Download PDF | P. J. P. Goldberg - Women in England_ c. 1275-1525 - (1996).
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Introduction
The past decade or so has seen an explosion of writings on English medieval women. Only a proportion of this literature, however, represents the fruit of substantial archival work and there is an inevitable tendency for such studies to be primarily dependent on an individual source.1 Much writing on medieval women has, moreover, drawn upon literary sources, a reflection of the way in which the field of Medieval Studies has come to be dominated by literary scholars. It follows that although certain texts, for example The Book of Margery Kempe, Ancrene Wisse, or even Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, are well known and readily accessible, of other sources, and particularly the rich variety of conventional historical sources, only a limited range are generally known.2 The purpose of this present collection is twofold.
The first is to make accessible and thus more familiar a broad variety of sources that can throw light on English medieval women. The second is to stimulate scholarship that makes greater use of a range of sources than has hitherto been normal. In making my selection I have consciously attempted to reflect as many facets of women’s lives as the record material will allow. On the other hand I have tried to avoid obviously atypical examples and I claim only to represent something of the different classes of source material available and not the range in its entirety. Although there exists an abundance of sources for women in later medieval English society, as so often with historical documents, few record women’s lives directly and all present their own problems of interpretation. Some aspects of women’s lives are better documented than others. Paid employment or death bed piety is comparatively well recorded, education, recreation, beliefs, and emotions scarcely at all.
Certain groups of women are likewise more conspicuous than others. The aristocracy, who largely fall outside the scope of this collection, but who form the focus of another volume in this series, and well-todo townswomen are readily observed, but the poor, the young, and the married are harder to identify outside certain limited contexts. (Jewish women, whose presence overlaps only with the first fifteen years of this collection, are also not represented.) My concern is not to present a synopsis of current historical knowledge, but a brief guide to the sources illustrated here, their problems, and how they may be used to illustrate a variety of facets of women’s lives. My choice of chapters is an attempt to impose some order on what may otherwise appear a rather miscellaneous range of source material, but is in itself partly determined by the relative availability of evidence under different heads.
Thus it was possible to offer two chapters on aspects of work together with a separate chapter on prostitution, but my chapter on recreation is noticeably brief, and I have almost nothing to offer on such topics as women’s attitudes to sex and sexuality, their experience of pregnancy and childbirth, how they coped with childrearing or bereavement, what were their reactions to the barage of misogyny that reached them from the pulpit, the council chamber, or even perhaps fathers, husbands, or brothers, and whether they ever, like Christine de Pisan, wondered if experience might not constitute a surer foundation for living than authority. Inevitably my selection of texts is shaped in part by my own interests and knowledge. I have deliberately allowed depositions, that is written records of the responses of witnesses to set questions, from the consistory court of York to feature prominently and have reproduced individual cases in extenso. On the one hand the substance of these cases, be they concerned with disputed marriages, defamation, or debt, is illuminating in itself. On the other hand they allow persons of both sexes, and even teenage maidservants, unmarried mothers, and elderly beggarwomen, to speak across the centuries, and they can throw light upon a range of matters quite unconnected with the substance of the case.
Whereas few of these cases have ever been published in their original form, let alone in translation, most other sources represented here have been published in one form or another. Women feature in them infrequently and often only briefly. This is particularly true of manor and borough court rolls or Peace session records. My concern here has been to represent those occasions where women do feature in the record rather than to reproduce any particular document at length. In the discussion that follows I shall attempt to offer some guidance as to how even brief and superficially enigmatic entries may be read and suggest ways in which particular sources may be used to address a range of historical questions. I shall arrange this discussion under the same headings as the chapters that follow. The texts referred to are those contained within the pertinent chapter unless indicated otherwise.
Childhood
As legal minors, youngsters of either sex are hard to find in medieval sources. For the greater aristocracy proofs of age will sometimes provide evidence relating to the births of heirs, but such evidence is not normally available for persons of lesser rank. A disputed marriage case [3] in the York consistory, however, provides a unique range of depositions relating to the birth of one Alice de Rouclif, a girl of minor gentry rank, but also of a number of village children. The depositions reproduced here throw light on the ‘ceremony’ of childbirth, on baptism, the churching of the mother, and the associated celebrations among kin, friends, and even tenants. (Baptisms and churchings are also occasionally noted in clerical accounts [4].) There is even a reference, contained in the deposition of Anabilla Pynder, to the use of a writing, perhaps a prayer, as an aid to a safe delivery. Similar customs are implied by the adoption of special girdles in childbirth [2]. The care with which the Rouclif family provided wetnurses for their two children contrasts with the conspicuous silence of other records in respect of lower echelons of society.
The implication is that the employment of wetnurses was an essentially aristocratic custom in late medieval England (cf. [5]) and that most mothers suckled their own children, often, as these depositions imply, for extended periods of time. This would have had the effect of reducing maternal fertility and of spacing births. It would also have resulted in healthier mothers, because less burdened by repeated childbearing, and healthier infants. The delivery of infants, as the accounts of the deliveries of both John and Alice de Rouclif indicate, were entirely managed and witnessed by women, though there is the implication, as shown in the depositions of Alice Sharpe and Margaret de Folifayt, that men might intervene when difficulties were encountered.3 The prevailing philosophy, however, was that the mother’s health was valued more highly than that of the child [1b].
Infants were swaddled (to keep their limbs straight) and kept safe in cradles [3], though pictorial evidence suggests that babies could be carried on their mothers’ backs and there is no reason to suppose that peasant women would not have taken their swaddled babies out with them to work in the fields. Children and infants feature as victims within coroners’ rolls. Many accidental deaths were no doubt associated with play or lack of proper supervision [6b], but it may be unwise to draw conclusions about the quality of childrearing from such a loaded source. The same source can demonstrate that parents’ made proper provision for the care of children when they were busy elsewhere [6a]. Accidental deaths of girls are, moreover, less commonly recorded than those of boys, probably as much because accidental deaths of girls were less likely to be reported to the coroner than that they were less vulnerable than their brothers; although all accidental and unnatural deaths were supposed to be reported, it is likely that the deaths of women and minors (and particularly female minors) would only be reported where these were sufficiently publicised or sufficiently suspicious that the community needed to make use of the proper channels in order to protect itself from suspicion of wrongdoing.4 Coroners’ rolls can suggest that older girls would assist their parents in a variety of tasks and errands [7]. Older girls, described as the daughters of a named parent, were also sometimes presented in manor court rolls for collecting wood, nuts, or berries.5
The ways in which pre-pubescent girls were brought up and socialised as young women is very difficult to reconstruct. Often we find clues only when the relationship between a girl and her parents or guardians became sour [9]. It may be that this was particularly likely to occur in the case of children taken into second marriages following the death of a parent [9a], [10], [11], [12] as folklore traditions imply. That the excessive use of corporal chastisement could become a matter for litigation suggests both that parents thought corporal punishment appropriate, but also that it was to be used only within reason and for good cause. The behaviour of John Raven [9b] is particularly interesting here. His justification for beating his ‘cousin’ (the Latin term implies a blood relationship, but is not more specific), a girl of ‘tender age’, was that she ‘desired to spend her time among boys and company improper to her rank’. It is implicit, therefore, that for a girl to play with boys was constructed as tolerable among the lower ranks of society (who knew no better), but not for families of rank, or at least having social pretensions.
That John is described as a chaplain (priest) may well have meant that he had particularly rigid ideas about how girls should behave. Although aimed at older children, the didactic poem ‘How the Goodwife Taught her Daughter’ (‘Adolescence’ [23]) implies that the primary responsibility for the moral and social education of girls fell to mothers. The popularity in later medieval England of the iconography of the Virgin teaching the child Mary to read/pray further suggests that it was mothers who taught their daughters the rudiments of the faith and in particular the Ave, Creed, and Paternoster (Lord’s prayer) and some bourgeois and aristocratic mothers may indeed have handed down skills in basic literacy.6 A small number of girls, presumably from well-to-do backgrounds, may have boarded at a nunnery and been educated there ([5]; ‘Devotion’ [2b], [3b]), but it is also possible that a few girls attended grammar school.
Adolescence It is apparent from the evidence of the poll taxes of the later fourteenth century (‘Husband and wife’ [1]; ‘Work in the countryside’ [22]; ‘Work in the town’ [28]) that comparatively few girls remained within their natal homes by the time they reached their teens and that this was especially true of urban society. It may well be that the poll tax evidence reflects conditions specific to the later fourteenth and earlier fifteenth centuries and that at periods prior to and subsequent to that time it may have been more common for adolescent girls to remain at home, but this observation must be necessarily speculative.8 We cannot, therefore, use the point at which girls left home as a simple point of demarcation between ‘childhood’ and ‘adolescence’. Nevertheless it would appear that from about the age of twelve years girls were considered old enough to leave home, physiologically to have reached or least to be approaching sexual maturity, and to have reached an age of discretion such that in canon law they were deemed of sufficient age to consent to marriage or enter a nunnery. Thus, though the concept of adolescence, if not the term itself, may be essentially anachronistic, the decision here to treat the years between menarche (sexual maturity) and the common age at marriage as part of a single chapter is not arbitrary.
It is much easier to find evidence about girls who had left home than teenage girls, or even young adult women, who continued to reside at home. Again the poll tax evidence allows us a series of snapshots of the institution of service in the later fourteenth century. Female servants, that is invariably young, unmarried persons supported in the households of their employers in return for their labour, appear then to have been very common in towns, probably as common as male servants, but rather less so in rural areas and especially arable regions.9 (Asmunderby with Bondgate (‘Work in the countryside’ [22]), where a broadly equal number of male and female servants are found, is characterised by woodland pasture.) The great numbers of servants, and the consequent frequency with which parents let children leave the natal home in order to take up positions, found in London at the very end of the fifteenth century was a cause of shocked comment by a visiting Venetian [1]. His observations, patently exaggerated for dramatic effect, have to be understood in the context of the visitor’s native culture. In northern Italy young people normally remained at home until they married. Only the very poor would send their daughters (let alone their sons) into service, a course of action that represented a surrender of paternal authority and which could easily lead to a loss of ‘honour’ for the girls concerned. In fact the English institution seems to have been very different. Female servants below the age of twelve are hardly to be found (cf. [2], [3]; ‘Childhood’ [9c]; ‘Law and custom’ [63b]). Similarly, despite the comments of the Venetian observer, female apprentices, that is servants contracted to a particular employer for a number of years in order to learn a craft, were probably comparatively uncommon in London and even rarer outside (cf. [4]; ‘Prostitution’ [10]) The majority of female servants were employed for a year at a time and seem frequently to have changed employers upon the termination of their contracts ([6], [11], [16]; ‘Husband and wife’ [11] deposition of William Coke).
(The customary minimum term of service of one year was enforceable after 1351 by statute [8b], [9], [10], although acute labour shortage in the later fourteenth century still led to conflict between employers [7], [8a], [11].) Often servants were hired at or around particular hiring dates which were dependent upon custom and the needs of the regional agrarian economy.10 Hence Martinmas (11 November) and Pentecost were regular hiring dates in Northern England ([8b], [11]; ‘Childhood’ [3] deposition of Maud de Herthill; ‘Husband and wife’ [11] deposition of William Coke; ‘Widowhood, poverty, and old age’ [12] depositions of Agnes Kyrkeby and Isabel Nesswyk), whereas Michaelmas (29 September) was common in the arable Midlands, and Candlemas (2 February) in the pastoral West. The ages of servants and former servants can often be calculated from deposition material and this confirms the impression that girls and young women in service were invariably aged twelve or more, but few women are still observed as servants after their mid twenties. (The pattern for males is not dissimilar.) Again it is deposition evidence that allows most glimpses of female servants’ tasks ([24] deposition of Walter de Mellerby; ‘Widowhood, poverty, and old age’ [12] depositions of Agnes Kyrkeby and Thomas Catton; ‘Law and custom’ [35] deposition of Joan Scharp), but ‘The Serving Maid’s Holiday’ [5] provides a few clues in respect of rural servants. Poll tax evidence (‘Work in the countryside’ [22]; ‘Work in the town’ [28]) suggests, however, that certain types of employer were more likely to employ female servants than others.11
The implication of this is that female servants also assisted in the workshop or the fields. Depositions and bequests to servants in wills further show that servants were sometimes related to their employers, and the appearance of servants among the will-making population [21b, c] further indicates that there was no necessary social gulf between employer and servant. In some respects employers stood as guardians to their servants [12a] and owed them duties of care, guidance, and moral instruction in addition to providing for their physical needs by providing clothing board, and lodging. Money wages, if they were paid at all, tended consequently to be modest ([6]; ‘Husband and wife’ [11] deposition of William Coke). Employers’ interest and concern for the well-being of their servants is reflected in bequests to servants of clothing, monies, household utensils etc. [13], [14], [15].
Occasionally former servants are also remembered [21a], and employers would take responsibility for the burial of any servant who died whilst in their employ [22]. On the other hand the employer’s duty to exercise discipline could result in conflict [16], [17], [18], though as so often the record is biased towards such cases. Much the same is true of evidence of sexual abuse of female servants ([19], [20]; ‘Prostitution’ [10]). Moral instruction and guidance is something that for the most part we can only guess at, but one of the more obvious uses of the didactic text ‘How the Goodwife Taught her Daughter’ [23] was for the direction of female servants by their mistresses. The text, which draws upon a paradigm of maternal instruction that would hardly require a textual form if the intended audience still resided at home, is evidently aimed at adolescents for the leitmotif is how girls should behave if they want to make good marriages. Such a marriage is here imagined to be to a burgess or citizen with his own workshop.12
Manners, deportment, the virtues of moderation and conformity, and a willingness to assist and supervise in the workshop are all demanded. Although such teaching would also have been pertinent to daughters continuing to live at home, and indeed the text could have served as a guide to mothers as to how to bring up their teenage daughters, it should be recognised that this is an essentially bourgeois didactic text. It is neither a simple mirror of actual conduct (indeed we may usefully read against the text), nor is it indicative of the values of peasant society or of the urban labouring poor. Moral guidance may have been considered particularly necessary in respect of young women on the eve of adulthood and the prospect of matrimony. ‘How the Goodwife Taught her Daughter’ was clearly concerned to dissuade its audience from anything other than the most circumscribed contact with the opposite sex. In practice many young women lived away from the natal home and enjoyed considerable opportunities to socialise with young men. This would have been especially true of the later fourteenth and earlier fifteenth centuries, but it may also have been more generally true of the lower echelons of society. This is suggested on the one hand by reading against the text of ‘How the Goodwife Taught her Daughter’, or by lyrics such as ‘The Serving Maid’s Holiday’ [5], and on the other by the numerous presentments within the church courts [27], [28], [30], [31], [32], [33] of unmarried women for fornication and likewise within the customary (manor) court [39], [42d, e, f] for leyrwite, the fine for fornication by villein women. (It is noteworthy that most leyrwite fines were paid in respect of women from poorer peasant families.13) How far mistresses gave advice to their female servants, implicit in the circulation of ‘How the Goodwife Taught her Daughter’, or how far servant girls depended on advice handed down by older and more experienced fellow servants we cannot know.
Certainly employers had a social obligation to protect the chastity of their female employees [25] and servants of both sexes were forbidden to marry within their term of contract without their employers’ consent. Most young women in fact probably abstained from serious courtship relationships, and certainly risky courtship relationships, until a year or two of when they might hope to marry. The impression gleaned from church court records is that few young women would consent to sex until an agreement to marriage had been made (cf. [25] deposition of John Gamesby, [27a, b, d], [30d]; ‘Widowhood, poverty, and old age’ [13]). This is explicit in a few instances, but is also apparent from the number of instances where sexual relations commenced immediately following a contract of marriage [24], [26].14 We know almost nothing of medieval sex education. There are occasional references to the use of herbs for contraceptive purposes and likewise as abortifacients ([5] note, [32b, e]; ‘Childhood’ [1b]). Coitus interruptus was probably also known, but this and the most effective contraceptive practice, i.e. prolonged breast feeding, were most likely to have been limited to within marriage.
We can get rather further with the question of how far medieval parents controlled marriages and how far the initiative was left to individuals. Marriage was regulated by the Church according to the rules of canon law. This held that the consent of the parties contracting, so long as they were of sufficient age, viz. fourteen for boys, but twelve for girls (cf. ‘Childhood’ [3]), not already married ([34b], [36]; ‘Husband and wife’ [11]), and not related within forbidden degrees, was held to be sufficient to make a binding marriage.16 Marriages did not need, therefore, to be limited to formal contracts at the church door, though the Church tried to discourage ‘clandestine’ contracts that fell short of this, nor was parental, familial, or seigneurial consent strictly necessary in terms of making a valid contract.
According to canon law, moreover, consent demanded no more than the exchange of words (or if those words indicated only intention to marry, the marriage was held to be immediately binding on consummation of the relationship). Although consent is not actually the same as free choice, a marriage made by force ([25]; ‘Widowhood, poverty, and old age’ [12]) was deemed to be contrary to the principle of consent and therefore invalid. Where disputes arose as to the validity of a marriage or, as was often the case, a woman sought to enforce an alleged contract of marriage against a recalcitrant man ([24], [26]; ‘Widowhood, poverty, and old age’ [13]), they were liable to become the subject of litigation within the Church courts. Deposition evidence in respect of matrimonial litigation is consequently an invaluable source, but one that is limited to disputed marriages. A careful reading of these texts, however, can suggest ways in which these necessarily atypical cases may throw light on more general patterns. Different patterns of litigation variously alleging consummated future contracts ([25]; ‘Widowhood, poverty, and old age’ [13]), contracts using words of present consent (e.g. [25], [26]) and multi-party contracts, where one party was allegedly contracted to two or more other parties (‘Husband and wife’ [11]), may suggest different levels of personal initiative or parental control in the making of marriages. In general disputed consummated future contracts suggest courtship relationships that had gone wrong [25]. Likewise multi-party actions often represent engagement disputes and reflect a high degree of personal initiative.17
Actual depositions provide more clues and may make reference to marriage tokens, viz. rings, gloves, sums of money etc. ([23] stanza 14; ‘Childhood’ [3] depositions of Anabilla, wife of Stephen Wasteleyne and Ellen, widow of Gervase de Rouclif), the words used ([25] deposition of Margaret Bown; ‘Husband and wife’ [11] deposition of William Coke), the witnesses, and the location, be it in bed [27c], at the church porch ([36]; ‘Husband and wife’ [11] deposition of Adam Roger), or in a garden arbour (‘Widowhood, poverty, and old age’ [12] deposition of Alice Rayner). The impression is that servants, who feature frequently in matrimonial causes ([25]; ‘Husband and wife’ [11]) and who lived independently of their natal families, enjoyed considerable freedom of courtship. In contrast, evidence of parental control – reflected in forced marriages, marriages within forbidden degrees, or even under-age marriages (‘Childhood’ [3]) – is most marked among substantial peasants where dowries might be paid [40] and daughters more frequently lived at home until marriage and, from the later fifteenth century, among well-to-do townsfolk (cf. [29b]).18 For the minor aristocracy evidence of parental involvement in the bringing together of young people in marriage is apparent from the formality of marriage negotiations culminating in the drawing up of actual contracts (‘Childhood’ [3] deposition of Anabilla, wife of Stephen Wasteleyne). It is also reflected in pleas for dispensations to marry despite ties of consanguinity or affinity sometimes recorded in bishops’ registers [34a] and papal letters [35]. Where the ages and marital status of deponents are recorded, it may be possible to draw some conclusions about customary age at marriage.19 Evidence from York consistory court depositions suggests that in the century after the Black Death urban women tended to marry in their mid twenties and rural women in their earlier twenties to men two or three years older than themselves, there being some relationship between age at marriage and degree of freedom of courtship.20
A more mundane source for marriage within peasant society exists in the record of marriage fines or merchets in manor court rolls and account rolls [39b, e], [42a, b, c], [43].21 Although only the marriages of more prosperous villeins – perhaps those which saw the provision of a dowry – resulted in a merchet payment, and the levy of merchet declined markedly after the Black Death, the record of fines may again provide some clues as to marriage formation. Clearly merchets were a useful source of revenue to lords (e.g. [39e]), but there is little evidence of actual seigneurial control of marriages except in respect of the remarriages of some landholding widows in the landhungry years before the Agrarian Crisis.22
That some women are recorded as paying their own fines [39b], [42a, b, c], [43a, c] may suggest personal initiative, but equally the many fines paid by husbands-to-be [39e] and fathers (or sometimes mothers) may signify parental involvement. Often the record distinguishes marriages within the manor [42a], [43a] from marriages outside [42c], [43b] and even marriages at will [43c].23 Razi has attempted to calculate age at marriage by observing the number of years elapsed between the first recorded appearance of the father in the court rolls and his daughter’s subsequent merchet payment, but this method has not commanded universal acceptance.24 Given the bias of the sources available, it is no surprise that we know more of courtship relationships that failed and resulted in litigation than of those that succeeded. In practice it is likely that a number of courtship relations that in canon-legal terms were strictly binding marriages were broken off by mutual consent and hence do not enter the record. (We may, for example, speculate that such was the apparently unconsummated contract between servants noted in one York case (‘Husband and wife’ [11]), remembered in this instance to obtain a de facto divorce from a subsequent established marriage.) In other instances couples cohabited, but apparently without the intention of marrying [28b, c, d], [30a], [31k], [32e]. Sometimes we may detect a popular resistance simply to the solemnisation of marriage at the church door (a position shared by Lollards) [31e, g] rather than to marriage itself, though this may be a consequence of the Church becoming by the earlier sixteenth century even more insistent that marriages should be so solemnised.
By much the same period a more puritanical attitude to pre-marital sex emerges such that women could be presented before the Church courts for having had sexual relations with their husbands to be [30d], [32b], (cf. also [37b]) even though this may previously have been a normal part of courtship. The implication is that marriage was increasingly understood in terms of the solemnisation rather than a simple contract. Before the fifteenth century couples who regularly cohabited could be made to undergo an abjuration sub pena nubendi [27a], i.e. that if they continued to cohabit then they would be deemed to be lawfully married, but such a policy seems not to have been pursued after that time.25 It seems to have been commonplace for priests to keep female servants or others as mistresses and de facto wives, although some clergy seem to have been much more exploitative of the women for whom they had pastoral responsibility [30b, c], [31c, i]. It may be that the former relationships were often tolerated by parishioners, whereas the latter might be reported at visitation. Sometimes these and other relationships led to the births of unwanted children and even to infanticide, perhaps specifically at the urging of the father who no doubt feared exposure or because there was no father to help maintain the child [30b], [31f, i], [33d]. In (canon) law, however, fathers did have a responsibility to maintain infants [32c]. With a hardening of moral attitudes (cf. the vigilance of the ‘honest wives of Windsor and Eton’ [30b]), however, coinciding with a decline in economic opportunities from the later fifteenth century, women who engaged in sexual relations as a part of courtship may have been particularly vulnerable to social ostracism and particularly at risk of being drawn into a subculture of petty crime and prostitution. Within this social context it became a work of mercy for the well-to-do to provide help in the form of dowries to facilitate the marriages of ‘poor maids’ [37].
Such dowries are also found in similar social contexts before the plague and in London for a few decades also after the advent of plague. It should finally be noted, by way of a caution, that not all women who achieved adulthood married. Numbers of ‘singlewomen’ – a term that merits further investigation – are to be found, for example, in fifteenth-century records, and some of the women living on their own noticed in poll tax returns may have been never married (e.g. ‘Husband and wife’ [1]), but how numerous such women were or how far any remained unwed of choice must remain matters for further research.
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