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Tag Archives: medieval history

Book review: Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History

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Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History by Barbara A. Hanawalt. Not recommended.

University of Minnesota history professor Barbara Hanawalt uses an array of primary sources, from court cases and Hustings Wills to contemporary books of advice, to show how typical children grew up in London during the 14th and 15th centuries, from an abbreviated childhood to early marriages and lengthy apprenticeships. Between chapters full of facts taken from her sources, she interjects composite fictions, from a schoolboy’s drowning to a case of marriage-related blackmail.

Hanawalt covers such topics as living conditions, sanitation, family and social networks, apprentice and servant contracts, relationships between apprentices and masters and servants and masters, orphans, wards, marriage, and birth. She also tries to define how an individual moved from one stage of life to another, with an apprentice or servant contract marking the transition from childhood to adolescence and the end of apprentice or a marriage marking the end of adolescence.

Although Hanawalt provides an excellent overview of how young people moved through life and the different expectations of males and females, there is little life in these pages beyond the facts, despite the fictional interjections (one of which turns the mythical “Robin Hood” into an urban blackmailer!). One comes away with a sense of a very ordered society, where citizens’ orphans are under the protection of the city through the mayor and chancellor and the guilds regulate dress, behaviour, and other potential expressions of individuality.

There is little detail, here, however, beyond the bare facts to show how children spent their days, how they felt about their parents and society, and what they aspired to. There is more about the contractual nature of apprenticeship and servanthood than about the day-to-day life of an apprentice, leaving the reader feeling that there are critical pieces missing about what “growing up” meant to the medieval mind. In many cases, Hanawalt will draw broad conclusions about how a particular situation might be treated based on only one or two records, although they may not be representative.

Hanawalt occasionally makes odd or even ludicrous statements or comments. For example, she says, “Ratus ratus, a scientific name with a redundant ring” unnecessarily, as this adds nothing of interest. Not only that, but the scientific name is Rattus rattus, and, although Hanawalt calls it the “common house rat,” it’s more typically known as the black rat. On p. 42, she says, “Growing up in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century London could not have been the same experience as growing up in more modern London.” This statement is so laughably self-evident that one wonders what Hanawalt was thinking to include it. Later, she talks about “pox, sweating sickness, flux . . .” without defining what was meant by those terms. (Is “sweating sickness” a generic term for unspecified fevers, is it a specific fever, or is it something entirely different?) She asserts that “females have a biological advantage in surviving disease” but does not provide the basis for this claim or cite a source for it. (I am curious as to what this advantage is.)

Some of Hanawalt’s examples do not seem related to the point. She says that “a visit to a physician might have been more of a hazard than a help,” then cites a case where “the child was not cured.” Logically, the supporting example should have illustrated how a physician’s treatment actually harmed the patient. She notes that “prostitutes, female servants, and singlewomen were at risk for conceiving illegitimate children.” What is a “singlewoman”? Perhaps this term has a specific medieval meaning, but without a definition, it sounds like she is saying unmarried women were at risk of having illegitimate children. At one point, she notes that “cases of forced prostitution of vulnerable young teenage girls can be multiplied in the record sources, but the repetition of such sad cases become depressing.” Does the reader need to be told this? And, since Hanawalt declares in the introduction that she has “a basic optimism about human nature that comes through,” her viewpoint is admittedly skewed.

Undoubtedly, Hanawalt has done her research and made a contribution to our understanding of the workings of London law and society as they affected children and adolescents (however defined). Unfortunately, for the general reader looking for the Middle Ages to come to life, Growing Up in Medieval London is not the best place to go.

20 March 2004
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Life in a Medieval Village

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Life in a Medieval Village by Frances and Joseph Gies. Recommended.

Life in a Medieval Village is one of a series, including Life in a Medieval City and Life in a Medieval Castle, written by Frances and Joseph Gies. This series rarely touches upon the great people and events romanticized by Hollywood and numerous fiction writers (and perhaps even a few historians), but focuses on the basics of everyday life for the average person or even the average lord or cleric. The Gies use a number of primary and secondary sources, the latter of which reveal how the historian’s view of the medieval village has changed in the 20th and 21st centuries and how flexible historians must be in interpreting the evidence.

Researched and written for the layperson, Life in a Medieval Village is more accurately about life in an English medieval village, with most of the detail coming from the records of Aethelintone/Aethelington/Adelintune/Aylington (Elton) in Huntingdon, one of Ramsey Abbey’s manors. The Gies provide a history of the village concept and its definition; its role in the manorial system (contrasted to the seigneurial system); a description of its people, physical structure, buildings, administration and administrators, judicial system, family and spiritual life, and work; and the background behind its decline.

The world of Elton and similar villages is not found in movies or novels. Social and economic statuses are not always clear cut, economic upward mobility is possible primarily through acquisition of land, and even the distinction between “free” and “unfree” is not distinct. Life revolves around the manor and the villeins’ and cotters’ obligations to the mostly absent lord and the manor, which come in the form of work, rents, fees, taxes, and fines. The administrative structure of the manor is somewhat like that of a modern corporation, with the lord as CEO of multiple manors (and primary consumer of goods) who “wanted the certainty of rents and dues from his tenants, the efficient operation of his demesne, and good prices for wool and grain.” His steward, or seneschal, serves as senior executive, while the bailiff, reeve, beadle, woodward, and others are the manor’s day-to-day managers and supervisors.

As the villagers acquire surnames (from where they live, what they do, the offices they hold, and personal characteristics), patterns emerge from the records. Some families become dominant economically and politically (e.g., holding many offices such as reeve or juror many times); others decline; while yet others show a propensity for violence and petty crimes. Such infractions are punished primarily with fines rather than corporal punishment; the stocks and hanging are resorted to only in the most egregious cases. The judicial system is often compassionate (or at least practical); many fines for minor trespasses are lowered or forgiven by the court because “she is poor.” When laws are broken, a jury hears the case, but the entire village decides.

The Gies also provide an excellent overview of the passing of the medieval village, which began with a sustained famine and the Black Death. The labor-intensive manorial system simply could not survive the depletion of workers, the increase in expenses, the onerous taxes brought on by wars, and, perhaps more importantly, the sense of change and discontent that began to pervade the villein class.

The challenge for the Gies as authors is to take the minimal material available (ranging from books about estate management written for lords and stewards to court and ecclesiastical records) and to bring the village to life from these records. What emerges are people who live in fragile houses; are rarely well fed from a nutritional perspective and whose food supply is always in doubt; work hard and are not above trying to wheedle out of work; who drink and fight and are sometimes brutal; fornicate (primarily a woman’s crime but not a particularly reviled one); vandalize; commit petty crimes against the lord and their neighbors; and in short live lives of struggle every day without the expectation or vision of change in the future.

The Gies focus on Elton, with supplemental material from other English villages, so the reader who is interested in village life on the continent will need to explore other works to flesh out the picture. Because the mostly illiterate villagers themselves left few personal records, it is up to the thoughtful reader to discern the village’s character and personality and to conceive of what day-to-day life must have been, based on the little that is known — to put oneself into the worn shoes of the working villein and to imagine his or her thoughts, feelings, and aspirations. Life in a Medieval Villageis a good beginning.

30 October 2003
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Who Murdered Chaucer? A Medieval Mystery

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Who Murdered Chaucer? A Medieval Mystery by Terry Jones, Robert Yeager, Terry Dolan, Alan Fletcher, and Juliette Dor. London: Methuen Publishing Ltd. 2003. 420 pages.

Geoffrey Chaucer was justice of the peace, knight of the shire, friend of the king, and “greatest living poet.” Abruptly, around 1400, this “public man of affairs” was never heard from again. Who Murdered Chaucer? stems from a coroner’s inquest into Chaucer’s disappearance staged at the Sorbonne in 1998 for the New Chaucer Society Congress. The resulting book is a smart, often irreverent layman’s probe into the fate of the man who, through The Canterbury Tales and other works, helped to establish English as a literary language.

Even at a 600-year-old crime scene, context is everything, and the authors explore the efforts that Henry IV and his allies may have made to obscure Chaucer’s memory. Painstakingly sifting through the clues that remain, they develop a convincing case that Chaucer was murdered for his political loyalties, religious leanings, and advocacy of the written English language.

The authors set the stage on which Chaucer played a number of roles, describing the progressive court of his patron, Richard II, and the turmoil that conflicting values and change invariably bring. On one side were John Wyclif and his followers, trying to make the Bible and God accessible to the people and to shame the church into reforming itself. On the other were the conservative barons and church leaders who stood to lose money and power in a world in which art and discourse might take the place of conflict, and the common man might be empowered to question age-old beliefs and practices. With the usurpation by Henry IV and the return of Thomas Arundel as Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Chaucer became a prominent man who suddenly stood on the wrong side of the important questions.

Much of the initial focus here is not on Chaucer, but on the history surrounding Richard II and the nature of his court, the barons’ rebellion, and the Peasants’ Revolt, and Henry’s usurpation. Later, the authors examine Chaucer’s surviving works, including The Canterbury Tales and illustrations, as well as the writings of his contemporaries, for clues as to how he may have antagonized the new regime and how he may have met his end. For example, they speculate that Hoccleve’s eulogy hints at an end that is both untimely and violent: “Death was too hasty to run at you and rob you of your life.” Puzzled by the discrepancies between Chaucer’s text and the Ellesmere manuscript illuminations, the authors examined the art microscopically and discovered that some of it had been clumsily altered, then speculate why.

Academics and historians may chafe at such conjectures, but generally they make sense. Occasionally, though, they do not. According to the authors, the Peasants’ Revolt “presented the royal faction with a tempting opportunity to eliminate the baronial opposition,” but they offer no feasible explanation for why Richard II turned on the rebels after he “signed their pardons and granted their requests.” Without understanding what happened and why Richard acted so treacherously and brutally, it’s hard for the authors to make a solid case, as they try to do, that Richard was not the unpopular monarch portrayed by Henry’s chroniclers. Later, they mention the “persistent rumours that Richard was still alive . . . the kind of rumour that would only gather round a figure who enjoyed strong support and even affection.” Yet the same type of rumours surrounded Hitler, as much from fear as from “support and even affection.” The case for Richard’s popularity is weaker than the one for Chaucer’s murder.

Although not addressed directly, one implied issue stands out — the importance of separation of church and state. Thomas Arundel and Henry IV need each other to usurp their respective positions, and their combined power, with no checks or balances, emboldens them to repress political foes and “heretics” with terror and torture. The danger of such of a broad spectrum of power concentrated in such ruthless, self-serving hands is clear — as Chaucer must have observed.

Well researched, engaging, and passionately and wittily written, Who Murdered Chaucer? shines a spotlight at a different and revealing angle on a turbulent time in English history and a definitive one in English literature. Whatever your interest in this period, Who Murdered Chaucer? will make you look at The Canterbury Tales and Geoffrey Chaucer in a more appreciative light as part of a greater story.

29 December 2008
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

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