The Ties That Bound
May. 22nd, 2013 07:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marycatelliThe Ties That Bound: Peasant Families In Medieval England by Barbara A. Hanawalt
A meticulous look at peasant life in the 14th and 15th century. With rigorous attention to what sources point to what -- which can get just a touch ghoulish, because one major source of information is inquests, describing what people were doing at the time of their deaths, and how the corpse came to be found.
It brushes on all sorts of subjects in the course of working things through. Cottages were commonly rebuilt every generation or so; an old man or woman who had given control of the lands to a child still lived in a separate cottage when at all possible. Food was commonly part of your wages at the beginning -- even for people who taught at colleges -- but the plague and famine in the middle, which produced both an abundance of available land and a scarcity of labor, resulted in laborers who demanded their wages in cash, and didn't like yearly contracts. The poor, the middling, and the prosperous peasant, the last of which usually monopolized the village offices as well. Kinship and inheritance -- the families of this era were clearly nuclear and only seldom extended farther. Labor for the man, the woman, and the children; boys joined in men's labor later than girls did woman's, but they were kept busy as adolescents on jobs requiring less strength. The stages of life, where, yes, they knew the children were children and teenagers were not quite adults. And the bonds of community and friendship.
A meticulous look at peasant life in the 14th and 15th century. With rigorous attention to what sources point to what -- which can get just a touch ghoulish, because one major source of information is inquests, describing what people were doing at the time of their deaths, and how the corpse came to be found.
It brushes on all sorts of subjects in the course of working things through. Cottages were commonly rebuilt every generation or so; an old man or woman who had given control of the lands to a child still lived in a separate cottage when at all possible. Food was commonly part of your wages at the beginning -- even for people who taught at colleges -- but the plague and famine in the middle, which produced both an abundance of available land and a scarcity of labor, resulted in laborers who demanded their wages in cash, and didn't like yearly contracts. The poor, the middling, and the prosperous peasant, the last of which usually monopolized the village offices as well. Kinship and inheritance -- the families of this era were clearly nuclear and only seldom extended farther. Labor for the man, the woman, and the children; boys joined in men's labor later than girls did woman's, but they were kept busy as adolescents on jobs requiring less strength. The stages of life, where, yes, they knew the children were children and teenagers were not quite adults. And the bonds of community and friendship.
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no subject
Date: 2013-05-23 01:31 am (UTC)Hmm, this sounds odd, given that I just finished reading Regine Pernoud's 'Women in the Age of the Cathedrals', and she spoke quite a bit about how large families were in medieval times, at least in France, with mom, dad, the kids, various aunts and uncles, cousins, etc., all living rather close together. So much so that religious rules about who could marry and how incest was measured went out to the third and sometimes fifth degree of kinship.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-23 01:46 am (UTC)Part of that is that their cottages were rather more limited. It was rare even to have a stem family -- the grandparents, one married child, and his children -- all living together. Plus they had much smaller ones, which both influenced and was influenced by the nuclear family.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-23 02:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-23 02:58 am (UTC)Re: Inquests
Date: 2013-05-23 01:12 pm (UTC)Another fun aspect of that is looking at the cause of death. I remember Comrade-Doctor C Sagan's amusement in Cosmos at a bill of mortality from Elizabethan London, which along with plague and misadventure also dutifully included the total deaths from “Planet” and “The Rising of the Lights.” He wondered what were the symptoms of “planet”?
Re: Inquests
Date: 2013-05-23 01:49 pm (UTC)Or influenza. Its very name means "influence" which at the time still meant stellar influence, all other uses being metaphorical invocations.