46. Walker, Wakefield, p.211. For the sixteenth-century figures and a general discussion of English illegitimacy, see Peter Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations: Essays in Historical Sociology (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 102-155. For the low illegitimacy figures in Europe in general, see Flinn, European Demographic System, pp. 25-26. While illegitimacy rates were low, considering the delayed marriages, bridal pregnancies may have been high.
47. J. Z. Titow, "Some Differences Between Manors and the Effects on the Condition of the Peasants in the Thirteenth Century," Agricultural History Review 10 (1962), p.4.
48. Just. 2/67 m. 40d. In just. 2/33 m. 7 the two children are five and two and both are girls.
Chapter 7. The Family as an Economic Unit
1. A. V. Chayanov, The Theory of Peasant Economy, ed. D. Thorner, B. Kerblay, and R. E. F. Smith (Homewood, Ill., 1966), p. 1.
2. Eric R. Wolf, Peasants (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966).
3. A number of models for household economy have been presented by historians and anthropologists. A popular historical one is based on the life cycle. Glen Elder in sociology did some of the pioneering work on life cycle in Children of the Great Depression (Chicago, 1974); Tamara K. Hareven, "The Family as Process: The Historical Study of the Family Cycle," Journal of Social History 7 (1974), pp. 322-329, and Tamara K. Hareven and Maris A. Vinovskis, eds., Family and Population in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, 1978), are other examples. These studies rely heavily on modern census data and do not have the flexibility needed for different types of sources. More valuable for earlier periods is Franklin Mendels, "Industry and Marriages in Flanders before the Industrial Revolution," in Population and Economics: Proceedings of Section V of the Fourth Congress of the International Economic History Association, ed. Paul Deprez (Winnipeg, 1970), pp.81-93. The life-cycle models are too static and only represent one variable. It assumes that peasantry are homogeneous. Davydd J. Greenwood in Community-Level Research, Local-Regional-Governmental Interactions and Development Planning: A Strategy for Baseline Studies, Rural Development Occasional Paper no. 9, Rural Development Committee, Cornell University (1980), pp. 11-16, has emphasized the importance of viewing peasant societies as heterogeneous. Other anthropological models include Teodor Shanin, ed., Peasants and Peasant Societies: Selected Readings (Harmondsworth, 1971); James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant (New Haven, 1976); Samuel Popkin, The Rational Peasant (Berkeley, 1979); and Jack Goody, Production and Reproduction: A Comparative Study of the Domestic Domain (Cambridge, 1976).
4. Wolf, Peasants, pp. 1-17.
5. Olwen Hufton, "Toward an Understanding of the Poor in Eighteenth-Century France," in French Government and Society, 1500-1850, ed. J. Bosher (London, 1973), pp. 143-165, shows that the obligation of the community to care for local poor was a very strong custom. English wills also indicate that people left provision for poor men by giving clothing and bread, as I elaborate in Part V.
6. English Wills, 1498-1526, ed. A. F. Cirket, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society 87 (1956), p. 55.
7. George Homans, English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1941), pp. 361-363.
8. M. M. Postan and J. Z. Titow, "Heriots and Prices on Winchester Manors," Economic History Review 2nd ser. 11 (1959), pp. 392-411, show that the poorer peasants died off during even minor peaks in the price of grain at the beginning of the fourteenth century and suffered considerably in the major famines.
9. J. R. Maddicott, The English Peasantry and the Demands of the Crown, 1294-1341, Past and Present Supplements I (Oxford, 1975).
10. Frances G. Davenport, "The Decay of Villeinage in East Anglia," in Essays in Economic History 2, ed. E. M. Carus-Wilson (London, 1962), pp. 115-116. Wolf, Peasants, p. 16, has suggested that acceptance of Protestantism in some parts of the world has had the effect of reducing ceremonial demands. In general, he sees a breakdown of authority as providing peasants an opportunity to reduce external payments, a condition certainly descriptive of fifteenth-century England.
11. H. E. Hallam, "Some Thirteenth-Century Censuses," Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 10 (1958), pp. 342-345.
12. Edwin DeWindt, Land and People in Holywell-cum-Needingworth, (Toronto, 1972), pp.112-117.
13. W. W. Skeat, Pierce the Plowman's Crede, EETS (London, 1906), pp. 16-17. Beatrice White, "Poet and Peasant," in The Reign of Richard II,ed. R. H. Du Boulay and C. M. Barron (London, 1971), p. 70.
14. Court Rolls of the Manor of Wakefield, trans. W. P. Baildon, The Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series 36 (1906), I, pp. 86, 203, 219, and passim. English Wills, pp. 26, 60, and passim.
15. J. Ambrose Raftis, "The Concentration of Responsibility in Five Villages," Mediaeval Studies 28 (1966), pp. 117-119.
16. A. Raistrick, "A Fourteenth Century Regional Survey," Sociological Review 21 (1929), pp. 242-245. See also Edgar Powell, The Rising in East Anglia in 1381 (Cambridge, 1896), Appendix 1, for Suffolk poll tax information.
17. Christopher Dyer, "A Small Landowner in the Fifteenth Century," Midland History 1 (1972), pp. 13-14. Joan W. Scott and Louise A. Tilly, "Women's Work and the Family in Nineteenth-Century Europe," Comparative Studies in Society and History 17 (1975), pp. 3&-64, point out that when women went off to labor in industry in towns, they did not necessarily send money home but kept it toward their own marriages. Judith Bennett, "Medieval Peasant Marriage: An Examination of Marriage Fines in the Liber Gersumarum," In Pathways to Medieval Peasants, ed. J. A. Raftis (Toronto, 1981), pp. 204-205.
18. J. R. Ravensdale, Liable to Flood: Village Landscape on the Edge of the Fens (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 48-62, surveys the various uses of fens and resources outside traditional cereal crops. The supplemental production of vegetables and various special items such as hazelnut oil was long a traditional occupation for French peasantry to help them through hard times. Carlo Poni, "Family and 'Podere' in Emilia Romagua," The journal of Italian History 1 (1978), p. 214, found that in nineteenth-century Italy women and children spent as much as ten hours a day during July and August working on the hemp.
19. Just. 2/17 m. 4d. Their boat capsized when a large wind came up. Isabelle drowned, but Paganus made it to shore. Elaine Clark, "Debt Litigation in the Late Medieval English Vill," in Pathways to Medieval Peasants, ed. J. A. Raftis (Toronto, 1981), p. 258 and throughout the article, discusses the various craftsmen and middlemen who enter into agreements with fellow villagers for goods and services.
20. Bedfordshire Coroners' Rolls, trans. R. F. Hunnisett, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society 41 (1961), pp. 117, 118. Just. 2/104 m. 9d.
21. Wakefield, I, pp.89-91, 141, 158, 176.
22. Wakefield, I, p. 149. See also p. 117. Court Rolls from the Manor of Carshalton from the Reign of Edward III to that of Henry VII, trans. D. L. Powell, Surrey Record Society 2 (1916), pp. 23, 31. These types of cases represent some of the main business of the court rolls. W. 0. Ault, "By-Laws of Gleaning and the Problems of Harvest," Economic History Review 2nd ser. 14 (1961), pp. 212-214.
23. Barbara A. Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict in English Communities (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), pp.83-85, 166-183, for more detail on thefts and the relationship of neighbors in crime, pp. 58-59, for information on acquittal and convictions.
24. Barbara A. Hanawalt, "Community Conflict and Social Control: Crime in the Ramsey Abbey Villages," Mediaeval Studies 39 (1977), pp. 402-423, has a fuller discussion of the criminal activities of the three different status groups. See also Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict, pp. 128-134. For trespasses, see 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. 116.
25. Clark, "Debt Litigation," pp. 256, 267-71.
26. Richard M. Smith, "Kin and Neighbors in a Thirteenth-Century Suffolk Community," Journal of Family History 4 (1979), pp. 229-249.
27. Anne DeWindt, "A Peasant Land Market and its Participants: King's Ripton, 1280-1400," Midland History 4 (1978), pp.
142-159. She found that the small land transactions benefited both the large holders and the lesser holders. This currency in small strips was a fluid and adaptable system that met individual family needs. Only a few of the more prominent villagers were also actively accumulating increasingly more land, and some of them were becoming peasant landlords themselves.
28. Eleanor Searle, "Seigneurial Control of Women's Marriages: The Antecedents and Function of Merchet in England," Past and Present 82 (1979), p. 32. R. H. Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford, 1975), p. 59.
29. A. E. Levett, Studies in Manorial History, H. M. Cam, M. Coate, L. S. Sutherland (Oxford, 1938), p. 246. Hilton, English Peasantry, pp. 40-42. Marjorie Kennedy, "Resourceful Villeins: The Cellarer Family of Wawne in Holderness," Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 48 (1976), p. 114.
30. Britton, Community of the Vill, pp. 97-103.
31. Clark, "Debt Litigation," pp. 253, 267-271. The two groups most distinguishable as creditors were the wealthy villagers and craftsmen.
32. Court Roll of Chalgrave Manor, ed. Marian K. Dale, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society 28 (1950), pp. xxvii-xxviii.
Chapter 8. The Husbandman's Year and Economic Ventures
1. Reliquiae Antiquae, I, ed. Thomas Wright and James O. Halliwell (London, 1841), p. 43.
2. Rossell Hope Robbins, Secular Lyrics of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (Oxford, 1952), p. 62.
3. Just. 2/194 m. 2, 2/195 ms. 7, 10, 10d. In an accident involving harrowing a field, the harrow turned over on the man's legs. Just. 2/200. For plowing accidents, see Just. 2/ 92 m. 4d. and 2/91 m. 4.
4. Just. 2/201 m. 2. David H. Morgan, "The Place of Harvesters in NineteenthCentury Village Life," in Village Life and Labor, ed. Raphael Samuel, pp. 27-72, has excellent descriptions of the field labor at harvest. Some of his evidence came from newspaper accounts of harvest deaths that are equivalent to the coroners' inquest records.
5. In just. 2/200 m. 1, 2/91 m. 4 a man hit himself in the leg.
6. Just. 2/194 m. 12; 2/104 ms. 32, 34d, 40; 2/105 m. 8; 2/71 m. 2d; and 2/69 m. 3 give a few examples among many.
7. For a more complete description of the agricultural year, see H. S. Bennett, Life on the English Manor (Cambridge, 1937), pp.77-96, and George Homans, English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1941), pp. 353-381.
8. Wood was cut from limbs and put into bundles or fagots and carted across the fields. Accidents involved falling from carts, having limbs fall on workers, and some even sat on the limbs that they were cutting and, of course, fell with the limb. Just. 2/194 ms. ld, 2; 2/195 for examples. Just. 2/194 m. 6 for digging drainage ditch. Working with horses was a frequent cause of death. The horses kicked people, threw riders, wandered into deep water to drink and the riders were washed off, or bolted at the sight of birds when they were being led to pasture. There are many examples throughout the rolls. See, for instance, just. 2/194 m. 6, 2/104 m. 8. A man using a beam to prop up his house was crushed by the beam in just. 2/195 m. 15.
9. William Beveridge, "Westminster Wages in the Manorial Era," Economic History Review 2nd ser. 8 (1955), pp. 20-26, and "Wages in the Winchester Manors," Economic History Review 7 (1936), pp. 22-43. A. Jones, "Harvest Customs and Labourers' Perquisites in Southern England, 1150-1350," Agricultural History Review 25 (1977), pp. 15, 98.
10. James E. Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages: The History of English Labour (London, 1884), pp. 170-175. Bedfordshire Coroners' Rolls, trans. R. F. Hunnisett, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society 41 (1961), pp. 15, 106, 111. Just. 2/85 m. 8, 2/67 m. 40. Christopher Dyer, "A Small Landowner in the Fifteenth Century," Midland History 1 (1972), p. 13, for pay of various servants confirms Rogers's conclusion that the permanent servants could be paid very well indeed. A fishpond keeper and hedger got ,E3 19s. 6d. annually.
11. In Just. 2/92 m. 5 a man was sitting on the wheel of a horse mill when it started pulling and he was crushed. See also just. 2/88 m. 2, 2/85 ms. 5, 8. In just. 2/203 m. 5 a man was milling when his millstone broke and one of the pieces hit him in the back.
12. Just. 2/18 m. 45; 2/104 ms. 14d, 15; 2/67 ms. 3, 5d, 19; 2/195, ms. 13d., 16d. The roads themselves caused some of the accidents. One man was driving on the highway and hit a pothole that made the cart overturn: Just. 2/85 m. 5. Carting was by far the most dangerous occupation for men, either in connection with fieldwork, carting goods, or travel. Of course, some of the carters were drunk when they had accidents. See, for instance; Just. 2/195 m. 9d, 2/203 m. 3.
13. Just. 2/104 m. 15; 2/91 ms. 3, 4, 5; 2/88 m. 2; 2/92, ms. 2, 4. Another man who was punting a boatload of goods across the water got stuck and tried to push off with his pole. It catapulted him into the water and he drowned: Just 2/104 m. 13.
14. Judith Bennett, "Village Ale-Wives," in Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt (Bloomington, Ind. forthcoming in 1986), has argued that men brewed in woodland as opposed to champion country. But no one questions that women predominated in brewing. L. F. Salzman, English Industries of the Middle Ages (London, 1923), p. 187. R. H. Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford, 1975), p.45. The Court Rolls of the Manor of Wakefield, trans. Sue Sheridan Walker, The Yorkshire Archaeological Record Series, 2nd ser. 2 (forthcoming), pp.122-123.
15. Court Rolls of the Manor of Carshalton, trans. D. L. Powell, Surrey Record Society 2 (1916), pp. 9, 21, 23, 31-40. Court Rolls of the Manor of Wakefield, IV, trans. John Lister, The Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series 78 (1930), p. 3.
16. Just. 2/78 m. 6. See also just. 2/104 m. 13, 2/91 m. 7, 2/17 m. 2d. Carshalton, pp. 23, 31. Wakefield, IV, p. 94. G. J. Turner, Select Pleas of the Forest, Selden Society 13 (1901), gives the villagers' activities in poaching in royal forests.
17. L. F. Salzman, English Industries of the Middle Ages (New York, 1913), pp. 114-132. The accidents with pottery came both from digging for clay and from getting the kiln so hot that it burnt the house. Just. 2/104 m. 26, 2/195 m. 6, 2/87 m. 3.
18. For examples, see Just. 2/93 m. 4; 2/91 ms. 8, 10, for masonry; in 2/67 m. 33d. a carpenter working on a house fell from his scaffolding; 2/82 m. 9 for driving cartload of beams; 2/194 ms. 7d, 8, for pulling beams out of old houses for reuse; in 2/199 m. 5 a man steps off a scaffolding while making a wattle-and-daub wall.
19. Just. 2/92 m. 4. Salzman, Industries of the Middle Ages, p. 171, suggests that although leather dressing was a widely diffused industry, it was not quite as common as Rogers suggested and would not be found in every village.
20. Just. 2/199 ms. 3, 5; 2/92 m. 4.
21. Hatcher, Rural Economy and Society, pp. 220-256.
22. Salzman, Industries of the Middle Ages, pp. 1-37. Accidents occurred in these pits similar to those in quarries and marl pits. They also tended to fill with water when not worked and people fell into them. In Wakefield the tenants could collect coal for their own use, but they had to pay for the right to do so.
23. Just. 2/67, 2/87 m. 2.
24. John Hatcher, Rural Economy and Society in the Duchy of Cornwall (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 222-243. Bedfordshire Wills Proven in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, 1383-1548, ed. Margaret McGregor, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society 58 (1979), pp. 41-42.
25. Court Rolls of the Manor of Wakefield, I, trans. W. P. Baildon, The Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series 29 (1901), pp. 80-81. Wakefield, IV, p. 20.
26. Elaine Clark, "Debt Litigation in a Late Medieval English Vill," in Pathways to Medieval Peasants, ed. J. A. Raftis (Toronto, 1981), pp. 261-267.
27. Christopher Dyer, Lords and Peasants in a Changing Sociey: The Estates of the Bishopric of Worcester, 680-1540 (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 305-315.
28. Edwin DeWindt, Land and People in Holywell-cum-Needingworth, (Toronto, 1972), pp. 117-126, 134-137. Cottagers were less likely to participate in the land markets than were the yardlander and half-yardlanders.
29. Hatcher, Rural Economy and Sociey, p. 236-238, 245, found that burge
sses in Cornwall were taking land in the country and putting it to pasture.
30. Wakefield, I, pp. 91, 96, 117. Carshalton Court Rolls, pp. 3, 7, 17, 25, 29. Wakefield, IV, pp. 16, 18, 22, 94, 95. One man put his mark on trees in order to steal them. Court Roll of Chalgrave Manor, ed. Marian K. Dale, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society 28 (1950), p.51.
31. Wakefield, I, p. 83. Wakefield, IV, p. 19.
32. Wakefield, I, pp. 12, 14, 30-32, 40. He had to give 6s. 8d. for aid in collecting the 100s.
33. Francis Davenport, "The Decay of Villeinage in East Anglia," in Essays in Economic History, II, ed. E. M. Carus-Wilson (London, 1962), pp. 112-124.
34. Nora Ritchie (nee Kenyon), "Labor Conditions in Essex in the Reign of Richard II," in Essays in Economic History, II, ed. E. M. Carus-Wilson (London, 1962), pp.91-111.
35. Bedfordshire Coroners' Rolls, pp. 6-7.
Chapter 9. Women's Contribution to the Home Economy
1. Reliquiae Antiquae, II, ed. Thomas Wright and James O. Halliwell (London, 1941), pp. 196-199.
2. Ibid.
3. See, for instance, Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work, and Family (New York, 1978); and Olwen Hufton, "Women and the Family Economy in Eighteenth Century France," French Historical Studies, 9 (1975), pp. 1-22, and "Women in the Revolution, 1789-1796," Past and Present 53 (1971), pp. 90-108.
4. J. C. Russell, British Medieval Population, (Albuquerque, 1948), pp. 154-156.
5. E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541-1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), pp. 257-265.
6. The wills are taken from the full collection for Bedfordshire: English Wills, 1498-1526, ed. A. F. Cirket, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society 37 (1956) and Bedfordshire Wills, 1480-1519, trans. Patricia Bell, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society 45 (1966). In using the wills for these figures I have omitted all clerics' wills and those of the few men who were bachelors.
7. Bedfordshire Wills, p. 87.
8. English Wills, p. 33.
The Ties That Bound Page 38