Women in England, c. 1275-1525. Documentary Sources.pdf

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Women in England
WOMEN IN ENGLAND
c. 1275–1525
Documentary sources
translated and edited by P. J. P. Goldberg
Manchester University Press
Manchester and New York
distributed exclusively in the USA and Canada by St. Martin’s Press
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INTRODUCTION
75
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medieval English society, as so often with historical documents, few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.
1 E.g. J. M. Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside: Gender and Household
in Brigstock before the Plague , New York, 1987 (manor court rolls); B. A. Hanawalt,
The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England , New York, 1986
(coroners’ rolls). Much the same is true of individual studies contained in such essay
collections as P. J. P. Goldberg, ed., Woman is a Worthy Wight: Women in English
Society c. 1200-1500 , Stroud, 1992; S. S. Walker, ed., Wife and Widow in Medieval
England , Ann Arbor, 1993.
2 The sources assembled here have consciously excluded a small number of such very
well known texts where they exist in readily available editions and translations.
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INTRODUCTION
3
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].
3 P. P. A. Biller, ‘Childbirth in the Middle Ages’, History Today , XXXVI, 1986, pp.
42-9.
INTRODUCTION
3
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].
3 P. P. A. Biller, ‘Childbirth in the Middle Ages’, History Today , XXXVI, 1986, pp.
42-9.
 
INTRODUCTION
5
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. 7
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
6 This theme is developed in W. Scase, ‘St Anne and the Education of the Virgin:
Literary and Artistic Traditions and their Implications’, in N. Rogers, ed., England in
the Fourteenth Century , Harlaxton Medieval Studies, III (Stamford, 1993), pp. 81-96.
7 P. J. P. Goldberg, ‘Girls Growing Up in Later Medieval England’, History Today ,
June, 1995, pp. 25-32. Caroline Barron has also argued recently that London
records provide shadowy glimpses of small schools after the fashion of early modern
‘dame schools’, which probably provided some sort of tuition, including literacy in
the vernacular, for both girls and boys.
8 P. J. P. Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York
and Yorkshire c . 1300-1520 , Oxford, 1992, pp. 200-2, 261-2, 275-9.
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