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A MEDIEVAL LIFE Cecilia Penifader and the World of English Peasants Before the Plague
Judith M. Bennett
un iver sit y of pen nsy lvan i a press phil adelphi a
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contents
Preface vii
Chapter 1. Ordinary People
1
Chapter 2. The World Around Her
26
Chapter 3. Lords, Ladies, and Peasants
44
Chapter 4. Parish, Belief, Ritual
62
Chapter 5. Changing Times
86
Chapter 6. Kin and Household
101
Chapter 7. An Economy of Makeshifts
119
Chapter 8. Community
137
Chapter 9. Women and Men
154
Chapter 10. Medieval Peasants, Modern People
174
Glossary 189 Index 000 Acknowledgments
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preface
I am fortunate in this book: it was fun to write in its original form, and it has now been fun to revise. For this new edition, I have taken advantage of digitized editing to correct errors, add substantive comments, and smooth phrasing. But I have not changed the core of the book, and its chapters remain much as they were. The most extensive additions are in Chapter 1, where I have tried to prepare readers better for a book that is as much an introduction to medieval peasants as a life of one peasant woman (the slightly changed title works to the same purpose). Because we now live in a world where accusations of fake news can quickly morph into accusations of fake history, I have also included in Chapter 1 a brief discussion of historical methods and historiography, and I have added to each chapter a sidebar on how historians know what we know. I hope t hese examples—on subjects like puberty, climate change, and DNA—will bring into better focus the methods, interpretations, and collegial arguments that lie behind the “received wisdom” provided here. The illustrations have been entirely reworked so that most medieval images are from a single source: the famous Luttrell Psalter, created not far from Cecilia and during her lifetime. The Luttrell Psalter provides a coherent visual program, and because many of its images are available online in full color, readers can easily investigate them further. A simple search under “luttrell psalter” will turn up a plethora of online images, but a good place to start is the British Library’s own treatment of the volume, found at https://w ww.bl.u k /collection-items/the-luttrell-psalter. The images are reproduced here by kind permission of the British Library, © British Library, Add Ms 42130, with the folio citations given under each image. Suggestions for further reading have been fully updated.
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chapter 1
Ordinary People
Crusaders marching off to reclaim the Holy Land; kings besieging castles with archers and men-at-a rms; bishops celebrating Masses in new cathedrals; merchants haggling for bargains at fairs and markets. These are the p eople whose stories are told in most histories of the M iddle Ages—a nd these people were, to be sure, important movers-a nd-shakers in their time. But they were also atypical. Most medieval people were not knights, kings, churchmen, or merchants. Most (more than nine out of ten) were peasants who eked out hard livings from the land. Yet even our modern dramas of medieval-like worlds almost forget this vast peasant population. The smallfolk of the Seven Kingdoms in Game of Thrones are mere background, mentioned passingly as dirty, dull, and mildly dangerous; even the f ree, unsettled, and foreign wildlings get more respect. In Lord of the Rings, halflings are umans. cleaner, smarter, and more benevolent, but they are hobbits, not h Ignored in elite histories and dehumanized in dramatic fantasies, medieval peasants have mostly disappeared from our imagination. This book seeks to right the balance by telling the story of the Eng lish peasantry through the uman, and very medieval peasant: Cecilia Penilife of one very real, very h fader who lived in the Eng lish midlands in the decades just before the Black Death (1347–1349). Why should we care about peasants? The simple fact that we have turned medieval peasants into filthy smallfolk and hobbits with hairy feet suggests we had better take a second look. Peasant is not a word that we usually apply today to people who cultivate crops in first-world countries—instead, we call t hese people farmers and farm laborers. We use peasant to describe cultivators— small cultivators—in less developed economies. In Europe, peasants are under-
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stood to have disappeared with modernization, a process that, in the phrasing of one famous book on the subject, made nineteenth-century peasants into modern Frenchmen. In North America, European colonists are deemed to have been transformed—by virtue of their migration and resettlement—from peasants into farmers. In China, where perhaps 50 percent of the population were peasants c. 1950, economists now argue about whether there are any peasants left at all. Yet societies of small, subsistence cultivators persist and even thrive today, especially in Central and South America, in sub-Saharan Africa, and in south Asia. To put this another way, peasants and peasant economies are part of our present as well as our past. If we think of t oday’s peasants as smallfolk or halflings, we risk profoundly misunderstanding our contemporary global economy. For historians of medieval Europe, the importance of peasants derives from two particular ideas about humans and human society. First, ordinary people have mattered in the making of history. U.S. History provides a good example. Any general history of the twentieth-century U.S. rightly talks about extraordinary individuals like Henry Ford, Al Capone, Eleanor Roosevelt, Billy Graham, Rosa Parks, and Bill Gates, but it also describes how the lives of ordinary people changed between 1900 and 2000—better housing and diets, more education, changing sexual mores, and the like. And it also considers how ordinary people changed the course of history, sometimes through collective protest (as with the Vietnam War and civil rights) and sometimes through everyday, private decisions (as with diminished birthrates). Ordinary p eople make history too—and as we shall see, this was as true of medieval peasants as of modern citizens. Second, historians understand that history is richer when seen from the margins. It is easy to forget about medieval peasants (the margin) if you start in royal courts and wealthy monasteries (the center). But it is hard to overlook monarchs and monks if you start from peasant cottages. This might sound abstract, but it is concrete and real. For a modern example, consider professional sports. Team o wners and players stand at the center of this industry, but if we think about sports only from their perspective (worries about revenues, salaries, and advertising contracts), we can almost lose sight of the fans without whom there would be no revenue-producing leagues and championships. If we flip the perspective and look at professional sports from the viewpoint of the fans (exciting games and charismatic athletes), we never risk forgetting the owners and players, who are simply too rich and famous to ignore. Fans might be on the margins of the sports business, but adopting their
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perspective helps us remember that professional sports are fundamentally about entertainment.
Cecilia Penifader By looking at medieval peasants, then, we can see both their rural world and the broader medieval society of which they were a critical part. We stand on the muddy margins with peasants and, looking upward and inward, we can better understand not only poor peasants but also prosperous churchmen, knights, ill and merchants, all of whom relied on peasant l abor. Cecilia Penifader, who w be our guide to the medieval countryside, stood—as a woman and an unmarried one at that—on the edges of her own community. We know a lot more about Cecilia than most other peasants, but a lot less than we would like. Unlike persons featured in modern biographies, Cecilia has left no diaries we can ouses we can walk through, no friends or family to be interviewed. read, no h Yet the few dozen extant details of her life—each a remarkable and precious survival from a society long past—make her particular story a gateway into the world in which she lived. When paid guides take tourists by foot or bus around cities like London, Paris, or Berlin, they always personalize their spiels by throwing in a few tidbits about themselves (hometown, favorite beer, and the uman like), both to amuse their audiences and also to make the big city more h ill be this sort of guide for us; we w ill learn the and real. Cecilia Penifader w known facts of her particular life, but we will also walk with her through the broader world of medieval villagers and villages. Cecilia Penifader was born at the end of the thirteenth century; 1297 seems the most likely year. At that time, peasants were just beginning to pass surnames from one generation to the next. Cecilia’s derives from Pennyfather, and it suggests that Cecilia’s paternal grandfather or great-grandfather was known for his miserly habits. Perhaps the penny-pinching of her ancestors explains, in part, the prosperity of her family. Compared to knights and ladies, Cecilia’s parents were poor peasants, but compared to other peasants, her parents numbered among the well-off. As a result, Cecilia grew up in a better-built cottage and with a better diet than many of her poorer neighbors. She also grew up with more siblings than most: three b rothers and four s isters. When she was about twenty years old, Cecilia acquired her first bit of land in Brigstock, and for the next twenty-seven years, the records of Brigstock tell a great deal about how she acquired and used her various meadows and fields. They also reveal that she was
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known to her family and friends as Cissa (a name that the clerks sometimes used instead of the Latinized Cecilia). These same rolls also report that Cecilia sometimes stole grain from her neighbors, sometimes argued with o thers, and sometimes owned animals that went astray. She never married, but she lived for about a decade next door to one b rother, and she later shared a h ousehold for about five years with another brother. When she was about forty-five years old, Cecilia fell ill, and after more than a year of poor health, she died in 1344. Just before her death, she tried to give her landholdings to three young people (including one nephew and one niece), but after long and acrimonious arguments, her sister Christina inherited her properties. This is the bare outline of Cecilia’s life, but the medieval archives of Brigstock tell much more. Like other medieval peasants, Cecilia Penifader left no diaries, letters, or other personal writings. Occasionally a bright and lucky peasant learned to read and write, but most peasants were illiterate. Of the few who gained literacy, almost all were men. The most famous was Robert Grosseteste, born of poor parents about 1168, who escaped his background so thoroughly that he taught at Oxford University and rose to become Bishop of Lincoln. Yet Robert Grosseteste was exceptional. He was so intelligent, some sources say, that his surname began as a nickname—“ large head”—for a precociously clever boy. Still, his cleverness might have come to nothing. If his parents had needed him at home or if his bailiff had opposed his education, he might never have left the place of his birth. So the educational success of Robert Grosseteste is the exception that proves the rule. Peasants, usually unable to read or write, have left no direct testimonies about their hopes, their fears, their delights, or their disappointments. Even Robert Grosseteste—who wrote a great deal about matters both philosophical and practical—never thought it worth his while to describe the world of his humble youth. As a result, we know about peasants and their lives indirectly—from the writings of their social superiors. In the tripartite view of society that was popu lar by the High M iddle Ages, peasants rested at the bottom of three orders. As “those who work” (in Latin, laboratores), peasants supported people more privileged—“those who pray” (oratores) and “those who fight” (pugnatores). Each of these three orders ideally helped the other, with clergy contributing prayers and knights providing protection, but the mutuality of the system was more ideal than real. Also, the three groups were not equal. A peasant might have benefited from the prayers of a nun or from the protection offered by a knight, but a peasant was deemed to do work of lesser value and to be a less worthy person (see Figure 1). Born into this unexalted state, a peasant’s lot was to
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Figure 1. Lords and Peasants. The mutual support of the “Three Orders” was a nice idea, but this image offers a different view. The two hooded peasants on the left are angry—one crossing his arms, and the other holding a tool (a yoke?) and brandishing a glove as a sign of challenge. The object of their discontent looks to be a bailiff or other manorial official (he wears no humble hood), and he is pointing (in justification? or in blame-shifting?) toward a fourth person who approaches with something (a document?) in hand. Some images in the Luttrell Psalter are easy to decipher, but o thers are, as here, hard to nail down. The bleeding through of images from the other side of the page (here, a fantastical creature with a dog’s head and huge beak) does not help. Yet the Psalter’s depictions of rural life are lively and beautiful—and well worth looking at, again and again. British Library, Luttrell Psalter, folio 197v.
l abor for the benefit of o thers. This was unfortunate for peasants, but fortunate for historians. Because peasants were important economic assets, both “those who pray” and “those who fight” kept careful records of peasant doings. Today, we can use these records to reconstruct the life of an ordinary woman who was born more than seven hundred years ago—and also to learn about the world in which she grew up, matured, and died.
How Do We Know What We Think We Know? Before we consider the documents in which we find Cecilia Penifader and her world, let us consider history and what it can and cannot claim. History and historians once embraced a noble dream, a dream that historians told the truth about the past. Like a god sitting on high, a historian looked back at dead people
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and wrote The Truth about their lives. T oday, truth seems a lot more elusive. Globalism and multiculturalism have taught us that perspective matters—that, say, the voyages of Columbus brought opportunity for Europeans and devastation for Native Americans. Postmodernism has taught us to doubt all truth claims. And social media have produced an epidemic of so-called fake news through which we wade e very day, sometimes e very hour. Instead of the certain truths of the twentieth century, we now seem to trust nothing and nobody. The causes of our twenty-first-century skepticism are new, but skepticism is not. Medieval students, who loved music just as much as students today, sang this complaint, Bad faith and deception grow like weeds And blatant lying too, Which steals away the very seeds Of all that once was true.
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Lies and fake news are serious worries, but they have one positive effect: they encourage skepticism which is almost always a good thing, especially among students and voters. Modern life demands that we ask all the time: How do we know what we think we know? In history, what we know relies on the interplay between two different very historian aspires to add streams of knowledge: facts and interpretation. E new facts to what we know about the past, usually by finding new sources (a diary in an attic!), or using new technologies (DNA analysis!), or simply reading old sources with new questions. For example, when I was a graduate student, I looked at a well-known but little-studied payment required whenever a serf woman married—the payment was called merchet. I found a register that listed hundreds of merchets; I created a database from them; and my analysis allowed me to introduce a new fact to history—that is, that young brides often possessed enough cash to pay this fine themselves. All historians are fact-finders, and students of history must, of course, get their facts right. Interpretation—the thinking and arguing side of history, where historians discuss what facts actually mean—is just as important. Since some brides paid their own merchets, does this mean that they worked and saved on their own before marriage (much like many women do today)? Were they therefore the economic equals of their husbands? Is merchet-payment a omen’s power (they had the cash to pay their own obligations) or a sign sign of w of their oppression (merchets were not required of bridegrooms)? Historians
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thrive on debate—it makes us think harder, read our sources better, and produce new facts. So we almost never agree on a single interpretation for very long. But this does not mean that interpretation is mere bias or opinion. Interpretation must be reasonable, logical, and fact-based. We can argue about what bride-paid merchets meant, but we cannot deny the evidence, and we cannot use the evidence to claim what it cannot prove. It would be poor thinking, for example, to argue that because brides sometimes paid their own merchets, medieval marriages were love matches. Some historians miss the old noble dream of a god-like history. I do not. By abandoning claims that History = Truth, professors t oday are, oddly enough, more truthful about what we can and cannot know. Uncertainty can be scary and it can also be abusively deployed, but humility in the face of the world’s marvels simply makes sense. It discourages dogmatism, encourages wisdom, and is steadied by the received wisdom (or common knowledge) on which all historians agree, at least for a time. This book, like all history books and especially history textbooks, relies on the received wisdom of history—that is, it relies on the knowledge of medieval peasant life that has been forged by generations of fact-finding and interpretive very nation in debate. In this regard, English rural history has a huge advantage. E Europe has its own traditions of rural history. For example, French historians have focused on the oppressive powers of local lords and their c astles; Spanish historians have studied the technologies of “dry farming” (mostly Christian) and irrigated farming (mostly Muslim); Polish historians have tackled differences between German settler communities and established Slavic communities; and Italian historians have dwelt on relations between the g reat city-states of the peninsula and their rural hinterlands. Peasants are present in all these inquiries, but passively so; peasants appear as mere background to histories of feudal power, technology, migration, and urbanism. Not so in English history where, since the publication in 1942 of George Homan’s English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century, peasant lives have been intensively studied. Historians since have studied how En glish peasants farmed, how they were housed, what they ate, how they organized their families, their land, their communities . . . and a host of other topics that we will take up in this book. The stark facts of Cecilia Penifader’s life have much fuller meaning, in other words, b ecause we can place her within a common narrative about the medieval peasantry that is especially deep and rich for England. Received wisdom is the starting point for all students of history (and their textbooks), but the dynamic workings of history—the new facts and new debates—are the very heartbeat of the discipline. I cannot send each of you into
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the archives to discover the fun of deciphering old documents or send you to conferences to watch historians b attle over opposing interpretations. But I have provided glimpses of the fact-finding and fact-interpreting pleasures of history ese let you see historians at work—digging in a brief sidebar in each chapter. Th up new sources, offering new interpretations, and sometimes stumbling into epic failures. I hope you enjoy them.
Manors and Manorial Records
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So. How do we know what we think we know about medieval peasants? Clues about how privileged p eople in the M iddle Ages regarded peasants can be found in their courtly songs, sarcastic proverbs, nasty jokes, and pious sermons. Knights and ladies were fond of songs known as pastourelles that told, among other things, about how easy it was for knights to have sex with peasant women or, failing that, to rape them; monks and students enjoyed jokes that portrayed peasants as ludicrously dumb and foolish; and priests, friars, and bishops preached sermons that depicted “those who work” as objects of pity, charity, and disgust. Even Piers Plowman, a sympathetic portrayal of rural life written a few decades after Cecilia Penifader’s death, portrayed the peasant’s lot as hard and pitiable. Th ese literary texts are useful for understanding the often astoundingly negative attitudes of elites t oward peasants, but they tell little about the peasants themselves. For information about the daily lives of peasants, the most abundant and most useful sources are legal and economic documents that report on the administration of manors. Manorialism was the economic system whereby peasants supported the landowning elite. On manors, in other words, the working lives of peasants intersected with the financial needs of their social superiors. Manors consisted of land and tenants, and they were common in regions with fertile soils that rewarded intensive cultivation: southeast and central England, northern France, western Germany, and certain regions of southern Europe, such as the Rhone and Po valleys. The land of the manor belonged to a landowner, the lord (dominus) or lady (domina) of the manor. (Roughly 10 percent of manors were held by women, mostly widows.) Some manorial land,called the demesne,was reserved for direct use of the landowner; most was held by peasants who owed various rents and dues for their holdings. Manorialism first developed in the Early M iddle Ages, and manors were originally worked mostly by slaves and other dependent tenants. Some w ere de-
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scendants of the coloni who had once worked the villas of the Roman Empire; others had been forced into a dependent state by violence and war; and still others had surrendered themselves into bondage in return for protection. By the eleventh and twelfth centuries, slavery was disappearing in most of Europe, thanks to a combination of Church policies, opposition from peasants, and practical concessions on the part of the landowning elite. By Cecilia’s time, most manors were worked by free peasants and serfs (in England, villeins). Freedom or serfdom was determined at birth; if born of parents who w ere serfs, a boy or girl was bound to serfdom. Serfs were not slaves; they could not be bought and sold at will, and they were protected by custom (that is, they were obliged to serve their manor as their parents had served—and no more). But because serfs were obliged not only to stay put but also to supply labor services, they provided landowners with an unusually exploitable work force for the cul ngland in 1300, about half of all peasants w ere serfs tivation of the demesne. In E and the other half were free. As manors developed, they grew more economically complex. In the Early Middle Ages, manors generated profit directly: the crops peasants cultivated in the fields; the goods they produced in manorial workshops; and the rents they paid for the plots they tilled on their own. By 1300, lords and ladies profited from manors in additional ways. First, they took the produce off the demesne and either consumed or sold it. The demesne, once cultivated by slaves, was by then usually cultivated by serfs and wage-laborers. Second, they collected rents from peasants who held plots of land from the manor. Tenants paid rent in cash, in kind (perhaps a chicken at Christmas and a few eggs at Easter), and, if serfs, in labor (under the direction of the manorial officers, serfs sowed, weeded, and harvested the demesne). Third, lords and ladies profited from legal rights that had accrued to manors over the course of centuries. Tenants had to attend manorial courts, where their small fines and fees produced valuable income; they were often obliged to pay for the use of manorial mills, ovens, winepresses, and other such facilities; and they had to pay a variety of small charges when they married, when they traveled, and even when they died. Free peasants and serfs endured the burdens of manorialism because they had little choice. The economic privileges of “those who pray” and “those who fight” were buttressed by considerable military, political, and social powers. In this regard, manorialism was complemented by the culture and power of the military elite. Between the ninth and eleventh centuries, a cohort of warriors had emerged in Europe distinguished by their skill in fighting on horseback, their close ties to one another, their hereditary claims to knightly
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status, and their control of the land. Historians have since coined the term feudalism to describe the culture, relationships, and rules by which these warriors lived, but this word often generates more confusion than clarity. Feudalism is a modern word (a medieval person would probably have talked about vassalage), and the term implies more order, system, and standardization than was the case. Worse yet, feudalism has two distinctive and confusing meanings today. Some scholars use it to describe the general economy of the Middle Ages; to them, feudalism is a stage in economic development in which serfs on manors were forced to labor on behalf of a warrior class. This stage was seen by Karl Marx as falling between slavery and capitalism. Many students encounter this definition of feudalism in economics and sociology courses. Yet most medievalists use feudalism in the more limited sense employed in this book; that is, to describe the customs and relationships of an elite who governed ordinary people by virtue of their military, political, and ngland into which Cecilia was born at the end of the social power. In the E thirteenth century, this small feudal elite, headed by a king, ruled the land. They waged war and negotiated peace; they judged and punished wrongdoers; they decided who could pass through their territories. In short, they governed by virtue of their wealth, aristocratic birth, and military might. Peasants were taught to respect the authority of the feudal elite as natural and good, but re atter too. Faced with a powerf ul and arspectful demeanor was a practical m rogant knight, Cecilia—or any other peasant—k new that deference and obedience were the safest behaviors. To profit from manors, lords and ladies needed not only to wield power effectively but also to manage their manors efficiently. In the late eighth century, Charlemagne, king of the Franks, had sought to compile detailed lists of royal ere manors, and in the ninth c entury, registers of lands, tenants, and income w ngland in the thirteenth kept for some ecclesiastical estates. But it was in E century that systems of manorial record-keeping more fully developed. There, an array of stewards, bailiffs, reeves, clerks, and other manorial officers supervised manors, and they kept copious records to prove that they were conscientious ese and honest administrators (and, in some cases, to hide their cheating). Th records tell a great deal about the peasants with whom manorial officers dealt on a regular basis. Custumals detailed the customs of a manor. In Brigstock, for example, a custumal specified that a sick person who gave away land had to be ouse after the gift; if the grantor died without strong enough to leave his or her h so doing, the transfer was invalid. This rule ensured that no d ying persons could be pressured to preempt, on their deathbeds, the claims of heirs. Surveys and
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rentals listed the tenants of the manor, telling what lands they held and, in the case of rentals, what rents (in cash, kind, or labor) they owed. No such records survive for Brigstock in Cecilia’s day, but a rental from 1416—about seventy years after her death—suggests that her f amily fortunes had plummeted; not a single Penifader was listed among the tenants of the manor. Account rolls noted the expenses and profits of a manor, usually for a year starting at Michaelmas (29 September), the traditional end of the harvest season. No complete accounts survive for medieval Brigstock, but, if they did, they might tell about the stipends given to manorial servants or the wages paid to workers hired on a day- basis to do specific tasks. Court rolls describe the proceedings of manorial courts, which dealt with a wide variety of contracts, disputes, and petty crimes. These courts usually met e ither twice a year or, as in Brigstock, e very three weeks. A fter clerks finished writing down all the court business, they rolled the parchment up for easy transport and storage—hence, “court rolls” (see Figure 2). When court rolls survive in abundance—as they do for Brigstock in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries—they offer unparalleled information about the crime, controversy, and commerce among medieval peasants. During Cecilia Penifader’s lifetime, almost all members of the feudal and ngland relied on manors and peasants for some of their ecclesiastical elite in E support. When kings, queens, barons, ladies, bishops, monks, and nuns sat down to supper, they ate food produced by the l abor of serfs on manorial de ouses in mesnes. When they purchased fine silks from the East, built new h stone, or arranged to have wine shipped from Gascony, they spent money accumulated from the rents, fees, and fines of their manorial tenants, f ree and serf. Yet the manor was not the only point of fiscal intersection between peasants and their social superiors. Monarchs held manors of their own, but they also claimed some authority over all peasants within their realms—even those who lived on manors owned by others. In England, the king could tax all peasants, could compel male peasants to join his armies, and could even force peasants to sell him animals or food at set prices. Cecilia Penifader was unfortunate to live in a time of particularly harsh royal exactions, a time when the three Edwards—Edward I (1272–1307), his son Edward II (1307– 1327), and his grandson Edward III (1327–1377)—turned repeatedly to ordinary peasants to find money, men, and food for their wars in Wales, Scotland, and France. ere also supported by manors, and like monBishops, monks, and nuns w archs, they had further interests in the peasants who lived outside their episcopal
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Figure 2. A Court Roll. This court roll for Brigstock in 1314–1315 is composed of sixteen parchment membranes stitched end to end, and it is more than nineteen feet in length. It is open to show the records of a single court. The entries are in highly abbreviated Latin, and the notes in the left margin mostly track income generated by court business. Fifty-five rolls (containing more than five hundred court sessions) survive for Brigstock manor between 1287 and 1348. Northamptonshire Records Office, box X364A, roll 26.
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palaces and monastic walls. In common with all medieval Christians, peasants were compelled to tithe, which meant that each year one-tenth of their harvested grain, new lambs, and other produce was given to the Church. (Peasant tenants on Church manors were not cut any slack—they paid both rent and tithe.) Peasants w ere also subject to Church law, and, if brought into an ecclesiastical court for fornication, slander, bigamy, or other offenses that fell u nder Church supervision, they could face fines and physical punishments. Some peasants so angered Church officers that they even endured excommunication, that is, they were cut off from participation in the sacraments and community of the Church. In January 1299, for example, the bishop of Lincoln ordered the excommunication of everyone in Brigstock who had participated in a robbery the week before. The thieves had secretly entered the chamber of Hugh Wade, a lodger in the house of a local widow, and stolen money and goods out of his strongbox. (The bishop probably responded so strongly to this theft because Hugh Wade was in his service.) It was in the interest of monarchs and ecclesiastics to keep good records of these additional dealings with peasants. Wherever tax lists, military requisitions, ecclesiastical court books, or bishops’ registers survive, they provide further information about the lives of ordinary people in the medieval countryside. As with manorial documentation, so too with these other types of records: they are especially full and abundant for England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. To sum up, we can study medieval peasants because their labor was so important in supporting the Church, the monarchy, and the landed elite. And we can especially study peasants in England because the archives there are especially full. In some cases, the superiority of English archives stems from the more careful record-keeping of its administrators, but, in most cases, it has been a matter of survival through the centuries. Thanks to a strong legal system, a ngland’s medieval arrelatively stable social order, and a hefty dose of luck, E chives have survived especially well. In France, for example, many medieval archives were destroyed during the French Revolution, and in Scotland, untold thousands of state documents were lost when a ship carrying them sank in 1661. History is built on evidence, and if t here is l ittle evidence, historians have much less to study and much less to say. Fortunately, the extant English archives allow us to say a great deal indeed about English peasants, and from that foundation, we can sometimes see enough in other archives to know how the English peasantry matched or differed from the peasantries of France, Scotland, Spain, Germany, Italy, and elsewhere.
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Although all records pertaining to manors and peasants are useful, the most useful are manorial court rolls. Peasants brought most of their legal business to these courts. Although free peasants could take some complaints to county or royal courts and serious crimes (such as murder and rape) often had to be judged in higher courts, it was to manorial courts that most rural disputes, crimes, inheritances, and contracts w ere reported. The court records for the manor of Brigstock survive in exceptional number for the time of Cecilia Penifader: 549 courts held between 1287 and 1348. It is important to recognize, at the outset, that manorial courts were differ ent from modern courts. Today, most of us go to court only when forced by special crisis or summons; in the fourteenth century, Cecilia Penifader and other tenants in Brigstock attended court e very three weeks, accepting its meetings as an ordinary and expected obligation. Today, we usually go to court for unpleasant reasons, especially to resolve conflicts or crimes; Cecilia and her neighbors certainly raised such difficulties in their court, but they also regis oday, courts are tered agreements, exchanged land, and agreed on ordinances. T dominated by professional lawyers without whom almost nothing can be done; ere so fully conversant with the rules of their courts the peasants of Brigstock w that they seldom needed specialists to help them. The meeting of a manorial court was so ordinary a part of life in Brigstock that most p eople probably felt as comfortable in court as they did in church or in the lanes in front of their houses. Since there were no purpose-built court buildings, peasants gathered, on court day, at their local church, in the lane, on the green, or at some other familiar location. In its origins, a manorial court was an instrument of seignorial power, a way for the lord or lady to control the manor’s tenants and to extract income from them. In a ctual practice, especially by Cecilia’s day, peasants used manorial courts for their own purposes, and the courts reflected local customs as well as the landowner’s interests. In a sense, the manor was the institution that convened the courts and kept records of the proceedings, but another institution, the peasant community, helped to determine what actually happened at any meeting. If jurors did not want to tell the court that a young woman had broken into the manorial sheepfold, then she could get away unpunished. If local custom determined that youngest sons inherited their fathers’ lands instead of oldest sons, then no lord or lady could go against that tradition in court. If tenants were unhappy about an action taken by a manorial officer, they would not hesitate to complain in court and even seek redress. So when Cecilia Penifader and her neighbors gathered every three weeks for the meeting of the Brigstock
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court, they w ere unlikely to be awed or alienated by the proceedings. Some peasants were more active and powerful in the court than o thers, but most probably saw it as a necessary burden and a useful forum; through it, they resolved conflicts, punished assaults and crimes, registered inheritances and transfers of land, checked that brewers and bakers did not cheat their customers, recorded loans and other contracts, and otherwise managed the day-to-day life of their community.
Brigstock and Cecilia Penifader In the early fourteenth century, there were thousands of rural communities scattered across the landscape of Europe. Neighboring villages could be quite different from each other, and differences between the regions of Europe were even more striking. As a result, Brigstock, the community in which Cecilia Penifader lived for almost fifty years, certainly does not represent the Medieval Manor. In Italy, for example, settlement was more continuous with Roman traditions than was the case in E ngland; manorialism relied less on labor services and more on cash rents; and drier soils required different tools, different crop rotations, and different crops. In the Holy Roman Empire, for another example, as German lords sought to colonize lands east of the Elbe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, they offered special privileges to attract settlers; as a result, peasants in these newly colonized areas enjoyed extensive freedoms and low rents that would have been the envy of their counterparts elsewhere. Brigstock does not even represent English communities, for to the north of Brigstock lay areas where hamlets were more common than villages and manorial authority was lightly felt; to the east lay East Anglia, renowned for its intensive and sophisticated techniques of farming; and in Devon and Cornwall to the southwest, there w ere few communities that closely resembled Brigstock in either manorial structure or economy. In much the same way, Cecilia cannot represent the Medieval Peasant. Many peasants w ere poorer than she; many w ere male, rather than female; and most married, but she never did. No one village or person can be typical of such European-wide diversity, but Brigstock and Cecilia were, at least, not wildly atypical. Brigstock, located in the heart of the most manorialized part of England, provides an especially fine example of the intersection of manor, village, and parish, and Cecilia’s life, supplemented by the lives of her married brothers and sisters, offers an unusually clear view of the opportunities and
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Brigstock
Map 1 The Location of Brigstock in Europe.
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choices that women and men faced in rural communities (see Map 1). Moreover, Brigstock and Cecilia are exceptionally well documented, a fact of no small importance when studying humble people who lived many centuries ago. Still, Cecilia’s life is best read as a case study, not a universal example. In some ways, she was quite common, average, and perhaps even representative; in other ways, her story was uniquely her own. Sometimes typical and sometimes not, Cecilia’s life
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allows us to approach, in an intimate way, the ordinary lives and communities of medieval peasants. Brigstock is located in the English midlands, about seventy-five miles oday, Brigstock lies in open country, but in the M iddle north of London. T Ages, it rested in the heart of Rockingham Forest, a royal preserve for hunting. For Cecilia, this meant that near her house stood not only fields and pastures but also a royal hunting lodge, woodlands, and parks maintained by the king’s foresters. These officers allowed the people of Brigstock to use the woods and parks in some agreed-upon ways, such as collecting fallen wood for fuel and feeding their pigs in the woods. Yet the king’s foresters also stood ready to arrest any peasant who tried to hunt game in Rockingham Forest or attempted to clear bits of the forest to bring new lands u nder the plow. In 1255, for example, the foresters searched for Hugh Swartgar and Henry Tulke of Brigstock, sus ere eventually pected of placing nets in the forest for catching hares; both men w caught, judged guilty, and imprisoned. The economies of most forest communities were diverse and flexible, and Brigstock’s economy was no exception. Cecilia’s neighbors supported themselves primarily by farming and animal husbandry, but they also profited from poaching, charcoal-making, and fishing. Some also worked in trades such as carpentry, thatching, and brewing, and a few seem to have taken on industrial work, such as making pots, weaving yarn into cloth, and quarrying stone. In Cecilia’s day, Brigstock consisted of three overlapping institutions: village, manor, and parish. The village of Brigstock was the oldest of the three, for ere manors or parishes, the peasants of Europe had settled long before t here w ere is some evidence of Roman activity in Brigstock, themselves on the land. Th but it was probably during the period of Germanic settlement in the fifth and sixth centuries that people first came to the area, settled in a cluster of houses, and began to clear the surrounding fields. When these first settlers built their houses huddled together in a central location in Brigstock, they formed one common sort of rural community in the Middle Ages—a nucleated village. Elsewhere, peasants established different types of settlements. Some lived on farmsteads scattered through the countryside, each settled on its own plot of ouseholds in a single localand, and some lived in small hamlets, with a few h ngland and Eu tion. These alternative forms of settlement were common in E rope, especially in regions of difficult terrain or poor soil. Brigstock’s nucleated village was typical of settlement in the English midlands, and it was found in other parts of northern Europe where soils were rich enough to support many families at once.
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The manor of Brigstock was much bigger than the village itself. It was also an ancient manor, more than two hundred years old by Cecilia’s time, for it was described in the Domesday Book, a realm-wide survey of manors, landowners, and tenants completed in 1086 for William the Conqueror. Brigstock manor then comprised almost all of the village of Brigstock and parts of three other settlements—much of Stanion to the northwest, and small parts of Geddington to the southwest and Islip to the southeast. Stanion was particularly important, for it had been created, sometime before 1086, when men and women from Brigstock decided to carve out new lands deeper in the forest. In Cecilia Penifader’s time, Stanion and Brigstock remained closely tied. Her parents held lands in both villages, as did almost all of their children once they grew up. Brigstock was also part of a parish, but like Brigstock manor, the parish was bigger than Brigstock village. A church dedicated to St. Andrew stood at the center of Brigstock, and it was an important focal point for the community. People worshiped in the church of St. Andrew not only on Sunday but also on holy days. Their faith was mixed with pre-Christian customs and ere no atheists in medipractices, and it was profound and heartfelt; t here w eval Brigstock, nor in any other medieval villages or towns. Moreover, as the biggest and sturdiest building in Brigstock, the church of St. Andrew was a place of work and play, as well as a place of worship. People held meetings in its nave, stored grain in its driest corners, and sold goods in its churchyard. The priest assigned to the church of St. Andrew had numerous and important duties, but he also had a second set of responsibilities: the church of St. Peter in Stanion was designated as a dependent chapel within the parish of Brigstock. In other words, the parish of Brigstock embraced two villages, Brigstock and Stanion, and two churches, St. Andrew’s and St. Peter’s. For most purposes, the people of Stanion worshiped in their own church, but on major feast days such as Christmas, Easter, and the feast of St. Andrew, they prob ably walked the few miles to Brigstock to celebrate in St. Andrew’s, the main church of the parish. For Cecilia Penifader, these institutions—village, manor, and parish— were very real. She agreed with other villagers on when to plant and when to harvest; she paid fines and fees at the manorial court; she rendered her tithe to the parish. It might often have seemed to her as if village, manor, and parish blended one into another. Parish funds could be used to repair a village bridge; manorial courts met on rainy days in the nave of St. Andrew’s church; villagers worked together to meet manorial obligations. But the three entities did not
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neatly coincide, and, with its messily overlapping boundaries of manor, parish, ngland and and village, Brigstock was typical of many rural communities, in E elsewhere. As economic and ecclesiastical districts overlaid upon the already settled patterns of villages, the boundaries of manors and parishes were drawn according to their own logic. In a world where villages had been settled by peasants, manors created to support the landed elite, and parishes drawn to care for Christian souls, boundaries of of the three were sometimes coterminous, but often not.
The Plan of the Book Most of the illustrations in the book come from drawings in the margins of the Luttrell Psalter, a devotional book created during Cecilia’s lifetime for Sir Geoffrey Luttrell, lord of the manor of Irnham in Lincolnshire, located about thirty miles north of Brigstock. The Luttrell Psalter (a “psalter” is a copy of the biblical book of Psalms) is justly famed for its depictions of rural life (including precise renditions of plows, carts, and windmills), and full-color versions are readily available for you to examine online. These drawings offer unparalleled glimpses of ordinary people doing ordinary things, but they sometimes depict peasants fancifully (showing peasants’ clothes as brightly dyed) and rudely (depicting peasants with rough features and unkempt hair). Some of the images were meant simply to entertain, but many w ere created as commentaries on the text (for example, shepherds shown alongside the story of the Nativity). The Luttrell images are, in other words, just like any historic document—they are revealing, but not transparently so. I hope you will look hard at the images in the book, examine at the originals online (try the British Library’s special site at https://w ww.bl.uk/collection-items/the-luttrell-psalter or simply search with keywords such as “luttrell psalter shepherds”), and familiarize yourselves with this extraordinary psalter and its interpretive challenges. The sidebar in Chapter 10 addresses the particular challenges of using creative works—and especially the Luttrell Psalter—in writing history. The chapters that follow begin with Cecilia’s childhood and end with her death, but they are organized topically rather than chronologically. We begin with three chapters that examine the main institutions of Cecilia’s life: the homes, lanes, and fields of her native place; the manor under whose authority she was born and lived; and the parish that nurtured her faith through the years. In laying a critical foundation, these chapters allow us to understand
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Cecilia in the context of village, manor, and parish. In Chapter 5, we w ill turn to what was probably the most traumatic experience of Cecilia’s life, a famine that afflicted Brigstock and most of northern Europe between 1315 and 1322. In the years when Cecilia was coming of age, she saw many of her neighbors and probably also her father and mother suffer from hunger, sicken, and die. But Cecilia herself survived the G reat Famine and, as we s hall see, even profited from the greater distress of her neighbors. In subsequent chapters, we will explore further aspects of her story: how her relations with parents, siblings, and kin evolved over the course of her life; how she supported herself through labor, land, and trade; how she stood in relation to her neighbors and fellow tenants; and finally, how her female gender did and did not shape her experi ill end by assessing what Cecilia Penifader’s life can tell us about ences. We w the medieval world in which she lived and the modern world from which we observe her history.
Suggestions for Further Reading
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For the German states, see Werner Rösener, The Peasantry of Europe (1994), much stronger on Germany than elsewhere; for England, Edward Miller and John Hatcher, Medieval England: Rural Society and Economic Change 1086– 1348 (1978); and Phillipp R. Schofield, Peasant and Community in Medieval England, 1200–1500 (2003); and for France, chapter 2 in Graeme Small, Late Medieval France (2009), pp. 53–94. For lively microhistories, see Richard Wunderli, Peasant Fires: The Drummer of Niklashausen (1992); Robert Bartlett, The Hanged Man: A Story of Miracle, Memory, and Colonialism in the Middle Ages (2006); Thomas N. Bisson, Tormented Voices: Power, Crisis, and Humanity in Rural Catalonia, 1140–1200 (1998); and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error (1978). For medieval ste reotypes of peasants, see Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (1999). For different national historiographies, see Isabel Alfonso, ed., The Rural History of Medieval European Societies: Trends and Perspectives (2007). For debates among English historians, see Phillipp R. Schofield, Peasants and Historians: Debating the Medieval English Peasantry (2016); and John Hatcher and Mark Bailey, Modelling the Middle Ages: The History and Theory of England’s Economic Development (2001).
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For an introduction to English manorial archives, see Mark Bailey, ed., The English Manor, c. 1200–1500 (2002). For a full-scale reproduction of the Luttrell Psalter, see Michelle P. Brown, ed., The Luttrell Psalter: A Facsimile (2006). For interpretation, see Michael Camille, Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England (1998).
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