49. Bedfordshire Coroners' Rolls, pp. 27-28, 33-34.
50. Court Rolls of the Manor of Wakefield, I, trans. W. P. Baildon, The Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series 29 (1901), p. 111. Court Rolls of the Manor of Wakefield, trans. Sue Sheridan Walker, The Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Society, 2nd ser. 2 (forthcoming), p. 109. Court Roll of Chalgrave Manor, 1278-1313, ed. Marian K. Dale, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society 28 (1950), pp. 38-39. Bedfordshire Wills, pp. 43-47.
51. Adamson, Treasury, pp. 119, 152-153.
52. Segar, Medieval Anthology, pp. 109-110, cites a poem that praises women because they wrap the naked-born baby in weeds and foster and feed it and give it their love. Adamson, Treasury, p. 118, for another example.
53. Robert [Mannyng] of Brume's Handyng Synne, pp. 38-39, 40-43. English Wills, pp. 20, 23, 41, 44, 48, 56.
54. McLaughlin, "Survivors and Surrogates," pp. 117-120.
55. Ronald Knox, trans., The Miracles of King Henry VI (Cambridge, 1923).
56. William Holden Hutton, The Lives and Legends of English Saints (New York, 1903), pp. 324-327. E. Cobham Brewer, A Dictionary of Miracles: Imitative, Realistic, and Dogmatic (Philadelphia, 1884), pp. 171-175.
Chapter 12. Growing Up and Getting Married
1. Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, trans. John Jay Parry (New York, 1972), p. 24. Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of the Family, trans. Robert Baldick (London, 1962), Ch. 6 and pp. 128-129. Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (New York, 1975), pp. 120-121.
2. Frederick J. Furnivall, ed., Hymns to the Virgin and Christ, the Parliament of Devils, and Other Religious Poems, EETS, o.s. 24 (London, 1868), p. 61.
3. Sue Sheridan Walker, "Proof of Age of Feudal Heirs in Medieval England," Mediaeval Studies 35 (1973), pp. 306-323. Zvi Razi, Life, Marriage and Death in the Medieval Parish: Economy, Society and Demography in Halesowen, 1270-1400 (Cambridge, 1980), p. 43. Court Roll of Chalgrave Manor, ed. Marian K. Dale, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, 28 (1950), p. 46. The Court Rolls of the Manor of Wakefield, trans. Sue Sheridan Walker, The Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series, 2nd ser. 2 (forthcoming), p. 33. Cicely Howell, "Peasant Inheritance Customs in the Midlands," in Family and Inheritance, ed. J. Goody, J. Thirsk, E. P. Thompson (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 145-146, found that in wills in Leicestershire the age of inheritance was variously described as sixteen, eighteen, twenty-one, or when they married. 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. 46-47.
4. Just. 2/106 m. 2, 2/112 m. 1, 2/255 m. 6, 2/17 m. 6.
5. Antonia Gransden, "Childhood and Youth in Medieval England," Nottingham Medieval Studies 16 (1972), pp. 3-4.
6. Britton, Community of the Vill, pp. 38-43.
7. Just. 2/82, m. 4. English Wills 1498-1526, ed. A. F. Cirket, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society 37 (1956), pp. 62, 68. Court Rolls of the Manor of Wakefield, I, trans. W. P. Baildon, The Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series 36 (1906), p. 148.
8. Court Rolls of the Manor of Wakefield, IV, trans. John Lister, The Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series 78 (1970), p. 145. Walker, Wakefield, p. 153.
9. Just. 2/48 m. 13, 3/23 m. 1.
10. Francis James Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, I, (Boston, 1883), nos. 13, 10A, and B, 11. Chalgrave, p. 49. Just. 2/108 m. 1.
11. Thomas C. Rumble, ed., The Breton Lays in Middle English (Detroit, 1965), pp. 13, 63-64, 90-91, 105-106. Child, Ballads, I, nos. 14, 17.
12. Margot Adamson, A Treasury of Middle English Verse Selected and Rendered into Modern English (London, 1930), p. 6.
13. Rossell Hope Robbins, Secular Lyrics of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (Oxford, 1952), pp. 16-19. The poem titles give a good idea of content: "Careless Love," "A Forsaken Maiden's Lament," "The Wily Clerk."
14. R. T. Davies, Medieval English Lyrics, A Critical Anthology (Evanston, Ill., 1964), pp. 67-68, 260.
15. Robbins, Secular Lyrics, pp. 32-33: "A Young Girl's Ideal."
16. Fussell, "Countrywomen in Old England," p. 117.
17. Just. 2/104 m. 23. See also just. 2/104 m. 42 and 2/200 m. 1.
18. Church-Wardens' Accounts of Coscombe, Pilton, Latton, Tintinhull, Morebath, and St. Michael's Bath, ed. Edmund Hobhouse, Somerset Record Society 4 (1890), p. 1.
19. Robert [Mannyng] of Brunne's Handlyng Synne, ed. F. J. Furnivall, EETS, o.s. 119 (London, 1901), p.36. George Homans, English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1941), pp. 366-367.
20. Bedfordshire Coroners' Rolls, trans. R. F. Hunnisett, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society 41 (1961), pp. 50-51.
21. Just. 2/116 ms. 6, 22.
22. Robert [Mannyng] of Brunne's Handlyng Synne, pp. 244, 257.
23. Britton, Community of the Vill, p.51. Wakefield, IV, pp. 53-54. The way the entries appear in that one session is completely different from the random appearances in the other volumes including Walker's edition. Because of the unique nature of that session, Searle's table in "Merchet in Medieval England," p. 28, is somewhat misleading, although this does not change the conclusions she draws. Razi, Halesowen, pp. 64-66, 138-139. Razi states that the legerwite cases are always births out of wedlock, but his argument is not convincing and one can only take the legerwites as fornication unless the record also states that the woman bore a child out of wedlock. His argument that the legerwiters were actually pregnancies rests on a few cases in which the woman was described as both deflowered and pregnant. One cannot assume from these few cases that all are cases of the birth of a child out of wedlock.
24. Britton, Community of the Vill, p. 51. Razi, Halesowen, p. 66.
25. Michael Sheehan, "The Formation and Stability of Marriage in FourteenthCentury England: Evidence of an Ely Register," Mediaeval Studies 33 (1971), pp.241-243.
26. P. E. H. Hair, "Bridal Pregnancy in Rural England in Earlier Centuries," Population Studies 20 (1966-67), pp. 233-243, and "Bridal Pregnancy in Earlier Rural England, Further Examined," Population Studies 24 (1970), pp. 59-70. He found that a large proportion of the brides were three or more months pregnant, thus suggesting the betrothal resulted from conceptions. Peter Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations (Cambridge, 1977), see Chapter 3, "Long-term Trends in Bastardy in England." Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525-1700 (New York, 1979), pp. 126-128.
27. Just. 2/18 m. 2.
28. Child, Ballads, I., nos. 5, 25, 9A.
29. Judith Bennett, "Medieval Peasant Marriage: An Examination of Marriage Licence Fines in the Liber Gersumarum," in Pathways to Medieval Peasants ed. J. A. Raftis (Toronto, 1981), p. 200. The percentage marrying outside the village could be higher because the category of licenses to marry freemen probably also contained outsiders. But the addition of this group of forty-nine marriages might split along the same proportions. Sheehan, "Formation and Stability of Marriage," p. 251. Helmholz's estimates on marriage outside the village were included in an earlier chapter.
30. Adamson, Treasury, p. 147.
31. Sheehan, "Formation and Stability of Marriage," pp. 228-237. Richard Helmholz, Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 25-73, on marriage contracts.
32. Ibid., p. 248.
33. Eleanor Searle, "Seigneurial Control over Women's Marriages: The Antecedents and Function of Merchet in England," Past and Present 82 (1979), pp. 32-37. Razi, Halesowen, pp. 51-56. The same type of marriage strategy was used in urban centers as well: Colin Platt, The English Medieval Town (London, 1976), pp. 105-107. Bedfordshire Wills, 1480-1519, trans. Patricia Bell, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society 45 (1966), no. 172, shows that relations with a son-in-law could be very amicable. In this case the man called his son-in-law "his son John Huckell" and left him everything. The fatherin-law did not live with them but in another village.
34. R. H. Hilton, The English
Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1975), p. 59. Searle, "Seigneurial Control," p. 30, 37. A. E. Levert, Studies In Manorial History, ed. H. M. Cam, M. Coate, L. S. Sutherland (Oxford, 1938), p. 245. Wakefield, I, p. 183. Calendar of the Court Rolls of the Manor of Wakefield, V, ed. J. P. Walker, The Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series 109 (1945), p.6.
35. Sheehan, "Formation and Stability of Marriage," p. 262. Helmholz, Marriage Litigation, pp. 90-94.
36. Razi, Halesowen, p. 66. K. H. Connell, "Peasant Marriage in Ireland: Its Structure and Development since the Famine," Economic History Review, 2nd. set. 14 (1962), pp.502-523.
37. Bennett, "Medieval Peasant Marriages," pp. 200-215.
38. Jean Sc1ammell, "Freedom and Marriage in Medieval England," Economic History Review 2nd set. 27 (1974), pp. 523-537, and "Wife-Rents and Merchet," Economic History Review 2nd ser., 29 (1976), pp. 487-490 has argued that merchet was a tax on people. Eleanor Searle, "Freedom and Marriage in Medieval England: An Alternative Hypothesis," Economic History Review 2nd set., 29 (1976), pp. 482-486; "Seigneurial Control," pp. 3-43; and "A Rejoinder," Past and Present 99 (1983), pp. 149-160 argued to the contrary that it was a way for the lord to tax land and goods transferred at marriage. Paul A. Brand and Paul R. Hyams, "Debate: Seigneurial Control of Women's Marriage," Past and Present 99 (1983), pp. 123-133 concluded that it was a marriage levy on wealthy peasants. Rosamond Faith, "Debate: Seigneurial Control of Women's Marriage," Past and Present 99 (1983), pp. 133-148. For examples of relief and marriage fine connected, see Chalgrave Manor, p. 58. Levert, Manorial History, pp. 236-238, observed for St. Albans that the fees for merchet were rather low and not a hindrance to free choice in marriage. Hilton, English Peasantry, p. 58, observed much higher merchet fees in the west midlands.
40. Levett, Manorial History, pp. 237-244. Brand and Hyams, "Debate," p. 132. Faith, "Debate," p. 145. Hilton, English Peasantry, p. 108.
41. Sheehan, "Formation and Stability of Marriage," p. 263.
42. Kenneth Stevenson, Nuptial Blessing: A Study of Christian Marriage Rites (New York, 1983), pp. 76-80.
43. Ibid., pp. 237, 244-245. Helmholz, Marriage Litigation, p. 30, feels that it is fair to assume that most of the couples who had a private ceremony at home intended to have the church ceremony as well.
44. W. 0. Hassall, How They Lived: An Anthology of Original Accounts Written before 1485 (New York, 1962), p. 99.
45. Homans, English Villagers, p. 173. Faith, "Debate," pp. 137-138.
46. E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, Population History of England, 1541-1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), pp. 300, 519. Hair, "Bridal Pregnancy," p.67.
Chapter 13. The Partnership Marriage
1. Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, trans. Neville Coghill (Harmondsworth, 1951), pp.276-298.
2. Richard L. Greene, The Early English Carols, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1977), nos. 407, 408, 409. In Rossell Hope Robbins, Secular Lyrics of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (Oxford, 1952), pp. 38-40, the "Hen-pecked Husband" complains that if he asks for bread his wife takes a staff and breaks his head. In another poem the man complains that he cannot give orders because his wife abuses him. But one proverb preserved in a poem advises a woman how to win a husband's love: "Hold thy tonge stille/And have al thy wylle": Robert Stevick, One Hundred Middle English Lyrics (Indianapolis, In., 1964). p. 11.
3. John Myrc, Instructions for Parish Priests, ed. Edward Peacock, EETS, o.s. 209 (London, 1940), pp. 34, 42.
4. Frederick J. Furnivall, Manners and Meals in Olden Times, EETS, o.s. 32 (London, 1868), pp. 36-58.
5. Paul Hair, comp., Before the Bawdy Court: Selections from Church Court and Other Records Relating to the Correction of Moral Offences in England, Scotland, and New England, 1300-1800 (New York, 1982). G. R. Quaife, Wanton Wenches and Wayward Wives: Peasants and Illicit Sex in Early Seventeenth-Century England (New Brunswick, 1979).
6. Barbara A. Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict in English Communities, 1300-1348 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), pp. 159-161. See particularly the histogram on p. 161 for comparison of the percentage of family members involved in jail delivery and manorial court cases. Compared with the modern figures on homicide among family members in England and the United States, the percentage of murders between spouses is very low. Richard Smith, "Kin and Neighbors in a Thirteenth Century Suffolk Community," Journal of Family History 4 (1979), has disputed the relatively low number of family members appearing in manorial court records, but he lumped pledging, a cooperative action, with debt, trespass, and assault. His figures are not useful for demonstrating intrafamilial conflict.
7. Court Rolls of the Manor of Wakefield, trans. Sue Sheridan Walker, The Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series, 2nd ser. 2 (forthcoming), p. 113. Court Rolls of the Manor of Wakefield, V, ed. J. P. Walker, The Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series 109 (1945), p. 130. Just. 2/107 m. 7. Just. 2/195 m. 13.
8. Robert [Mannyng] of Brunne's Handyng Synne, ed. F. J. Furnivall, EETS, o.s. 119 (London, 1901), pp. 63-68. He tells the story of the adulteress whose body was split in two; a dragon lived between the two halves in her tomb. He quotes a proverb on jealousy saying that when a man is jealous, there is a cuckold in the house, meaning that his jealousy will drive a woman to adultery. Court Rolls of the Manor of Wakefield, III, trans. John Lister, Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series 57 (1917), pp. 45, 108, 109. Court Rolls of the Manor of Wakefield, IV, trans. John Lister, The Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series 78 ()930), 33.
9. Just. 3/24/1 m. 2, 3/78 m. 2. Chertsey Abbey Court Rolls, Abstract, trans. Elsie Toms, Surrey Record Society 21 (1937), p. xiv, records a case in which a wife and her lover killed her husband and fled from the area. Many years later a son of the woman appeared and tried to claim his father's holding. But the murdered man's brother claimed that the boy was not the son of his brother.
10. Bedfordshire Coroners' Rolls, trans. R. F. Hunnisett, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society 41 (1961), p. 13.
11. Richard Helmholz, Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 74-111.
12. Sheehan, "The Formation and Stability of Marriage in Fourteenth-Century England: Evidence of an Ely Register," Mediaeval Studies 32 (1971), p. 252.
13. Helmholz, Marriage Litigation, pp. 88-89.
14. Robert [Mannyng] of Brunne's Handyng Synne, pp. 237-238.
15. Sheehan, "Formation and Stability of Marriage," pp. 254-255.
16. Helmholz, Marriage Litigation, pp. 100-111.
17. A. C. Chibnall, Sherington: Fiefs and Fields of a Buckinghamshire Village (Cambridge, 1965), p. 118.
18. The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Stanford B. Meech and Hope Emily Allen, EETS, o.s. 21 (London, 1940), pp. 6, 11-15, 21, 23-24.
19. Thomas C. Rumble, The Breton Lays in Middle English (Detroit, 1965), pp. 113, 118. Francis James Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, I (Boston, 1883), no. 6A. Charles Wimberly, Folklore in English and Scottish Ballads (Chicago, 1928), pp. 205, 211. Book of Margery Kempe, pp. 221-227.
20. Helmholz, Marriage Litigation, pp. 102-105.
21. Court Roll of Chalgrave Manor, ed. Marian K. Dale, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society 28 (1950), p. 44.
22. Wakefield, I, p. 84. Just. 2/112 m. 22. Robert [Mannyng] of Brunne's Handyng Synne, p. 69.
23. Margot R. Adamson, ed., A Treasury of Middle English Verse Selected and Rendered into Modern English (London 1950), p. 53. Other examples in Frances Comper, ed., Spiritual Songs from English MSS. of the Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1936), pp. 4, 5, 12, 17.
24. Adamson, Treasury, p.40. See also Comper, Spiritual Songs, pp. 18, 39. In the latter the poet puts into the mouth ofJesus the verse "Shall I, Moder, maiden and wife, My dear spouse, shall I so?"
25. Thomas Wright, ed., Songs and Carols (London, 1836), song XVI.
26. Rumble, Breton Lays, p. 85.
27. Beryl Rowland, Medieval Woman's Guide to Health: The First English Gynecological Handbook (Kent,
Ohio, 1981), pp.22-23.
28. Child, Ballads, I, no. 15. In France the couvade, or "man-childbirth," was practiced. Men had to imitate the labor pains of women: Madeleine Jeay, "Sexuality and Family in Fifteenth-Century France: Are Literary Sources a Mask or a Mirror?" Journal of Family History 4 (1979), p. 342.
29. Jeay, "Sexuality and Family," p. 41. Child, Ballads, I, no. 20, and II, no. 64. Wimberly, Folklore in English and Scottish Ballads, p. 124. He identifies it with an old Swedish custom and mentions the birth tree. The custom is more widespread and has been identified with birth being an act of "falling." See Nicole Belmont, "Levana: or How to Raise up Children," in Family and Society, ed. Robert Forster and Orest Ranum, trans. Elborg Forster and Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore, 1976), pp. 11-12. For birthing positions, see George Engelmann, Labor Among Primitive Peoples (St. Louis, 1883); Harold Speert, Iconographia Gyniatrica (Philadelphia, 1973); and Palmer Fundley, The Story of Childbirth (New York, 1934).
30. Rowland, Medieval Woman's Guide to Health, see Introduction and Chapter Ten in the text. The advice deals in a practical way with difficult birthing positions, sickness in the woman, and sickness in the fetus.
31. Just. 2/105 m. 8. Wimberly, Folklore in English and Scottish Ballads, pp. 359, 409.
32. Jeay, "Sexuality and Family," pp. 331-342. Anthony Goodman, "The Piety of John Brunham's Daughter, of Lynn," in Medieval Women: Dedicated and Presented to Professor Rosalind M. T. Hill, ed. Derek Baker (Oxford, 1978), pp. 352-353. In general, the medieval French folklore is very different from the English, emphasizing virginity before marriage, marriage at the onset of puberty, and endogamy: E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541-1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), p.254. In Colyton from 1560 to 1629 the average number of children by age of mother was 2.18 for women 20-24, 1.88 for women 25-29, 1.84 for women 30-34, 1.53 for women 35-39, 0.83 for women 40-44, and 0.09 for women 45-49. E. A. Wrigley, "Family Limitation in Pre-Industrial Europe," Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 19 (1966), p. 90.
33. Just. 2/18 m. 46, 2/104 m. 10, 2/195 m. 3d., 2/75 m. 1, 2/76 m. 1, 2/69 m. 7,2/70 m. 7. The men of the village also enjoyed a good fight. Sometimes these appear as accidental deaths because a knife slipped out of a sheath or a punch was fatal: Just. 2/67, ms. 40, 45. But the number of fights that were fully described in the self-defense homicides indicate that the villagers stood around and watched the fight, and reported it in full to the coroner when one party died. Raphael Samuel, "`Quarry Roughs': Life and Labour in Headington Quarry, 1860-1920," in Village Life and Labour, ed. Raphael Samuel (London, 1975), pp. 148-151, found that people spoke with nostalgia about the fights of the "good old days."
The Ties That Bound Page 40