The Ties That Bound

by Barbara A Hanawalt

  82. Bedfordshire Coroners' Rolls, p. 31.

  Chapter 4. Inheritance

  1. Jack Goody, "Inheritance, Property and Women: Some Comparative Considerations," in Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe, ed. Jack Goody, Joan Thirsk, and E. P. Thompson (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 10-34.

  2. A. E. Levctt, Studies in Manorial History, ed. H. M. Cam, M. Coate, and L. S. Sutherland (Oxford, 1938), Chap. 4. Paul R. Hyams, King, Lords, and Peasants in Medieval England (Oxford, 1980), gives a detailed discussion of the history of villein holding and the law and is well worth reading for those interested in a complete discussion of the problem. I only briefly cover the material here as I am interested in its relationship to the family. Since a lord wanted to keep the land productive, he had no desire to deprive a tenant of his chattels, and hence he demanded heriot (the best animal or cash on a tenant's death) as a symbol of his rights: J. A. Raftis, Tenure and Mobility: Studies in the Social History of the Medieval English Village (Toronto, 1964), pp. 4617.

  3. Paul Vinogradoff, Villeinage in England: Essays in English Mediaeval History (Oxford, 1908), pp. 246-250.

  4. George C. Homans, "The Frisians in East Anglia," Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 10 (1957-8), p. 191, supported the general conclusions about the division of champion and woodland that Vinogradoff had established.

  5. Chertsey Abbey Court Rolls, Abstract, trans. Elsie Toms, Surrey Record Society 21, p. xiii.

  6. Zvi Razi, Life, Marriage and Death in the Medieval Parish: Economy, Sociey, and Demography in Halesowen, 1270-1400 (Cambridge, 1980), p. 96.

  7. David Sabean, "Aspects of Kinship Behaviour and Property in Rural Western Europe before 1800," in Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe, 1200-1800, ed. Jack Goody, Joan Thirsk, and E. P. Thompson, (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 98-99.

  8. James B. Given, Society and Homicide in Thirteenth-Century England (Palo Alto, Calif., 1977), pp. 162-163. Barbara A. Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict in English Communities, 1300-1348 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), pp. 162-163.

  9. Sabean, "Aspects of Kinship," p. 98.

  10. Razi, Halesowen, p. 52. Zvi Razi, "Family, Land and the Village Community in Later Medieval England," Past and Present 93 (1981), p. 7, found that 60 percent of the inheriting brothers provided siblings with land in preplague Halesowen. Such arrangements also appear frequently in wills. Raftis, Tenure and Mobility, pp. 45-48.

  11. Margaret Spufford, "Peasant Inheritance Customs and Land Distribution in Cambridgeshire from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries," in Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe 1200-1800, ed. Jack Goody, Joan Thirsk, and E. P. Thompson (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 156-159, discusses the effects of providing for siblings on the success of the inheriting son. She argued that the necessity of giving chattels to siblings or taking on their support could severely hamper the economic success of the inheriting brother.

  12. Barbara Dodwell, "Holdings and Inheritance in Medieval East Anglia," Economic History Review 2nd ser. 20 (1967), pp. 53-66. George Homans, English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1941), pp. 133-143, and "The Rural Sociology of Medieval England," Past and Present 4 (1953), pp. 32-43. Rosamond J. Faith, "Peasant Families and Inheritance Customs in Medieval England," Agricultural History Review 14 (1966), pp. 77-86.

  13. H. E. Hallam, "Some Thirteenth-Century Censuses," Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 10 (1958), pp. 345-348. He found a rather remarkable range of diversity among the villages he surveyed. In an area that generally practiced partible inheritance (among sokemen at least) anywhere from 13 to 55 percent of the tenancies were joint. The size varied from below five acres to thirty acres with the upper range being more usual. Dodwell, "Holdings and Inheritance," pp. 61-64.

  14. A. R. H. Baker, "Open Fields and Partible Inheritance on a Kent Manor," Economic History Review 2nd ser., 17 (1964), pp. 20-21.

  15. David Roden, "Fragmentation of Farms and Fields in the Chiltern Hills, Thirteenth Century and Later," Mediaeval Studies 31 (1969), pp. 232-237.

  16. Hilton, English Peasantry, p.99. Raftis, Tenure and Mobility, pp. 37-42, for a discussion of the succession of the wife. Eleanor Searle, "Seignorial Control of Women's Marriage: The Antecedents and Function of Merchet in England," Past and Present 82 (1979), p.38, argued that giving a dower was a sign of freedom on the part of the husband and that the unfree peasants, who were bound by manorial customs, endowed the wife with half of the husband's tenements for life. In a strict legal sense such a conclusion might be correct, but the blurring of the lines between free and unfree tenants and the use of wills actually made the system more flexible; both free and unfree husbands tended to use the generous provisions of customary law.

  17. Margaret Spufford, Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 162-163. J. Z. Titow, "Some Differences between Manors and the Effects on the Condition of the Peasant in the Thirteenth Century," Agricultural History Review, 10 (1962), pp. 6-8. Titow has argued that on manors with land shortages the marriage of widows tended to make the direct descent from father to son meaningless, and that family holdings tended to "wander around."

  18. Court Roll of Chalgrave Manor, 1278-1313, ed. Marian K. Dale, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society 28 (1950), p. 10.

  19. English Wills, 1498-1526, ed. A. F. Cirket, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society 37 (1956), p.46.

  20. Roden, "Fragmentation of Farms and Fields,", pp. 228-230.

  21. Chertsey Abbey, p. xiii.

  22. The Court Rolls of the Manor of Wakefield From October 1331 to September 1333, trans. Sue Sheridan Walker, The Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 2nd ser., 2 (forthcoming), p. 219.

  23. Chertsey Abbey, pp. xiv-xv.

  24. Ibid. See also Walker, Wakefield, p. 256. Court Rolls of the Manor of Wakefield, I, trans. W. P. Baildon, pp. 212-213.

  25. R. H. Helmholz, "Bastardy Litigation in Medieval England," American journal of Legal History 13 (1969), pp. 370-371. Searle, "Merchet," p. 36. Razi, Halesowen, p. 65.

  26. Walker, Wakefield, p. 5.

  27. W. G. Hoskins, The Midland Peasant: The Social and Economic History of a Leicestershire Village (London, 1957), pp. 28-55, shows free peasants passing family land from generation to generation for hundreds of years. Cicely Howell, "Peasant Inheritance Customs in the Midlands, 1280-1700," in Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe, 1200-1800, ed. Jack Goody, Joan Thirsk, and E. P. Thompson (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 126-131. Razi, "Family, Land and the Village Community," pp. 1-9.

  28. Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism (New York, 1979), pp. 85-86.

  29. Howell, "Peasant Inheritance," pp. 123-124, 131.

  30. Edwin DeWindt, Land and People in Holywell-cum-Needingworth (Toronto, 1972), pp. 167-183. Edward Britton, The Community of the Vill: A Study in the History of the Family and Village Life in Fourteenth-Century England (Toronto, 1977), p. 79, has less precise information but estimates that 75 percent remained before the plague and then the number declined. Razi, "Family, Land and the Village," pp. 20-21. Raftis, "Changes in an English Village after the Black Death," Mediaeval Studies 29 (1967), pp. 158-177. Generalizations in medieval peasant society are maddeningly difficult because of the marked regional differences. In the case of Cornwall, the tin industry led to greater mobility and consequently a greater turnover of tenements in the first half of the fourteenth century. The Black Death did have the usual dislocating effects, but by the end of the fourteenth century there was greater stability, with over three-fourths of the tenants renewing. This pattern held in the fifteenth century. John Hatcher, Rural Economy and Society in the Duchy of Cornwall, 1300-1500 (Cambridge, 1970), p. 220. Faith, "Peasant Inheritance Customs," pp. 88-92. Faith found that while demand for family land was breaking down in general, widows continued to insist on their family right.

  31. N. L. Brooke and M. M. Postan, eds., Carte .Nativorum: A Peterborough Cartularly of the Fourteenth Century, Northamptonshire Rec
ord Society 20 (1960), Chap. 2.

  32. A variety of studies have commented on the land market in the early fourteenth century. Anne DeWindt, "A Peasant Land Market and Its Participants: King's Ripton, 1280-1400," Midland History 4 (1978), pp. 142-158. Howell, "Peasant Inheritance," pp. 135-137. DeWindt, Holywell-cum-Needingworth, pp. 43-67. Britton, Community of the Vill, p. 86. E. J. King, Peterborough Abbey, 1086-1310: A Study in the Land Market (Cambridge, 1973). Faith, "Peasant Inheritance Customs," pp. 86-87.

  33. Howell, "Peasant Inheritance," p. 125.

  34. Andrew Jones, "Land and People at Leighton Buzzard in the Later Fifteenth Century,'-' Economic History Review 2nd ser. 25 (1972), pp. 18-27. Christopher Dyer, Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society: The Estates of the Bishopric of Worcester, 6804540 (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 298-315. Razi, "Family, Land and the Village Community," pp. 18-22, correctly cautions that the decline in people of the same surname taking up properties does not necessarily mean that the same bloodline is not inheriting. The argument here, however, is that families and individuals did acquire new pieces of property to help their family placement strategies either by taking on a distant relative's tenement or purchasing entry into new lands. In doing so, they ignored the old customary rules of unigeniture or partible inheritance.

  35. DeWindt, "Peasant Land Market," p. 153. Dyer, Lords and Peasants, p. 315, found much the same pattern by reconstructing the biographies of men from the middle to late fifteenth century who acquired land during the prime of their life and gradually dispersed it as they aged. He mistakenly regards this as a sign of the breakup of the family, for it is more reflective of the new land market. Indeed, further examples in Dyer's chapters also indicate the continued importance of family inheritance. Howell's "Peasant Inheritance" and Spufford, "Inheritance Customs", pp. 156-157, indicate that the family remained strong.

  36. Patricia Bell, Bedfordshire Wills, 1480-1519, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society 45 (1966), pp. 11-12. Razi, "Family, Land and the Village Community," pp. 20-21.

  37. DeWindt, "Peasant Land Market," pp. 152-153. Chalgrave Manor, pp. 63-64.

  38. Wakefield, I, p. 208.

  39. Ibid., p. 108. The court rolls abound with cases of the father setting up sons and daughters during his lifetime. For other cases, see ibid., pp. 85-88, 95, 97, 120, and Walker, Wakefield, pp. 40-41, 214, 288, 299, 301. Hallam, "Thirteenth Century Censuses," p.351, found that such inter vivos settlements were rare in areas practicing partible inheritance. A father might be particularly careful to make an inter vivos settlement if he planned to have two sons take joint control of a tenement on a manor that normally practiced primogeniture. Thus William Lolyere and his two sons entered a covenant that he would grant the tenement to the two brothers and their heirs with the provision "that one of the aforesaid brothers shall not be allowed to alienate or sell the said tenement without consent of the other:" Chalgrave, p. 32. For similar cases, see Chertsey Abbey, pp. xiv, xxxvi.

  40. Wakefield, I, p. 211.

  41. Bedfordshire Wills, p. 6.

  42. Howell, "Peasant Inheritance," pp. 141-143.

  43. 8 percent, 6 percent, 4 percent, 3 percent, 7 percent, respectively.

  44. 4 percent, 0.5 percent, 3 percent, respectively.

  45. Bedfordshire Wills, p. 50.

  46. Ibid., pp. 11-12.

  47. English Wills, pp.31-39.

  48. Ibid., no. 149. In no. 156 the will of one of Hugh's sons is recorded and shows that the land he received from his father was divided between two sons.

  49. Howell, "Peasant Inheritance," p. 141. In manorial courts, if the person died without kin the land was taken into the lord's hands and rented out again. Some effort would be made to find a person in direct descent to take the land, and sometimes the person would present themselves in court to claim the land. Razi, Halesowen, pp. 110- 113 found that after the Black Death kin quickly appeared to take up land left vacant.

  Chapter 5. Kinship Bonds

  1. Bertha Phillpots, Kindred and Clan in the Middle Ages and After: A Study in the Sociology of the Teutonic Races (Cambridge, 1913), pp. 242-263. She argued that because the Anglo-Saxons migrated by boat as individuals or small family units, they lost kin identity earlier than continental tribes, who, in migrating overland, moved as a kin group. Some of the discussion of the open-field system has revolved around the early kinship systems, but as our period is later we may leave the matter aside. For a taste of the arguments, see Robert A. Dodghson, "The Landholding Foundations of the OpenField System," Past and Present 67 (1975), pp. 3-29, and T. M. Charles-Edwards, "Kinship, Status and the Origins of the Hide," Past and Present 56 (1972), pp. 3-33.

  2. Lorraine Lancaster, "Kinship in Anglo-Saxon Society," British Journal of Sociology 9 (1958), 236-239.

  3. Ibid., pp. 366, 372. Jack Goody, The Development of Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 18-19, 262-278.

  4. Richard Helmholz, Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 77-87.

  5. Kenneth W. Wachter, with Eugene A. Hammel and Peter Laslett, Statistical Studies of Historical Social Structure (New York, 1978), p. 159.

  6. Helen M. Cam, Liberties and Communities in Medieval England: Collected Studies in Local Administration and Topography (Cambridge, 1944), pp. 124-135.

  7. Zvi Razi, Life, Marriage, and Death in the Medieval Parish: Economy, Sociey and Demography in Halesowen, 1270-14M (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 147-149; "Family Land and the Village Community in Later Medieval England," Past and Present 93 (1981), pp. 22-27.

  8. Michael Mitterauer and Reinhard Sieder, The European Family: Patriarchy to Partnership from the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. Karl Oosterveen and Manfred Horzinger (Chicago, 1982), p.9.

  9. A. C. Chibnall, Sherington: Fiefs and Fields o fa Buckinghamshire Village (Cambridge, 1965), p. 95. Chertsey Abbey Court Rolls, Abstract, trans. Elsie Toms, Surrey Record Society (1937), p. xxxix. The use of the matronymic is thus consistent with the earlier practice that David Herlihy, in "Land, Family, and Women in Continental Europe, 701-1200," in Women in Medieval Europe, ed. Susan Mosher Stuard (Philadelphia, 1976), pp. 13-46, described for Europe.

  10. M. F. Nimkoff and Russell Middleton, "Types of Family and Types of Economy," The American Journal of Sociology 66 (1960), p. 217.

  11. Maurice Bloch, "The Long Term and the Short Term: The Economic and Political Significance of the Morality of Kinship," in The Character of Kinship, ed. Jack Goody (Cambridge, 1973), p. 86 and throughout.

  12. Lancaster, "Kinship in Anglo-Saxon Society," pp.368, 370. The duties of fictive kin are not spelled out either.

  13. Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 152.-1700 (New York, 1979), pp. 82-109. See also their comparisons to French studies and a modern British study.

  14. Elaine Clark, "Debt Litigation in a Late Medieval English Vill," in Pathways to Medieval Peasants, ed. J. Ambrose Raftis (Toronto, 1981), p.252. Richard Smith, "Kin and Neighbors in a Thirteenth-Century Suffolk Community," Journal of Family History 4 (1979), pp. 224-225. Edwin DeWindt, Land and People in Hollywell-cum-Needingworth (Toronto, 1972), p. 246, has similar results. See also Martin Pimsler, "Solidarity in the Medieval Village? The Evidence of Personal Pledging at Elton, Huntingdonshire," The Journal of British Studies 17 (1977), pp. 1-11.

  15. Smith, "Kin and Neighbors," pp. 245-247.

  16. Marjorie J. O. Kennedy, "Resourceful Villeins: The Cellarer Family of Wawne in Holderness," Yorkshire Archaeological journal 48 (1976), pp. 107-113.

  17. Judith Bennett, "The Tie that Binds: Peasant Marriages and Peasant Families in Late Medieval England," The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 15 (1984), pp.111-129.

  18. Court Roll of Chalgrave Manor, 1278-1313, ed. Marian K. Dale, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society 28 (1950), pp. 45, 47, 53-54, 64, and p. 15, in which an aunt of the inheritor is guaranteed a third of the land for life. For a complicated case from wills, see the arrangements of the Russel family in Bedfordshire Wills, 14&0--151
9, trans. Patricia Bell. Bedfordshire Historical Record Society 45 (1966) no. 149, 156, and 173. Court Rolls of the Manor of Wakefield, I, trans. W. P. Baildon, The Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series 36 (1901), p. 104. Court Rolls of the Manor of Wakef eld, IV, trans. John Risler, Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series 57 (1917), pp. 10, 144, and p.86, in which an uncle is the heir to his bastard niece. E. A. Wrigley, "Fertility Strategy for the Individual and the Group," in Historical Studies of Changing Fertility, ed. Charles Tilly (Princeton, 1978), pp. 135-154.

  19. The Court Rolls of the Manor of Wakefield From October 1331 to September 1333, trans. Sue Sheridan Walker, The Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series 2 (forthcoming), p. 210. At Wakefield in 1332 the sons of William del Lyghthesles exchanged land in various parcels with Henry del Lone and his family, but they do not appear to be related in any apparent way. Razi, "Family, Land and the Village Community," pp. 8-29. Using somewhat more refined methods for detecting familial relationships than surnames, Razi has estimated that in Halesowen reliance on extended family was much greater than at first appeared, particularly in the period of population decline and stagnation. But his numerical data include nuclear family as well as extended and, therefore, are not useful in presenting a broader picture of reliance on more distant relatives. His point is well taken, however, about the problems of relying on surname evidence alone, but the arguments of the article are conflicting. All examples that he uses for relying on distant kin following the Black Death are inheritances and a debt that will finally be resolved through an inheritance.

  20. Bedfordshire Coroners' Rolls trans. R. F. Hunnisett, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society 41 (1961), pp. 28-29. In another case the record said that the whole household was concerned and they had searched for the missing member for a whole week.

  21. Wrightson and Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village, p. 83.

  Chapter 6. Household Site and Structure

  1. William Goode, World Revolution and Family Patterns (New York, 1963), p. 17, argued that even in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Europe, where he sees a great deal of mobility, the family structure did not change to a conjugal family system. He confesses that the lower strata of society "resembled conjugal families," but that the elders dominated family life and thus the real characteristics of such a system could not exist. Instead, with the Reformation, conjugal families began to develop. John C. Caldwell, Theory of Fertility Decline (New York, 1982), pp. 157-179, for a summary of his theory, and pp.217-222 for problems with western European patterns. Caldwell's theory is that in all peasant economies high fertility and many children contribute to the family unit's prosperity. He argues that many hands lightened the load of home- and fieldwork and assured the senior couple that family wealth would continue to flow up to them as they aged and they could, therefore, be assured of a comfortable and prosperous old age. Caldwell himself admits that in the historical perspective, England and much of western Europe did not conform to this pattern in the preindustrial period. Since he would like to argue that Third World populations go through the same phases as that of western Europe, this admission proves somewhat damaging to his theory. First he assumes that the traditional family is extended and paternalistic, whereas the medieval peasant family was neither. He also assumes that family wealth and benefits flow up to the parents, whereas medieval English parents had constantly to worry about how they would distribute family land and wealth so that as many of their children as possible receive a portion. Among medieval English peasants family wealth flowed down, not up, and peasant parents faced the unhappy prospect that they might have an impoverished old age.