Medieval Rural Communities

I have recently started to conduct research into the utilisation of far right ideologies of medieval peasantries. In particular the Nazi ideology of blood and soil is of significant relevance in this context. the notion that a people (Volk) is intrinsically, almost genetically tied to the soil which it works and inhabits is the cornerstone of ideas which places one group of people over another. In this context the concept of a peasantry as the original tillers of the soil of an imagined or perceived homeland offers a ready made mythology of original inhabitants tied and bound to the soil, provides fertile ground upon which blood and soil ideologies can flourish.

National Socialists idealised the medieval peasantry, which gives me a handy starting point for further research.

A first little foray into the field of medievalism was offered when Trump supporters attempted to storm Capitol Hill and some researchers felt drawn to comparing these events to 1381. This, however is the wrong starting point. As a comparison the Capitol Hill incident reminded me rather of the infamous Beer Hall Putsch by Hitler in Munich in 1923. The discussion and exchange on this issue was published in Medievally speaking: https://medievallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2021/01/1381-2021-and-all-that.html?fbclid=IwAR2UITquki21IJ6IkJBTaUzJGIFRcXw9WPrxv9xUZ4k01jcx6NroKyWp32c

Watch this space for more updates on my research into medievalisms, the far right and medieval peasantries.

After too many years, it is finally out, and I am so pleased and proud to have played a role in its creation. The Routledge Handbook of Medieval Rural Life is finally published, It was a long labour of love which aims at shedding light on the medieval peasantry across Europe. This awesome book contains contributions from 22 fabulous contributors, covering a huge variety of topics, from landscape history, trade, material culture, family life, resistance and conflict over to experimental archaeology from across medieval Europe. It was a mammoth task which I completed in the middle of moving across borders from England to Germany due to Brexit, and as such, as I mention in my introduction, it became a labour of love for breaking down borders, creating understanding and helping to facilitate looking over the garden fence into neighbouring countries. Our histories are intertwined, multifaceted, and worthy of sharing. So here it is, and I hope you will enjoy it and find it as fascinating to read all the different chapters as I did.

https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-Medieval-Rural-Life/Muller/p/book/9781138849228

It is that time of the year again! Hot on the heels of the One Day Colloqium on Children and Borders at Oxford follows Leeds 2019. Where I am really looking forward to be a presenting a paper on the material culture of children and adolescents as part of the  Session ‘The Materiality of Growing up In Medieval Society’. I am particularly pleased that Dr Mary Lewis (Department of Archaeology, University of Reading) who has conducted some very exciting and seminal work on the bioarchaeology of medieval childhood will be giving a paper entitled ‘The Bioarchaeology of Children: Rural Life’ in the same session.  IMC Leeds 2019 Children and Borders Colloquium, Oxford

I am so looking forward to speaking at this very exciting looking One -Day _Colloquium at Oxford University at the end of the month. I will be talking about how we can think about borders in the context of medieval rural childhood. On the one hand we might consider how we are so fond of constructing our own borders and definitions: what is a child? what is an adult? where is the line between them? – and conclude that such demarcations – usually age related- are really modern constructs and rather unhelpful in attempting to demystify childhoods from pre-modern periods. On the other hand we might like to consider the role and the nature of agency children were able to exercise and thereby be allowed to learn, make mistakes and represent an integral part of medieval village society.

https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/event/children-and-borders Children and Borders

Coastal fishing communities are not like other, inland communities, and that is why I find them utterly fascinating. The landscape itself can offer particular, and depending on the location – harsh challenges which are then overcome by communal co-operation. We only need to think of medieval communities along the British East Anglian Coast, or in northern Germany or the Netherlands working together to drain marshland, erect dykes and ditches to expand landed resources for agricultural needs. Just as teh landscape shaped the people who worked and lived in them so the people responded by moulding that landscape . A dialectical process, a dance between human needs and nature’s designs, shifting, changing, inspiring.  At the same time coasts offer ways to make a living which are limited or absent from inland locations. Fishing might be the obvious one, but an important associated by – industry is salt making, or mussel farming. We know next to nothing about the influences of the sea on coastal farming activities. So did communities take advantage of the availability of seaweed as a fertiliser for their fields for example? For much of our manorial records such activities, unless regulated by seigniorial demands and authority took place under the radar of manorial administrators. The importance of fishing to communal incomes and living standards can hardly be overstated. In coastal villages the ways in which people could make a living were significantly more varied than in most inland communities. Owning a boat or captaining a ship no less meant not merely sources of income but also status in the community. The analysis of social structures in manorial communities which were located by the seaside is significantly complicated by the fact that historians of medieval peasant societies are very used to looking at manorial documents, being able to reconstruct landholdings, the size of tenements , how much rent individual peasants paid to their lord and whether they were free or unfree or  – indeed- held both free and unfree land. What manorial sources are less explicit about are other assets which lords cared little about or had little influence over. A landed tenement was part of the lord’s dominion, it might contain arable, a garden, a house with perhaps a byre, shed or other outbuildings. The lord would know its worth and the relationship between lord and tenant via the land was clear. When a tenant owned a small boat or even a large ship like a dogger, as was the case, for example in medieval Heacham in Norfolk, the lord might not have any influence over the economic advantages such tenants could reap. In manorial documents a tenant owning extremely valuable ships might look like a poverty stricken smallholder. They might indeed hold some land, 5 or 10 acres perhaps, but this was by no means the sole or main way in which these seafaring peasants made their living. They also had cash when others who only lived off landed resources did not. Fishing seasons overlap with farming seasons, but not quite. In late autumn, winter or early spring  a fisherman might be doing rather well, when a peasant might be starting to struggle. This has all sorts of effects on life- cycles, births and marriages in particular are influenced by fishing seasons.

I know it has been some time since I last added to these pages, but I was busy writing and finishing my book on medieval village children, the research for which has occasionally made it into the pages of my blog.Why Medieval Childhood ? A girl called Edith….  I am so pleased to be able to announce that the book will be published by Palgrave Macmillan this year. https://www.palgrave.com/de/book/9783030036010

 

 

Fundamentally medieval – as any other historical – childhood matters. I find myself saying and thinking this a lot these days as I keep working on and re-working the introduction for my book on medieval village childhood. For many years the study of childhood has resided firmly on the margins of historical enquiry, if it existed at all. The discipline of history was not alone in this, as both archaeologists and sociologists have bemoaned the fact that the study of childhood was not considered important by research until quite recently. How can this be? After all, everybody was a child at one point, children and young people are everywhere and would in pre-modern societies most certainly have constituted a much larger proportion of the population than they do now.  Arguably they are a much more important subject for research than the traditional pursuit of the examination of diplomatics, battles and political machinations of the high and mighty, unless, of course you think that children do not matter because you feel that they had no agency, or that their agency – limited as it was- of little or no consequence. Sound familiar? It should, as similar views were help about the history of women.  The reasons for this type of perspective can probably be found in an overwhelming androcentric perspective which has dominated the various disciplines. (See especially Dawson and Alanen for further discussions of this) The view that everything revolved around adult men who ran politics and cultural exchanges and dynamics, has blinded researchers historically not only to the history of women and gender, but also children, who are – of course – culturally very much associated with women. The research on children thereby probably suffered a double disadvantage; they were seen as less important than men and less important than women. Added to this a widespread view which perceives children not so much a entities in their own right, but mere appendage to adults, small beings who are in a liminal state before ‘becoming’ adult – hence more ‘important’ people, and we have a situation where children are not only neglected as a valid research topic, but also people who research them are frequently asked ‘but why children?’ (See Alanen’s excellent discussion of the idea of childhood conceived as an adult to be in below)

Ok, here is why: They are interesting people in their own right, they did have agency – always and yes, even in medieval society, and no, they were not seen as ‘little adults’. They had agency  of sorts in law, in economic production, in the production and performance of culture. Anybody who thinks children have no effect on culture – even adult culture – is sorely mistaken. That medieval society had a view of childhood as distinct from adulthood is now happily not really questioned anymore, but is also, however, secondary to my own interest in the young people themselves. (The seminal works by people including Shahar and Orme on medieval childhood were crucial in putting to rest the idea that medieval society had no concept of childhood) The perspective on the history of childhood must now shift from a top down – developmental perspective – to a bottom up one which tries to focus on the children rather than on OUR view of what we think medieval adults thought of them, although this is clearly part of the equation. Androcentric views of the past are also presentist in conception. a look into the past desiring to seek what we know and comparing the past to our own lives. So we think that we know what childhood means and ask ourselves what it looked like in the past, so the danger is that we look in the past for what we think we know of the present  in the context of childhood this is a view based on rather traditional developmental views of childhood as ‘not adult yet’. So what we find will by definition be shaped by what we seek – this was Philippe Ariès’ core problem, even if he very much desired to circumvent it. Instead the life of a child is in a constant dialectical relationship with adults and other children, They are not passive recipients of culture, they are not only vulnerable victims, they have views and perspectives, responsibilities and wishes. Do the sources exist? yes they do, but the same sceptical question was asked regarding the history of  women – the problem, it was said, was a ‘lack’ or dearth of sources on women, hence research has to be limited. This, we now know, is also incorrect, generally speaking, we see what we decide to see, it is merely a matter of asking the right question of our sources. Children ditto.

For further reading on these issues see for example:

L. Alanen, ‘Rethinking Childhood’, in: Acta Sociologica, vol 31, no. 1 (1988) pp. 53-67.

P. Ariès, Centuries of Childhood (1965)

W.A. Corsaro, The Sociology of Childhood (fourth edition, Sage, Los Angeles, London and New Delhi, 2015)

N. Orme, ‘The Culture of Children in Medieval England’, in: Past and Present, vol. 148, no. 1 (1995)

Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, (London and New York, 1992)

 H. Dawson, Unearthing Late Medieval Children; Health, status and burial practice in Southern England (BAR British Series 593, 2014)

I am really looking forward to giving a short paper under the above title at the International Medieval Congress at Leeds soon in a very interesting session sponsored by the Landscape Research Group in Oxford. IMC Programme Session The Medieval Landscape. 

I have been very preoccupied in recent months with writing my book on medieval village children, and am still not quite finished with it. So it requires somewhat of a shift to think once again about my other project, a microhistory of the coastal fishing village of Heacham in Norfolk. The sources for the coastal manor of Heacham are unusually plentiful, if not always in the best of condition. Memory plays a crucial role in the rolls especially in the 13th century, when communal memory is used very actively to construct manorial court precendent to inform seigniorial policies regarding the manor. Memory was thus a communal tool to resist lordship, shape manorial custom and negotiate boundaries, physical, moral, economic and hierarchical boundaries. Whether memories are ‘true’ or not is really not of importance, it is the communal weight behind them that matters, the collectivity of an intellectual construct if you will, which establishes parameters within which community and lordship operates. On another level memory also operates in purely physical spheres, trees, fields, hills, mills, bushes, all become markers of identity.  The people who inhabit the coastline falling within the jurisdictional boundaries of the manor similarly embody a link between communal, collective memory, landscape and neighbourhood identity, forged through families holding particular tenements for generations, or living in neighbourhoods associated with particular crafts or the fishing industry. In places the land and the family identity intertwine, land being called ‘the lands of …’ followed by a family name even long after the family itself does not hold the land anymore. Memory and land thereby forges and re-enforces local identities and familial associations. So apart from the fun of seeing friends and colleagues again at Leeds, I really look forward to turning my attention and focus back to medieval Heacham.

Sometimes it is difficult to distance oneself from the material of one’s research. The Abbot of St Albans was hardly popular with his tenants. He treated the towns people of St Albans like unfree tenants, villeins, and even called them thus. I have previously written about his continued arguments with his tenants across various manors, which caused them to rise up in rebellion in 1381, and how even after the revolt was crushed, he continued to actively try to subjugate and humiliate his tenants. In various episodic clashes between the Abbot and his tenants, the latter kept pushing against seigniorial authority and the former striking back, occasionally with the backing of the king. When the townspeople buried their dead hanging from gibbets after the 1381 revolt secretly at night time, he ordered that their bodies be dug up again and replaced in the gibbets. Repeated arson attacks at various of the Abbot’s estates in, what seems to be revenge attacks after the suppression of the rising, show that even years after the revolt feelings ran high on the St Albans estates

One rarely commented upon fact of life in rural English society of the later Medieval period were the payments of heriots, or death duties to the lord, which fell due upon the death of a tenant, a head of a household, man or woman, holding the tenement from the lord in villeinage. The type of heriot exacted varied significantly according to locality and lordship. In some places only the best animal of the tenant who had died was collected from their heirs, and those without ‘beasts’ paid none. Some lords took cash payments instead of animals, and some do not seemed to have minded as long as something was given. If a family was impoverished, occasionally lords waived the heriot payment altogether, though admittedly this was fairly rare.

So this is where our favourite medieval Abbot comes in. At St Albans the lord took almost anything. He preferred the best animal, an oxen or horse, valuable animals and beasts of burden, we can also find him taken pigs and sheep. Things become troubling in the year the Black Death arrived in the various manors of the Abbey. Many holdings went through more than one heir in a single year as the plague took its terrible toll. The Court Books of the St Albans Manor of Winslow have been edited and translated by David Noy, and been published by the Buckinghamshire Record Society. Spanning much of teh 14th century, including the plague year of 1349, they tell a story of a ravaged population, struggling with the terrible effect of the epidemic, meanwhile the Abbot of St Albns was collecting heriot after heriot. When Ralph Kyng died holding a virgate of land a heriot of a bullock was collected. teh holdinmg went to Walter, Ralph’s brother, who died, and from whom a brass pot was collected worth 12d. The holding then went to Agnes, Walter’s sister, but she died as well and now the lord collected a heriot from her which was a mere plate which was worth a mere 6d. The next heir in line was Agnes’ uncle, John, who was finally excused from paying an entry fine to take up the holding as he was considered too poor. Or look at Henry who held nothing but a cottage from the lord and whose heriot was a dish worth a mere 1 penny and a half. While many tenants had a cow or horse when they died, their heirs often had far less valuable things left in their possessions. Joan had died holding a cottage  and her heriot payment was a cheap tunic. It makes me rather worried about the implications behind comments that individual tenants had ‘no heriot’ at all..

It is the end of another busy term and in between writing, I am really looking forward to presenting a paper on medieval village orphans at the Seen but not Heard Conference at The University of Sussex in January. It will be a pleasure to go back to the University, where I studied for my first degree, and where I was first introduced to the study of the history of childhood.Seen But Not Heard?