the Conquest to 1600 A.D. (New York, 1978), pp. 38-39. Bigmore, "Villages and Towns," pp. 169-170, suggests that some village contractions, such as in the relatively high-altitude Hound Tor in Dartmoor, showed signs of attempts to deal with the worsening climate in the fourteenth century by building grain-drying facilities and converting deserted houses into barns. Conversion of deserted houses into barns appears to have been routine throughout England.
The Ties That Bound Page 34