The Ties That Bound

by Barbara A Hanawalt

  2. M. F. Nimkoff and Russell Middleton, "Types of Family and Types of Economy," American Journal of Sociology 9 (1974), pp. 219-220.

  3. E. A. Hammel and Peter Laslett, "Comparing Household Structure Over Time and Between Cultures," Comparative Studies in Society and History 16 (1974), pp. 76-97.

  4. H. E. Hallam, "Some Thirteenth-Century Censuses," Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 14 (1958 ), pp. 348-353.

  5. Lutz Berkner, "Recent Research on the History of the Family," Journal of Marriage and the Family 35 (1973), p. 399; "Rural Family Organization in Europe: A Problem in Comparative History," Peasant Studies Newsletter 1 (1972), pp. 145-146; and Franklin Mendels, "Inheritance Systems, Family Structure, and Demographic Patterns in Western Europe, 1700-1900," in Historical Studies of Changing Fertility, ed. Charles Tilly (Priceton, 1978), pp. 209-223. Berkner has argued on the basis of his evidence from early modern Germany that stem families are typical of peasant societies. J. Krause, "The Medieval Household: Large or Small," Economic History Review 2nd ser. 9 (1957), pp. 420-421. George Homans, "The Frisians in East Anglia," Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 10 (1957), p. 192, argued that on a Norfolk manor between 1309 and 1329, 136 holdings were transferred to heirs during the tenant's lifetime and only 74 went to heirs after the tenant's death. The fathers, he argues, were retiring and the families lived on in the same house. Hallam, "Thirteenth-Century Censuses," p. 353, found only 4 threegenerational households out of 252 mentioned in the thirteenth-century serf lists.

  6. M. W. Barley, The English Farm House and Cottage (London, 1961), pp. 12-13. J. G. Hurst, "A Review of Archaeological Research to 1968," in Deserted Medieval Villages, ed. Maurice Beresford and J. G. Hurst (London, 1971), p. 113.

  7. Just. 2/67 m. 40. Bedfordshire Coroners' Rolls, trans. R. F. Hunnisett, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society 41 (1961), p. 101, records a felonious attack on a household at night. In it were a husband and wife, the husband's mother and brother, and the daughter of another brother.

  8. Cicely Howell, "Peasant Inheritance Customs in the Midlands, 1280-1700," in Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe, ed. J. Goody, J. Thirsk, E. P. Thompson (Cambridge, 1976), p. 145, has concluded that peasant men married rather late, so that the period of three-generational families was short, about three and a half years.

  9. Kenneth Wachter with Eugene A. Hammel and Peter Laslett, Statistical Studies of Historical Social Structure (New York, 1978), pp. 64, 80-90, 105-112, have suggested that the English case might be different and that in Russia, parts of France, Germany, and perhaps the Mediterranean area stem families would be more common.

  10. David Herlihy and Christine Klapisch-Zuber, Les Toscans et leurfamilles (Paris, 1978), pp. 482-485. Jean-Louis Flandrin, Families in Former Times; Kinship, Household, and Sexuality, trans. Richard Southern (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 71-84.

  11. Hallam, "Thirteenth-Century Censuses," p. 352.

  12. Ibid., p. 348. R. H. Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1975), pp. 99-100. Barbara English, A Study in Feudal Society; The Lords of Holderness, 1086-1260 (Oxford, 1979), p. 191. In the Herlihy-Klapisch-Zuber study, Les Toscans, the widows headed 6 percent of the households (widowers 6.8 percent) in the countryside; the percentage was even higher in the city. Christiane Klapisch, "Household and Family in Tuscany in 1427," Household and Family in Past Time, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, 1972), p. 273.

  13. Peter Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations: Essays in Historical Sociology (Cambridge, 1977), p. 13, has distinguished four characteristics of the Western family: (1) the basic nuclear family, (2) the woman's rather late age of marriage, (3) the relatively small gap in age between marriage partners, and (4) the presence of servants in households and the importance of servitude as part of the life cycle of young people. Because the issue of servitude as part of the life cycle-and, indeed, their routine presence in households-is questionable, the matter of servants will be discussed in later chapters.

  14. Jack Goody, "The `Family' and the 'Household,"' Domestic Groups, An Addison-Wessley Module in Anthropology 28 (1972), pp. 5-9.

  15. David Herlihy, "Population, Plague, and Social Change in Rural Pistoia, 1201-1430," Economic History Review 18 (1965), pp. 235-244. The drastic depopulation following the plague forced landlords to make capital investments in agriculture and allowances on the rent in order to keep their peasants. Carlo Poni, "Family and `Podere' in Emilia Romagna," Thejournal of Italian History 1 (1978), pp. 205-217, found that in nineteenth-century Italy the landholding was almost an unconscious control over family size. If landholding was small, so too was the family. There was an escape provision that if the number of people on a holding got too large, the lord could set up a new holding for a secondary family. But failing new land, the young men became servants. In the Herlihy-Klapisch-Zuber study of Tuscany they found relatively large households in the countryside in 1427. The mean varied from 4.4 persons per household in Arezzo to 7.5 in San Gimignano. Household size increased with wealth, although, by occupation, agricultural households averaged only 4 persons. Klapisch, "Household and Family in Tuscany," pp. 275-278.

  16. Razi, Halesowen, pp. 32, 85-88, 93. He found that male replacement rate for poorer peasants was only 0.713, but higher for the wealthy. The mean was 1.220. Manorial records underrepresent women, so that, making the assumption that the ratio of women to men was 50:50 (a ratio that has been disputed), he suggests that between 1270 and 1349 the average number of a couple's offspring over twelve years of age was 2.8, with the rich having 5.1 children, middling peasants 2.9, and poor 1.8. Suffolk figures from R. M. Smith, "English Peasant Life-Cycles and Socio-economic Network," Ph. D. Thesis (Cambridge University, 1974), p. 104. Hallam, "Some ThirteenthCentury Censuses," pp. 340-354, 361, found an average household size of 4.86 in the late thirteenth century in Lincolnshire. He also found that larger holdings produced larger families. Thus those with zero to five acres had 4.33 persons per household, those with five to thirty acres had 4.78, and those with over thirty acres had 6.2. In some cases Hallam found that these people were routinely living on one to one and a half acres per family, but they were diversifying their economy with fish and game and pasturing. H. J. Habakkuk, "Family Structure and Economic Change in Nineteenth-Century Europe," Journal of Economic History 15 (1955), pp. 6-10, also argued for larger family size in areas of partible inheritance. Peter Laslett, "Mean Household Size in England since the Sixteenth Century," in Household and Family in Past Time, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 133, 143-146. Josiah Cox Russell, British Medieval Population (Albuquerque, 1948), p. 24, used 3.5 as household size, but all modern estimates have moved that figure higher.

  17. Robert S. Gottfried, Epidemic Disease in Fifteenth-Century England: The Medical Response and the Demographic Consequences (New Brunswick, NJ., 1978), pp. 167-175, 187-203, regretfully does not discuss number of children in a testator's will, which would have been a useful table to include, but his replacement rates of males is remarkably low and would seem to place the average household size closer to Russell than to other studies. But since children might be excluded from wills either because they were young or they had already inherited, the wills are not very reliable for studying household size.

  18. Flandrin, Families in Former Times, p. 53.

  19. John Hajnal, "European Marriage Patterns in Perspective," in Population in History, ed. David V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley (Chicago, 1965), pp. 113, 116-120. Russell, British Medieval Population, pp. 154-158. T. H. Hollingsworth, "A Demographic Study of the British Ducal Families," Population Studies 11 (1957-58), p. 14, and his Historical Demography (Ithaca, N.Y., 1969), pp. 382-383. The problem with the poll tax evidence is that there was widespread evasion, especially among the young people that one wants to be able to count. The information on the peerage is not a reliable index to the age of marriage of the population at large because the aristocracy frequently entered into earlier marriages if some diplomatic or economic alliance could be acc
omplished by betrothing children. E. A. Wrigley, "Family Limitation in Pre-Industrial England," Economic History Review 2nd ser. 19 (1966), p. 86, calculated the mean age of first marriage for males in the years 1560-1646 at 27.2 and for women at 27.0. The median was close to 26 for both and the mode was around 23. Michael Flinn, The European Demographic System, 1500-1820 (Baltimore, 1981), pp. 19-29, concluded from looking at all the early modern data that 24 for women and 26 for men was more common. Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Les Toscans, p. 207, also show that the age of marriage went down following the Black Death, but in Italy the women married in their middle to late teens and men in their thirties, so that the differences in ages of the partners was thirteen to fifteen years. Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525-1700 (New York, 1979), p. 47, found men marrying at 25.3 and women at 24.6. Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (New York, 1965), p. 83, showed that in the early seventeenth century the age was 21.6 for women and 26.5 for men. !

  20. Richard Smith, "Hypotheses sur la Nuptialite en Angleterre au XIIe-XIVe siecles," Annales Economies, Sociitis, Civilisations 38 (1983), pp. 107-124, presents an assessment of Hajnal's argument as well as a discussion of the other European studies. Comparing the most reliable poll tax returns from 1377 and 1381 with records from 1599 and taking into account the various estimates of the number of males left out of the tax because they were legitimately exempt as beggars and clergy or were concealed, Smith has concluded that from 50 to 55 percent of the male population was married.

  21. Edgar Powell, The Rising in East Anglia in 1381 (Cambridge, 1896), Appendix A, contains a complete transcription of the poll tax for Suffolk.

  22. Razi, Halesowen, pp. 47-63, 132-137. Wrigley, "Family Limitation," p. 92. David Levine, Family Formation in an Age of Nascent Capitalism (New York, 1977), p. 148. The marital response to plague and economic opportunity has been questioned for early modern England. Wrigley found that the visitation of plague in 1646-1647 brought later marriage and lower fertility. Levine found that although a farm laborer could earn the maximal amount that he would by age twenty, he did not marry because social pressures in the peasant community inhibited early marriage.

  23. George Homans, English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1941), pp. 133-176, argued that in areas of primogeniture sons waited until their father died to marry, and thus the age of marriage was high. Howell, "Peasant Inheritance Customs," p. 145. In support of his argument, Howell has written that the large number of widows granting land to their sons indicates that they did wait. But mere transfer of land does not necessarily prove that the son did not already have a family. Widows' rights varied considerably from community to community but need not have barred a son from working the land and marrying or being settled on other land with his new family.

  24. Razi, Halesowen, pp. 50-58, 135.

  25. H. E. Hallam, "Population Density in Medieval Fenland," Economic History Review 2nd ser. 14 (1961), p. 78, found 0.46 persons per square acre and households with one to one and a half acres. J. Z. Titow, "Some Evidence of the Thirteenth-Century Population Increase," Economic History Review 2nd ser. 14 (1961), pp. 218-224, found 3.3 acres per capita in 1248; by 1311 it decreased to 2.55. Razi, Halesowen, p. 30, found that 43 percent of the population lived on a quarter-virgate or less.

  26. Elaine Clark, "Some Aspects of Social Security in Medieval England," journal of Family History 7 (1982), pp. 307-320.

  27. J. R. Ravensdale, "Deaths and Entries: The Reliability of the Figures of Mortality in the Black Death in Miss F. M. Page's Estates of Crowland Abbey, and Some Implications for Landholding," in Land, Kinship, and Life-Cycle, ed. Richard Smith (forthcoming). See also Titow, "Thirteenth-Century Population Increase."

  28. Judith Bennett, "Medieval Peasant Marriage: An Examination of Marriage License Fines in the Liber Gersumar ua," in Pathways to Medieval Peasants, ed. J. A. Raftis (Toronto, 1981), pp. 208-211.

  29. Bedfordshire Coroners' Rolls, pp. 48-49.

  30. Barbara A. Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict in English Communities, 1304-1348 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), pp. 104-107, 153.

  31. Robert [Mannyng] of Brunne's Handyng Synne, ed. F. J. Furnivall, EETS, o.s. 119 (London, 1901), p.60. Richard Helmholz, Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 91-99. Darrel Amundsen and Carol Jean Dreis, "The Age of Menarche in Medieval Europe," Human Biology 45 (1973), pp. 363-368. The reported age of menarche was twelve to fifteen in the sixth through the fifteenth centuries.

  32. Francis James Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (Boston, 1883-1894), I, no. 7. In the Erlington group, no. 8A, there is also a bride theft in which Willie takes a well-guarded maiden but loses his life.

  33. Rossell Hope Robbins, Secular Lyrics of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (Oxford, 1952), p.37. Thomas Wright, Songs and Carols (London, 1836), song xii. Richard Leighton Greene, The Early English Carols, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1977), nos. 404, 405.

  34. Just. 2/104 m. 49. Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford B. Meech and Hope Emily Allen, EETS o.s. (London, 1940), p. 6.

  35. E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541-1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), pp. 257-265. Their figures were made on the basis of back projections. They have observed that "there is a general tendency in western societies for early marriage to be associated with low levels of permanent celibacy, and for late marriage to go with a higher level of permanent celibacy." Peasants in medieval England may have adapted depending on economic circumstances. The medieval record evidence for percentage of population marrying and the age of first marriage is unsatisfactory and perhaps too weak to overcome a hypothetical argument along the lines of the models suggested in Wrigley and Schofield's concluding chapter on the dynamics of population and environment (pp. 454-484). To argue that the early modern pattern of late marriage was simply a continuity of the medieval marriage pattern is to ignore major social and economic changes that could have had a profound influence on age of first marriage. If anything, the late sixteenth century with its large population would more closely resemble the early fourteenth century, but the pattern in between could have been radically different.

  36. John Hatcher, Plague, Population and the English Economy, (London, 1977), pp. 55-62. Sylvia Thrupp, "The Problem of Replacement Rates in Late Medieval English Population," Economic History Review 2nd ser., 18 (1965), pp. 101-119. Ronald Lee, "Models of Preindustrial Population Dynamics with Application to England," in Historical Studies in Changing Fertility, ed. Charles Tilly (Princeton, 1978), pp. 155-207, devised a model testing the effects of demands for labor on population change and found that between 1250 and 1700 it had little influence.

  37. John T. Noonan, Jr., Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by Catholic Theologians and Canonists (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), pp. 202-203. P. P. A. Biller, "BirthControl in the West in the Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries," Past and Present 94 (1982), pp. 3-26. J. A. Barnes, "Genetrix : Genitor :: Nature : Culture," in Character of Kinship, ed. Jack Goody (Cambridge, 1963), pp. 69-73. For the folkloric traditions, see Barbara A. Hanawalt, "Conception Through Infancy in Medieval English Historical and Folklore Sources," Folklore Forum 13 (1980), pp. 127-157.

  38. Noonan, Contraception, pp. 210-217. Calendar of Nottinghamshire Coroners' Inquests, 1485-1558, ed. R. F. Hunnisett, Thoroton Society Record Series 25 (1969), p.8.

  39. Barbara A. Kellum, "Infanticide in England in the Later Middle Ages," History of Childhood Quarterly 1 (1974-75), p. 367.

  40. Juha Pentikainen, The Nordic Dead-Child Tradition (Helsinki, 1968), pp. 68-79, 94-95.

  41. Child, Ballads, I, nos. 20, 21.

  42. Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict, pp. 154-157, for a more complete discussion. The work on church courts is Richard H. Helmholtz, "Infanticide in the Province of Canterbury during the Fifteenth Century," History of Childhood Quarterly 2 (1975), pp.382-390.

  43. Don Brothwell, "Paleodemography
in Earlier British Populations," World Archaeology 4 (1972), pp. 83-85.

  44. Johannes de Trokelowe, Annales (Chronica Monasterii S. Albani), ed. H. T. Riley (London, 1866), p. 94.

  45. Barbara A. Hanawalt, "Childrearing Among the Lower Classes of Late Medieval England," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 8 (1977), pp. 9-14, for an expanded discussion.